Unleashing Personal Exuberance

monotheism, india, and "the beast with one back"

1. The crucial distinction between monotheism and polytheism is revenue flows. My parents purchased salvation with one check a year; my neighbors in Taiwan would have killed for such a streamlined financial system. The Fire God remains on a barter economy (he seems to enjoy pineapple and Coke), the Daoists will only take cash, and nobody is quite clear on what exactly the Boddhisatva wants. The medieval Catholic Church lasted so well because it integrated the two approaches -- think of Martin Luther as an advocate of a neater spreadsheet (roughly: "saints are false consciousness").

This system was bad for atheists, but they have come up with a clever new income stream. Profits now grow in proportion to Christopher Hitchens' ego.

2. Meanwhile, in India, the government may come down because it has acheived what the majority of the country wants. At issue is a nuclear deal with the United States that gives a quiet nod to India's nuclear program despite the governments failure to endorse a ban on testing.

The previous government, run by a Hindu-nationalist party (the BJP) badly wanted the agreement but never got it. Their goal is to bring down the progressive party (the UPA) of Manmohan Singh. UPA's only real transgression was to negotiate a deal, but the BJP is using its rent-a-mobs to drum up nationalist sentiment by claiming the treaty violates the country's sovereignty.

The BJP, being the minority party, couldn't achieve anything without help on the inside. Their turncoat allies? The Communists. Normally, Communists and very nationalistic religious parties do not make natural bedfellows, but it turns out the Commies hate the U.S. more than they hate the opium of the people.

So the Commies will symbolically pull out of the ruling coalition (not clear if they would actually support a no-confidence motion), and the thing that 90% of the populace wants will be jeopardized.

Moral of the story -- Communism may be good for something after all.

3. I knew Claude Scales was a funny man, but who knew he did penis jokes? Turns out the boomer knows quite a bit about being self-absorbed -- "the hot date with the Sally Five-slide." Such cool lingo they have in Brooklyn!

Claude's post remined me of a challenge set down by that dirty-minded instigator, Keifus, thrown down at John McG at Wag the Slate, the beta version of WikiFray. John rose to the occasion with the classic titles "Who's Beating the Meter?" and "Improper Self-Love." But, improbably, it was MsZilla who was the hands-down winner.

Feeling nostalgic for the old days, I thought I'd revive the tradition.

We're Having A Heat Wave, A Tropical Heat Wave

I wonder if this could be

a temporary work through

No comment

(numbers don't lie)

Notice

http://nuponuq.com/table/forum/index.php?action=display&forumid=4&msgid=2160

On The Origin of Weblogs

What do you think of this idea for a book blog?

Ever since Blogging the Bible wrapped up, I've been wondering what Blogging The Origin of Species would look like. There's a part of me that thinks it would be little more than Cliff's Notes updated for the 21st century, and written by an amateur, but I still think that it might make for a worthwhile project. Mainly because the more interactive format that a weblog (Um... why does Blogger flag "weblog" as misspelled?) provides could make for an entertaining, lively and sometimes vitriolic debate. But I'm curious - would any of you see this as an interesting exercise?

Open thread

Please use the first comment link (to the left of the post count) to sound off.

The Old Man and the Sea

1. Backward Induction:

A while back, I developed a habit of getting depressed on Fridays. Sunday evenings are depressing for the obvious reason (demise of the weekend and impending work week). Saturdays started getting bleak on anticipation of those Sunday evening blues, and soon, thanks to acute foresight regarding what lay in wait for Saturday, a pall of gloom descended on my Fridays too. At a time when most people joyously rushed out of their offices to hit the pubs, the restaurants and the theaters (to say nothing of wild orgies and raves), I made excuses to go home and lie wrapped in a blanket lest I slash my wrists in despair. What kind of deluded idiot celebrates a fleeting freedom when the fate of being dragged back to the harness is merely two days away?

A key determinant of the quality of life is how we relate to the future. That seems obvious enough; what is less clear is how exactly it works (or can be made to work). For example, placing a high weight on the future may elicit much good behavior in us (e.g., avoid adultery, stick to a diet, stop being an asshole), but may also unravel all commitments (love, loyalty, friendship) by throwing a harsh light on the impermanence of everything. There is also the argument that what we tend to hold intrinsically precious is what is fleeing. I wonder if I should prefer a one night stand with Angelina Jolie or a lifetime. Maybe I’ll settle for a week.

Eventually, I found a way of conquering my weekend blues. On Monday morning, I tell myself that glorious Friday is only five days away, so that I am essentially a free man biding my time to throw off my shackles. This has imparted such an insufferable aura of cheerfulness to my demeanor throughout the week that most friends and colleagues shun me till Thursday night at the very least. I wonder if I should return to the previous perspective.

2. Virtual Dotage:

Once one has spent a good length of time on a discussion board, a sensation sets in that can only be described as simulated dotage. I don’t mean it in the trivial sense of having “aged” in terms of years spent, but in the psychological one of garbled memory, attention deficit and an increasingly blurry sense of what is happening around on the board. Here is my best understanding of Wikifray/nopunuq/whatever’s architecture:

There are a bunch of individual blogs. When people post comments there, they show up here, so that others can reply here, discussing what they read there. The blog entries elsewhere also show up here as feeds, but comments must be posted there to be registered here as such. Some posts made here may be published in Wordflare, which has its own forum where readers may comment on what they read there about thoughts originally posted here (or, for that matter, there) in response to blog entries which appeared there (not Wordflare, the other “there”, wherever that is). All this digs up the old philosophical squabble about whether there really is any there there, but that is neither here nor there. I think.

Was I even close?

3. Religion:

As a self proclaimed atheist, I am often alarmed at the prospect of being clubbed together with polytheistic nutcases practicing ritual sacrifice and other weird shit. Let me explain.

There is little difference, really, between an atheist and a deist. The atheist believes there is no God, while the deist believes that He exists, but resolutely stays away from the universe (i.e., He is always there, never here). Thus, which framing I choose ought to make not an iota of difference as to how I expect the universe to behave, or what my fate in it will be. I might just as well call myself a deist.

The difference between a deist and an orthodox monotheist is similarly infinitesimal. Suppose I believe that saints can fly. Rather than calling this a supernatural phenomenon, I can always rewrite Newton’s law so that the gravitational force between bodies is a function not only of their mass and the distance between them, but also of their virtue, thereby fitting my belief into a deistic framework where natural law rules supreme. Alternatively, were I of the opinion that Newton’s inverse square law operates without exception, I could still think that God is working furiously every nano second to keep it from breaking down.

Finally, the distinction between monotheism and polytheism is just plain absurd. Is the Federal government a single entity, or a conglomeration of interacting entities like the Defense department, the Treasury and the CIA? I could frame my beliefs as if all godliness were emanating from a single source, or (without any alteration to their essential substance) as if they were multi-sourced: like the dept. of miracles, the dept. of fire and brimstone, the divine hurricane dispatch service, and so on.

This has led me to the disturbing conclusion that I may be a worshipper of the flying spaghetti monster and the giant tea-pot, after all. In which case, who am I to call the Scientology kettle black?

Open Letter to My Computer, With Certain Comments Directed Toward Floyd Landis

Dear Computer,

I'm not sure you will be able to read this, as you seem to be dead, forcing me to walk to the library this morning and locate some paltry stand-in, some off-key understudy, to fill in.


I don't think I ever typed into you a favorite bit from Full Metal Jacket:

This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy, who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will. Before God I swear this creed: my rifle and myself are defenders of my country, we are the masters of my enemy, we are the saviors of my life. So be it, until there is no enemy, but peace. Amen.

In order to make myself write, I sometimes thought much the same about you, computer. Together, we were adding to knowledge, defending the republic against ignorance, saving my life by applying it to a small yet useful purpose, a bailiwick.

I've wanted to be a historian since I was around six. This was mostly my father's doing: he hung timelimes on the walls of the kitchen. The Dark Ages started with the TV set and stretched to about where we kept the Legos. From the Legos to the cookbooks was the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment bridged the gap from cookbooks to fireplace. Years later I learned that Jesuits created imaginary buildings with rooms storing bits of information -- this spacial arrangement facillitated memory of thousands of details. When the Jesuits arrived in China, the Chinese were most impressed by their astronomy and their pneumonics.

I don't know if my father knew about the Jesuits, but all my life I've known that the 30 years war was 1618-1648 because of it's relation to the fireplace. My mother taught me argument (see other letter); my father was the details man.

At any rate, the Ph.D was the culmination of all this, and it was predictably Oedipal. If you are going to slay your father, best to have a good computer. I'm sorry I whacked you so hard, and particular sorry about the cat hair. And perhaps it's the, well, the maleness of all that that makes me think of guns and Kubrick movies. Time to switch metaphors.

We live by the stories we tell about ourselves. That's how I read the texts that TenaciousK posted today. It suits me to regard the writing of history as an epic exercise, and me part of it. It's a productive fiction -- my very geekiness takes on a heroic hue, my errors are tragic flaws, my paragraphs catharsis. I'd be better off if I chose a more modest metaphor (looking into a well). Then I wouldn't get motivated by things like the Floyd Landis ride in the Tour de France.

The urge of the historian is to participate in making people immortal, to keep the past close by, to give it life in the present. It's a completely ridiculous job, as silly as comparing a thesis to a bike race. What I do will end up on some busted computer, you or something like you, and a time will come (for the vast majority of the world it's long since here) when nobody cares about nineteenth-century China.

Still, it's fun to occupy the spaces that have been filled with stories, to go to the Forbidden City, the Red Fort, Walt Whitman's house. History is also a way we give poetry to objects (like you). At the end of the day, it makes me happy.

Anyway, as I say goodbye to you, computer, I'd also like to bury this sense of epic, which pumped up my ego but made it so hard for me to write anything. I'd like to stop caring about how long things last, and be content that they are still around, allowing me to measure myself against them, to find a kind of footing, to get oriented against whatever household object and whatever past comes to hand.

Thanks for your help.

Best,

august

cc: Floyd Landis
encl(2): Full Metal Jacket DVD, Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney

Open Letter to My Mother

AAARRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!