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.