Boys’ Toys

I was trying to think of a way to impress Erika Price (see Erika’s comment here), when it dawned on me.

I was shopping at a big box toy store in St. Louis County tonight, accompanied by my wife and children.  I was waiting for my family to make a purchase when I realized that I had a camera available in the car. I ran out to get the camera to snap a few photos to help raise a simple question:  Are boys getting an overdose of the idea that violence is the best first approach to solving human conflict?  Asked another way, how often is it that a toy marketed to boys suggests that there are ways of solving problems other than smacking someone on the head, stabbing them, shooting them, vaporizing them or slamming them into a wall?  Based on the toys that one Toys R Us store displayed most prominently, the answer is not often. On what do I base this conclusion?  Read on and enjoy the slide show.

Before you go thinking that I am a radical pacifist.  Consider these things.  I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.  Also consider that I loved superhero comic books growing up.  Further, I supported military action against the Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks.  Violence sometimes has a place in solving some situation, in my opinion.

But back to the store.  There’s no hint of violence in the baby toys.  There’s …

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Newsweek explores recent books denying existence of God.

It’s in the September 11, 2006 issue of Newsweek.   The article explores the issues presented by the following three books:

  • The End of Faith, by Sam Harris
  • Breaking the Spell, by Daniel Dennett and
  • The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

It is a good sign that Newsweek is acknowledging some of the basic points raised by these books.  For example, Newsweek has this to say about the position of Harris on skepicism:

“Tell a devout Christian … that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible,” Harris writes, “and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.”

The Newsweek article presents the view of Dawkins regarding the basis for morality, as presented by many Christians:

“If there is no God, why be good?” he asks rhetorically, and responds: “Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up.”

Harris sharply questions the moral “lessons” of the Bible: 

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Sunny past, dark future. Or something like that.

Earlier, I wrote about the rosy, sunny image of “the good old days” and the sad reality that those days just never existed. A body of psychological evidence explains in part why we cling to this fantasy: we have a tendency to blanket our old memories with simplicity and inaccuracy.

First, memory tests conducted on the elderly suggest that as we age, we become more likely to remember warm, pleasant experiences and steer clear of recalling negative stimuli. Though most of us associate old age with grouchiness and malcontentment, older people actually tend to filter their memories in favor of the enjoyable.

In a 2004 study at Stanford, professor of psychology Linda Cartensen asked young adults and elderly adults to view a variety of slides and then complete a memory exam on the scenes they had witnessed. Though young adults beat out the elderly on overall short-term memory, elderly adults demonstrated a remarkable ability to recall pleasing scenes, such as those of happy infants and puppies, and performed even better than their young counterparts in this regard.

Surprised at these results, Cartensen also monitored the moods and memories of adults aged 18 to 94, and found that older adults reported greater happiness and spent less time “wallowing in bad moods” that brought younger respondents down. In a review of Cartensen’s study, Psychology Today wrote that seniors tend to “revise history” to make the overall image of their life appear more appealing. The article continues:

“Pleasant memories are always invading [seniors’]

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Red State, Blue State, My State? You State!

How red is the country, and how blue are we? Well, even in 2000, I wanted to see the colors of the states mixed, so we could see how purple each one was. Go here to see a variety of ways of looking at the red-blue situation from the 2004…

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Moral Bias

I’ve been thinking about this since the initial post on our biases and all the responses.  In the course of trying to come up with an “appropriate” response to the world, we often find ourselves caught up in endless exception-making, fudging, attempts to shoehorn certain proclivities and habits into convenient moulds so we don’t go through our days constantly flinching at our inadvertant insensitivities. 

Does it do any good?  The flinching?  I mean, after the Sixties, one had to have been living on Mars for half a century not to be aware that there had been a Big Shift away from what might be called Gross Cultural Reliance to a more nuanced approach which has been (often derisively) termed Political Correctness.  The former is a condition wherein one “borrows” wholesale from the culture to make associational choices.  It doesn’t occur in this instance to question the wisdom of the culture–it’s what it is, and we are part of it, ergo…

But we realized that the Culture At Large was in many ways an Idiot.  It stepped on people.  It made too little room for variation.  It tried to be all things to all people, but it was necessary that all people somehow be The Same in order for that to work.  Those with a vested interest in keeping everything the same mightily resisted movement to change the rules.

We never did come up with a solid formulation that allows for prejudice.

You have to, you know.  What we ended up …

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