closetpuritan

10:39 am: Pigs are flying and the weather in hell is decidedly nippy...
A news article/blog (being associated with a newspaper, it occupies a gray area...) where the comments are, on average, more well-thought-out than the original article!
Dawkins on the Power of the Jews

I have mixed feelings about Dawkins at best, and his phrasing could have been better ("have a disproportionate influence" would have been better than "monopolize"). Also, I'm not at all sure that atheists do outnumber religious Jews in the U.S. (It depends on how religious "religious" is--but self-identified atheists only make up about half a percent of the population, whereas "nonreligious" people make up about 10-15%. People whose religion is Jewish [right-wing/fundamentalist or otherwise] make up about 1.5% of the U.S.)

More importantly, the reason that the neocon/right-wing Israel lobby has disproportionate influence is because they're in bed with the Christian Fundamentalists, who believe that a Jewish homeland in Israel is necessary for the war in the Middle East that will bring about the End of Days and the Rapture. And I just can't see atheists gaining more influence on issues of importance to them by working with the Christian Fundamentalists.

In other words, Dawkins isn't very well-informed about the intricacies of religious politics in the U.S. Well, ignorance is bliss.

UPDATE: This blog entry describes where Dawkins goes wrong in more detail.

09:47 pm: I'm not sure if I should even post this*
I have just realized that being gay is, in fact, a choice.

Gays usually respond to the assertion that being gay is a choice by asking who would choose to be gay when gays are subject to so much prejudice in this country.

However, I think that being gay must have enough subversive appeal to them that it's worth the personal risks they take by being gay. What we need to do is persecute them more, so that the risks of persecution outweigh the thrill of undermining the sacred institution of marriage. And I know how much persecution would be sufficient. We just have to treat them the same way Iran would treat them. It worked for Iran: Iran does not have any homosexuals.
*for fear that it will be taken up as a serious argument by the religious right.

08:30 pm: Some perspective on wind turbines
I don't think that wind turbines are especially ugly, so I've never really been against them for that reason. I do realize that other people don't like them, and for some places (such as New England, where the fall foliage on the mountains is a draw) the perceived scenic beauty of the countryside can have economic value. But the following letter from the Bangor Daily News brings some perspective--if you think that wind turbines are bad for the scenery, consider the alternatives. It's a little histrionic at times, but it's definitely a wakeup call.

Energy wars

My family has lived in our beloved valley here in West Virginia for 10 generations. I’m a coal miner’s daughter and granddaughter.

There is an energy war going on here. We’re being bombed with three and a half million pounds of explosives every day. Up to 700 feet of mountaintops have been blasted from 400,000 acres of our mountains.

The deforestation worsens flooding and toxic coal waste sludge dams sit above our homes and schools.

Some children slept fully clothed and ready to run during rain events. Homes are damaged and covered in coal and silica dust. Residents can’t sit on their porches, some use respirators when they mow their lawns because of coal dust. Our water and air are poisoned daily. Our miners die, suffering from black lung and crushed bodies so Americans can have energy.

Both wildlife and human habitat is destroyed and poisoned.

Some dare to compare wind farms to mountaintop removal. Come to West Virginia and see the difference. We are fighting for wind here on our ridge, to save it from mountaintop removal. One person’s trash becomes another person’s treasure.

More wind and solar means less coal, kilowatt by kilowatt, until coal and nuclear plants are gone. The air coming out of a wind turbine is as clean as the air that went into it.

The wind dilemma is a class issue. We are poisoned for others’ conveniences. If your energy comes from coal, then it is covered in our blood and it should be dripping from our light switches. War is waged against us for energy, but yet some people don’t want to look at a wind turbine.

When you flip on that switch, remember who suffers. Take responsibility and fight for renewable energy. Your children’s lives depend on it. Visit www.ilovemountains.org.

Julia Bonds
Co-Director Coal River Mountain Watch
Rock Creek, W.Va.

10:01 pm: Suing God
I found this story interesting... I especially liked the fact that in the photo chosen for this story, Chamber's head appears to be framed in a halo (which is actually an electric fan). And I would note in response to "God" that while wars are attributable to free will, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. are more often than not beyond our ability to control. (The fact that God doesn't step in to stop genocide or torture because he apparently believes that the killers' free will and their ability to carry out their free will is more important than giving the victims the ability to avoid being killed is something that I will not get into any further than I just did on this particular post.)

I initially thought when I read this story, "This guy chose a pretty clever and amusing lawsuit to make, and he certainly has a point about frivolous lawsuits." Then I found out what lawsuit he was protesting. The victim of an alleged rape was ordered by a judge not to use words such as "rape", "sexual assault", "sexual assault kit", etc., and was suing to be able to use those words. It's clear to me that, even to someone who might agree with the judge's decision, this is not a frivolous lawsuit. What the hell is wrong with you, Sen. Chambers? You're making other nonbelievers look bad.

10:13 am: Petty and Sleazy
The widow of a Wiccan soldier was excluded from a speech Bush gave to relatives of fallen soldiers, apparently because she was fighting to get the Wiccan symbol engraved on her husband's memorial marker. Bush has done plenty of things I don't approve of, but this is just petty and sleazy.

BTW, this should be the last post for today. I'm catching up after spending a lot of time at work the last week, where I can read the news but don't want to post to my journal.

09:40 am: "Dragged Through the Mud"
I can't be the only one who's noticed (actually, my boyfriend noticed it first) the immense irony of George W. Bush's complaint that Gonzalez's  "good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons" when Gonzalez initially claimed that the fired attorneys were fired because of performance issues when they were really fired for political reasons. The fact that their firing was attributed to performance issues, by the way, was what spurred them to go to the press, not the mere fact that they had been fired.

09:01 am: Division of labor
OK, it looks like I can't get married now: live-in boyfriends do more housework than husbands.

And I also think that this article is very true. Mom, I hope you're reading this.

This does kind of raise an interesting question, though. I've rarely seen households where men do absolutely no housework, but I've never once seen a household where the woman was not the one making sure that everything got done. I think it's due to one or more of these reasons:
1. Neither one wants to take charge, but since the housework is traditionally a woman's role, the woman sees that if she doesn't take charge of the housework, the man is still not likely to do it any time soon, whereas the man thinks that if he doesn't take charge then someone else (the woman) will.
2. Women tend to tolerate messiness less. Maybe because they just don't like it, maybe because the messiness of the house is seen as reflecting on them but not on the man. Therefore, they care about it more than the man, and therefore, they're not willing to let the house get as messy. For men, it's more worth it to live in a messy house rather than being the one responsible for cleaning up. There are some neat freak men, but they're the exception.
3. Women tend to be more responsible/more "goody two-shoes", at least in some ways, than men.

08:16 am: Real Ultimate Internet Naivete
Apparently China's Xiaolin Temple... I mean, Shaolin Temple, has first demanded that an internet user with the handle "Five Minutes Every Day" apologize for saying that a Japanese ninja beat them in unarmed combat, then decided to sue him.

"The so-called defeat is purely fabricated, and we demand the Internet user to apologise to the whole nation for the wrongs he or she did," the Beijing News said, citing a notice announced by a lawyer for the Shaolin monks.
The Shaolin temple "strongly condemned the horrible deeds" of the user, the newspaper said.
"It is not only extremely irresponsible behaviour with respect to the Shaolin temple and its monks, but also to the whole martial art and Chinese nation."

Hey, Shaolin monks: not only are you taking this way too seriously, but by referring to an internet post as "horrible deeds" (how can words even be deeds, horrible or otherwise?) you are sound like caricatures of yourselves.

This reminds me a bit of the story of the king who commanded the tide to stop. And of the people in Iran, etc. who started riots because of a European political cartoon depicting Mohammed. And of the people who write serious letters to the Real Ultimate Power website about what ninjas are really like. What are they going to do next, start defending the fighting skills of pirates versus ninjas?

Here's a pseudo-Buddhist simile: To sue such a person would be like suing the passing birds for pooping on your head.

Pray for free speech and common sense. Oh, wait, I'm an atheist. Well, don't act like the Shaolin monks, anyway.

P.S. My boyfriend says that they don't need to sue him, they need to show him their kung fu, and show him that their fighting is stronger than that of any ninja.

06:57 pm: J.K. Rowling hates periods.
She should read this and this webpage. Or she should read the section of The Elements of Style on colons: "Join two independent clauses with a colon if the second interprets and amplifies the first."

Spoiler alert: There are some minor spoilers contained in the quotes I am posting. All the quotes are taken from Chapter Four of the seventh Harry Potter book.

She's good at creating an engaging, page-turning plot and an interesting world (even if the world doesn't make sense if you think too deeply about the cosmology of it), but she's not what I'd call a great writer. Her characters often seem caricature-like or like embodiments of stereotypes--altered slightly to fit the Wizarding world. (She's kind of like Dickens that way, I suppose; I've never been a fan of Dickens and think he's overrated.) In addition to this, her books lack a greatness that authors like George Eliot, Shakespeare, Aldous Huxley, Jane Austen, Peter S. Beagle or Ursula K. Le Guin have--I can't fully explain what this thing that her books are lacking is, but I've never claimed that I was a great author. Not that you should expect that kind of greatness from what is, after all, a young adult book series. They're still quite an enjoyable read.

But what's really annoying is that she can't get basic punctuation right.

"Harry could feel the sidecar beginning to sink again: Crouching as low as he could, he pointed at the middle of the oncoming figures and yelled, 'Impedimenta!'"
"Hagrid swerved and zigzagged: Harry knew that Hagrid did not dare use the dragon-fire button again, with Harry seated so insecurely."
Those sentences deserve a semicolon, not a colon. The second parts are not a direct explanation of the first parts.

Possibly the worst example of her misuse of the colon is the following (which is an entire paragraph):
"The jinx hit the middle Death Eater in the chest: For a moment the man was absurdly spread-eagled in midair as though he had hit an invisible barrier: One of his fellows almost collided with him---"

Double colons and no periods, exclamation points or question marks to end a sentence in the entire paragraph!

For all of these quotes, other than the second one ("Hagrid swerved...") note that the part before the colon is an explanation of the part after, not the other way around.

Rowling also overuses semicolons. Here's an entire paragraph:
"He knew a dreadful, gut-wrenching pang for Hedwig as it exploded; the Death Eater nearest it was blasted off his broom and fell from sight; his companion fell back and vanished."

You're supposed to use semicolons when sentences are related--related by more than the fact that they follow each other chronologically.

I mostly saw her use this jarring kind of punctuation during the fight scene that these quotes are taken from. Apparently, she thought it would be more exciting and fast-moving if she joined together as many sentences as possible. It was both unnecessary and counterproductive: As I've said, J.K. Rowling is not a great  writer, but she's good at keeping her books interesting. This scene would have been exciting without trying to reduce all pauses as much as possible, and every time I saw an improperly used colon or semicolon, it threw me out of the book a little bit.

I've heard that they either allowed her to not have an editor, or to override the editor, in her last book because she is so famous and powerful. I couldn't find a source on the Internet for that, though.

And by the way, if you want to see examples of the proper use of colons, I've scattered them throughout this posting. ^_^

Tags: grammar, harry potter, j.k. rowling

10:08 am: Michael Bloomberg is scum
Michael Bloomberg doesn't just "speak his mind", he's a sleazy misogynist. He makes Giuliani look good. And he tops George W. Bush for talking to the American public like we're 3-year-olds:

In private conversations, Bloomberg is less inhibited and is known to tell bawdy jokes, use provocative language and comment on women's appearances.

The public got a glimpse of this in 2003, when he told a pair of disc jockeys on a radio program that he would "really want to have" actress-singer Jennifer Lopez. A day later, Bloomberg backpedaled a bit and told reporters, as his face reddened, that he would want to "have dinner" with her.

And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.

A less-restrained Bloomberg was also portrayed in a book of quips, quotes and anecdotes attributed to him and put together by employees for a birthday present in 1990. It contains such statements as: "If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they'd go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale's."

...I suppose that's why I've been going to the library instead of Bloomingdale's. Oh wait, when I choose the places I go, I don't have impressing males at the front of my mind. What could possibly be wrong with me? Maybe Bloomberg should also consider the possibility that women who go to Bloomingdale's want to be appreciated for their beauty, but that that doesn't mean that they're stupid--or want to have sex with Michael Bloomberg (which would be a special category of being stupid).

06:24 am: Climate Change--and more Puritan "street cred" for me
David Brin's got a post on his blog about Climate Change Denier talking points. You can find fact-based refutations of their arguments in a lot of places, but this focuses more on looking at the Climate Change Deniers' arguments themselves.

And he also mentions something that I've often thought: the left side of the environmentalism debate is more puritan-like and more conservative in the traditional sense than the Republican side. See below, or read Brin's post on his blog.

Oh, what has happened to conservatism?

Ever heard of “waste-not, want-not?”

Or “a stitch, in time, saves nine?”

Look back at the old puritans like Cotton Mather. Now remove their trait of nasty intolerance. Then ask - who most resembles the puritans nowadays?

Not today’s profligate, adventurist, insatiable and (above all) indulgence-promoting conservatives.

No. Today’s “puritans”are the worried, chiding and sometimes downright grouchy liberals! Wagging their fingers. Preaching that we ought to save our pennies and frugally learn to live within our means.

Oh, and not befouling our nest! How about a burden of proof for those who say “no worries” about that? Wasn't "cleanliness is next to Godliness" another conservative reflex? Once?

I’ve said it before and I will again, till enough “ostrich conservatives” wake up to how thoroughly their movement has been hijacked by traitors to everything it once stood for.

02:51 pm: No matter what happens, it's the other side's fault
So one of my supervisors randomly announced that "as soon as a Democrat's in office, we'll get another terrorist attack." Yes, 9/11 was Clinton's fault--it was all the fault of the previous administration--but if the terrorists make another successful attack the same day that a Democrat takes office as president, it will obviously be the Democrats' fault. Or maybe his argument was that it would be the voters' fault for making our country look weak by choosing a Democrat, thus inviting attack.... You know what? Maybe I'd better stop trying to make sense of what goes through the mind of someone like that.

08:11 pm: Something Unexpected Happened Today...
I found myself defending Andrew Speaker, the TB guy, the man who said, "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing."

One of my coworkers happened to mention him and said, "They should take away his livelihood. They should disbar him." To which I basically said, "What the hell kind of sense does that make?" (Several minutes of conversation followed, with a lot of kidding on the square comments from her, while I was trying to talk seriously to see if I could get her to see why her proposed course of action didn't make sense.) Finally she admitted that 'should' meant 'I desire to happen because I'm vengeful'. Then she said I should be more 'evil', or something. (No, thank you. I am closetpuritan, after all.)

I find this more than a little disturbing, coming from someone who works for the government and is supposed to fairly apply the laws to all. I wouldn't trust that kind of power in the hands of someone like that.

Some people reading this may think, "But why don't you want Speaker to lose his livelihood? Don't you think he's irresponsible and morally dubious?" Well, yes. But I don't think that punishment should be used to gratify people's desire for vengeance. The punishment that she's proposing would be sort of like if, instead of taking away your driver's license for drunk driving, they took away your job at a call center. (Or the way my coworker is proposing it, if they did that in addition to taking away your license.) It's basically screwing up someone's life and making them poor by punishing them in a way that's not particularly related to the offense, rather than making the punishment fit the crime.

A good example of making the punishment fit the crime is what they're actually doing now (and what Speaker is complaining about), i.e., having an armed guard outside his door until his TB has been treated. And, of course, everyone now knows he's a jerk--that's kind of fitting as well and a good warning to anyone who's going to deal with him about how they can expect him to act.

In fact, let's look at a picture of him:


Doesn't he remind you of all the most irresponsible frat guys you've known in college (if you went to college)? Of course he does.

09:54 am: Live in infamy, Andrew Speaker
You and your non-apology.

"'I don't expect for people to ever forgive me. I just hope that they understand that I truly never meant to put them in harm.'" Could have come from a drunk driver. Does the concept of manslaughter mean anything to you, Speaker?

Not quite as bad as the "sorry you got offended" type of apologies that you hear, but still pretty bad. Basically, he's saying, "I feel really bad for you guys, but I still don't think it was my fault." He never acknowledges the fact that the US government was working on ways to get him back to the US without him boarding a commercial airliner, possibly by air ambulance. For that matter, if he was a personal injury lawyer, he probably has enough money that he could pay for a private flight. Maybe he'd have to take on some credit card debt or something to do it, but it doesn't seem like a lot to ask if people's lives are at stake.

"'I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person,' he told the paper. 'This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing.'" WTF? "I haven't committed any crimes except that one manslaughter. Why should I be put in jail?" "I never treated you poorly except for cheating on you. Why are you breaking up with me?" "I've never done anything to you except tell lies about you while your back was turned. Why don't you trust me?" He's basically saying that he cooperated with everything except the most important thing they've asked of him. Seriously, was this guy trying to make a joke? He has shown himself to be thoroughly untrustworthy, and it's obvious that he'll only cooperate when it's convenient to him. With that kind of sense of entitlement, he's probably inspired several entries on customerssuck. He's exactly the sort of person who makes waiters want to spit in his food.... Maybe that's how he got tuberculosis!

He put out the above quote before he was identified as a lawyer. When I first read it, I thought he probably was a lawyer. That sense of self-entitlement connected with one's professional identity seems like a common attitude among yuppies, and lawyers in particular. And the fact that he was reluctant to reveal his actual profession, yet wanted to communicate that he was both successful and well-educated, was another clue that he was a lawyer.

"Speaker said he and his wife were 'scared out of our minds' at the prospect of being indefinitely placed in an Italian hospital and dying there."
Again, WTF? You guys were told that they were working on ways to get you out of there. Why is he trying to gloss over that fact? Was he just panicky and not listening? Did he decide he couldn't trust/didn't believe the US government? Or maybe, after he realized that his disease was more serious than he had at first thought, he was in a rush to get back to being treated, and didn't really care if he infected other people in his rush to get back? True, the government is not known for its swiftness of action, but that's a lot of risk to expose other people to because you think the government might be slow to get you back home.

"He said his father, also a lawyer, taped that meeting.
'My father said, "OK, now are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he's a risk to anybody, or are you simply saying that to cover yourself?" And they said, we have to tell you that to cover ourself, but he's not a risk.'"

As a lawyer, he should have known from the above that there was still some risk, even if it was small--otherwise they wouldn't need to cover themselves.

And he's a personal injury lawyer--you'd think he'd realize the extent to which he's to blame for his conduct. If anyone got infected because of his adventures, I hope he gets sued. To me, he is worse than a drunk driver, because even though it's less likely that someone will be killed or injured by his actions, if someone does get infected it could spark an epidemic that would kill more people than a drunk driver would ever be able to kill.

05:57 am: Worst Mixed Metaphor II: The DNA Strikes Back
"'Shanghai will grow,' Gutierrez says. 'The question is how it will grow. We can program into its DNA a sustainable growth pattern. We have to make cities, as much as we can, future proof .'"

Wired, why did you have to ruin a perfectly good article in the 2nd-to-last sentence?

(Yes, I know that they're quoting someone and therefore aren't entirely at fault. They're the ones responsible for including that particular quote, though.

The thing that jumped out at me first was the unnecessary use of "DNA." It adds absolutely nothing! It would be a much better sentence if they simply said "We can program it with a sustainable growth pattern," or "We can program a sustainable growth pattern into it."
Why, Gutierrez, why? What possessed you to insert such a meaningless phrase into that sentence? Seriously--do people think they're being clever, or what? You're just making the sentences harder to parse.

It took me a while before I even noticed that on top of a bad DNA metaphor, this was a mixed metaphor: you can't really "program" a city, so he must have taken "program" as a metaphor from computer programming.

Disclaimer: People have every right to use horrible mixed metaphors in everyday speech. I'm sure I've done it myself. So I don't hold it against Gutierrez that he would do that when speaking colloquially. And maybe Wired could not find a better quote to illustrate the point they were trying to illustrate. (I don't think a paraphrase would have had the same effect, given the quote's placement at the end of the article.) So this is not so much about criticizing people's actions as about criticizing the horrible sentence. The author of that New York Times article about Philip K. Dick, however, I hold completely responsible for inflicting this kind of sh** on unsuspecting readers.

01:27 pm: Good essay on atheism...
...and a good response to the people trying to use the Virginia Tech shooting for political ends.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/19/18451/0971

08:34 pm: Use of "genetic", "genes", and DNA as an analogy/joke...
-Is a frequently-used technique at the New York Times
-Is almost as bad as using the word "literally" as a superlative
-Betrays a simplistic understanding of how genes/genetics/DNA work
-Takes a nice, unvague scientific word, created to be a nice, unvague scientific word, and adds vagueness and a new colloquial meaning to it
-Results in the WORST MIXED METAPHOR EVER [EV4R!]:
"It’s as if his imaginative DNA had spread like a virus."

Live in infamy, Charles McGrath.

12:50 pm: Yellow-Rumped Warbler/Myrtle Warbler
So I made up some "suet", hoping to attract some birds other than goldfinches. Because I've been getting almost nothing but goldfinches at my birdfeeders. Occasional chickadees and morning doves, some gray squirrels, but mostly goldfinches. (I have a tube-type sunflower seed feeder, a tube-type thistle seed feeder, and a house-type sunflower seed feeder.)

Anyway, it worked. After some time searching online, I found that the new birds I've been seeing are male Yellow-Rumped Warblers, with the Myrtle Warbler coloration.

So if you, too, want to see Yellow-Rumped Warblers, you could try making suet cakes using the recipe below. And, if you like to make bacon, you can use up some lard! Also, I used natural, no-hydrogenated-crap crunchy peanut butter. The oilyness of the peanut butter may make a difference in what kind of birds you attract, I would think--natural peanut butter tends to be more oily.

The recipe I used is "Jesse Perez's Bird Cakes" from this site.

06:01 am: The "Untold Success Stories" in Iraq
I have always been against the Iraq war, but once we had already invaded Iraq, I felt a certain amount of ambivalence about how quickly we should leave. I'm a bit less ambivalent after seeing this story. Apparently, all those "under-reported success stories" that people (McCain et al) have been talking about should have quotes around them.

If we've accomplished our goal of removing Saddam Hussein, if our reconstruction resources aren't being well used, if the Iraqis themselves mostly want us to leave, if our troops cannot make Iraq safe or prevent civil war, why are we still there?

12:18 pm: "Honor Killings"
"Honor Killings" are bad. I think anyone likely to read this journal knows this.

So I was reading this news story about the increasing number of honor killings happening in Britain, committed by immigrants from Muslim countries. And it was depressing and stuff. And then I read down near the bottom that the non-honor-killing-Muslim reaction goes something like this:

"There's a perception that the community is under threat and that they have to defend people they don't agree with... They feel that this is not the time to be critical [of other Muslims]."

Granted, it's a natural reaction to want to defend your group when it's attacked by someone from a different group. However, that is NOT a good excuse! You're going to defend a murderer just because he's a fellow Muslim?! You know that what he's doing is wrong, but it's more important for your group to stick together. WTF is wrong with you?! I'm sorry, but that is in many ways more of a moral outrage than the honor killing. It shows absolutely no integrity. If I wanted to convince someone that most of the human race are just worthless sheep, I guess I wouldn't have to go farther than the British Muslim immigrant community. If you're going to enable murderers by trying to protect them from the police, then you're just allowing more murders to happen, and you're just as guilty as the people who actually commit the crimes.

One of the things that makes this all the more infuriating is that this isn't even mandated by their religion! A lot of the people doing this think that it is, but Muslim scholars say that it's not. It's just a custom that grew out of a combination of their religion and their cultural "values". (I use the term "values" very loosely.) And then some of them use the "it's our culture" defense like this was something as harmless as celebrating Cultural Holiday X! Cultural tolerance should not extend to practices that are clearly morally unacceptable.