Thursday's Brain: I am... I am Superman, And I Can Do Anything!

[elfs]

Robert Mugabe prepares to wage war on his own people.

While Iraq and the Olympic Torch shennanigans distract us, let me remind you that last week we were all hopeful that Robert Mugabe would go peacefully, but now it looks as if he's going to do everything he can to destroy Zimbabwe one last time.

We've done 100 years of occupation before. We did it in Alabama.

Bill Scher finds a precious quote on Red State, a true right-wing paranoid website, to the effect that we're overblowing McCain's claim that we'll need to stay in Iraq for a 100 years. The anonymous Red Stater writes:

Someone should ask the Democrats if they think we're still at war with the confederacy, the Germans, and the Japanese given all the standing American armies in the South, Germany, and Japan.

On the one hand, I share Scher's WTF moment there. On the other, I can completely understand where the writer is coming from: if you believe that the forced reintegration of the southern states into the United States polity was an illicit endeavor, than one of the purposes served by the continuing presence of US military bases in southern states is to remind you and those who share your beliefs that "the South" will never again be allowed to "rise" and reclaim their independence.

Comic book metaphors for today's readers.

As we get closer and closer to a future where anyone can be Tony Stark, I have to wonder about Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias. Yglesias famously coined the phrase "The Green Lantern Doctrine." The Green Lantern, recall, was determined to be such a good man that he could be given the power ring, which would do anything he willed it to do. The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, as Yglesias formulated it, "We can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower."

Klein (a friend of Yglesias, and riffing off something Yglesias wrote) now crafts "The Superman Doctrine," to wit:

Superman and Captain America were superheroes of an odd sort: tremendously powerful beings whose primary struggle was often to follow the self-imposed rules and strictures that lent their power a moral legitimacy. Neither allowed themselves to kill, and both sought to work within the law. Given their strength, either could have sought world domination, and even if they didn't, they could have been viewed with deep suspicion and even hatred by those who were convinced that they one day would seek world domination. It was only by following ostentatiously strict moral codes that they could legitimize their power and thus exist cooperatively with a world that had every right to fear them.

There's a small smidgen of me that approves, wholeheartedly, of the notion that these comic book superheroes represent the best, easiest, and most accessible common cultural pool we have.

The different epistemologies of science and religion

John Wilkins has a brilliant essay on the difference between the two. He notes that many people believe that science and religion are compatible, and then he opens up with all guns:

This is simply wrong. For a start everyone knows that science and religion are elbowing each other for more room on the social and conceptual dance floor.

Science is something nobody who is sane and informed can reject. Its epistemology is based on evidence and inference, and when it works it works, end of story. All human beings are forced to admit the truths that science has shown us. A couple of centuries ago, relatively recently in human history, the universe was a very small and very young place. Now it is understood to be ancient and enormous. No religion that denies these facts can survive in a reasonable environment.

John's charming assumption that we live in "a reasonable environment" is destroyed by the American version of Haryun Yahya, Expelled, but it is otherwise a strong essay.

The Muji Chrononotebook.

I am so trying this with my own notebook. It looks so simple. Instead of a dated, linear entry, you draw a clock and then line your way through the events.

Bookwinked

A list of books men should be seen reading in public if they want to get laid.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

The girls today in society go for classical poetry, so to win their hearts one must quote with ease Aeschylus and Euripides. But the poet of them all, who will start 'em simply ravin', is the poet people call the bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

[tamino.livejournal.com]

I read Sam Harris' "The End Of Faith", and he makes the same point about how science cannot coexist with religion because "religion", the way he defines it, requires *literal* belief in various things. (Actually IIRC Harris makes a further distinction between moderates and fundamentalists, and what I'm talking about pertains to what he calls fundamentalism, and what Wilkins seems, if I'm reading it right, to be simply calling "religion")

Why not take creation myths *as* myths, though? If one has a creation myth that says "so-and-so happened", you don't have to take that literally; you can take it as a sort of emotional/spiritual "flavor". In a physical sense I might live in a world that condensed out of random heavy elements that previous generations of supernovae had spewed. But in my own emotional space, why can't I be free to be descended from Abraham, in a world where each creature wasn't just arbitrary but was lovingly created and given a name and a place in the world?

I know there are people in the world who take their religion in a very literal sense. *In my experience* those people are the (admittedly rather vocal) minority. It is my impression that most people are capable of telling the difference, and when the appropriate situations are for each. I'm honestly confused as to why this is such a big either/or thing.

[tamino.livejournal.com]

Incidentally I should add, in case it's not obvious, that I *personally* am anything but Christian (or really any organized religion). I just don't see anything wrong with it, or any way in which it (taken as emotional/spiritual/philosophical "flavor") is incompatible with science.