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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
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Never having been able to make it through the book myself, I have to admire Kathryn Schulz, who read the whole thing, and thinks Henry David Thoreau was a wanker. Like Ayn Rand, it’s a mystery how such an obnoxious thinker became so revered.
Thoreau went to Walden, he tells us, “to learn what are the gross necessaries of life”: whatever is so essential to survival “that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.” Put differently, he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In “Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.
As it turns out, very little counted as life for Thoreau. Food, drink, friends, family, community, tradition, most work, most education, most conversation: all this he dismissed as outside the real business of living. Although Thoreau also found no place in life for organized religion, the criteria by which he drew such distinctions were, at base, religious. A dualist all the way down, he divided himself into soul and body, and never could accept the latter. “I love any other piece of nature, almost, better,” he confided to his journal. The physical realities of being human appalled him. “The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,” he wrote in “Walden.” Only by denying such appetites could he feel that he was tending adequately to his soul.
Schulz does explain why he’s popular. His nature writing, when not soured with his philosophy, is excellent, and he appeals to something in the American psyche.
Although Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero.
Ah. He was a primordial Republican.
If you noticed some really annoying slowdowns here on FtB over the last few days, we were being effectively ddos’ed by China. Not because we were a threat, but apparently because a Chinese search engine was being a bit overzealous and repetitive in slurping up links.
This situation has been corrected thanks to the efforts of our clever technical person, Alex. All hail Alex!
…or argue with dudebros on Twitter. I made that mistake yesterday.
First problem: they were arguing with me about plagiarism. It’s not so bad, they said.
Have you ever noticed that they tend to focus on trivial interpretations of real problems? They all think that they’re like little cut-rate Malcolm Gladwells, the twerps, and that picking some bit of common knowledge and taking a counter-intuitive perspective makes them brilliant. No, it doesn’t. Most often it makes them wrong.
So they’re yammering at me that it isn’t even a crime — it’s not stealing, because the original creator of the idea hasn’t lost anything, so why should anyone complain about it? Except, of course, that the creator has had credit taken from them, and try telling a writer that they lose nothing if someone else copies their work without attribution. But hey, they were on a roll.
Then, predictable as clockwork, the second problem: stereotyping. You know who else plagiarizes a lot? Asians! Their culture encourages copying. Then, the trump card, gloriously played with a triumphant smirk: When I say plagiarism is bad, I’m accusing all Asians of theft.
Yeah. All Asia. All Asian culture thinks plagiarism is just fine.
That’s where I threw up my hands and blocked them all. There is stupid, and there is impenetrable ignorance.
I just liked that line, from this story about Jim Bakker claiming his choice of underwear color was a sign from his god. Wait, Jim Bakker is still alive, and still working as a televangelist? That’s more a portent than his underwear, I fear.
He was claiming that because his underwear was black, the world was going to end in September. It is now October, of course, so it’s obvious that his underwear is a false prophet, and must die.
There seems to be a lot of end-of-the-world nonsense going around. Last month’s eclipse was also supposed to be a portent of apocalypse. It fizzled. Now some guy is claiming the world is going to end tomorrow.
I’m not worried yet. I’ll tell you tomorrow what color underwear I’m wearing, and then maybe it will be time to panic.
A clinic in Virginia took a pro-active stance against the anti-choicers preaching and sermonizing outside: they tried to drown them out with a recording over a loudspeaker. I don’t actually approve of that tactic — the first consideration ought to be welcoming patients, and compounding cacophony isn’t helpful. Interestingly, though, their choice of a recording was the audiobook of The Happy Atheist, as read by the resonant Aron Ra.
“We are apes and the descendants of apes,” the recording of Meyers’ book “The Happy Atheist” declared. “We’re the descendents of rat-like primates, who were the children of reptiles, who were the spawn of amphibians, who were the terrestrial progeny of fish, who came from worms, who were assembled from single-cell microorganisms, who were the products of chemistry.”
“Your daddy was a film of chemical slime on a Hadean rock and he didn’t care about you—he was only obeying the laws of thermodynamics,” it continued. “You aren’t here because of grand design, but because of chance, contingency and selection.”
Not only was Aron Ra given no credit, they also…misspelled my name. I guess I should learn to expect that. When I got married, I suggested that I adopt my wife’s name instead, but she squelched that. No one would ever misspell “Gjerness”, would they?
But actually, much as I appreciate the attention and the anger of Christians, don’t blare my words at women just looking for care. It’s not appropriate and is counterproductive.
This one is at Umpqua College in Roseburg, Oregon. Ten people are dead.
I feel cynicism and despair. Nothing will be done. We are targets in the sights of the NRA, and there will be the usual excuses from armed lunatics.
More gun control NOW.
I’ve just heard on the evening news that the shooter was “mentally ill” — I’ve heard this repeatedly now. I’m going to demand some consistency.
If this guy was so sick in the head that he should have been institutionalized before he committed this crime, then we need to round up all the sick fucks on 4chan and get them medicated right now. If you’re not willing to do that, if it is too much to label a huge fraction of the privileged male population mentally ill, then stop claiming somebody who is actually representative of a common attitude is diseased.
Don’t flirt with your students. Ever. Under any circumstances. It is gross and inappropriate, and leads to nothing but trouble. The story of Stephanie Jenkins and her mentor is a prime example.
Maki illustrated two great truths about trolls:
They’re all about making sure only people like them get to be part of a community.
They’re so busy policing purity, they don’t bother to contribute productively.
His commentary is also spot on.
In a field where people work day and night to make sure every kid has a chance to become excited about science, the thought that there are old white dudes publicly sneering at a teenager because he wasn’t ingenious enough is sickening. Seeing people who identify as skeptics entertain wild conspiracy theories about a sinister muslim boy and his plot to get arrested for attention would be hilarious if it weren’t so toxic.
It’s a good thing to keep in mind: trolls aren’t necessarily simply frivolous haters who are out to destroy everyone’s fun for laughs. Sometimes they’re so very committed to the goals of a group that they dedicate themselves to non-stop hatred of the perceived enemies of that group, internal and external.
Heather Armstrong, better known as Dooce, is a mommy-blogger — she writes stories about her family and personal life — and she’s giving up the game for a surprising reason. Not because of the trolls (although there’s some of that) but because keeping her advertisers has been a pain in the butt.
The problem, Armstrong says, was that because she felt so beholden to them, she was agreeing to do just about anything to keep the advertisers happy.
“What happened over the last couple of years is the brands have been given a lot more say and a lot more control than they did when I was starting out,” Armstrong said.
“At the beginning, it was, ‘We’re just gonna put the logo at the end of the post. Write something around this.’ … And then it was, ‘Well, actually, we need you to show pictures of the product”. And then it was, ‘We need you to show the product.’ And then it was, ‘We need your kids involved in the post.’”
Wait, what? I’ve never been asked to personally endorse or build an article around the annoying items that we get as advertisements. No wonder we’re not rolling in the big bucks here!
Good for Armstrong for refusing to put up with it, but I’m wondering now how we’d handle it if FtB decided to sell out. Can you imagine the makers of homeopathic medicines, or shills for Bible colleges, asking me to show the product in an article or bring in a heartworming (not a typo) story featuring my godless, snarky kids? Not gonna happen. First try in which I mention some of our advertisers, they’d be frantically phoning me up to never mention their company name again…hey. HEY. I just had an IDEA.
Got something you want to bring to the public attention? I’ll start talking on the blog about your fantastically godless, liberal, feminist hair gel…wait a minute. What’s that poking out of the side of my laptop?
I didn’t know companies could transmit $100 bills through HDMI ports. That’s kind of cool. And a very fast response, Nameless Company That I Shall Never Ever Mention on the Blog Ever Again.
