I just wonder....

...how many years of his tax returns did Congressman Ryan have to provide to the Romney team as part of the vetting process?

Just saying.

Anti-atheist discrimination

Interesting article over at Salon about the discrimination faced by atheists. I've run into it occasionally. The first time I explicitly hit it was in junior high, when it was made very clear by my peers, and my teachers, that some opinions were simply wrong and should be kept to myself in any event. 

My views on religious issues have waxed and waned over the years since then, though I'm currently  back in my default strongly-doubting agnostic mode.  (Making the positive claim that something doesn't exist is much more difficult than the observation that there's a notable lack of evidence for something existing.) 

The only sort I've bumped up against lately is the informal variety. The sort that's perfectly legal, and that our society says is acceptable. So, for example, if someone informs me that I couldn't possibly be moral, that I'm not fit to stand in front of a classroom, that I'm not loyal to my country (and too dim-witted to understand what my country is 'really' all about), well, I'm supposed to just thank them for trying to help me be a better human being for pointing out to me how awful it is that I'm not like them. I've had all of those happen, by the way. 

On the other hand, I've also not had problems (at my current job) with people evangelizing me on the job, knocking my performance appraisal, or spamming me with "god will hate you if you don't forward this" emails.  Updating my filters has taken care of the emails from friends, former friends, people with whom I took high-school classes in the same building, distant cousins, etc. I've learned from experience, they won't take you off their "Emails For Jesus" list no matter how often you ask, so it's easier, and kinder, with less hurt feelings all the way around, to just update the filters so it's not taking up space in the inbox and be done with it. 

Incidentally...what made me question religion and turn to the more austere, but reality-based, appeal of reason in the first place? Reading the Bible. All of it, cover to cover. But that's another story, for another day.... 

Great moments in proofreading

Salon.com edition.....

A pleasant Friday evening

Spending Friday night at an installfest for a beginners Python workshop... Good turnout, much geekery.

Slate.com as stalker

Slate.com has a social-media plugin thingy called MySlate. They really, really want you to use it. They put ads for it on every darn page. Sometimes when you're reading an article, a popup flies over from the side to try to get you to sign up for it.

This morning, I learned that clicking a link to read an article gets a full-page pop-up that blocks you completely because they just want you to know how incredibly amazingly awesome it is And of course, it's got the usual microscopically sized, barely-contrasting-color close button, so it keeps it right there on the screen in front of you as long as possible.

Apparently their theory is this: If they've ignored the other popups and closed them without following the links for the last 50 times, they're obviously just being coy, but if we bomb them enough with intrusive-enough ads for this thing they obviously don't want, they'll relent and give in. The behavior is exactly the same as an abusive stalking would-be lover.

Why do so many sites assume that readers have no other options, and that their precious 'content' is so amazingly unique that users will put up with any amount of harassment to get it? Dear Slate.com: If you annoy me enough, I won't give in; I just won't be back. You're dumping enough cookies on my computer already, a simple flag of "Hm, this guy's turned down joining our incredibly amazingly awesome crappy add-on 20 times already, maybe, just maybe, he's really not interested." Is that so hard?

Obama's 'evolution'

It was announced too late to make a difference in North Carolina. In a way that risked no votes. And while this is his personal view, there is no policy followup, no action behind it, merely a statement of his personal views. Nothing suggesting any official response. And though I'm sure he's saddened by how often people's basic rights are put to to a vote, to make sure that equal treatment under the law doesn't offend the citizenry, that sadness doesn't lead to any commitment to change.

So. Thank you, Mr President, for saying some words.

And once again, Shep Smith demonstrates that Fox isn't an entire wasteland of partisan hackery.

Ugly website update

This was going to be a quick post that Salon.com's new look could be used as a classroom example of how to make a site uglier, less useful, harder to navigate, and more self-important.

Then I logged in to Blogger to make the post, and saw what Google has wrought upon the control panels. They win. FAR uglier and less useful.

Whatever their target demographic is, I'm apparently not in it.

Mismatched Caption Dept.

I don't know if it's an issue with the website or with my browser, but I've noticed something about Andrew Sullivan's site. The right side of the page has links to various articles at the Daily Beast. Sometimes the linked story changes, but the image attached to the link doesn't. This can  result in things like this:

No, you don't care to know where my mind went with that combination.... 

On movie atheists

After some discussions with a friend, I've got some ideas bouncing around in my head, none of them original... in fact, I can't escape the feeling that I'm at least paraphrasing someone else. So, with that disclaimer:

There are 2 basic types of atheists depicted in movies.

The first is the person who used to have faith but lost it due to some personal tragedy; the death of a child seems a popular reason here. At any rate, there's no need to worry about this person, because by the end of the movie they will have regained their faith, and come to understand that it's not God's fault their child died, but was rather their own, that of an alcoholic/violent ex-spouse, or (more recently) the fault of dark-complexioned people who follow one of the 'wrong' religions. They will not hold God responsible in any way, and in fact may go so far as to say that it's all for the best, or that while they don't understand why it happened, they know there must be a reason, which they are apparently content never to find out.

(Insert rant here about the frequency with which 'divine justice' is presented as the explanation behind  "God kills a child, in order to teach an adult a Very Important Life Lesson.")

The other type of atheist is the sneering, condescending intellectual, most often a self-important professor, who openly and rudely (since atheists don't have good manners) mocks anyone with any religious belief whatever, and insults religion in general at the slightest excuse. At a critical point of the narrative, this person will either betray the heroes (because you can't have morals or ethics without religion, therefore atheists can't be trusted), abandon someone to a horrible fate in a shocking display of complete self-centeredness (because you can't have concern for other people or compassion of any kind without religion, therefore atheists only think of themselves) or reveal himself as a sniveling coward (because you can't have courage, moral or otherwise, without religion, therefore atheists crumble at the first sign of difficulty). This type of atheist is usually eaten by a velociraptor. Even in movies that don't otherwise feature dinosaurs. Their deaths will be presented in a way designed to make the audience cheer.

There are a few variations ("They only have about a dozen characters, but they mix them around a bit"), but those are the main two types. There might be exceptions out there, but personally I'm not aware of any popular movie that makes it clear that one character is an atheist while those around them are believers, that doesn't give the atheist a good solid comeuppance by the final reel. They're certainly never shown to have any moral strength.

Personally, I've known just as many manipulative creeps, cowards, and self-centered blowhards who happily mouthed bible verses the entire time, while looking down on anyone who didn't share their particular brand of belief, as I have obnoxious agnostics or arrogant atheists. But that's just me. Maybe I should be keeping an eye out for velociraptors, just in case.

Christopher Hitchens

We've lost a thinker, one not afraid to say the truth as he saw it. Literate, reasoned, passionate about his causes, never one to shirk from a fight or to back down when principle was at stake. Restless, curious, erudite. His knowledge sometimes seemed encyclopedic, and some of his articles were on topics I knew nothing about--but his writing made it clear, and why it mattered.

I suspect he would have been alternately infuriating and inspiring to have working in the office next to you.

He's been taken from us too soon.

McArdle on Poverty II

She is on a roll...! Seriously. Go read it. This should be required reading.

Incidentally...

I couldn't let Andrew's latest hilarity pass without mentioning it...

Here's the setup:

I left the conversation hanging a while back, after my post about God being the most powerful force in the universe, rather than the anthropocentric notion of an old man with a gray beard in the sky. I left it because it felt like an impasse, with my view hovering in mid-air next to that of many readers, who insist that Christianity conform to what they think it must be (mythical piffle).

Yes, just because many, perhaps most, practicing Christians take their mythical piffle quite seriously and get rather upset when you try to point out the mythical-piffleness of it. And note that the problem is that his readers are insisting that Christianity conform to "what they think it must be," (emphasis mine), a nicely dismissive phrase that makes it clear that they just haven't thought it through like he has.

Here's the pitch:

But my view is certainly orthodox Christianity, as long as you ascribe consciousness andcaritas to the universal creative force. Anyway, that is a roundabout way of saying I read something this week that seemed more persuasive than my flawed efforts.

Then he quotes another source:

What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does its eyeball. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious.

And here's the punchline (still quoting that secondary source):

One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does. The idea is enough to render the Judeo-Christian cosmos sort of quaint. . . .It works perfectly as a religion. Others talk about God, and I feel we can sit together, that God is one of this thing’s masks, or that this thing is God.

And remember, gang, there's absolutely NO mythical piffle here! Because...because...well, there just isn't, because he said so. That Nature developed consciousness as a means of observing itself? An interesting idea...but hardly self-evident or impossible to deny, and it is by no means self-evident that Nature 'experiences love and desire.' Insisting it does, with no evidence (Nature seems to have an awful lot of random cruelty and wanton destruction as well) is...well... mythical piffle.

More on Poverty

Following up on yesterday's post...

One of the most pernicious aspects of poverty is touched on by a post over at Sullivan, relating to what the deterrent effect (if any) of the death penalty (news flash: There doesn't seem to be one).

The issue relates to what's called locus of control: Basically, do you see what happens to you as the result of choices you make that are under your control, or the result of events outside your control.

As Megan McArdle pointed out in the post I linked yesterday, there's no margin for error when you're poor. A careless, frivolous expense early in the month may mean you live on PBJ (or just skip a few meals) by the end of the month. Yes, you can save for something--but an unexpected car repair can wreck your plans completely. (And of course, since a beater was all you could afford, it's more likely to break down in the first place.) There was an NPR interview I heard a while back of someone trying an experiment of living on food stamps for a few months, and then writing about it. What she described was interesting--she said she expected money to be tight, but she wasn't ready for how exhausting it was. You couldn't just decide "that looks good, and it's on sale, I'll get it." You still had to think through how much you had left, what else you needed to get, what other expenses you had this month...on and on. Day after day.

Or, as my mom once said, "There's no shame in being poor, but it's damned inconvenient."

And eventually, the grind wears you down. And you stop considering possibilities. You saved up for the class at the community college but then your car broke down the 4th week of classes and by the time you got it fixed you'd missed two weeks of classes and couldn't catch up. You tried to get into that training program but your job changed your schedule and you couldn't go. The kids got sick and you couldn't get anyone to care for them so you had to stay home, and that got you fired.

And eventually, it really does seem as if life is happening to you rather than being under your control. Your locus of control has been externalized; and once that's happened, changing that way of thinking is very difficult. The narrowing of possibilities, the not even considering certain options because "that isn't for people like me" or "that wouldn't work anyway" or "I'd never be able to afford it," the lowering of ambitions and goals until it's "Just make it through to the weekend." Keep your head down, don't make waves.

Unfortunately, the "ground down and kicked around until ready to just give up" state can also be interpreted as "some people just prefer poverty to getting off their butts and doing something about it." Because, of course, when an unexpected $500 car repair bill is inconvenient but not catastrophic, when a day's work doesn't involve backbreaking labor--in short, when you're comfortably middle class and have convinced yourself it's all entirely because of your own achievements--it's plainly self-evident that anyone else could do it too. And as Heinlein pointed out, "Anytime 'everyone knows' thus-and-such, it ain't so, by at least a thousand to one."

McArdle on Poverty

A few weeks back I mentioned in passing that the Atlantic's Megan McArdle has an occasional habit of falling back into glibertarian hand-waving. Fairness demands I point out that when she avoids it--as this post on the intractability of poverty certainly does--she's first rate.

She points out that there are environmental constraints, but also bad choices, and (what too many writers on this subject don't get, but if you've ever lived in poverty you learn real quick):

It isn't that people can't get out of this: they do it quite frequently. But in order to do so, you need the will and the skill--and the luck--to execute perfectly. There is no margin for error in the lives of the working poor.

And that many decisions made out of fatigue, hopelessless, lack of information, or simply different priorities, lead to perpetuation of the problem.

It's a hard problem. Really hard. I don't have an easy answer any more than she does. But it's nice to see someone on the internet recognizing both sides of the problem, at least.

As adults they are the products of everything that has happened to them, and everything that they have done, but they are also now exercising free will. If you assume you know the choice they should make, and that there is some reliable way to entice them to make it, you're imagining away their humanity, and replacing it with an automaton.

Public policy can modestly improve the incentives and choice sets that poor people face--and it should do those things. But it cannot remake people into something more to the liking of bourgeois taxpayers. And it would actually be pretty creepy if it could.

Logic that you only hear in faculty meetings

Our school requires PhD faculty to teach 2 courses per semester.

Many top research schools require 1 course per semester, or less, from their top researchers.

Therefore we should reduce our teaching load.

Hmmmm, how many hidden assumptions can you find in that statement?

Things I've learned from grading students' papers

• Viewing someone's public Facebook profile without their written permission is a violation of their privacy. (At least if it's a University doing the looking.)
• Posting something on Facebook (such as bragging about breaking a University's rules) is the same as confessing in a courtroom and is absolutely dispositive.
• Corporations have good reasons for gathering information on their customers, it's for the customer's own good, and the fact that it may conceivably have a theoretical misuse is irrelevant, because they've said they won't misuse it, so they won't.
• Copyright doesn't apply to the performance of a play if it's performed outdoors.
• Bragging about breaking a University's rules can't be used against the student if the rulebreaking or cheating takes place off-campus.
• You can copy a copyrighted work, as long as the amount copied is less than 100%.
• Once a company has your data, they can use it for any purpose whatever, regardless of why it was originally collected. This is legal, so by definition it is ethical and there is no rational basis for objecting.

This is why it's so hard to go to work some mornings....

Penn State, and lacking explanations

The news coming out of Penn State is, of course, shocking, outrageous, and all the rest. Plenty of pundits are trying to come up with reasons why it happened, or how it could have gone on so long, or how varied the reactions are now (the students are rioting because the coach was fired for covering up child rape? and they're seeing the coach as the victim?).

Megan McArdle over at the Atlantic is trying to come to grips with it. I've had my criticisms of Ms. McArdle in the past; I don't remember if I've shared any of them here or not. Her tendency toward glib, dismissive, off the cuff solutions to other people's problems, privileged outrage when things affect her personally (see debit card fees, and limits thereon), blahblahblah. Some of her comments are, I think, pretty much on target; others are almost dangerously out to lunch. Overall, her on-target percentage is higher than average, probably higher than mine, so I keep some opinions to myself. After all, she's putting her thoughts out there with her name on them for public view daily, I'm firing off potshots relatively anonymously when the mood hits me. There's a difference.

She's grappling with why this happened, how it could have happened, what possible reason people could have for letting it go on. And she's coming up short.

Because, as an economist, she's viewing things as a classical economist. To the classical economist, people are rational, utility-maximizing beings, with at least a modicum of empathy toward others, basic fairness, and an enlightened-self-interest recognition of the societal need to protect the innocent and the vulnerable.

Which may be very useful for certain types of analysis, but fails completely (because it is completely at variance with reality) when we enter the dark twilight world where power, privilege, and sex intersect.

On a campus with a winning football team, the coaches (and to a lesser degree the athletes) have power. And they certainly have privilege. The problem with privilege, of course, is that it becomes invisible, taken for granted, and tends to grow. Those with privilege quickly learn that there's no one to say no. Or to give any negative feedback at all. I read a blog yesterday quoting Walter Mondale to the effect that he didn't realize he wasn't funny until he was no longer VP and people stopped laughing at his jokes. So, one tends to assume that if in doubt, one can get away with it. Because one always has in the past.

Meanwhile, for those in the vicinity... Taking on someone with power is risky. It's dangerous. It's unpleasant. Part of privilege is that others will take one's side no matter how egregious the offense (see Students, Penn State, Rioting). If anyone loses their job, it's usually not the privileged one.

So it's easier (lower immediate cost) to look the other way and maybe try not to think about it too much. In fact, after a while, that becomes rather easy. All too easy.

It's not a satisfying explanation. It's not rational. It's not about rational behavior. It's about social pressure and not wanting to rock the boat and not taking on someone who has Very Important Friends, In High Places. No, they didn't market their development office as a pedophile procurement business. But if Big Donor X called up and asked so-and-so to call him back, well, you take the message and pass it along. Do you suspect? Maybe. But you don't know, and why make trouble for a winning program on the basis of rumor? Particularly when whatever hits the fan will not be distributed evenly?

As much as I've ragged on him (and I have shared those views here), Andrew Sullivan understands it. His parallels with the Church abuse scandals are a little overdrawn--I don't believe the comparison is as direct as he's making it here--but it's the same basic dynamic at play.

The people who did know, who saw, and did nothing, are the most contemptible here. But that's another rant. For another evening.

It's not rational. It's not amenable to economic analysis. But it's still reality.

Today's random musing

Sparked by a quote posted by Sullivan:

"Some of you … God hates you. Some of you, God is sick of you. God is frustrated with you. God is wearied by you. God has suffered long enough with you. He doesn’t think you’re cute. He doesn’t think it’s funny. He doesn’t think your excuse is 'meritous.' He doesn’t care if you compare yourself to someone worse than you, He hates them too. God hates, right now, personally, objectively hates some of you," - Pastor Mark Driscoll.

Quoting a friend of mine: "I know that I've created my God in my own image and likeness when he hates all the same people I hate."

This has been today's random musing.

Meanwhile....

Salon.com rolls out its own makeover.... and immediately becomes a leading contender for Slowest Loading Site On The Whole Damn Internet.

Further bulletins as events develop.

I know what I said yesterday, but...

Slate.com continues its push to drive away readers and push itself [farther] into irrelevancy with a hideous makeover of the homepage. Butt-ugly, badly organized, loaded with twitterish fluff and "here's what your neighbors are reading" pap, it's becoming an example of everything that's wrong with online culture.

No, I'm not a fan.

I understand they're struggling, and have to keep changing and adapting if they're going to survive. This isn't a "they've changed it, argh, change bad" post, but the changes they've made are a major step backwards in the usefulness and interest of the site.

So, they've made a decision about their market, and I'm not really part of it. Fair enough. Good luck, guys... I'll check in occasionally, but probably not as often.