Glenn Greenwald dissects a "solution" to the attempted bombing of a Northwest airliner coming from the Right Wing of the political spectrum. How barbaric right wingers are to suggest that we "kill them all," even people from Yemen who are innocent. And how ignorant to fail to understand why many people from Yemen are angry with the United States. Greenwald correctly points out the absurdity of the claim that they hate us for our "freedom."
I think we've almost reached the end of an extraordinary ten years or so. Immense amounts of information that should have been public has been kept private. Consider, for instance, eight years where the Bush administration classifying almost anything controversial to be "secret." More recently, we've seen the supposedly transparent health care debate become shaped by opaque dealings because, for instance, Big Pharma and the White House. We continue to see the Federal Reserve successfully prevent tax-payers from learning the inner-workings of an extremely power organization, the actions of which affect us all. But there's more to this decade than secret things that should be public. It's public things that should be secret, and I think this second phenomenon is well-illustrated by the following video: What should, for all intents, be a private moment, the marriage proposal by a pleasant-seeming fellow to his weather channel forecaster girlfriend, has been turned into a public spectacle. I'm sure that no one meant any harm, but as I watched this, it was as clear as can be that I didn't belong there. This should have been a private moment between the two lovebirds, but the decision to broadcast what appeared to be a surprise proposal (from her standpoint) just couldn't be resisted. The draw of the limelight was just too alluring. And proposing in public warped the situation in several major ways. She seemed to be willing, but was she really? Did she really want to make her lifetime commitment, and the tremble of her voice, a spectacle for numerous people who had actually tuned in only for the weather? And consider what this sort of thing does to the viewers. Watching this exchange turned me into a voyeur. Did you feel that way too? Here's more information on this TV proposal. Nor is this private-things-made-public situation unusual. Anyone turning on TV these days (TV is foisted upon us in waiting rooms, airports, stores, and even the courthouse where I served as a juror two weeks ago) sees numerous what-should-be private moments, including families airing out their dirty laundry on TV. We also see it on numerous blogs--I've read one where the woman advised the world that her husband is a drunken bum and that she's going to leave him--she wrote this to total strangers before telling him. You can also get a regular dose of what-should-be-private information just by browsing Facebook or, better yet, MySpace. And the mainstream media simply just can't get enough of what should be private family matters regarding politicians, actors, musicians and, of course, athletes. So there you have it. We are simultaneously seeing a continuing explosion of public private things and private public things. This just can't be healthy.
Alternate history is a subset of science fiction. Stories and novels of this sort have been written for a long time, but in the last three decades or so the form has come into its own. Many of them are playful What-Ifs that look at how things might have gone had a detail or two gone differently. They are then excuses for adventure or thriller plots that quite often have little real poignance, not least because often the point of departure for the changed history is quite unlikely.
The best ones, however, play with changes that actually might have happened given just a nudge in one direction or the other, and the unfolding drama gives a glimpse of worlds that could easily have come about, often forbidding, thoroughly cautionary. We tend to assume, unconsciously at least, that things work out for the best, even when there is evidence to the contrary. An understandable approach to life given the limit power any of possess to effect events, change the course of history, or otherwise fight perceived inevitabilities. But unlike in fiction, it is rarely up to one person to fight evil or correct wrongs. It is a communal responsibility and the only tool we possess collectively is the wisdom accrued over time from which we might draw clues what to do.
Word War II provides a wellspring of speculation on what might have been done differently if. It seems occasionally that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Seen purely from a military standpoint, perhaps so. For all its formidable abilities, Nazi Germany was ultimately limited by available resources, something certain generals tried to address on multiple occasions but ultimately failed to successfully repair. But politically? The world at the time offered faint comfort to those who thought the democracies could win in a toe-to-toe fight with the tyrants.
Allow me, then, to recommend a trilogy of novels that represent the better aspects of alternate history and effectively restore the chilling uncertainties of those times.
[more . . . ]I hadn't read a list of prominent nontheists (atheists, agnostics and other religious skeptics) for awhile. Here's a recently updated list with lots of prominent names. Here's another. Both of these lists include background information regarding each name on the list. Some famous contemporary atheists, agnostics and skeptics are: Daniel Radcliffe Bill Maher Pat Tillman Oliver Sacks Bill Gates Omar Sharif Dave Barry Warren Buffet Phil Donahue Katharine Hepburn Angelina Jolie Lance Armstrong This list includes numerous scientists, along with many actors. Noticeably absent are politicians, which brings to mind polls showing that half of Americans would absolutely refuse to vote for any atheist politician. What follows are the percentages of people indicating in 2006 that they would refuse to vote for "a generally well-qualified person for president" on the basis of some characteristic; in parenthesis are the figures for earlier years: Catholic: 4% (1937: 30%) Black: 5% (1958: 63%, 1987: 21%) Jewish: 6% (1937: 47%) Baptist: 6% Woman: 8% Mormon: 17% Muslim: 38% Gay: 37% (1978: 74%) Atheist: 48%
At the Chronicles of Higher Education, William Deresiewicz writes about our long-evolving idea of friendship, and it's not a good thing. The more friends we claim to have, the more we are diluting the idea of friendship. Deresiewicz makes many worthy observations along the way, including the suggestion that the classical idea of a committed friendship conflicts with the expanding notions of freedom and equality. When I commit in real-life ways to particular friends, I seem to be acting in an exclusionary way toward all of those people who didn't make the cut. In modern times (says Deresiewicz), deep and committed friendships make some of us uneasy. "At best, intense friendships are something we're expected to grow out of." The comments to the article divided rather evenly into those that found the article poetic and inspiring versus those that found the author to be verbose and "howling at the moon." Reading this piece, I repeatedly thought of Robin Dunbar's research regarding friendship. We are not physiologically capable of having more than 150 good friends at one time. But networking tools certainly seem to expand our contacts (if not our friendships) well beyond 150. How should we really describe those people to whom we are linked up, but not in a deep way or a flesh and blood way? Reading this article, I was also reminded of several friendships that I would absolutely positively claim to be deep meaning friendships, that were started and maintained through the Internet. None of these are mere Facebook "friends"; they each involved substantial amounts of private email and, eventually, some face-to-face discussions. I mention this to fend off any suggestion that "real" friendships should be limited to those relationships maintains primarily through flesh and blood encounters. Here's a bit more from Deresiewicz' thought-provoking article:
If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.