DISQUS

Congratulations on the aldaily.com link. Talk about status unrelated to income...

What about those of us who were duped into smoking a pack of short Luckies a day because we thought the filters were bad for you? What about us? Is there no justice?

Hey, nice "auto-shill" popup links. I personally never click through to an Amazon link, so I tend to miss half the conversation.

Frank's right on both counts - those are Bertram's scare quotes around "decent," intended to identify a particular crowd of hawkish liberal internationalists, and there's no reason I can see to claim that they are all worked up over self-determination, as opposed to liberal democracy. The whole back-and-forth is a muddle of misplaced accusations and counter-accusations.

It means wash your bottle out after drinking CarnoMaxx - the new energy beverage that tastes just like raw meat.

Amen. I've been bitching about this for a while now, and have come to believe that no matter how badly you implemented this change, and no matter how many negative externalities you introduced, you'd still have a net benefit.

The freedom to choose your neighborhood without regard to its public school and the freedom to choose your work without regard for its health care plan are the two biggest political prizes that might actually be in reach of our generation.

Those of delicate sensibilities please forgive the following ill-considered and sweeping generalization:

I think that churchgoing conservatives are more or less content with the order of the cosmos, and don't see a great many opportunities for humans to improve on the inherent nature of things. The left, on the other hand, attracts folks who believe that through human effort, we can redress the fundamental unfairness of the universe, or the market, or the weather, or whatever. That idea carries an inherent sense of discontent.

I'd like to see how happiness reports compare to the old "is the country headed in the right direction" question. Can people maintain happiness even while they think the nation (or world) is going to hell in a handbasket? I'd have to assume so, since that's a prevalent conservative sensibility (though not one I share).

A parental vision of the state probably tracks closely with the pernicious things you mention, since becoming a metaphoric "child" is a really effective way to put one's moral responsibility into government escrow.

Not to get all chicken-and-egg about it, but, I'd be even more interested to see if societies with brittle, imperiled family structures have greater tendencies toward seeing the state as a metaphorical parent. If you're a strung-out, glue-sniffing, AK-toting orphan at age 10, you might be inclined to seek a surrogate family wherever you can find it. I wonder if the same phenomenon scales up to the societal level.

Yeah, I agree. It's like watching the glass blowers and dry-stane-dykers sharing a plate o' haggis.

Mr. Wilkinson-
Your post has revealed a profound injustice in the world of popular urban entertainment, where the "arms race" has reached truly catastrophic levels. Today I plan to file a class action suit on behalf of all sucker MCs who can demonstrate that the microphone skills of their rivals have caused them to be "frozen," "crushed," "knocked out," "paralyzed," "murdered," no longer able to "touch the mic," or otherwise subjected to emotional duress due to their rivals' lyrical flow. If you or your readers think you may been harmed due to someone else's irresponsible microphone skills, please contact my office.

-Lionel Hutz, Attorney

Will -
Why do you have to assume that every believer is 100% certain of the afterlife? As I said above - we agree on the kind of behavior that one could predict from someone like that.

If the concept of religious doubt is really all this new to you, those Mormons you grew up with must have really kept their eyes on the prize better than I do.

In your red button example, can I feel and smell the hot coals over which I'll have to walk while listening to "We Built This City?" In other words, is the threat of punishment as credible as the apparent short-term reward?

By your definition, I don't truly believe in eternal reward or punishment. In spite of myself and my religious inclinations, my own belief in the hereafter isn't concrete enough to really influence my behavior in the here and now.

Your vision of the frustrated believer demands that I concoct layers of meta-belief in order to come to terms with my incomplete faith in the hereafter. Instead, I admit that it's not strong enough to dictate my actions.

I think we both draw the same conclusions about the behavior we could predict out of someone who truly and completely believes in eternal reward. After all, plenty of such people provide an example as they blow themselves up in Iraq every week.

The rest of us make do with what we admit to be an incomplete faith in the hereafter. That's not so complicated, but not as simplistic as the red button.

Sure - if you're a Christian, you ought to believe in the eternal reward and behave accordingly. And I admit that I'm quite "self-conscious about putting myself on." Frankly, it feels weird and counterintuitive, which is why I have a hard time with your assertion that I actually just beleive that I beleive. Because in fact, I don't even believe that I believe correctly, dig?

But look at the different things that have to be in place to really yield the kind of Christian that you and Orwell imagine:

1) Total belief in the reward of heaven and corresponding punishment of damnation, or at least enough certainty to think of it as the best bet

2) Precise understanding of the behavior required to attain that reward

3) Comprehensive self-scrutiny and self-awareness

4) The self-discipline required to implement all of #2 in light of #3

I understand your point to be that, given #1, there ought to be no self-discipline required, since the apparent reward is so great. In Orwell's words, "If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it."

But the "nuance and backsliding" that Ross is talking about are our failures to attain all four of the above criteria. I don't have to be filled with a cringing self-loathing to view those things as difficult, and I really don't see "meta-atheism" as explaining anything that can't be accounted for by the limits of human discernment, prudence, and will.

At least you can take some comfort that you're making the same mistake as George Orwell.

Most observant believers don't adhere to the religious moral imperative out of belief in the hereafter - Judaism has a pretty vague notion of the afterlife, without much sense of desert, if I'm correct.

Instead, the religious moral code is based on the idea that there is an inherent order to the cosmos that doesn't correspond to the default nature of the human will. Devotional life is the process of retraining one's will -- wrestling it into harmony with the divine order. This applies to all sorts of religious doctrines, regardless of how much speculative carrot-and-stick they involve.

None of us knows how much time is allotted to us for this work, so we tend to guard life and limb about as vigilantly as the rest of y'all (not that I wouldn't like to see the accident mortality survey that you speculate about...).

Keelay's right.
Someone should do a comic book about a philosophy grad student, climbing on the ceiling with suction cups and somersaulting between laser beams outside the secret vaults at Nike and Coke headquarters, all in search of the innocuous gray notebooks containing behavioral truths TOO HORRIBLE TO REVEAL...

The very point of this UN recommendation is that development aid ought to be a massive, unified, centrally directed effort, which invites a "thums up/thumbs down" vote on it. That's the very trouble with Sach's vision.

Whenever someone starts talking about a "New Marshall Plan," it's time to holler "check, please."

This feels a little like Russian Roulette.

Open Your Heart | Will Oldham
Working for the Man | PJ Harvey
Koka Kola | The Clash
Dirty Old Town | The Pogues
Lord Only Knows | Beck
Fabricoh | Archers of Loaf
Ready to Go Home | Hank Williams
Allegro non Troppo | St. Petersburg Soloists Brahms & Shostakovich Quintets
Whirl | The Jesus Lizard
Sea of Heartbreak | Johnny Cash
You and Me | Neil Young

Whew.

The question about who among the commenters are parents wasn't meant to imply anything about fatherhood and masculinity, though it was taken as such. Sorry.

I'm asking because part of the fun of the ongoing science project that is parenthood is watching other parents freak out over gender roles, thinking through one's own hangups, and speculating on which characteristics of a child are conditioned vs. innate.

That's all I meant.

Kipp:
If you think there's something so very ironic (and why does irony always have to be "delicious," anyway?) about a "bookish, metrosexual man with interests in poetry and art museums speaking as the mouthpiece of masculinity," that says more about the narrowness of your own gender notions than about Will or his argument. Who, by your standard, is allowed to speak on the subject of masculinity? Only macho meatheads? Robert frigging Bly?

Just because Will or anyone else likes art museums doesn't mean he has to then forsake all claim to masculinity and its various social, moral, sexual, and aesthetic implications.

Quick show of hands here: who among the commenters has kids? Just curious.

Note the approving citation of Fareed Zakaria:

After all, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany via free elections.

...and I apologize if I mistakenly abbreviated dannaruca to "Dan."

Dan - I think what's Will's saying is that the liberal order is neutral in regard to how its operating principles are originally derived.
Just because some social conventions are irrational or groundless, they can still be valid in that they provide the consensual regularities that support the order.

Joanna-
Your comment upstream about the "spiritual experience" being a biochemical function is a diversion. Very few religious believers ever get a buzz off of worship - it's not what most devotees are in it for. Whether someone adopts a religious ontology or not has little to do with their biological predisposition toward "happy juice" or the lack thereof.

I'll grant that some devotional environments are explicitly designed to induce a sort of temporary euphoria, but those are the exceptions, and they don't account for the prevalence of religious identification.

"It's more likely that you just aren't trying to win, and it's a lot more fun to jeer from the sidelines...."

That sounds like a cry for help to me. I read it as "you don't have a cadre of shiny-faced, glad-handing hacks reminding you of who really runs things."

I think "big" is understood as meaning "ambitious."

A "big" government wants and tries to influence its citizenry more than a "smaller" one. So you're right - it's possible to imagine a small government that churns through an enormous amount of revenue but only serves an ornamental purpose. In the real world, however, taxes are a good indicator of government ambition.