faith in honest doubt

Objects Unanalyzed

2009-11-25T05:02:00.000-08:00

The Film Talk blog recommends the documentary Objectified:

‘Objectified’ is sedate, but not slow – peaceful yet thought provoking – it’s a reverie on the nature of the designed elements around us. Comprised of interviews with many the worlds leading designers and commentators on design the pic is a reflective – exuberant in a minor key – paean to both the practice of design and its effects on us.

I would call that an accurate and complete summary of the film, but for whatever reason -- maybe the title? -- I expected it to move past the idea that we live in a designed world and offer some reflections, possibly some arguments and criticisms, about the pros and cons of this. That is, I was expecting an analysis of design and its implications for the world, and less a straight celebration of design.

I should probably form expectations of films based on something more than the title, but then again, titles are 'designed objects' and they therefore involve elements of tone-setting, evocation, persuasion, arguably 'social control.' I expected the film to feature speakers with European accents making claims like that, or rather, wildly exaggerated versions of such claims delivered with absolute solemnity.

I wouldn't necessarily have accepted, agreed with, or declined to snigger at high-minded theorists waxing on about how Apple's, Ikea's, and Target's design choices are implicating humankind in oppressive totalizing metanarratives or whatever, but I expected perspectives that go beyond "design is awesome!" and I think the film would have been stronger with them.

Something along the lines of Jill Lepore's discussion of business consulting, scientific management and taylorism would have been a good corrective:

In 1911, Taylor explained his methods—Schmidt and the pig iron, Gilbreth and the bricks—in “The Principles of Scientific Management,” whose argument the business über-guru Peter Drucker once called “the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.” That’s either very silly or chillingly cynical, but “The Principles of Scientific Management” was the best-selling business book in the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor always said that scientific management would usher in a “mental revolution,” and it has. Modern life is Taylorized life, the Taylor biographer Robert Kanigel observed, a dozen years back. Above your desk, the clock is ticking; on the shop floor, the camera is rolling. Manage your time, waste no motion, multitask: your iPhone comes with a calendar, your car with a memo pad. [emphasis mine]

The connection between human minds, human work, and human tools is far from trivial. Change an object, and you change the nature of a task and thereby reshape the mind needed to do it. Whether you liberate possibilities or foreclose them by design choices, and what those possibilities are, is a weighty and important question, one this film only glancingly addresses.

It's easy enough to understand why: design is awesome, and this film shows many examples of elegantly designed objects. It's hard to watch this film without walking away understanding why people get passionate about it. Design also strikes me as one of those fields of endeavor for which everyone considers himself an expert or a 'natural.'

Meaninglessness's Referent

2009-11-25T05:01:00.000-08:00

Michael Shermer offers several reasons for the resistance to accepting evolutionary science, including this one:

The equation of evolution with ethical nihilism. This sentiment was expressed by the neoconservative social commentator Irving Kristol in 1991: "If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded -- or even if it suspects -- that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."

Meaningless to whom? And how?

For what little it may be worth, this line of thinking -- "life is meaningful because god says so" -- is actually an infinite regress, or maybe something worse. If our memories, reflections, and feelings vis-a-vis one another are not enough to make life meaningful, what does god add?

More power? God is the ultimate social-moving dandy with invitations to all the big social scenes, audiences with all the world leaders, back stage passes to all the concerts, sporting events, upscale dinner parties. He runs in fancy circles, knows everybody's numbers, can cite charming anecdotes about anyone you can name. Or maybe this simply means he can squash us like so many gnats or make sure we never work in the industry again.

On this view, having a relationship with god is like having a relationship with Colin Powell or Bono or Paul McCartney, only a thousand times better. As we are social animals, this is a more or less valid picture of 'meaningfulness,' but it's pretty far from noble when regarded in the light of day.

More time? God was thinking and feeling about our lives before we were born and will be around to remember us after we leave sublunary life. So? If there is something meaning-endowing about being thought about, felt about, and remembered, I see no reason why the meaning-endowing powers of thinking, feeling, and remembering goes to zero if it does not last forever. What is 'forever' to us but a word, an abstraction built on the negation of our everyday experience of time? It's a phantasm.

Concretely, I don't know what to think of anyone who was thinking about my day-to-day three trillion years ago and will still be thinking about it three trillion years in the future. The idea of that bores me beyond imagining, and this is my own day-to-day I have in mind.

With or without god, and with or without evolution, we gain meaning by the experience of life and how we reflect on it. Any 'meaning' beyond this is guesswork, and we should take care that these guesses don't negate or occlude the meanings available to us. We should live for what we know, and this entails trying to expand what we know within our finite limits.

Origin at 150

2009-11-24T08:28:00.000-08:00

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago today. It revolutionized the science of biology, and arguably altered the way humankind has thought of itself ever since.

And everyone lived happily ever after. Yes?

2009-11-23T16:09:00.001-08:00

This week, I am squirreled away in a super-secret redoubt somewhere in Cascadia, so blogging will continue to be even sparser than usual.

Stepping Up vs. Paying Up

2009-11-22T19:02:00.000-08:00

Discussing the prospects of passing substantial health care and greenhouse emissions legislation, Matt Yglesias starts out soundly enough:

The crucial thing to remember is that Barack Obama didn’t emerge out of the ether with progressive policy proposals. Commitments to things like an aggressive carbon emissions target and a strong public option emerged over the course of a presidential primary campaign wherein activists affiliated with the environmental and labor movements created an incentive structure that led the main candidates to make those promises.

Only to arrive, curiously enough, at this:

[I]n general, what’s needed is more persuading and more organizing by the kind of people who did the persuading and organizing that got us the Obama agenda in the first place. [emphasis mine]

I realize what I'm about to say is anathema, heresy, terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad in some circles, but I actually think that now is precisely not the time for more persuading and more organizing. Now is the time for advancing the legislation for which all that effort was expended leading up to the 2008 elections. Now is the time for the president and the large Democratic majorities favored by all that organizing to enact the agenda those activists were promised.

This is especially true of matters currently before congress that were, as Yglesias outlined in the first passage cited above, the substance of so much organizing, persuading, strategizing, and campaigning leading up to the 2008 elections.

Grassroots organizing in the context of electoral politics is the vehicle by which favorable politicians gain power, whereupon it is their duty to use that power to make the changes that animated all the organizing and persuading. If it is not that -- if it exists merely to set the stage for more grassroots organizing, let alone on the same controversial political questions, then it is a complete waste of time. In which case it is even less something of which to say, "now is the time."

After much organizing and persuading, our side won. Now is the time for congress and the president to repay the hard work of those who organized, fought, persuaded, and voted them into power.

They Complete Each Other

2009-11-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

The Mentos ads alluded to here always did seem to lack something. I always assumed it was a reason to exist or a non-annoying characteristic, but no, this send-up makes clear that what they were missing was a blast of full facial Jesus.

Which is to say: having reached their optimum, having maxed out, having reached their natural zenith, the Mentos advertising can cease forevermore.

The same goes from the other side. Even in its sunniest presentations, Christianity had always seemed weighed down, anchored to an unnerving focus on death -- how to prepare for it, what comes after it, its inevitability, Jesus's particular experience of it, its failsafe program to elude it too often resolving to a preoccupation with it. And don't even get me started on the cannibalism.

No more! The flash of Mentos's (artificial) color and (chalky) flavor fills in all the gaps left by that unremitting bleakness. Here, a beaming Jesus is offering some brightly colored, sugared chalk, which is not much, but it's a considerable improvement over a chunk of his own flesh.

They each had a good run.

(via The ZehnKatzen Times)

Sterling-Cooper's Prescience on Global Warming

2009-11-20T05:02:00.000-08:00

While it was not featured in any Mad Men episodes, I have to guess that this ad from 1962 was the product of Pete's uncanny ability to anticipate future developments combined with Peggy's efficient verbal craft.

I do wonder if Don signed off on it, however -- the exclamation mark at the end of the ad's headline doesn't strike me as a Don-friendly move. Maybe this ad was conceived and executed while Don was off jet-setting with the Eurotrash.

(via Grist)

John Yoo Too

2009-11-20T05:01:00.000-08:00

Glennzilla quotes attorney general Eric Holder and then comments:

[Holder] Courts and commissions are both essential tools in our fight against terrorism . . . On the same day I sent these five defendants to federal court, I referred five others to be tried in military commissions. I am a prosecutor, and as a prosecutor, my top priority was simply to select the venue where the government will have the greatest opportunity to present the strongest case with the best law. . . . At the end of the day, it was clear to me that the venue in which we are most likely to obtain justice for the American people is a federal court.
[Greenwald] Does that remotely sound like a "justice system"? If you're accused of being a Terrorist, there's not one set procedure used to determine your guilt; instead, the Government has a roving bazaar of various processes which it, in its sole discretion, picks for you based on ensuring that it will win. Even worse, Holder repeatedly assured Senators that the administration would continue to imprison 9/11 defendants even in the very unlikely case that they were acquitted, citing what they previously suggested was their Orwellian authority of so-called "post-acquittal detention powers." Is there any better definition of a "show trial" than one in which the defendant has no chance of ever being released even if acquitted, because the Government will simply thereafter assert the power to hold him indefinitely without charges?

I would be delighted to be shown where Greenwald has erred in his assessment of the current administration's abuses. At best, I've encountered celebrations of the fact that Barack Obama is a constitutional law scholar -- Randi Rhodes likes to recite this factoid in her radio show -- but this intensifies rather than excuses the insult to what used to be American legal standards. Of all people, Barack Obama knows better than to do what he is doing, and yet he continues unraveling the rule of law with as much blithe indifference (or merriment, or cynicism, or whatever it is) as his worst predecessors.

John Yoo is also a constitutional scholar. Constitutional scholarship manifestly doesn't help.

"I never thought I'd solve wet arms and sleeves"

2009-11-19T21:00:00.000-08:00

It's literally true to say, as the improbably enthusiastic woman says toward the end of this video, that I never thought I'd solve wet arms and sleeves. Seriously, I have never thought that. Not even once -- not until this ad came along.

Now I know there's hope.

I suspect it would be very gauche to compare the appearance of anyone in this video -- I'm not naming anyone in any green shirt -- with this character from the seminal 1972 film Gargoyles.

(via Portland Mercury)

Atheist Ads in Puddle-Town!

2009-11-19T05:01:00.000-08:00

Even here in the "People's Republic of Portland," where there's only a church on every other corner, putting godless ads on buses is controversial -- this local news story isn't quite panicky over it, but it dials up the drama:

I feel some sympathy for the TriMet spokesmodel featured here. I have no idea what's really circling through her mind as she speaks, but she seems to have no genuine interest in noticing, let alone commenting publicly on, the ads. But local tee-vee news being what it is, the reporter ratchets up the "controversy" angle, and thus comments must be extracted.

That I am only now learning of these ads, and of the "Portland Coalition of Reason," perhaps speaks to the cats-that-won't-be-herded mentality of filthy atheists like myself. Yay team?

By the way, the answer to the ad is yes. Yes, we can be good without god, and it's a good thing too, because it's the only way there has ever been to be good.

(via Domestically Challenged and Dave Knows Portland)

This Decade and Others

2009-11-18T20:42:00.000-08:00

Don't call me surprised:

Paste Magazine has just named their “25 Best Album Covers of the Decade (2000-2009).” Sitting atop the list at number one? None other than Neko Case and her latest greatest album “Middle Cyclone.” The good folks at Paste explain the choice, “For the multi-talented Case, making one of the best records of the year wasn’t good enough. She also handled the artwork, drawing and photography, casting herself—perched atop a 1968 Mercury Cougar—as the coolest hood ornament of all time.”

For me, the success of an album cover includes the quality and fit of the album title, and Middle Cyclone is intrinsically evocative while conveying something of the music.

On these grounds -- cover art plus album cover and what the combination suggests -- I find I like surprisingly few of the entire top 25, but I do adore the cover of Weezer's Raditude -- this is a perfect portrait of the idea of "raditude," crucially including the ironic scare quotes that go along with the word:

Off They Go

2009-11-18T05:01:00.000-08:00

The Catholic Diocese of Washington DC is making threats:

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington wants the city to change its proposal to legalize same-sex marriages to exempt the church from the law, but so far city council members aren't budging.

Catholic Charities provides social services to about 68,000 people, some of which are city contracts like the management of homeless shelters. The marriage bill would not require churches to perform same-sex weddings, but because Catholic Charities uses city money, the archdiocese fears it would have to offer employee benefits to married same-sex couples.

The diocese is threatening to cease its tax-funded social services work if it can no longer discriminate against gays in hiring, firing, and promotion -- or as neatly summarized by Jason Rosenhouse:

How charming that the Washington Archdiocese believes discrimination towards homosexuals is a higher calling than helping the poor. Sounds like they really have their priorites in the proper order.

I say: good riddance. Let the bigots go, and let this be an enduring object lesson in the flaws of using faith-based organizations to do the work of government.

God Laughs

2009-11-17T20:52:00.000-08:00

This bumper sticker is one of the numerous variations of the "pray for Obama" meme with which clever mouth-breathers are gracing the scene these days. The punchline, such as it is, can be found in the words of Psalm 109:8:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

Classy.

Get it? They want the president to die soon! Guffawing yet?

For Blundering Harder

2009-11-15T10:22:00.000-08:00

David Broder was paid to write this:

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right. [emphasis mine]

It requires an especially staggering magnitude and kind of stupidity to conclude that after years of blundering through a poorly-conceived, reckless occupation of Afghanistan and achieving nothing more than a costly stalemate, the next best step is to stop thinking, decide something or other, and start blundering harder.

I don't know what should be done; I strongly doubt the USA has any answers for Afghanistan, but we have seen what comes of shipping bottomless supplies of troops, contractors, and cash -- death and waste. It's reasonable to expect that more of the same will produce more of the same.

The Beatles Remastered: More Cowbell

2009-11-14T16:43:00.000-08:00

I've endlessly pooh-poohed enhanced, deluxe, remastered, or otherwise tarted-up reissues of existing recordings, but I have to admit that the new enhanced edition of Rubber Soul sounds better than the CD version we've had before, and the clearest point of distinction comes in "Drive My Car."

It now has more cowbell.

If you happen to have the two versions available to play side by side, you should be able to hear a difference here, and if you can't, your audio playback system may itself need more cowbell.

Poem of the Day: "Lullaby"

2009-11-13T05:02:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem to return to whenever you need to rescue love from the fashionable madmen with their pedantic boring cries.

W.H. Auden, "Lullaby"

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Clash of the Titans: The Wrong Way but Faster

2009-11-13T05:01:00.000-08:00

I will watch the shit out of this remake of Clash of the Titans, even as I expect it to be terrible:

The 1981 Clash of the Titans will always have a special place in my movie-going heart, as it was the first movie I went to alone. No, the real reason, and the reason this new version can match but not exceed the original, is the original's use of stop-motion animation, which holds a special kind of terror that no CGI, no matter how advanced, can match. Behold its terrible glory:

Back then, movie heroes didn't need muscle tone, even if they were cast in roles calling for sleeveless garments and feats of strength.

(via Institute of Jurassic Technology)

Failed Cultural Escape Hatches

2009-11-12T19:18:00.001-08:00

In the November 2009 Harpers, Mark Kingwell winds down a review of The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects as follows:

Nor will consideration of our own place in the consumer economy necessarily lead to changes in what we value: this is theory, not therapy. Meanwhile, various inventive cultural escape hatches -- hi-lo cultural slumming, the dandyism of camp -- seem jejune if not flatly contradictory. There is nothing outside the system, and attempts at escape are always just higher-order versions of distinction. You can't win, and you can't stop playing.

Here's some advice: stop worrying about it. The point of analyzing desire is neither victory nor freedom; it is, instead, to indicate an alternative scale of value, according to which idleness and play -- the everyday gift of detournement -- are cherished as the most divine, because least encumbered, dimensions of human life. If we could see that, maybe the closed promises of consumption would give way to the open invitation of thought itself.

As a meditation on consumerism and its inter-nested traps, this has plenty to recommend it: I can attest to the futility of trying to use camp and irony to circumvent the charms of consumerism. It doesn't work, certainly it doesn't work to roll back the desire for the the new, the more, the better, whatever presents itself as the next to supersede and surpass. Nor does thinking about the shallowness at the base of it dissolve it. Focusing on the distance between the shallowness and any higher ideal does not close that distance, but maybe it qualifies as thought anyway. The unexamined life is not worth living?

So whatever. The real reason I reproduced that passage is that it's an instance of found prose that could almost serve as a precis of this precious, precious blog. Almost.

Creeds That Ring True

2009-11-12T05:01:00.000-08:00

Look no further than this brief summary to see how Christianity makes more sense than all those other silly religions with which it competes for, you know, souls and cash donations and credibility and so on:

The belief that a walking dead Jewish deity who was his own father although he always existed, commits suicide by cop, although he didn't really die, in order to give himself permission not to send you to an eternal place of torture that he created for you, but instead to make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically promise him you accept him as your master, so he can cleanse you of an evil force that is present in mankind because a rib-woman and a mud-man were convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

Yes, people by the truckload are raised to believe this as the capital-T Truth. Try to believe that!

I came by this rendering at The Atheist Camel, though it's not clear whether it originated there. It sounds rather Bill-Maherish to me, and that's a good thing.

Anyhoo, believe it or you'll spend an eternity in hell.

At Least One of These Is Wrong

2009-11-11T05:02:00.000-08:00

Eulogizing the soldiers killed at Fort Hood, President Obama spoke, in part, as theologian-in-chief:

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know -- no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice -- in this world, and the next.

It's a good thing our system of government does not actually grant the theologian-in-chief role to the president or any other office, because this theological declaration is wishful thinking, and more to the point, flatly false.

Taking the claims one by one, first, the logic behind the killing is not hard to comprehend: it has been spelled out again and again, and there's nothing abstruse in it.

Second, no, we do in fact have no trouble identifying at least one well-known, much-discussed faith that justifies these and similar murderous and craven acts.

Third, since we do know of a faith that justifies these deeds, and since that faith comes bundled with a god whose devotees zealously characterize as just and loving, it follows that a just and loving god looks upon these deeds with favor. Such a god and such devotees are ispo facto disgusting, despicable lunatics, but characterizing them so does not make them go away.

Fourth, we know nothing of what will happen to the murderer after death, and certainly nothing of whether it will be just or unjust. The available evidence indicates he will moulder away as his immune system, now as dead as the rest of his body, no longer opposes the forces of natural decay. Soon enough his body will be converted to food energy of other organisms; or perhaps his chemical constituents will be scattered by fire, erosion, corrosion, or some of all of these. Beyond that we know nothing.

The faith that the president finds so elusive, and the theology whose logic he professes to be so incomprehensible, is presented clearly in this video -- and while I don't speak the language, it's obvious that the speakers are confident of their theological declarations, at least as confident as the president was of his:

Disputes of this kind can never be settled by the confidence, sincerity, or brashness of the speakers. So long as opposed declarations are adjudicated by apparent sincerity, or by the number of supporting citations of ancient books (filled with still more wild claims), or by the number of believers, or by any of the assorted forms of wishful thinking, humankind will stumble along shouting baseless assertions at itself.

By contrast, those who want to say something definite, credible, and enduring should ground their claims in publicly available evidence. On that basis, all theology is bunk.

Not Cats

2009-11-11T05:01:00.000-08:00

I see no reason to call this "cat fighting." That's a stupid term, and this is not fighting. One BYU player is shown throwing a mild elbow toward the beginning, but the rest is #15 for UNM:

In my blackest heart of little hearts, I admit that watching some Mormons take a beating is not the worst thing imaginable. And while my blackest heart of heart has the floor, it would like to suggest that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if NFL players took to policing the long hair look by yanking some fellow players down by their long flowing locks.

Come on, guys! It's a big, thick handle just waiting to be grabbed! Think leverage!

All of this is well past the bounds of sportsmanship.

(NFL photo source: NY Sun)

Mad Men - A Third Season Ends

2009-11-10T05:01:00.000-08:00

I am still reeling from the season three finale of Mad Men; rarely has a mere tee-vee show so wantonly toyed with my emotions by cutting so close to life. Here's Heather Havrilesky, and I warn my three readers that there will be spoilers aplenty from this point forward:

Even as Betty and then Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) dress Don down with their unforgiving words, he almost seems to lean into their disapproval, as if he's relieved that finally someone's going to call him to the carpet for his clumsy, caddish behavior. Maybe he realizes he's been as much of a presumptuous asshole as Conrad Hilton, who cast aside his professional and personal relationship with Don the second he was no longer useful.

True enough, but I am not sure Betty belongs in the list of chasteners (more on that presently), and the list is incomplete without Roger Sterling and Pete Campbell. Bringing Roger into the conspiracy was the first instance in which Don had to abandon pride and set right a relationship he had abused, and it was Roger who expressly alerted him to the importance of valuing relationships.

Pete insisted on hearing from Don himself why the new firm needed his talents, and again Don abandoned pride and told Pete not only the truth but what Pete wanted to hear, that Pete Campbell has a genuine talent for seeing emerging novelties that others miss.

Most poignantly, Don confessed to Peggy that he sees her as not only a talented creator but a mirror of himself, a person who has survived to experience life from both sides of a profound trauma. From a man as vain as Don -- and we have to admit his self-regard is not without justification -- this is arguably the highest compliment he can give. To her credit, Peggy perceived the truth behind the vanity in this -- that for all his flaws, Don "gets" her and genuinely appreciates her.

Betty's dressing down of Don was of another sort, as I question whether she has anything to teach. When Don angrily confronts her over the relationship with Henry Francis, she affirms that all the affluence in which he has swaddled her is not enough, and then reminds Don that she knows enough to destroy him. Learning the full story of her husband's past has gone from riveting revelation to justification for separation to grounds for blackmail in a space of a few days. Both see that she is most of the way into her next relationship with a man of mystery who is issuing declarations of devotion and promises of support. For all her evident learning and polish, if she wants anything more than to be fawningly adored, she has failed to show it -- her father's characterization of her as a house cat ("an important person with little to do") seems vindicated. Don sees that this is not a relationship to value, and it's hard to see where he's wrong in that.*

More from Havrilesky:

The flashback to his father's death seems to signal that Don is finally going to put his daddy issues aside and shake off the shadow of his real identity once and for all. Now that his fake life is crumbling around him, something resembling an authentic life seems possible at last.

Uh, no. The real-fake boundary is one Don still has no way to bridge, and I don't see Don getting any closer to moving beyond his past. Indeed, the flashbacks in this episode were triggered by the looming reality that he would soon exit his children's lives, as his own father had done, so we learn, thanks to the strong kick of a horse. Don's separation comes from a different cause, but it is arguably more painful: the scene in which Don and Betty inform their children of their impending divorce is, I can assure you, one of the more true-to-life dramatizations ever to pass through tee-vee screens. Whatever successes and excitements attend the new firm the principals have founded, the pain of Don's alienation from his children will continue, and the flashbacks will come in train.

Havrilesky is mostly right with this:

Breathtaking, really, that each character's deepest desires and drives could be satisfied without screwing up the story or turning it into a fairy tale. In particular, the difference between Peggy and Joan and what they each want was beautifully expressed in seconds: Roger, Joan and Peggy are hunched over the books at the old offices, exhausted from their scrambling attempts to bring as much with them to the new firm as they can before they're locked out, when Sterling asks, "Peggy, can you get me some coffee?" Without wavering, Peggy snaps back, "No."

Next we cut to Don informing Joan, "I'm at the Roosevelt, but I'll need you to find me an apartment."

"Furnished?" Joan asks without skipping a beat, in that tone of professional nonchalance that makes her such a star. Sure, Joan's made to be a caretaker and organizer of men's lives, but does that make her miserable? No. She absolutely glows when she's s given an opportunity to do what she does best. [emphasis mine]

Truly we see a great step forward in Peggy's assertiveness in this small scene -- as well as the two scenes before with Don -- a step that is too long in coming. But I am struck by the diminishment of Joan Holloway's abilities as "a caretaker and organizer of men's lives," and I think Havrilesky has fallen into Matthew Weiner's trap of luring viewers into thinking that Joan's beauty somehow reduces her -- that because she is a beautiful woman, she has to be "dumb," whereas Peggy is more humble in appearance and therefore visually coded as An Intelligent Woman.

What an antiquated, pre-second-wave-feminism, 1950s-1960s way to think about women!

Yes, Joan is beautiful and aware of her sex appeal (and yes, willing to leverage that), but she is also strong, intelligent, and capable. When, a few episodes before, the unfortunate British newcomer had his foot nearly severed by a riding lawnmower, Joan ran toward the grisly scene and took charge as others fainted, shrieked, or backed away. She knows what everyone does (and how well), she knows where everything is (and where it should be), and shows a tremendous talent for organization, an unfailing eye for detail, and a careful insight into the strengths, weaknesses, and stresses affecting the people around her. This is no small collection of abilities, and goes well beyond "caretaker and organizer of men's lives," though it necessarily includes that. From the first episode of season one, Joan has has risen to every challenge placed before her, and I predict her role will expand and her merits will become more apparent in the new firm to which Roger shrewdly added her.

* There is more to say about Betty Draper. Certainly she has been betrayed, lied to, and neglected; more fundamentally, as much or more than Don, she finds herself in a life she clearly never wanted. From the fact that she has not outlined a clear alternative to marriage and children in a beautiful house in the suburbs, it does not follow that she has no basis for resenting the limitations of that life -- and this is so even if she had been living out the most perfect example of that life, i.e., with a husband who didn't withhold, lie, and cheat repeatedly. She has much in common with April Wheeler from Revolutionary Road, but lacking, I think, the same degree of self-awareness and ability (willingness?) to articulate her own agony. We know how well the self-awareness served April Wheeler in the end, so this may not necessarily prove to be a bad thing.

Never Trust a Glibertarian with Data

2009-11-08T18:16:00.000-08:00

Really, given the glibertarian source of the data, I had a feeling it would come to this -- the spectacular failure rate of teen Oklahomans on a multiple-choice citizenship quiz, upon which I snarked in September, was very likely bullshit.

Absolutely definitive proof of fraud is not present, but Nate Silver, who is not a lying glibertarian determined to destroy the idea of public education, has the corrective:

Cannaday [also not a lying glibertarian] therefore had little difficulty setting up an experiment: he arranged to have all the seniors in the 10 secondary schools in his district take the Strategic Vision/OCPA survey. Cannaday tried to replicate the Strategic Vision survey to the greatest extent possible. The same exact questions were used, and as in the case of the original survey, the answers were open-ended rather than multiple choice. The survey was administered to a total of 325 seniors, including special education students.

Cannaday's survey however, found his students doing just fine: They answered an average of 7.8 out of the 10 questions correctly.

Sigh.

My apologies to the teens of Oklahoma, the teachers, the schools, and dearest Ponca City for accepting such a poor representation of the quality of learning in the state.

Hills, Valleys, and Dales

2009-11-08T17:25:00.000-08:00

This is not an update.

Another Dale, not this Dale, has hosted the 45th Humanist Symposium.
Yesterday, despite gathering clouds, I had a pretty pleasant, albeit hill-rich, run of nine miles. Unfortunately, the weather proceeded to go from so-so to terrible, with strong rain pressed along by strong wind, and yet I still had ten more miles to cover before reaching the full nineteen that I had inexplicably set as my goal. When the lightning began, I was at in a clearing at the crest of Powell Butte. As much as I love Powell Butte and the principle of the Darwin Awards, I saw them as two great tastes that taste terrible together, and quickly headed to the vicinity of the exact same trees pictured here. That combined with some dumb luck kept me alive and miserable for the next several miles of puddles, piercing rain, numb hands, numb feet, and chafing. Yay!
I have nothing on valleys. That was a tasteless inducement to draw valley enthusiasts to this precious, precious blog. Do I feel badly about this legerdemain? No. No I don't.

Carl Sagan Day

2009-11-06T05:03:00.000-08:00

I don't quite know what it means, but I like it since it favorably concerns one of my very first man-crushes, Carl Sagan: Carl Sagan Day is tomorrow!

I assume there will be lots of science-y stuff going on. Holy crap, I was right!

I would ask that Carl Sagan Day not be contrued as suggesting that we should ignore Carl Sagan's work on other days. Here is a little piece from Pale Blue Dot -- shortly over three minutes of the kind of awe-inspiration he exuded like so much excess aftershave.