Guns and Freedom - The Diplomat

Part of the difficulty in comparing these countries is that the notion of freedom is somewhat different as compared with the U.S.  For many in Japan, freedom is not simply about free speech, freedom of the press, and voting, it is also about having a society that is safe and in which people support each other.   Many Americans tend to construct a concept of freedom as being associated with a lack of interference from government and other members of society. 

These different ideas about the nature of freedom contribute to the generation of distinct cultural attitudes about guns and gun control.  I am not going to argue in favor of one view of freedom over another, but I will make a simple point: the idea that guns are necessary to preserve freedom is empirically wrong.  Countries like Japan make it very clear that it is possible to have a free society while also maintaining strict control over guns. In fact, the Japanese recognize that widespread gun ownership decreases safety and security and, in turn, makes for a less free society.

The Diplomat

What the "Walking Dead" says about the war on terrorism

It’s the reversion to this tribalism that makes The Walking Dead‘s apocalypse so chillinglly real. Modern moral progress, as Peter Singer argues, has proceeded by expanding the sphere of moral concern to an ever-larger group of people. People may have once only cared about those who share their nationality, race, or gender, but as Enlightenment ideals about universal human rights took root, humans have moved inexorably towards treating everyone as equally worthy of moral concern. The Walking Dead‘s third season has suggested that, when you demolish a stable society, this purported moral progress will have proved a smokescreen, and that our enlightened selves are just as brutally tribal as our ancestors.

Walking Dead on Human Nature 

Faith and Reason - Greg Koukl

"So let's set the record straight. Faith is not the opposite of reason. The opposite of faith is unbelief. And reason is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of reason is irrationality. Do some Christians have irrational faith? Sure. Do some skeptics have unreasonable unbelief? You bet. It works both ways."

-Greg Koukl

A reflection from a Soviet labor camp - Solzhenitsyn

While in prison, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflected on his own experience in a Soviet labor camp.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Solzhenitsyn admitted that being in a labor camp showed him how easily he could have engaged in what the camp guards did if the tables had been turned.

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t….

Meet the Facebook version of you - Gizmodo

The wit in your status updates is delightful. The real life version of you always seemed intent on cornering me into a night of drinking wine after work so I could listen to you go on rather humorlessly about money problems and the usual rash of petty resentments against family and colleagues. But the Facebook version of you is one languid little paragraph of blurted bon mots after another. 

And I am crazy about the fact that the Facebook version of you is spiritual bordering on religious and philosophical. The real life version of you is, to be blunt, pretty quick to judge people for believing in anything more than reasonably priced alcohol, entry level luxury cars, restlessness, and chronic dissatisfaction. But the Facebook version of you has spun an enchanted web of a bio that feels like a cross between Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech and the mission statement of an idealist’s filthy commune that I long to spend my remaining years on.....

- Gizmodo  

The iPhone 5 vs the iPhone 4GS

A Type of Faith - Tim Keller

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternative beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because 'There can't be just one true religion,' you must recognize that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts. If you went to the Middle East and said, 'There can't be just one true religion,' nearly everyone would say, 'Why not?' The reason you doubt Christianity's Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith."

- Tim Keller

Number Of Users Who Actually Enjoy Facebook Down To 4 - The Onion

"...Indeed, the Pew report found that 99 percent of Facebook members could not recall having enjoyed any of the social network’s features at any time since 2009. Of that subset, 74 percent said they had asked themselves “How has my life come to this?” while checking the website multiple times per day, 67 percent said they were “inevitably plunged into an alternating cycle of vanity and self-disgust” when reviewing tagged pictures of themselves, and 52 percent said they had questioned the whole point of life itself after spending half an hour on the site only to realize the most interesting thing they had seen the entire time was a photo of what someone had for dinner..."

the rest at The Onion

Dilbert on Statistics

The First Things Principle - C.S Lewis

“Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.”

- C.S Lewis

"Man is an end in himself" - Ayn Rand

Bioshock

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

- Ayn Rand

Unfair Monkey Experiment

Contemporary Spirituality is "faith-lite"

In short, spirituality is ‘faith-lite.’ Whereas religion (or Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’) makes heavy demands on practitioners to adjust their thinking, feeling, and acting to fit with what’s been revealed according to the tradition, spirituality doesn’t make such demands, and it thereby makes us stupid or at least intellectually lazy. It also makes us selfish … 

”Spirituality doesn’t face the fear and loathing of existence, the abyss. Instead, it covers over the abyss with easy answers about an immortal soul or about happiness coming from within. When happiness comes from within, you don’t have to worry about the countless others outside of your spiritual bubble who are far from happy. Thus privatized, happiness becomes the name for a rather unjust and miserable way to live.”

- David Webster, Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish and Unhappy

Ouch.

Mad Men - Opening Sequence

"Advertising is based on one thing : Happiness" 

"You're born alone, you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I'm living like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't one."

- Don Draper

Existensial Panda in Seoul

A Summary of Walter Benjamin

1. Everything is perfectly reproducible but the act of reproduction devalues things.
2. Reproduction exchanges uniqueness and permanence for plurality and transience.
3. We change our tastes accordingly to enjoy transient things uncritically.
4. As a result we rapidly lose our ability to exercise value judgements - particularly when watching TV or films.
5. The end result is that we lose our critical faculties altogether. We begin to value everything uncritically.
6. Consumer society then satisfies the demand for worthless commodities.
7. As we consume these commodities, becomes overwhelmingly superficial.

From Marcus Honeysett's Meltdown

Temper - G.C Lorimer

"When you are in the right, you can afford to keep your temper, and when you are in the wrong you cannot afford to lose it"

-G.C Lorimer

The Seven Deadly (Online) Sins???

No other Sovereign than Fact - Joseph Mazzini

If there be not a Supreme Mind reigning over all human minds, who can save us from the tyranny of our fellow men, whenever they find themselves stronger than we? If there be not a holy and inviolable law, not created by men, what rule have we by which to judge whether an act is just or unjust? In the name of whom, in the name of what, shall we protest against oppression and inequality? Without God there is no other sovereign than Fact; Fact before which the materialists ever bow themselves, whether its name be Revolution or Buonaparte.

-  Joseph Mazzini, 19th Century Italian Liberal, The Duties of Man

Guide to Understanding the Introverted!

From Schroeder Veidt…

Dying Lion Sure Doesn't Feel As Though He's Completing Some Great Cosmic Circle

THE SERENGETI—According to a male lion currently dying on the Serengeti Plain, his agonizing demise certainly doesn't seem as though it's part of some transcendent cosmic circle of life, but rather as if he’s slowly and painfully bleeding to death.

The expiring lion, who dragged his weakened body onto an isolated patch of grassland Monday after being mortally wounded by a poacher, confirmed to reporters that he is not experiencing a tranquil, satisfying sense of harmony with the universe, but is instead mainly feeling intense physical torment brought on by a fatal wound to the abdomen.

"I could be wrong, and maybe this is all an enchanting and noble chapter in life's great cosmic narrative, but right now it pretty much just feels like I'm dying alone on the ground in a puddle of my own blood," said the 500-pound big cat, releasing a deep moan as violent spasms seized his body. "Shouldn't I be feeling a stirring sensation of kinship with all living creatures or something? Yeah, I'm not getting any of that."

"Plus, I was illegally shot by a poacher. How does that fit into this ancient, majestic cycle in which all of nature is connected as a unified being?" the lion added.

 

Observing his surroundings, the moribund lion reported that he has seen no brilliant gleaming light shining down from the heavens that makes him realize he's part of a sacred tradition as old as life itself, nor has a hush seemed to fall over the land in a reverent acknowledgment of his passing...

..."I guess I thought there'd be a choir of chanting, melodic voices, and that all the animals of the African valley would gather on a distant ridge to respectfully view my last moments and recognize our essential interconnectedness," said the lion, drawing his last labored breaths. "But there's nobody else around at all, except those vultures."

- From the Onion. The rest at the link

Great Smile, Crushing Theology

Great Smile

In the Bible, God is seen as a Savior—someone who rescues people when they are at their worst, not when they are thinking positive thoughts. St. Paul met Jesus while he was still “breathing out murderous threats” against Christians. In Acts 27:20, St. Paul and St. Luke “abandoned all hope of being saved” in a storm at sea, before Paul comes to his senses and affirms God’s presence with him. In Matthew 26, Peter denied Jesus three times, just as Jesus went to the cross to save him (and everyone else). In the Old Testament, God chooses Israel not because of their greatness and strength, but because of their smallness and weakness.

So if you have total control of your mental outlook, and if you are able to always do the right thing, Osteen’s your man. However, if you are frustrated, tired, unable to do the thing you ought to do, I suggest you look to Jesus.

-  Read the rest of the Mockingbird's article, Osteen : Great Smile, Crushing Theology

Mike Lewis's graduation speech to Princeton

"...The book I wrote was called "Liar’s Poker."  It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of a sudden people were telling me I was born to be a writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of an age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn't disinherit me but instead sighed and said "do it if you must?" Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place?

This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either...

...In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything. 

All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you'll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't. 

Never forget: In the nation's service. In the service of all nations.

Thank you. 

And good luck."  

 - Mike Lewis, writer of "Moneyball", speaking to Princeton graduates

Wikipiphany

Is it true? - Matthew Parris, The Spectator

‘Faith’ means faith. Doubt is not faith. Faith is not seeking but finding. Real Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Jewish believers are being patronised by kindly agnostics who privately believe that the convictions of those they patronise are delusions. A lazy mish-mash of covert agnosticism is being advanced in defence of religion as a social institution. But ‘whatever floats your boat’ is not the wellspring of Judaic belief. The God of the Gap is not the God of Islam. Jesus did not come to earth to offer the muzzy comforts of weekly ritual, church weddings and the rhythm of public holidays.

As an unbeliever my sympathies are with fundamentalists. They seem to me to represent the source, the roots, the essential energy of their faiths. They go back to basics. To those who truly believe, the implicit message beneath ‘never mind if it’s true, religion is good for people’ is insulting. To those who really believe, it is because and only because what they believe is true, that it is good. I find David Cameron’s remark that his faith, ‘like Magic FM in the Chilterns, tends to fade in and out’, baffling. If a faith is true it must have the most profound consequences for a man and for mankind. If I seriously suspected a faith might be true, I would devote the rest of my life to finding out.

As I get older the sharpness of my faculties begins to dull. But what I will not do is sink into a mellow blur of acceptance of the things I railed against in my youth. ‘Familiar’ be damned. ‘Comforting’ be damned. ‘Useful’ be damned. Is it true? — that is the question. It was the question when I was 12 and the question when I was 22. Forty years later it is still the question. It is the only question.

- Matthew Parris, on his article "Beware - I would say to believers - the patronage of unbelievers" in The Spectator

A Summary of Michel Foucault

1. Authorship is a modern idea.
2. We cannot know an author.
3. Therefore the author does not have authority.
4. Hence we need to interpret.
5. We cannot interpret the original author - so we can all bring our own interpretations.
6. I can bring any meaning I like. I can use the text however I like.
7. Everything in the world is a text - I can understand anything in the world however I like

From Marcus Honeysett's Meltdown

Arrested Development vs The Godfather

How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood

By Alyssa Bereznak

My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously. She agreed, dissolving Sunday church and Bible study with one swift signature. Mom didn’t mind; she was agnostic and knew we didn’t need religion to be good people. But a disdain for faith wasn’t the only reason he wrote God out of my childhood. There was simply no room in our household for both Jesus Christ and my father’s one true love: Ayn Rand....

I don’t know exactly why [my father] sparked to Rand. He claimed the philosophy appealed to him because it’s based solely on logic. It also conveniently quenched his lawyer’s thirst to always be right. It’s not uncommon for people to seek out belief systems, whether political or spiritual, that make them feel good about how they already live their lives. Ultimately, I suspect Dad was drawn to objectivism because, unlike so many altruistic faiths, it made him feel good about being selfish.

Needless to say, Dad’s newfound obsession with the individual didn’t pan out so well with the woman he married. He was always controlling, but he became even more so. In the end, my mother moved out, but objectivism stayed.

 From Salon Article, "How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood"

Kim Kierkegaardashin Twitter

Someone made a Twitter account that mashes up the sayings of famous philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and famous socialite Kim Kardashian

Here's a few tweets:

God Admits Humans Not Most Impressive Creation

'It's Mountains,' Says Divine Being

 

THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH—The Lord our God, Divine Creator and Ruler of the Universe, announced Wednesday that He considered mountains, not mankind, to be far and away the most impressive thing He had ever brought into being.

Calling the selection "not at all challenging" to make and "kind of a no-brainer," the deity explained that while He felt the human species was a good creation and worthy of praise, a human being simply paled in comparison to the sheer awesomeness of a snowcapped 20,000-foot mountain.

"Mountains, above all else, are undoubtedly my most splendid creation," God proclaimed. "Mountains are incredibly tall. They are also miles wide and are filled with millions upon millions of tons of earth. These facts alone make them objectively more impressive than human beings."

- The rest at The Onion

Why there is no meaning - Aldous Huxley

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.... For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation ... liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.... There was one admirably simple method in our political and erotic revolt: We could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.

- Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means

Colbert the Apologist?

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

How to solve a prison outbreak - Korean Comic

Creator of VeggieTales repents

"I looked back at the previous 10 years and realized I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction. You can say, “Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so,” or “Hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!” But that isn’t Christianity, it’s morality. . . .

And that was such a huge shift for me from the American Christian ideal. We’re drinking a cocktail that’s a mix of the Protestant work ethic, the American dream, and the gospel. And we’ve intertwined them so completely that we can’t tell them apart anymore. Our gospel has become a gospel of following your dreams and being good so God will make all your dreams come true. It’s the Oprah god.

- Phil Vischer, Creator of the now bankrupt VeggieTales, from an interview with WorldMag

Geese Rush Hour

Why Dungeons & Dragons is banned by the Catholic Church

via SMBC

Farewell to Friday Night Lights

FNL has pulled this off by sticking to one byword: respect. Dillon has unemployment, drugs and strip clubs, but it's also a town where teenagers still say "ma'am" and "sir." Coach Taylor is respect personified. Unlike Don Draper, he's a hero, not an antihero; Chandler gives him a soft-spoken honor that today's serious drama rarely depicts. And he gives respect back, teaching his players the strength that comes from unironic devotion, captured in the motto "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."

Though they can, of course. Sometimes teams lose, families lose, towns lose. What saves them is teamwork, which goes beyond the sidelines. FNL is a football show, but one in which what matters above all is not the Hail Mary pass but the faces in the stands watching its arc. "When you go back out on the field," Taylor tells his team as they trail in a big game at halftime, "those are the people I want in your minds. Those are the people I want in your hearts."

Just as HBO's crime-drama masterpiece The Wire was a searing vision of what is wrong with America, Friday Night Lights has been a clear-eyed, full-hearted tribute to what is right with it. Whether you're urban or rural, red or blue or purple, this show was made for you and me.

- Times Review on Friday Night Lights

The Foundation of Unyielding Despair - Bertrand Russell

"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of the universe in ruins-all these things, if not beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

- Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy

How then does Bertrand Russell define the words that he uses?

YEY! Windows 95!!

The relationship between markets and morality- Os Guinness

What, then, is the relationship between markets and morality?

Unless capitalism has an ethical boundary, it will always create two problems. One is the problem of insatiability, never knowing when to stop, always wanting just a little more. The other problem—you can see this very clearly in America today—is commodification. The good society draws a line between what is and what is not for sale, but, in modern America, almost everything is up for sale, including much that should not be. We need powerful faith with strong ethics and knowledge of what is legitimate to buy and sell—that’s the market at its best—but certain things are not for buying and not for selling, and we should know why.

- Os Guinness, the great-great-great grandson of Arthur Guinness (founder of the Guinness brewery)

I believe I can fly

Brave New World (is Here!)

"...Huxley also foresaw a disturbing partnership between the state and capitalism but didn’t anticipate how little need for government collusion sophisticated marketers would need to reorder society. In “Brave New World,” the state has suppressed all simple sports because they don’t require lots of expensive equipment to keep the economy humming. Instead, it relentlessly hypes complicated tech-y activities such as “electromagnetic golf.” A couple of generations ago, kids might have bought one baseball glove and one bat that would last for years. Today they instead spend hundreds of dollars on Xbox 360s and games that quickly become boring and demand to be replaced with upgraded versions.

Thanks to subliminal messages repeated thousands of times in nurseries while kids sleep, the “Brave New World” characters grow up conditioned to accept a disposable society in which everyone is always hungry for the latest thing and simply discards the old. Huxley would be surprised to see that no such indoctrination is necessary to make people throw away an iPhone that was state of the art three years ago and line up overnight to get a slightly improved version...."

- Kyle Smith, writing in the New York Post

Strength versus Object of your faith

“It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.” 

- Tim Keller 

By What Standard ? - Douglas Wilson

"...The question, “By what standard?” really is a fundamental question. The same question arises in disputes on many playgrounds—it's the same thing as asking, “Who says?” If you claim that I have to do something, the question should come back, "Why do I have to do this?"...

During our three days together making Collision, this was one of the few times where Christopher was brought up short. I think it was because the question here was a complete novelty for him, and he needed a moment to think about it.

When he tries to answer the “By what standard?” question, notice how he smuggles in the assumption that I am asking him to prove. He says that he knows certain (moral) realities because he is among the “higher primates.” But there is a word in there that is value-laden—higher. Higher by what standard? What are we talking about?

Christopher set up the next exchange nicely by acknowledging that as primates, we have a jumble of conflicting instincts. The response I offered was something I first learned from C.S. Lewis. If I have two competing and contradictory instincts, an evolutionary approach can account for each of those instincts (say, self-preservation and herd preservation). What it cannot account for is a third instinct that tells me which of the first two instincts I ought to obey in this instance. I do not have an “umpire” instinct that decides between them.

What I do have is a conscience, which cannot be accounted for apart from God. Christopher tries to take a “conscience vote” among the students there when he brings up the question of eternal torment. But we don’t need a conscience vote. We need to account for why we have consciences in the first place."

- Douglas Wilson discussing his experience with Christopher Hitchens

Thomas Cranmer's anthropology

 

"What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn't direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants."

-  Ashley Null summarizing Thomas Cranmer's (English theologian) anthropology

Homer takes a lie detector test

Human Civilization Brings Out Worst In Area Man - The Onion

Sources close to local resident Justin Krypel admitted to reporters this week that while the 34-year-old account executive was "basically a good guy at heart," human civilization has a tendency to bring out the worst in him.

"I've known Justin for years, and whenever he's not engaged with modern society in any way, he's actually pretty nice and laid-back," said former roommate Michael Mariani, 32, who noted Krypel was typically agreeable when sitting by himself in a room doing nothing. "However, as soon as he's exposed to some aspect of the culture in which he lives, he can get pretty irritable and difficult to be around."

"Some things just really seem to push his buttons, like work, having to deal with other people, or any inescapable feature of human existence along those lines, really," Mariani continued. "It's best to try to avoid that stuff when you're around him...."

- The Onion, "News Human Civilization Brings Out Worst In Area Man"

How Not to Write About Africa - Foreign Policy

"It's hard out here for us old Africa hands. We are desperate to see more coverage of important stories from the continent and for our neighbors to become more educated about the places where we study and work. Yet when we get that coverage, it tends to make us cringe.

Take, for instance, the current violence in northern Mali. In the last six weeks, Mali has experienced a coup d'état and a declaration of independence from rebels who now loosely control half its territory. The recent conflict has displaced approximately 268,000 people as various groups of Islamists and separatist rebels jostle for control of desert oasis cities as a drought-driven food crisis looms with the arrival of the country's hot season. The situation in Mali is by far the worst unfolding humanitarian crisis in the world today, but compared with say, Syria or Afghanistan, you probably haven't heard much about it. 

Or consider the flurry of coverage of Central Africa that followed March's "Kony 2012" phenomenon. First of all, it is frustrating that it takes a viral Internet video or the involvement of Hollywood celebrities to bring attention to the depredations of groups like the Lord's Resistance Army. Even worse, many Africa correspondents file stories that fall prey to pernicious stereotypes and tropes that dehumanize Africans. Mainstream news outlets frequently run stories under headlines like "Land of Mangoes and Joseph Kony," seemingly without thinking how condescending and racist such framing sounds..."

Laura Seay, the writer of the article, "How Not to Write About Africa" (Foreign Policy) with the following questions and conclusion.

"Is it because Africa is still in many Western minds the exotic "other" of movies and imagination? Or perhaps because many Western reporters still approach Africa with a mixed sense of excitement at being somewhere so "unique" and fear of the Heart of Darkness? Or is it simple ignorance about an Africa that, as Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina notes, is never going to look like what the West wants it to look like? I don't have a definitive answer. But I do think we can do better."

This video explains part of the problem and provides a solution too.

 

United States Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

-  United States Declaration of Independence

Poor "Michael Jordan"...and "Michael Bolton"

Poor Michael Jordan...can't be as bad as Michael Bolton though...

Smoking and lotteries

Rationality and Materialism according to C.S Lewis

"If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too.  If so, then all our thought processes are mere accidents-the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms.  And this holds for the materialists' and astronomers; as well as for anyone else's.  But if their thoughts are merely accidental by-products...why should we believe them to be true?  I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give a correct account of all the other accidents."

- C.S Lewis

Three basic principles about China - The Diplomat

1) China is so vast in terms of land and people that it sees itself as an enclosed universe onto itself.

2) China’s overpopulation and its limited natural resources mean that the Chinese economy and political system are both based on a national zero sum game of exploiting the peasantry. 

3) This exploitation of the peasantry is so convenient and lucrative it becomes the elite’s raison d’etre, which in turn leads to a stagnant inward-looking authoritarian political order and philosophy that fears progressive ideas as much as peasant rebellions.

- The Diplomat

A Morning Prayer

Punishment versus Rewards - Aldous Huxley

In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effec­tive, in the long run, than control through the rein­forcement of desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manip­ulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children. Pun­ishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable behav­ior, but does not permanently reduce the victim's tend­ency to indulge in it.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

The End Result of History according to Calvin (and Hobbes)

Did Jesus exist? - Bart Ehrman, an agnostic historian answers

...And so, with Did Jesus Exist?, I do not expect to convince anyone in that boat. What I do hope is to convince genuine seekers who really want to know how we know that Jesus did exist, as virtually every scholar of antiquity, of biblical studies, of classics, and of Christian origins in this country and, in fact, in the Western world agrees. Many of these scholars have no vested interest in the matter. As it turns out, I myself do not either. I am not a Christian, and I have no interest in promoting a Christian cause or a Christian agenda. I am an agnostic with atheist leanings, and my life and views of the world would be approximately the same whether or not Jesus existed. My beliefs would vary little. The answer to the question of Jesus’s historical existence will not make me more or less happy, content, hopeful, likable, rich, famous, or immortal.

But as a historian I think evidence matters. And the past matters. And for anyone to whom both evidence and the past matter, a dispassionate consideration of the case makes it quite plain: Jesus did exist. He may not have been the Jesus that your mother believes in or the Jesus of the stained-glass window or the Jesus of your least favorite televangelist or the Jesus proclaimed by the Vatican, the Southern Baptist Convention, the local megachurch, or the California Gnostic. But he did exist, and we can say a few things, with relative certainty, about him.

-Bart Ehrman

Happy Easter!

Coloring for Lazybones

Photoshop vs Real Cate Blanchett - Mike Cosper

Tim DeLisle, editor of Intelligent Life, commented on the un-edited photo of Cate Blanchett, saying:

When other magazines photograph actresses, they routinely end up running heavily Photoshopped images, with every last wrinkle expunged. Their skin is rendered so improbably smooth that, with the biggest stars, you wonder why the photographer didn't just do a shoot with their waxwork.

 A part of the answer is probably this : (quoted from James K. A. Smith)

It's not so much that we're intellectually convinced and then muster the willpower to pursue what we ought; rather, at a precognitive level, we are attracted to a vision of the good life that has been painted for us in stories and myths, images and icons. It is not primarily our minds that are captivated by rather our imaginations that are captured, and when the imagination is hooked, we're hooked.

- obtained from Mike Cosper's Gospel Coalition article

Moral Relativism - Sam Harris

From Sam Harris himself

"While few philosophers have ever answered to the name of 'moral relativist,' it is by no means uncommon to find local eruptions of this view whenever scientists and other academics encounter moral diversity. Forcing women and girls to wear burqas may be wrong in Boston or Palo Alto, so the argument will run, but we cannot say that it is wrong for Muslims in Kabul.... Moral relativism, however, tends to be self-contradictory. Relativists may say that moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework - but this claim about the status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks. 

In practice, relativism almost always amounts to the claim that we should be tolerant of moral difference because no moral truth can supersede any other. And yet this commitment to tolerance is not put forward a simple one relative preference among others deemed equally valid. Rather, tolerance is held to be more in line with the (universal) truth about morality than intolerance is. The contradiction here is unsurprising. Given how deeply disposed we are to make universal moral claims, I think one can reasonably doubt whether any consistent moral relativist has ever existed."

- Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

Greed is the Beginning of Everything - Tomas Sedlacek

 In a SPIEGEL interview, Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek discusses morality in the current crisis and why he believes an economic policy that only pursues growth will always lead to debt. Those who don't know how to handle it, he argues, end up in a medieval debtor's prison, as the Greeks are experiencing today.

SPIEGEL: It's easy to increase consumption, but decreasing it is much more difficult to do. Doesn't the uneven distribution of wealth also propel the wheel of desire, based on the motto that I want what others have?

Sedláček: Yes, the social ladder becomes sticky on the way down. The view of economists is that each individual seeks to maximize his benefit. The only problem with this is that we cannot precisely define what the optimal benefit is for us. We don't know what we want. That's why we need comparisons, examples and suggestion. Try imagining an object of your desire, a beautiful woman, for example. It doesn't work as an abstract idea, because the imagined image in your head is volatile. You need a photo, a description, a model. Someone has to tell you what you think is so great that you find it irresistible -- society, neighbors and colleagues, but also the advertising and entertainment industry, ads, films and books. All desires that exceed our basic biological needs are determined by culture. We want to live as if we were actors portraying ourselves.

Thanks to Kai for the article

Don Draper in 1977?

via Vulture

Can This Bring Long-Term Prespective? - Football365's article on Fabrice Muamba

"Saturday night. We were all shocked.

As the news about Fabrice Muamba's condition broke, it was a natural reaction for many people to say how this situation really 'puts everything into perspective'; that in the face of such an awful thing, football and all its business simply does not matter. And they were right. Here was a matter of life and death; there is no bigger, more profound struggle...

...If Fabrice Muamba's collapse did really 'put things into perspective' and if those words are profoundly felt, all these problems could evaporate. They do not need to exist. A better world is possible.

Perhaps we need a graphic reminder that we are all human and that more unites us than divides us. And if Saturday's events illustrated anything, it was precisely that. After a season of, at times, bitter rancour let's hope this moment of darkness ends up illuminating a new path."

- From Football 365 "Can This Bring Long Term Perspective"?

Calvin and Hobbes explains the Economic Crisis

"Moral Ideas" - C.S Lewis

"If 'good' or 'better' are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each people, then of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than each other. Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring, For the same reason it is useless to compare the moral ideas of one age with those of another: progress and decadence are alike meaningless words."

- C.S Lewis

The Hitchens Brothers Agreement

"My brother and I agree on this: that independence of mind is immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if we are disliked for doing so."

- Peter Hitchens, brother to the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, writing in the Daily Mail

Soccer according to Hank Hill

"Why do you have to hate what you don't understand?"

Objectivism - Ayn Rand

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

- Ayn Rand, in an appendix to Atlas Shrugged

New vs. Old Tolerance - D.A Carson

How does what you call the old tolerance differ from the new?

"The old tolerance presupposed another system of thought already in place—Christianity, communism, Naziism, Buddhism, secularism—whatever. The issue then became how much deviation from that system could be tolerated before coercive force is applied. To the extent that one allowed deviation, one was tolerant; correspondingly, where one judges that deviation has gone too far (e.g., almost everyone agrees, even today, that pedophilia goes beyond the pale), then coercive force—in short, intolerance—is a virtue. It was quite possible to disagree strongly with what a person was saying, but still tolerate the opinion that was perceived to be aberrant, on the ground that it was better for society to allow such opinions than to coerce silence from those articulating them.

But invariably, tolerance has its limits. The new tolerance (1) tends to insist that those who merely disagree with others, at least in several spheres, are intolerant, even if no coercive force is applied; (2) tends to make such tolerance the supreme good, independently of surrounding systems of thought; and (3) tends to be remarkably blind in regard to its own intolerant condemnation of everyone who disagrees with its own definition of tolerance. The result is that in many domains, in many discussions, the question is rarely "Is this true?" but "Is anyone offended?" Rigorous discussion of content soon shuts down; truth is demoted; various forms of class warfare are encouraged; in some domains it becomes wrong (supreme irony) to say that anyone is wrong."

- D.A Carson, in an interview with John Starke

Bonds. James Bonds

An Awkard Family Photo

via Awkardfamilyphtos.com 

How ('Friday Night Lights') Football Players Got Trounced by ‘Glee’

From the worth-reading New York Times article on tv shows Friday Night Lights and Glee

"The real message of “Friday Night Lights” is a message about the joy of little things: the awkward thrills of a first kiss; the strange blessing of an unexpected rainstorm on a lonely walk home from a rough football practice; the startling surge of nostalgia incited by the illumination of football-stadium lights just as the autumn sun is setting; the rush of gratitude, in an otherwise mundane moment, that comes from realizing that this (admittedly flawed) human being that you’re squabbling with intends to have your back for the rest of your life. If “Glee” is about expressing yourself, believing in yourself and loving yourself all the way to a moment of pure adrenaline-fueled glory, then “Friday Night Lights” is about breathing in and appreciating the small, somewhat-imperfect moments that make up an average life.

It’s not hard to see why “Glee” would be more popular right now, but its moment, like the moment of glory it celebrates, feels likely to come and go. Recognizing the impermanence of such moments, “Friday Night Lights” embraces the rough edges, the fumbling, the understated beauty and uncertainty of the everyday. It’s rare for a TV show to acknowledge that happiness is a fragile, transient thing. Although the tenure of “Friday Night Lights” may have proved just as fleeting, its exquisite snapshots of ordinary life won’t fade from our memories so quickly."

"Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose"

Why am I always tired?

Bonus "Cat goes on the Anfield (Liverpool) pitch video" after the break...

The Real Reason for Democracy - C.S Lewis

"I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man.

I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.

The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true...I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation...

The real reason for democracy is just the reserve. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle sat that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters."

- C.S Lewis

Angry Chivalry

Nation Somehow Shocked By Human Nature Again

Nation Somehow Shocked By Human Nature Again

'How Could Someone Do Such A Thing?' Populace Wonders Of Event That Has Transpired Literally Millions Of Times

...As the initial wave of grief began to subside Sunday, many throughout the country started openly questioning why this incident happened, putting forth a host of explanations that ranged from lack of government regulation to negligent parenting to declining church attendance, but never once mentioning that it likely would have occurred anyway.

"If it's possible for something positive to come out of this terrible turn of events, perhaps it will make people stop for a moment and realize how short and precious life is," said Daniel Romero, 45, of El Paso, TX, who, until this event, seemed to have somehow ignored the most omnipresent characteristic of his species: its mortality. "You have to recognize that each day you have is a gift and always remember to cherish your loved ones."

At press time, Romero remained unaware that he, like everyone else in America, will completely forget the incident within a week and then abandon his own sensible advice.

The whole Onion article here