Eccentric Flower:200909/Things and Stuff
From Eccentric Flower
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Things and Stuff
I read this morning that Jeph Jacques apparently feels
And, as is traditional when I see people with talent and ability saying stuff like that, I want to slap him. Well, maybe a little tiny bit. A small slap.
I am just not very sympathetic to people griping when they have skills I actually value, which includes none of my own. I have watched Jeph work his way up from barely legible cartoons to brilliantly executed ones over the span of some years. If I thought that making a cartoon every day could improve my work like that, I'd be making a cartoon every day. But it does not, and anyway I'm permanently out of ideas that fit that format.
So, Jeph, with apologies for the tough love: Some of us would trade a lot of things to be able to do what you do. We live in the Twitter universe. Try feeding people the best idea in the world at a thousand words or more and watch in pain as they all refuse to read it, or claim that they've read it but then prove through their remarks that they haven't. Words are a nearly lost art. Pictures, on the other hand - you can occasionally still manage to present a real idea and have it absorbed through pictures. Ergo: Your skills are more valuable than mine.
Also, I gather you can play the guitar. I play the piano (very poorly). Same discussion, different medium.
I really wish all you capable people wouldn't get depressed about your existence. I keep trying to hog the floor and it's not working. Can't you all be more well-adjusted than me? I don't feel like I'm asking a lot here.
In a completely different category of irritation, some book anti-recommendations.
Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken. You are all too young to remember the foofaraw about this.* I've read it; it's passably amusing SF. What? You say it wasn't intended as SF? Oh, well then.
At least Von D isn't a hollow-earther. Edmund Halley, the most respectable hollow-earther to date, had the disadvantage of 1690s science, and anyway he was only hypothesizing to try to explain some other anomalous data of his. No one else since then has had much of an excuse. In 2006 David Standish wrote a retrospective of the history of this belief. While some of the style complaints about the book may be legitimate, the astonishing thing is that some people actually fault him for being too dismissive of the hollow-earthers. It is not possible to be too dismissive of hollow-earthers. Here's a comment on Amazon allegedly from a real live human in the Boston area:
Sir: Boston is the historical homeland of scholarship and higher education in America. You are embarrassing us all here. Leave town.
You would think that I would just shrug it off, like the publishers of Raymond Bernard's The Hollow Earth:
Why would anyone need to care whether anyone else believes crap like this? Why would anyone need to care that people are reading the treacly claptrap of people like Virginia Essene or Helen Shucman or Jane Roberts or any of a thousand others who have been brought to my attention by terribly, terribly earnest people over the years ... and apparently taking it utterly at face value? Why can I not bring any sense of humor to bear on this, even though many of my peers would insist it calls for one? Why can I not, like they do, take it as a big joke?
Two reasons.
1. Sloppy thinking in one area corrodes thinking in others. I have read a lot of bad science and I have enjoyed a great deal of it - when it is presented as fiction. It's fun to speculate on conditions inside a hollow earth or postulate alien contact of various kinds. But when you start trying to take bad science as reality, the complete tunnel vision you need to do this - to conveniently ignore all manner of contradictory facts - affects your thinking in other ways.
OK, so, you know the idiots who are still raising a stink about where Obama was born? Here is an interesting fact. Our constitution does not say that the president must have been born in the United States. It says he must have been born a citizen of the United States. So, assuming his mother was a US citizen in good standing at the time of his birth - and no one has tried to suggest she wasn't - he could have been born in Hawaii or Kenya or Beta Regulon II for all it matters to his eligibility. There are a lot of people ignoring this, because there are a lot of people in this country - far too many - who have learned to ignore any information that does not fit their personal thesis. And they are bogging down the universe for everyone else. They are polluting the waters of discourse. They piss in the pool.
If you think it is hilarious that someone can be a hollow-earther, yet cuss at the birthers and how they will not shut up, please be aware that the two are interconnected. I can't laugh at one and cuss at the other. Nor should you.
2. Belief in an external saving force promotes emotional and moral lassitude in the real world. The thing about a lot of these theories - the various beliefs in benign and/or watchful aliens, or the Seth idiocy, or other powerful forces which will eventually lead us all to a new harmony and completion and we shall evolve into better beings - well, I like the idea of evolving into better beings. But the idea that something More Powerful Than Us will be the catalyst for this evolution is effectively a sugary way of removing any responsibility for our own evolution at our own hands. We don't have to try to become better people; the aliens will rescue us from our sins. We can just sit and eat Cheetos and keep killing each other and wait. Good things will happen, honest. No postage required.
I try not to pick on religion point-blank, because I think religion is very much a mixed bag and people get into religions for different reasons. Some of those reasons are more acceptable than others. But you will notice that I am far more into "The Lord helps those that help themselves" than "The Lord will provide." Maybe there is a higher power and maybe there isn't. I've always sided with Pascal on that matter. But even if there is, that does not in any way relieve you of the responsibility to better yourself and the world around you on your own time, nor does it excuse any sort of appalling behavior you may think to commit.
It doesn't matter if there are gods. Let's stipulate there are gods. Hell, let's stipulate there are benevolent aliens sitting out at Lagrange point 5 with Kirlian crystals at the ready. There are also car manufacturers.
Even if you believe in the God of Toyota, and can prove that the God of Toyota exists, how does that relieve you of the responsibility to keep your car clean, or excuse you of blame if you drive recklessly and kill somebody in a car crash?
To end on a pleasant note, as a reward for people who read this far: Way back in high school, when dinosaurs walked the earth, the girl I was infatuated with for many years gave me cassettes with odd songs on them. She detested excessive clarity and deliberately did not label songs with artist's names. For some years, therefore, all I knew about a fabulous track called "Baroque and Blue" was its title and the fact that the cassette which was my only source for it was succumbing to the ravages of time.
Last night the title popped back into my head and I was able to track it down. Here is a video of it being performed by its original performers. Those who have the patience will be rewarded to sit through the whole thing. This is not a piece of music that front-loads all its surprises.
* This is intended as humor. I realize some of you are older than me. Chronologically. However, on the curmudgeon scale I outpace you all.
Funny thing is, I initially wrote "who" out of sense of grammar, but then changed it to "that" because if I had left it as "who," ten people would think I was misquoting it. Of course it should be "who," but I have heard it 97 times out of 100 as "that." Go figure.
-- 17:28, 21 September 2009 (BST)
Joy:
Hypothesis Confirmation is a known human bias, and everyone is susceptible to it. Yet another reason to be depressed!
-- 17:29, 21 September 2009 (BST)
It doesn't depress me that we are susceptible to it. It depresses me that some people are actively embracing it.
We are not responsible for our born biases, only for our failures to overcome them.
-- 17:38, 21 September 2009 (BST)
Perhaps "biases" was the wrong word. Substitute "instincts."
-- 19:02, 21 September 2009 (BST)
Joy:
Yes, I do. But I mean at a pretty basic level - you have perceptual biases to view things in particular ways, and your neural connections are set up to do certain kinds of processing easier than other kinds. For example, you have biases that let you see the contours and angles of occluded objects as all belonging to the same object versus being a random assortment of object pieces, and you have a bias to take a new name for something (when a child learning words) as referring to the whole object instead of one little piece of the object.
One of our biases is that we tend to "see" and believe evidence that confirms what we already believe/know and discount evidence that contradicts that. It probably has quite a bit of survival value, to be able to sort through information quickly to find what we're looking for, but when it gets applied to complex social situations you end up with what we more commonly call biases/stereotypes/etc.
-- 20:00, 21 September 2009 (BST)
"Boston is the historical homeland of scholarship and higher education in America. You are embarrassing us ..."
Uh. Nicholas Negroponte. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Believe me, as the home of "scholarship and higher education in America", the hollow-earthers are a long long way from being the highest priority embarassment to Boston.
-- 20:14, 21 September 2009 (BST)
I didn't say anywhere that there was a quota on embarrassments.
I keep hoping Negroponte will actually go to one of these countries where he's trying to peddle wildly inappropriate merchandise and actually learn something about conditions there. Then again, I dislike the man fervently and I also hope he will be eaten by a lion.
-- 20:20, 21 September 2009 (BST)
P.S. Because I have the argument with certain people every time I bring up Negroponte about "why One Laptop Per Child is a really stupid idea," and I don't care to have it again, I'm just going to note that I hated Negroponte long before OLPC. He is a flaming gasbag of pure ego, who conceives of half-baked projects whose only criterion for getting the thumbs-up is whether they advance his legend. He then farms out the dirty work to poorly-paid underlings, ignores them if they tell him the pie is in the sky, and walks away from the inevitable wreckage unscathed.
[italics mine]
I wouldn't go that far either, because it is merely the latest and most obvious of Mr. Negroponte's vanity projects. One day, in an ideal world, someone will stop giving him money to churn out his ill-conceived farts of technopuffery. But I'm not holding my breath.
-- 20:33, 21 September 2009 (BST)
Oooh, ouch. I'm sort of in a moral quandary here. See, John Dvorak also thinks Negroponte is much ado about nothing. The problem is, Dvorak is a Blowhard of Legendary Proportions himself. (They even resemble one another.) If one correctly disses Negroponte, does that imply one must embrace Dvorak, the man who has "made a career of pretending to have idiotic, badly-written contrarian opinions"? Is the enemy of my enemy necessarily my friend? This is a toughie.
At least Dvorak baits Apple zealots, which is always fun.
-- 21:29, 21 September 2009 (BST)
Joy, I suppose I was hung up on syntax. I see what you are saying about basic level instincts. I am sure that some are born with inate ability, which I would call talent, not bias, to hear things on different levels or visualize outside the box. If that's the concept you refer to, then bias just seems like not the right word. I think of bias as something learned after the fact, and with a negative context.
I read something recently about perfect pitch. The premise was that no one is born tone-deaf. If they were, then Chinese children would not be able to learn to speak. They need to be able to differentiate the "pitch" of a word in order to comprehend the different meanings inherent in the same basic symbol. There are purported to be many, many more Chinese with perfect pitch as we know it, because we don't have a need as children to exercise that particular talent (bias?) and therefore lose the ability after a time. Interesting, I thought.
-- 23:00, 21 September 2009 (BST)
Andy:
If you've only heard that movement of the Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, you should listen to the rest of it; it's all wonderful.
-- 23:14, 21 September 2009 (BST)
Mel:
I am far more into "The Lord helps those that help themselves" than "The Lord will provide."
If you think about it, "The Lord will provide" is just another version of The Secret and various other philosophies involving wish fulfillment: if you wish hard enough, or believe fully enough, it will come true.
I have been very down on religion lately, but it's not really religion in general I have a problem with, it's these people professing to be Christians and then preaching hate, which is a whole different kettle of fish than the wish-fulfillment crowd - and much worse, as far as I'm concerned. I suspect that the louder they yell, the more they're turning people off, anyway. I just hope I'm right about that, because they've been scaring the pants off of me.
-- 23:53, 21 September 2009 (BST)
Mel, I'm a card-carrying Republican and they terrify me, too. Right now, I'm feeling pretty disenfranchised, because the Fundamentalist wackos seem to be taking over the party. My leanings are decidedly conservative, especially fiscally. Socially, I'm moderate, and these screaming mimis are preaching a brand of hatred that is utterly foreign to me. So I don't really belong anywhere, these days.
-- 00:20, 22 September 2009 (BST)
Andy: Ordered it the instant I found out who the performers were. The full CD will be arriving any minute now.
-- 00:20, 22 September 2009 (BST)
Iain:
I read this morning that Jeph Jacques apparently feels "that basically the only thing I am any good at in life is this comic (and I'm not even very good at that!)"
All's I can say is: My, that sounds familiar.
So, assuming his mother was a US citizen in good standing at the time of his birth - and no one has tried to suggest she wasn't
Actually, I'm pretty sure they have, on the "if you marry a person who is a foreign citizen, you and your children are perforce foreign citizens" principle. That, and they try to say that she renounced citizenship for herself and her children when she moved to Indonesia. Of course, she didn't, and it doesn't work that way for her children even if she did.
-- 00:25, 22 September 2009 (BST)
Try feeding people the best idea in the world at a thousand words or more and watch in pain as they all refuse to read it, or claim that they've read it but then prove through their remarks that they haven't. Words are a nearly lost art. Pictures, on the other hand - you can occasionally still manage to present a real idea and have it absorbed through pictures. Ergo: Your skills are more valuable than mine.
Nope, and you know that's not what the difference is. Jacques isn't any more skilled as an artist than you are as a writer, it's just that Jacques has honed two skills you steadfastly refuse to employ: persistence and self-marketing.
-- 00:43, 22 September 2009 (BST)
Mel:
I'm also pretty sure I heard somebody say that Obama wasn't a citizen because he was born outside the US AND his mother was a minor married to a foreign citizen. I have no idea if the minor part is true or not; he was clearly born in Hawaii, anyway, so it's moot. But of course they don't want to hear that part.
-- 01:00, 22 September 2009 (BST)
Joy:
Bunny, I'll just say that bias is a technical word used in a lot of sciences to refer to propensities to process information in one way or another. It doesn't get reduced to instinct because sometimes the biases are at a cognitive (thought) level, which are much more complex than a simple instinct. Not all biases are purely biologically/genetically driven, but the idea is that our biological and cognitive system is set up so that it tends to function in certain ways (another example, the left hemisphere tends to be dominant in most right-handed adults; it might derive from the left hemisphere being ever so slightly bigger/faster in utero and at birth, so that it wins a bunch of the competitions for cognitive functions, which then sets it up to be bigger). Then, of course, experience interacts with these initial biases to create the whole system.
-- 01:38, 22 September 2009 (BST)
I know we are always going to disagree on this, but I find these people, both the birthers and the charioteers of the gods, absolutely fascinating. I find it amazing the diversity of ways in which people cling to irrational beliefs that are easily dispelled by readily available evidence. Socialized medicine is inefficient! Gays in the military destroy morale! Mark Bittman knows how to cook! That sort of thing. So weird!
As for the sense of humor business, I don't see what the alternative is. I'm not going to be able to change their minds. Are you? Bitch and moan and gnash your teeth all you want to, but unless you've got a way to fix human nature, that's just the way things are going to be, and it's a waste of energy to get all het up about it.
-- 04:07, 22 September 2009 (BST)
Peebles: Oh no, I think yours is the far more constructive response. I wish I could bring myself to laugh at them too. But the anger and nausea just kicks in too strongly for anything else to work.
Iain: Of course that reaction is familiar! That's my point. Anyone I admire is supposed to be better-adjusted in that direction than I am. I don't like learning that my heroes have the same neuroses. Sure, everybody has neuroses, but I expect them to have better and different ones!
Kidding aside, I have this weird idea of "bigger people = bigger problems" that I have never been able to shake. I see myself as a small person, a very insignificant person, with problems that aren't even very interesting problems. If someone I think is bigger than I am turns out to have some of the same problems, then that means either they're not as big as I thought or I'm bigger than I thought. Either conclusion is disturbing, but for different reasons.
I realize that makes absolutely no sense.
-- 14:26, 22 September 2009 (BST)
Following along these lines - not that this adds clarity: While it is disheartening to hear that someone a little bigger than I am - someone I admire but whom I still consider to be human - has the same sort of petty neuroses and quirks I do, it is actually encouraging to learn about neuroses in people who have gotten so big that they are quasi-mythological. I was heartened to find out that Abraham Lincoln was a gravely neurotic person, for example - it brought him back down out of the level of the gods for me. I don't like the idea of gods walking among us. Makes me nervous. But the idea that my local personal heroes might have the same clay feet I do also makes me nervous. Go figure.
You may ask, is there anyone I want to set lower on this hierarchy than myself? Yes. People I don't respect or like are supposed to be more damaged than I am. However, with mythological villains, finding out that they had human traits is disheartening, not encouraging. I don't want to know that Hitler actually had a gentle side or to better understand his motivations.
In other words, I am not comfortable with quasi-mythological heroes walking through the pages of human history, but I'm quite comfortable with having quasi-mythological villains doing so.
God. Sorry for all these posts. I became aware yesterday when I posted the Negroponte crap that what I was really hungering for was a long, deep conversation/argument with another human in person. Hence the verbal diarrhea.
-- 14:37, 22 September 2009 (BST)
Bunny42:
"Our constitution does not say that the president must have been born in the United States."
Interesting you should mention that, since there was also quite the dustup about John McCain having been born in Canal Zone.
Great trio! Kinda puts me in mind of George Shearing style (talking of "back in the day") only I don't recall Shearing with a flute. Thanks for sharing.
"The Lord helps those that help themselves"
AAAGGGGH! Sean will love that you said this. I've been smacking his head with "Who" refers to people, "that" refers to things. He says nuh uh, it doesn't matter, and everybody does it. And, sadly, he appears to be right. Again...
-- 17:25, 21 September 2009 (BST)