Showing posts with label cyberspace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyberspace. Show all posts

Monday, August 21, 2017

Blogging Christianity

Yesterday I reached the end of the trail of what became a Sunday blog about the history of the Christian faith. I had started it for a friend preparing for confirmation as an adult; she wanted to hear the outline of the Christian story in order, so she could grasp how Christian beliefs, morals and rituals developed.

The result was my blog Let Mountains Hear, its title drawn from Micah 6:2. It originally was just a tag in a blog about faith, generally and haphazardly, as ideas came. Then the history came to dominate, then it became a weekly blog, one post every Sunday.

Yesterday was the final, 140th post since April 2013.

Anyone interested in reading it through, from beginning to end (and correcting, corrections are always welcome), may

(a) start at the beginning Story of the Christian Faith and click on the Newer Post link at the very bottom of each entry; or

(b) use the menu at the top, which organizes the posts by era, starting with Abrahamic Faith, then Bethlehem through Chalcedon, Middle Ages, Renaissance & Reformation, Modernity, Our Time.

It grew like Topsy, with some posts longer than others, a few topics spread over posts — all guided by the inexorable march of historical time, with some attention to complexity.

Describing the setting and themes of the Nicene Creed took five weekly entries. The Protestant Reformation and various reactions took about 20. Looking back, I see I did not cover every possible detail, but I would argue that all the major developments that help define modern Christianity are there.

The idea was to write something by an ordinary person — I am neither a professional theologian nor historian —for ordinary people. My biases are my biases, I wear them on my sleeve, but I tried in general to be fair as I am fair in my professional work, journalism.

So, it is done.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Why the pseudo-religious website Patheos should be really called Atheos

The Tldr (too long, didn't read): truth in advertising. Patheos (dubbed in its header as "hosting the conversation about faith") promotes itself as "the premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality," when in reality it is all about promoting atheism and anti-religious bias.

Atheos uses three tools of intellectual dishonesty to accomplish this:
  1. Postings attempt to present U.S. Protestant Evangelicals as mainstream Christianity instead of a minuscule set of U.S. sectoids made up of undereducated people who confuse memorizing Bible verses with knowledge and Christian faith. Yes, Evangelicals are a wet dream for people who like to wield straw-man arguments against Christianity; but they're not widely representative.

  2. Atheos prefers its bloggers to be either fringe people who are marginal even in their own tiny denominations, non-denominational, Unitarian (not Christian) and occasionally rabbis (to whom Christianity is, understandably, apostasy). Their pieces, time and time again, reflect a bias in favor of anything that makes adherents of Christian religion, specifically a Bible-belt caricature of Christianity, look like lunatic haters.

  3. The message is always that, if you strip the layers of (alleged or Evangelical) Christian belief, you come up empty. The truth always lies elsewhere. Some of the remembered fragments of Christianity from childhood may be comfort food for the soul — but never anything approximating truth.
You think I'm kidding. I'm not and I can show you this is what Atheos is really all about.

In fact, in an online discussion I challenged my good friend Peter Kirkwood, who thought I was being a little too harsh on the website, to come up with "an article in Atheos that has a positive faith-inspiring piece, that is not about how so-and-so (absurdly unknown evangelical pastoroid) hates gays, sex and secularism."

He came up with 7 examples. I put the links and my response to each one immediately after.

  • What I Learned in Seminary: Doubt is Overrated. Here is a minister of a marginal Protestant church (the Church of Christ has about 2 million members) admitting he doesn't have any answers and his faith does not speak to the concerns of people. Not great advertising for his church, his ministry or his faith; nor inspiring.

  • The Church Is Political, But How?. An evangelical admits that all [evangelical] "voter guides" are pro-Republican. Stop the presses! The evangelicals are a collection of miniscule churchlets (the biggest of which is the two or three Baptist groups, which are about 13 million) that have no common policy and have, by their own admission, a very narrow point of view. This is not Christianity, this is Evangelical World, an amusement park where some preachers get very rich selling "Bahbles."

  • The Strange Task of Preaching: Isaiah 55:10-13. This  can be summarized as "God is dead." However, let's pretend otherwise and keep on praying anyway so the author, a professor of preaching, can keep his day job. You don't believe, say so; don't hide behind Charlie Brown's favorite verses.

  • Rosenzweig and Weil Are Dead. At last, Diogenes, we have an honest man: a rabbi. Franz Rosenzweig and Simone Weil were two 20th century Jews who dabbled in Christianity. R became every Hillel club's the poster boy for why youthful modern Jews should not convert to Christianity; W became the poster girl who couldn't bring herself to convert for a number of neurotic reasons. (I happen to like both R and W and have read a fair share of their writings, but they are not exactly on anyone's road to Damascus.) Again, Atheos posts models of not becoming Christian.

  • Wonder Woman and Pinchas: The Persistent Appeal of Zealotry Here another rabbi, a convert from Christianity, effectively equates faith with "zealotry." He whimsically, but ineffectively in my view, taps Wonder Woman (no doubt to appeal to hipsters), then copies Richard Dawkins' argument (see my post Going to the Atheist Church) about violence in the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament). Thank you, Atheos, for the propaganda from someone who left Christianity (a fact omitted on the site, of course).

  • A Timeless Winning Trifecta for Every Age. I was willing to give this one a few points, but its Methodist author spends most of his time talking about being old. Eventually he wends his way to St. Paul and love, hope and faith, concluding they are worth it even for new generations (even though Boomers have it all wrong). What? Come again? Half a point for not saying anything overtly hostile to the faith; but Atheos gets subtle here: when it is a believer, make sure it is someone too distracted with himself to stay on topic.

  • Christian: You Are Upset About the Wrong Things. In the final example of uplifting faith-inspiring propaganda from Atheos, we get a Baptist, but one who left ministry to make money, citing pseudo-sociology to remind us — stop the presses, again! — that Evangelicals care more about the evils of saying "shit" than 30,000 children dying. Cleverly, the author says "Christian," not "bigots who like to think the 'Bahble' makes them right."

Peter's examples did make me aware of one thing. Atheos is really an anti-evangelical site. Of course, Evangelicals' religious illiteracy (aside from their memorized Bible verses) make them very much like the kid who walks around high school unaware that someone has taped a sign that reads "kick me" on the back of his shirt.

They are supremely mockable pseudo-Christians, whose faith derives from an originally well-intentioned movement (see from my other blog the post Awakenings). Admittedly, so are almost all of us who believe in Jesus the Christ, hope for improving and try, often failing miserably, to love.

The subtlety and disingenuous approach of Atheos, however, demonstrates malicious and malevolent intent. They should change their name and let their atheist colors fly.

    Friday, March 07, 2014

    Is it the long winter? Is it me? Why can't people exchange more than chit-chat and pictures?

    There's a dearth of real, urgent, passionate and intelligent discussion on the Internet. Yes, you have TED and there is "social media" (I hate the term); but there is, increasingly, nowhere to discuss things that matter with people who have a modicum of education.

    I don't do chit-chat, in person or online. I'm terribly bad. I run out of things to say in three minutes. Your illness? I'm a bit phobic about talking about disease, minor or major. As to your family ... I care, because? Gardening is a yawn. Your plans for retirement, your dream house, your car ... yawn, yawn, yawn.

    Consider ideas, not the partisan or doctrinally correct or fashionable or  lockstep or group-think mishmash you think is your ideo-(a)theo-philosophical "position." More how it applies and how you came to this conclusion and how come there are so many other "positions."

    Give me religion. Is there a God? What church does she attend? Is homosexuality moral? Why can't a society with so much religion be fairer, more equitable and so forth? Why, why, why ... and let's source our answers, at least in passing, please.

    Or politics, but not so much which party is right nor the latest chatter from your favorite radio ranter or columnist, but something that you really want to explore.

    Legal or economic issues. What's happening or what do you think will happen?

    Or literature or the arts. What are you reading or seeing (no TV, please)? Do you like or dislike it? Why?

    Or historical interpretations.

    There used to be some (few) email lists that had some level of intelligence in them. (Although, frankly, I'm appalled at the level of historical, religious, political, cultural and linguistic illiteracy that is found online.)

    Anyone wish to revive cyberspace for any of this? Or just exchange email? Or point me to where this exists, if it does?

    Wednesday, September 14, 2011

    My readers' top 10 are a complete puzzle

    Who are these people reading my blog? A look at my stats shows that the top pageviews went to essentially humorous and (to my mind) largely trivial posts. I realize that to bloggers who get thousands of hits a day and tend or even hundreds of comments, my numbers are puny. But, still, they provide a sense of priorities.

    Here they are, as follows:
    1. But She's a Commoner!, Nov 17, 2010: 3 comments; a whopping 5,838 page views!
    2. Dulce et Decorum Est?, Sept 11, 2005: 854 page views.
    3. The Elephant in the Blog, Sep 21, 2007: 115 comments; 502 page views.
    4. Who is an Anglo?, Aug 15, 2007: 11 comments; 480 page views.
    5. Why do the heathen rage, July 5, 2009: 4 comments; 346 page views.
    6. Felicitous? -- A True Fable, Sep 17, 2007: 254 comments, 293 page views.
    7. Values vs. Ethics, Sep 7, 2007: 9 comments; 215 page views.
    8. The Burqa and the Thong, Feb 12, 2010, 7 comments;182 page views.
    9. Predatory Men, Predatory Women, May 31, 2007: 15 comments; 155 page views.
    10. Goodbye, Uptown Cathay, Jul 9, 2010: 1 comment; 90 page views.
    All right, I get no. 1: everybody was tuned into the royal wedding.

    And no. 3 is the sequel to no. 6, both precipitated by an invading swarm of British trolls, scallawags and sundry other nether creatures (note the high number of comments).

    No. 2 is one of my personal favorites (see under "Favorite Posts," left), yet it didn't garner any comment. I had no idea that many people were drawn to it.

    But no. 4 got hits mostly from Britain before the horde. I guess Brits were experiencing an identity crisis that day.

    Then no. 5 was a whimsical think piece that meandered through religion, literature, psychology and I tagged philosophy to cover them all. Didn't expect this.

    Nos. 8 and 9: obvious.

    No. 7 got many hits from India and the Middle East. Soul searching in distant lands?

    Then there's no. 10, about a neighborhood restaurant. Who knew so many people cared?

    You people are strange.

    Monday, September 12, 2011

    Why are people so insincere in email?

    I mean, there's signatures such as "In Christ," "Peace" and "Cheers" (and now someone has sent me an email from "[sender]lovesyou@[isp].com") after put downs and insults. Then there's the sarky oblique comment by someone who think's he's being veddy, veddy clever.

    One person I have known for 37 years claims she was "offering an olive branch" after unfriending me on Facebook without the slightest leavetaking. Another claims not to be calling me obtuse in the phrase "I won't insult your intelligence by accepting that you're actually as obtuse as you pretend to be"

    "This information could make you a celebrity among Biblical theologians; you will be in demand everywhere; and it will be a privilege I will remember all my life to say I was one of the first to hear it," writes another put-down artist, a clergyman I believe. He signs his missive, "In Christ," obviously because when one is "in Christ" one just loves to have a good laugh at other people's expense.

    And, oh, if I had a nickle for every time I've received a furious, enraged rant, signed with the irenic (not "ironic," look it up), "Peace."

    Wednesday, May 11, 2011

    Why $7,000 for a dog to be in an ICU is silly, wasteful and not at all principled

    A Facebook "friend" I thought was a sensible good lefty, reacted with the most petty bourgeois matron's bogus sentimentality when I suggested a better solution than spending thousands on a very sick dog: a shotgun. Of course, the coterie of "good girls" who think commenting consists only of saying insipid niceties were outraged.

    Let's think this through, shall we?

    At a time that millions of people cannot get medical care for lack of money (leading to an overuse of intensive care units to make up for good preventive or palliative care), it is a rather bizarre use of resources to spend thousands on a dog.

    Is that cruelty? Not, it's a sense of priorities. Humans should show kindness to individuals of their own species, before venturing to solve all of nature's problems.

    Anyone who has spent more than a day in a farm will recognize that the slaughter of animals that are ill is a kindness.

    Of course, I suppose all the animal lovers have never eaten hamburgers, hot dogs or steak, let alone chicken, kidneys, salmon, crab, etc. For those who will reply haughtily that they are vegetarians: don't you have to kill a plant or steal its eggs (fruit) to subsist on a vegetarian diet?

    Finally, let's face it, having a slave animal cooped up in a city dwelling designed for humans may feel very sentimental and motherly and kind. But it isn't. As found in nature, animals run free, without collars or owners.

    How is sentimentalizing one's "love" of a pet any different than Antebellum slaveowners saying they treated their slaves "like family"?

    Monday, January 03, 2011

    Consumer Rights in a Corporate Internet

    Now that the Internet is about to be swallowed up by governments and giant multinational corporations, let's assert some basic rights as consumers. After all, if it's just going to be a service we pay for, let's get our money's worth, at a minimum.

    If the United States of MicroVeriGoo will be in charge, on our dime, let's demand:
    • no more tweeting and status-updating involving the trivia of everyday life (we don't care what you're cooking for dinner);
    • no more endless comments by people who obviously have never read the words they're attempting to write (we do so need edyucashun);
    • no more scams, by Nigerians or European software companies alike; and
    • no more spam.
    If the USM can't do that, let's just take our business elsewhere. (Fidonet, here we return ...)

    Friday, December 31, 2010

    "The Cloud" is all about "ka-ching!"

    Notice Microsoft's TV commercial trying to push "the cloud"? Notice Google pushing a new netbook that has a minimalist "operating system" that is little more than a glorified Web browser? Notice the barrage of e-mails about "net neutrality"?

    We are on the frontier of the corporativization of the Internet, indeed of all of the cyberworld, which is not unlike the coming of "civilization" to the Wild West. Up to now the Internet has been a multinational, geeky environment of minimal restraint and increasingly affordable access: my Web site has gotten more or less the same shot as The New York Times, my voice and Paul Krugman's are out there as cybernetic equals.

    Don't call me paranoid just because they're after us, but ...

    There is a longstanding commercial reason why powerful corporations want you to go to "the cloud" and want to be able to control bandwidth allocation: there's more money in it.

    In the cloud, corporations can hold your data hostage in private storage spaces that belong to them and impose whatever recurrent fees they want to use programs and access your own information. The potential for mischief and price gouging are enormous!

    Credit card companies and PayPal have banded to make a financial pariah of Wikileaks, declining to process donations to the group that has aired a great deal of horse manure in the U.S. government's Augean stables.

    You think they couldn't or wouldn't do the same to you, if you crossed them?

    And think about it: the cloud is a giant leap away from the PC.

    The personal computer, or microcomputer to be precise, is a machine you can own, like a car. You can buy or download programs to use whenever you want. You can store whatever data you want, including those naughty pictures you'd rather no one else see.

    And it's all physically located in your own study or kitchen table or office that no one else has the right to interfere with, provided you don't use them to harm others.

    It used to be that computers were giant machines with tapes, guarded jealously by guys (they were all guys) in lab coats. You could use a dumb terminal, essentially a keyboard and screen without storage or memory of processor. Your terminal was attached by wires, phone lines, whatever, to the big machines. You, or more likely your employer or research facility, had to pay per minute of computer time: 2+2=4, that's X microseconds, add 8 thousandths of a penny to the bill.

    That's the model that networks and networking are going back to under the metaphoric "cloud" -- which is a dumb, cheap machine attached to a mainframe belonging to Microsoft or Google or whomever.

    Instead of opening WordPerfect or Open Office to write your Great American Novel essentially for no more than the original fixed, one-time cost of getting software and hardware, suddenly every tool you use to write belongs to Big Brother, Inc. Big Brother USG (US govt. or in Iran, Ahmadinejad) can come with a warrant, or just say "pretty please," and start a file on every intimate thought you ever commit to cyberstorage.

    If you run out of money or if some Poobah decides your thoughts are undesirable, you can get locked out of your own stuff.

    Won't happen? Tell that to the millions who were evicted out of their own homes in the last two years because they were conned into signing away rights in humongously unequal and predatory transactions.

    The same thing goes for Net Neutrality, the notion that you and The New York Times have equal rights to access the wonders of the Internet -- in fact you have more rights because you are (Supreme Court decision notwithstanding) a real, flesh and blood person.

    You've been warned.

    Friday, December 17, 2010

    Opera 11 bats it out of the park!

    I'm in love! Yesterday I downloaded Opera 11. Once again I  experienced the thrill of the original Firefox, which was the Roadrunner to the slow moving, poky Internet Explorer's Wile E. Coyote. Now Opera 11 does it to the arthritic Firefox.

    Opera 11 is a free (as in "free beer") web browser with e-mail and lots of other functions. It is fast and the install file is little more than 8 mb. (Get it here.)

    All right, so I have to learn a few things about Opera. In two minutes I got the essential functionality I crave thanks to extensions and "widgets." There's much tweaking to come, of course. I'm a perennial tweaker.

    But later, dude. Right now I just want to zip around the 'net like I did in the old Firefox hotrod. This is a new start. I'm not even importing my literally thousands of bookmarks.

    Thanks, Opera!

    Thursday, July 22, 2010

    Some Blogging Changes

    I don't have it in me to keep my day job and write my little essays with great frequency. Therefore, I have started a separate blog, Headline du Jour, for pithy daily commentary. This blog, Antipodes (formerly Shavings Off My Mind), will become my weekly "editorial" or "sermonette." Spanish readers may also try Desde Yanquilandia, my effort to comment on life here in the First World, with some perspectives borrowed from the Third.

    Sunday, April 11, 2010

    Smallest, easiest writing tool in the world

    While I don't usually post about computers and software, since there are gazillions of techie blogs, I really want to plug the software adaptation by my good cyberfriend Little Girl, called Book on a Stick.

    It's a tiny file you can run on any operating system on any computer capable of connecting to the Internet with a browser. If you're reading this, you can use it. What's it for? Writing.

    Why get it?
    • It's totally free.
    • It runs very simply on your browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) in any operating system (Linux, OS X or other Mac systems, Windows and more ...).
    • The files it produces can be read in any computer with any system.
    Little Girl admits it's based on on a similar tool called Wiki on a Stick.


    "I liked the program so much that I wanted to get inside it and mess with its nuts and bolts to customize it," she wrote me. "After fiddling with it and changing some things, I liked my version(s) of it better."

    It's your choice. I'm just passing this on.

    UPDATE: Little Girl informs me that Book on a Stick now lives here:

    http://bookonastick.wordpress.com

    Sunday, October 04, 2009

    Friending and Unfriending

    I feel right in the midst of the Zeitgeist. In yesterday's Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor sang a very funny song about being "unfriended" on Facebook, featuring a couple of verses that went, "you don't need me / you've got Carla and Nicholas Sarkozy."

    It sure spoke for me, I was unfriended this week by a fellow blogger. The curious thing is that I had stopped following her blog -- one of those navel-gazing white-girl blogs in which all comments coo "you're awesome" -- some time ago.

    Then she "friended" me some days ago. You know, click, click, "wanna be my friend"? (For a funny take, see Are You F*cking Kidding Me? (Facebook Song) on You Tube.)

    Now, if you want to know my opinions about friendship go to my post Misanthropy and Friendship (one of the things I love about this medium is that one can slowly build an easily cross-indexed "canon" of ideas). Friendship is close to love, as the Quakers well knew, even though that's not how most people live.

    The average experience in North America since the settlers is of friendships made on a handshake and a prayer, without commonality or shared experience or anything else before the arm is extended in peace.

    Remember declaring someone or being declared "best friend" on the school yard? That's more or less the experience being summoned to mind on Facebook and similar social sites.

    "Unfriending" -- click, click, I don't like you any more -- is just as childish.

    In my case, it was done just to shut me up.The unfriender belongs to that generation that was told "good job!" far too many times; as many of her peers, she accepts only congratulations.

    That's been my perennial complaint about "cybercommunities" and cybercourting. There's a deceptive sense of immediacy: since we share an easy and common interface, we must be in this together, no? The ego barriers collapse into cybersex, or at least a romance, because "at last, someone understands me" (at least until the computer is turned off).

    There's no person to deal with, really. Only a bunch of keys, a mouse and our own imagination.

    So, my fair unfriender, take your friending and unfriending: I won't be your groupie. You don't want discussion of ideas, you want a cheap ego-boost. That's fine. Just call it what it is.

    Wednesday, April 01, 2009

    1000 Readers

    Call it sour grapes, dyspepsia or mere grumpiness, but I was flabbergasted to learn that a blog whose name itself is a bit edgy has 1,000 Google Reader subscribers (actually it's 1,136). This one has a mere 10.

    OK, so there are other forms of subscribing to my blog, but even if I add up all those, this blog is still woefully out of the ballpark. That's not the point.

    Here I go, offering insights into the way our politics and economics work and intertwine, trying to sort out philosophical questions, attempting the odd poem. I am offering pensées. My friends and a few new cyberacquaintances pop in now and then. Maybe 2 leave a comment.

    But "Black Hockey Jesus," the blogger of the site noted above, posts an invitation to join his "cult" and posts something titled Suicidal Jesus, which -- yes, yes, yes -- is wickedly funny, and he gets 60 comments.

    What's wrong with this picture?

    Thursday, January 29, 2009

    "goddacode"

    William Henry Harrison, the ninth U.S. president, served for the shortest period of time, 32 days. Like me, he caught a bad cold on inauguration day.

    Harrison was sworn in on March 4, 1841, facing an extremely cold and wet day. without an overcoat or hat. He also delivered the longest inaugural address in American history: it lasted two hours. In an era without penicillin, he died by April 4.

    Now you know why I have been silent. I think I will live to blog again.

    Sunday, January 18, 2009

    Partisan or Critic?

    Barack Obama's presidency will undoubtedly change the way current events feel to me -- perhaps to all of us --introducing to my analyses the perennial problem of objectivity. Obama is a bright, appealing man who has yet to disappoint, whereas I mistakenly took Bush for a wrongheaded fool before I realized that, for reasons unknown, he is a skilled and malevolent dissembler.

    This blog is not an exercise in journalism, as I have said. I already do that at work.

    Yet even as a philo sophos 1-- Greek for "lover of truth" -- who is epistemologically agnostic, I am perfectly able to see a difference between partisanship and criticism.

    Political parties being what they are in the United States -- largely capitalist cheerleaders who are either centrist to mildly reformist (Democratic) or center-rightist to economically darwinian (Republican) -- partisanship takes the form of dogmatic sycophancy. Everything the party leaders, especially if it includes a president, say or do is defended; everything the other side says or does, especially their president, is attacked.

    That, at least, is what the political attack dogs and spinners do. Inside the no longer smoke-filled rooms where real decisions are made, there is a great deal of winking and nodding among accomplices in the conspiracy to keep things as they are for the benefit of those who profit most. They call it the art of "compromise."

    A true critic (from the Greek kritikos, or "one who is able to make judgments") renders a truer, or at least less partial, version of events and policies. The origin of kritikos, after all, is the verb krinein, "to separate" or decide.

    Besides, I have never been able to be a lockstep member of any political or religious organization. My partisanship, if any, runs further to the left than most of the Democratic Party, toward a peaceable and mild anarchism that questions the very foundations of human association -- much as we humans need social links to survive.

    This is a long way to warn everyone that the gloves are off insofar as Obama and the incoming administration and the Democratic blowhards in Congress. Yes, potentially Obama represents change; but the present social and economic status quo has swallowed changers whole before.


    1 I'd like to call attention to the fact that in categorizing posts, I draw on a pseudo-Aristotelian typology of ideas. Thus "philosophy" is the search for ultimate truths, "ethics" the moral branch of philosophy (with "decalogue" a particular subset of my own). This is why I have separated "politics" meaning political theory or political philosophy, from "current events" meaning comments on the headlines and "political economy" meaning, with what I deem charming anachronism, analyses of the social and economic relations within nation-states. And, yes, if you have read this far, you spend way too much time on the 'net.

    Tuesday, September 02, 2008

    The E-mail Peace Pipe

    "We, the cyberassembled people of this correspondence, gathered by the Internet for the purpose of improving the terms of intercommunication, and sustaining a long and viable friendship, do hereby establish the following Treaty ..." Thus, with a bow to the Constitution, begins my peace pact in a quarrelsome exchange of mails. Is it a model?

    Let's see. I'll translate the pseudo-legalese into a few rules of the road for e-mail peace.

    To communicate we must first assume that everyone is, in principle, equally deserving of being heard. Just because some have areas of expertise by way of schooling, work, location and so forth, it doesn't mean that others lack standing to raise factual and logical challenges.

    Truth or validity should rest on verifiable, sourced evidence or sound reasoning, rather than biases, feelings or opinions.

    No one should appeal to
    • force, sentimentality, pity, inexpert third parties not in the discussion, vanity or snobbery;
    • arguments against the other person, abuse, circumstantial incrimination or dismissal;
    • claims that two wrongs make a right; 
    • picking apart and/or attacking a "straw" argument that has not been made;
    • raising red herrings or baiting; 
    • weak induction, including appeal to unqualified authority, ignorance or lack of evidence;
    • overgeneralization, false cause, compounded exaggeration; 
    • weak analogy, presumption, ambiguity, grammatical analogy;
    • questions with built-in assumptions, false dichotomies, suppressed evidence.
    No one has to assent to a statement merely on someone's say-so, but you are always free to take someone else's word. If you assert something, you bear the burden of proof; without it, what you say is just an opinion.

    Whenever someone takes offense, the matter should be dropped without further question, regardless of whether the reaction seem reasonable. Conversely, however, just because someone takes offense it doesn't mean that offense was intended or warranted.

    Take what is said at face value unless humor, irony, sarcasm or figurative meanings are expressly communicated. This is especially necessary in international communication.

    Friday, August 15, 2008

    Contra Feministe

    One of my newer favorite feminist feeds, Feministe, has been doing a series of numbers on traditional religious positions in an uninformed way that I, as an agnostic and former believer, find profoundly embarrassing.

    Yes, Feministe folks, I agree that abortion should remain legal in the United States, the claim of the virgin birth of Jesus raises some pretty thorny questions and biblical dicta on homosexuality are ... um ... not au courant, to say the least. But that does not necessarily mean that
    • ipso facto, it is illogical and beyond comprehension that someone would be "politically opposed to safe, legal abortion and reproductive health services," as KaeLyn wrote;
    • the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth hinges on a mistranslation of Isaiah, as Sam wrote; or
    • the biblical injunctions against homosexual sex are inherently outdated, as Sam, somewhat more trenchantly than above, wrote.
    Kaelyn's straw-man and ad hominem approach to abortion, a topic I hate to discuss (because all reasonable discussion has long ago become impossible), Sam's rabbinicocentric interpretation of Christian doctrine and her historical optimism have common limitations.

    Central to all three is the their limited point of view.

    Because she is "pro-choice" -- yet another abortion debate weasel word, but don't get me going -- is her position, Kaelyn seemingly cannot imagine that people whose religion makes abortion a very grave immorality would hold that the ideal law would ban such a thing.

    Yet one need not revisit the hoariest theocracies to find explicit links between religious and political views -- John of Leiden, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Ghandi -- among folks with whom I imagine Kaelyn might find some common ground.

    Similarly, Sam made a somewhat more forgivable mistake in hanging her intellectual hat regarding the virgin birth on a particular set of passages in Isaiah, which she deems "mistranslated." The birth narratives in the gospels owe as much to pagan sources as to Judaic; it was simply inconceivable to the ancient mind that a great personage would not have been born amid all manner of miraculous portents.

    In her more recent and even more measured posts, Sam's even more forgivable limitation is that she does not seem to be able to see beyond her own time. Weighing whether to chuck biblical rejection of homosexuality or modernity it is clear that her dogma is the modern age. I have never been certain that being modern was always best and a solid reading of history supports that view.

    In sum, my criticism is not about the opinions but rather the way they are delivered, which tend to make contrary opinion look more reasonable.

    Sunday, August 03, 2008

    British Victim Olympics Come to the USA

    Imagine that a taxicab rider in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 had parlayed minor injuries into an interview on "60 Minutes," a blog, a book and an occasional column in The New York Times, taking on the role of poster child and blaring loudspeaker of 9/11 victimhood. Imagine then, that an apparently unbalanced woman challenged her role on her own blog and Ms. Victim managed to have the challenger imprisoned for doing so.

    Change the country to Britain and the event to the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and you'd be imaging someone like Rachel North, of whom apparently the Brits must now be so tired that just yesterday she was now bottom-feeding on a lazy Saturday U.S. public radio show that specializes in weird slices of life.

    I heard it yesterday, having been apprised of her radio appearance by an alert reader of this blog.

    North, which I understand is a pseudonym, was interviewed by an entirely sympathetic English-sounding voice concerning her apparent encounter with British conspiracy theorists who believe she is part of some British coverup concerning the London bombing.

    Did she have anything new to say about her experience? No.

    Did North have anything to comment concerning her egregious moves to censor another blogger under medieval British laws that allow trial in absentia (!) and jail for the expression of opinion? No.

    The show was merely devoted to how teddibly, teddibly difficult life is for poor, forlorn Rachel North who, apparently is pursued by all sorts of British online nutcases, who claim -- obviously irrationally -- that she is part of a government conspiracy to blame Muslims for the attack.

    Rachel North is not that important, chaps!

    No mention of her publicity-seeking "diary" of her experiences during the bombing on the BBC, her endless blogging on her own tragedy and her continuing nitpicking of the Labour Party government's official investigation. Nor much mention of the money she made off the tragedy with her book and column in ultraconservative news magnate Rupert Murdock's The Times of London.

    There was no mention of one Felicity Jane Lowde, against whom North and others campaigned to have jailed for her admittedly questionable opinions concerning North in comment sections on North's blog and posts on Lowde's own. Lowde was imprisoned last summer. So much for Britain's right to free speech.

    As I have written here earlier (see here and here) a pox on both their houses. Insofar as I am concerned it's just an online catfight of no significance -- except that it has rattled the cages of the inmates in that asylum called the United Kingdom and she now is trying to bring the circus here. (There's more money to be made in the USA, isn't there?)

    Indeed, also not mentioned in the radio show, the behavior displayed by North's own supporters -- see the 250 comments on the first link cited above -- amply demonstrated that they are no lilting, longsuffering wallflowers. Whatever is wrong with Lowde, the "Northsquad" as my cyberfriend Alex Fear calls them, and perhaps anonymously North herself, are as "antisocial" online (this was their charge concerning Lowde) as their bête noir.

    Why do I, who am usually more interested in politics, economics, ethics, etc., even care? Because in National Public Radio's one-sided, semi-prurient infotainment about North, I found a saddening blur of lines between blogging and journalism, between right and wrong, between what is important and what should be laughed out of the court of public opinion.

    On WAMU, the station I heard her on, they didn't bother to inquire enough to uncover the free speech scandal of a blogger jailed for airing opinion, the travesty of shameless publicity-seeking that surrounds explosive incidents (pun intended) or the silliness of an English-accent-only broadcast segment on a show for American audiences about events and people of no consequence here.

    Sunday, June 01, 2008

    Blogging vs. Journalism

    This week Alex Fear won a round of beer from me when someone made the 250th comment on my post concerning a catfight two barmy1 Englishwomen decided embark upon in the blogosphere. In all the British verbal diarrhea, one recurring theme is the mistaken view that this blog -- or any other, for that matter -- amount to journalism.

    This is now espoused by one of those immensely tiresome British commenters who asserts that she is a "journalist" and how dare I blog without reference to the canons of the trade to express compassion for Felicity Jane Lowde, a woman who obviously could use some. I strongly suspect the alleged journalist is none other than Rachel Whatszername, a celebrity victim du jour in Britain back in 2005, but that's neither here nor there.

    No one who has actually earned money reporting facts in print or broadcast -- as I and my journalism colleagues do in our respective news journals and bulletins -- would confuse such work with blogging, essentially an unpaid hobby in which people "log" their thoughts in essays of varying length on matters large and small. Essayists are not journalists, any more than entomologists who write multiple scholarly volumes about insects are journalists.

    Journalists who blog are not doing journalism when they blog; they are blogging. This is much the same as with entomologists, who are not engaged in entomology when they are bugged by bloggers.

    Now it's easy to see how a Brit might be confused about this.

    The British press treats facticity with a fair amount of latitude. Having had the temporary misfortune a number of years ago to work as a journalist in Britain, I discovered this the hard way. As in most of Europe -- Brits don't know they are European, so keep this on the Q.T. -- the British press is first and foremost opinionated.

    The Times is conservative, The Guardian is liberal. The tabloids are mostly fascistoid, sexist and mostly devoid of truly useful or significant information -- like the telly2.

    Much as with our own public lack of information in North America, the British public is grossly misinformed, but their disinformation arises out of corporate policy harkening back to forever (read Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" for a time-tested sendup). Most newsrooms in Britain have a creature unknown in these shores, known as a "sub-editor" whose job is to make sure not merely that the syntax is correct, punctuation clear and word usage consistent with style, but also that the "editorial line" is reflected in the set of factoids conveyed.

    As if this were not enough, since 1912 the Ministry of Defence [sic] has routinely issued something called a "D notice" to any journalistic scribe the bureaucrats want, without accountability or reason, let alone rhyme. Upon receipt of the "request" not to publish whatever it is officialdom wants not published for reasons of "national security" (no one has ever abused that phrase, of course), reporting ceases instantly.

    Not only that. The British legal system is so tilted in favor of money that courts notoriously reward the most inane nuisance suits to the point that most British journalists are not allowed to mention a traffic accident without a police report to source it on -- no matter what they or other witnesses saw with their own eyes!

    In brief, freedom of the press as we know it is nonexistent in Britain. The D-notice exerts what we in the USA regard as unconstitutional prior restraint, to which the practice of libel law adds an economic muzzle.

    So, to the average Brit, your run of the mill blog is a veritable font of journalism. All you need is a typeface and -- presto! -- you're a journalist!

    But wait! We haven't even examined the difference between opinion and reporting of fact. Of course not! The average Brit is utterly unable to distinguish between the two, given that he has been served up opinion as reportage all his life.

    In sum, to all you Brits agog about Rachel and Felicity, stay after class and write on the blackboard 100 times: Blogging is just a hobby.


    1 Britishism for "nutty."
    2 'nother one, television.

    Tuesday, March 18, 2008

    7 Random Factoids

    Savia has tagged me to

    #1 Link to the person who tagged me (see above)
    #2 Post the rules on my blog (to wit, this list).
    #3 Share seven random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog.
    #4 Tag seven random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
    #5 Leave a comment on their blogs so that they know they have been tagged.

    I don't know if I even cyberknow seven bloggers. Will try. Meanwhile, let me unearth the facts:

    1. I am colorblind. This does not mean that I see in black and white, as some people think, but that I confuse certain colors (red-green, green-brown, blue-violet) in certain shades and indeed see through certain kinds of camouflage. (The lore among colorblind people is that during the Korean War the air force discovered that colorblind aerial spotters did very good reconnaissance.)

    2. In my right index finger I am double-jointed. My half-sister is double-jointed in all her fingers. My father's genes at work.

    3. I didn't get a driver's license until my 30s. I was overseas and too young according to local laws when everyone was getting licenses here; by the time I returned everybody had already gone through driver's education. Not having a car helps you meet people, as you always need a ride.

    4. I didn't own a television from 1977 to 2003. It was a rude awakening to discover how low television had fallen. Then again, the bonus for about a couple of years is that there was no such thing as a repeat for me.

    5. I hate mint, spicy food (and any condiment spicier than pepper, including pepper), beets, celery and onions. Forget Mexican or Indian restaurants with me.

    6. I have never been to Asia and Africa and I never want to go.

    7. The first computer I ever used was an Osborne II, back when the dinosaurs roamed.

    OK, that takes care of items 1 through 3 of the meme rules. I have to come up with seven bloggers I know well enough to tag. This may take a while.