The Best of Faiths

              The Best of Faiths

               And I, unworthy of it

               Is there a God, and if so, then why is there suffering? Is God unfair? Or powerless? Or ignorant? God is said to be infinite in compassion, power and wisdom; but this is inconsistent with the reality of suffering. It is also at odds with Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which proves that every social system is somewhere either unfair or indecisive or illogical or perverse.

               I doubt there is a God, but I cannot prove a negative; therefore I am an agnostic. I doubt and I scoff; I agree with all of the faiths, about all of the other faiths.

               This includes atheism, which I consider the most pious of faiths, and I mean that in a good way. Atheism gives God the perfect alibi; not present at the scene of the crime. Atheism is also the purest of faiths, for it demands neither tithe nor rite. Atheism is the most unified of faiths, for there are infinitely many ways for there to be one god, but only one way for there to be none. And atheism is the most mystical of faiths, for it denies the mind the all-too-human comfort of a finite image of the ultimate.

               Atheism is therefore the best of faiths; but I myself am not the best of believers; so a doubter I remain. Maybe God exists and maybe not! But I'll gladly grant atheism this; if there is a God, then God is almost certainly not Yahweh, nor Christ, nor Allah, nor Krishna, nor Zeus, nor Odin, nor Quetzalcoatl, nor Yu-Huang, nor Horus, nor Marduk, nor any other human fiction.

On the Dilemma of the Damned Beloved

On the Dilemma of the Damned Beloved

             Heinlein, in "Job, a Comedy of Justice", has our pious hero reject Heaven because his beloved pagan wife was not in it. In contrast, C.S.Lewis, in "The Great Divorce", shows a blessed lady send her damned husband back to Hell. I see in this a curious metaphysical moral dilemma; namely, are the saved to care about their loved ones amongst the damned, or not? If yes, then their bliss would be contaminated by grief for the suffering of their damned beloveds; if not, then they attain perfect bliss at the price of rejecting empathy, memory, and ultimately even free will.
             The saved with damned loved ones therefore face a Faustian bargain; either love with pain or pleasure without love. This is of course a test of character, pitting virtue against vice. I say that the virtuous choice would be to leave the soulless bliss of false Heaven and enter the soulful turmoil of false Hell, and this for the sake of love; for love is true Heaven.
             Hmm… that has fantasy-novel potential...

When I went Galt

    When I went Galt

      When I was in graduate school at Berkeley, one of my colleagues was Matthew Weiner. Like me, he had a scraggly beard. Like me, he wore hippy-dippy Birkenstock sandals. And let's not forget the tie-dye T-shirts and the rainbow suspenders. But unlike me, he signed up for the IDA; the Institute for Defense Analysis. That is, he was a spook-in-training. He told me that the IDA was the most liberal of the spook shops; but I didn't buy it.

      Maybe I'm blowing his cover by mentioning this. I doubt it, it was all in the open. And in any case, fukkit. And what's more, fukkim. Freakin' sell-out!

      One day he approached me. How would I like to give a lecture, about my four-valued paradox logic, at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory? I said no. He shrugged; it's my loss.

      But I didn't think so. Here was my reasoning: if I give that lecture, then what's the best-case scenario? The bomb-makers get interested, they study my graduate thesis, and then they incorporate my work into a weapon of mass destruction. And for that they hire me, and pay me top dollar too; but there's a downside.

      For according to the Law of the Excluded Middle, either my brain-child, thus weaponized, gets used... or it does not. You'll grant that? And if it got used, then I personally would be involved in a deed of apocalyptic horror and evil; and in that case it would have been better if I had never been born.  Whereas if it did not get used, then my thought and labor would moulder in some missile silo, achieving nothing but the negative task of 'deterrence'; and it would be as if I had never been born.

      And so I calculated that Livermore Lab was offering me a no-win deal. Either it would be better that I had never been born, or it would be as if I had never been born. If that's not a Faustian bargain, then what is? Either an enormous negative return on my investment of time and thought and devotion, or a flat zero return; I figured that there was no way to profit from so Satanic an offer, so I turned it down. There was some shit that I would not eat.

      My wife Sherri says she's proud of me for that, which is nice, but pride doesn't pay the bills. What's worse, I feel unfulfilled. Lorn of destiny. Diamond logic is good stuff, solid work with real uses; really it ought to be in computer chips all over the world, but it is not, because I refused to adapt it to the task of death, destruction, terror and domination. (A.k.a. "defense".)

      I have been harshly punished for my moralistic pride; it has condemned me to a life without traction. Stagnant income for decades, no influence, obscure, ignored. Take that, Nat! How do you like your 'integrity', Mister Nobody? For what profit it a man to save his own soul but lose the world?

      My personal tragedy is trivial, but many others share it. Multiply my underachievement by millions of others in the same position as mine. Result; decades of national stagnation. That's what happens when enough people go Galt.

      ‘Going Galt’ is perhaps a misnomer; for though my strike was based upon rational self-interest, it was enlightened self-interest; not very Randian. Perhaps you could instead say that I (and many others) ‘walked away from Omelas’.

***

      I met Matthew Weiner again, years later. It was during the first Gulf War; you know, the one which didn't get Saddam Hussein, but did convince bin Laden that the USA is the Great Satan. I was walking through the U.C.Berkeley campus, which I hadn't visited for years, and suddenly I was face to face with him. We stopped and looked each other over. The junior spook still had a scraggly beard, and a tie-dye T-shirt, and clamdigger shorts, and rainbow suspenders, and Birkenstock sandals. I was clean-shaven, and was wearing a black shirt, black jacket, long black pants, black belt, black socks, and black leather shoes. I looked like an undertaker, for indeed I was consciously in mourning.

***

      I sometimes thought about Matthew Weiner towards the end of the Bush Jr. years. I hear that the spooks were furious about Plame, and none too happy about being ordered to fit the facts to the policy. I've had sucky bosses too, but none of mine ever insisted that two plus two equals anything other than four.

Re: Power of Pride

      There’s a bumper sticker I’ve often seen. It has the words “Power of Pride”, on a swirling red and blue background of stripes and bars, vaguely reminiscent of an American flag. These bumper stickers first appeared during the Bush Jr. administration, during the run-up to the Iraq war.

      Whenever I’ve seen that bumper sticker on a parked car, and I have a chance to leave a note, then I do so, and the note reads:

      ****

      Re: Power of Pride

      Your bumper sticker reads “Power of Pride”; but Power corrupts and Pride is a sin. I’d rather have Freedom than Power, and I’d rather have Conscience than Pride. Freedom of Conscience is like Heaven; Power of Pride is like someplace else.

      ****

Do white people exist?

     Do white people exist?

      In previous posts on this blog I have questioned the existence of Santa Claus, and money, and intelligent life on Earth. I have done so for philosophical reasons, usually relating to the incompleteness theorems of metamathematics. But white people? Don’t they exist; and also black people, and yellow? Surely my own eyes will say yes.

      But in fact my eyes say no! And so will yours, if only you use them.

      For what is white? It is the color of paper, and clouds, and milk. Suppose you, the reader, were called a white person; and that you were to pour from a carton of milk into a clear glass; and you were to see, to your amazement, that the fluid in the glass was the exact same color as your hand. Would you drink it?

      Of course not! You would sniff the glass suspiciously; you would empty the glass into a sink and run water to wash the sink clean; and then you would take that carton of milk back to the store, and demand your money back. Why? Because milk is white, but this stuff wasn’t!

      If you ever saw a cloud the same color as you, and if it started to snow you-colored snow, then wouldn’t you hide indoors until it stopped? That wouldn’t be a normal cloud! Normal clouds are white!

      Put a piece of white paper diagonally atop another piece. It will be hard to see the edge, for the two pieces of paper are the same color. Now put your hand atop a piece of white paper. It will be easy to see the outline of your hand, for the paper is white and you are not.

      A purist would object that albinos exist, and albinos are white. Not exactly; for even albinos, though pale indeed, still show in their skin some yellow, from subcutaneous fat, and some red, from arteries, and some blue, from veins. So even albinos have a complex color, tertiary at least; and the rest of us have a quartenary skin color.

      Seeking unbiased vision, I asked a professional artist what color I am. Katherine McKay said that I am a light, warm shade of brown. Now I am about as Caucasian as they come; indeed my grandparents came from Poland and the Ukraine, which neighbor the Caucasus mountain range; so if I am a shade of brown, then so is pretty much anyone else. (Slightly off-white pinkish albinos excluded.) If you were to write with ink the color of Louis Farrakhan on paper the color of Patrick Buchanan, then you would have to squint to read whatever you wrote, for you were writing with brown upon brown.  Excluding the rare pinkish albino, we humans are basically mammal-colored. 

      So if anyone were to tell you that he saw a stadium full of white people, then he was seeing something that was not there and could not be. He was seeing with his preconceptions, not with his eyes. An illusion!

      White people, and black people, and yellow people, are all of them hallucinations! And not figuratively, but literally!

On Cootie-Powered Idea Theft

     On Cootie-Powered Idea Theft

      Normally, when you steal an idea from someone, then that person gets to keep the idea. In fact that person gets to take credit, and boast ‘at last you have caught up to me’.  But what if you could steal someone’s ideas in a way that they can’t take credit, and must even repudiate? What if you could steal an idea out of someone’s head, so they don’t have it any more?

      Impossible, you say? But we have witnessed just this happening with Barack Obama versus the Republican Party. Over and over he has taken their ideas, which they have repudiated! He has stolen so many of their own ideas out of their heads that they must now run on bad ideas, or no ideas at all!

      Why is this so? How is it even possible? I blame Cooties.

      Cooties are a children’s schoolyard fiction. They are a kind of invisible magical lice, undetectable to the bearer, but intolerable to everyone else. They contaminate individuals, and anything that individual touches. They come in Boy and Girl varieties; Boy Cooties on boys, Girl Cooties on girls, each repulsive to the other sex. In theory they can be cured by Cootie shots, but in practice the only thing a child can do when approached by someone with Cooties is to run away.

      It seems that the Republican Party thinks that Barack Obama has Cooties. Therefore he must not be touched, and nothing that he touches may be touched either. Normally Cootie-bearing would be career-ending for a politician, but Obama has found a way to turn Cooties to his advantage. For not only does he have Cooties, but anything that he’s for also has Cooties, and must be avoided by all right-wing-thinking people.

      Therefore all he need do to deprive his political opponents of a useful idea is to say that he is for it. That gives the idea his Cooties, which they must flee. He keeps the idea, they lose it; he has stolen the idea out of their heads. Beware the power of the Cootie!

On the “too many” trope

      On the “too many” trope

      A variant of the “too many” trope came up in the news recently.  A certain Fox News commentator disgraced herself by saying that some female soldiers had been ‘raped too often’. The comedian Jon Stewart then asked if those soldiers should be raped ‘just enough’.

      Just so! Let us focus on that phrase ‘too often’.  It and variants are a common trope in political speech.        

      Candidates for office are wont to intone:

      “For too long we have had to endure Z…”

      “Too many hard-working Americans suffer from Z…”

      “Too much Z is polluting our air…”

      - for various values of Z. There’s also too often, too rarely, too little, too much, and on and on; and it’s always some evil that is in excess. But if that is the trouble, then what is the alternative?

      Logic dictates that the only alternatives to ‘too many’ are ‘too few’ and ‘just enough’. So I ask, with Jon Stewart, if the Fox news commentator was calling for just enough rapes? Or even too few?

      What would be ‘just enough’ rapes? For fewer than just enough would be too few. Well, how about a truly holy number; zero! More rapes than zero would be excessive, fewer would be impossible; therefore zero is the precise optimal number.

      But if ‘just enough’ equals ‘zero’, then ‘too many’ equals ‘any at all’, and to say “too many people have suffered from Z” is the same as saying “people have suffered from Z”.  So the words ‘too many’ can be deleted from all of its uses, without changing meaning.

      But not without changing political effect! For to say ‘too many have suffered from Z’ is not just to say that  Z exists and that people suffer from it; it also says that we, the people, have been tolerating a non-zero quantity of Z, and that it is now time to reduce Z to a lower, more tolerable, quantity. That lower quantity will probably not be zero; such rigor would probably be expensive, and we have other problems;  but rest assured that we, the people, now aroused from our slumber, will combat Z until it declines to the point that we can return to our slumber.

      Therefore the ‘too many’ trope is not telling you what is true, nor what is good, but instead how to think and what to feel. Worse, it does so covertly, while pretending to tell you what is true and good. The ‘too many’ trope conveys, not information, but manipulation.