Month: November 2010

If You Can’t Take The Heat, Pick Up A Controller

A new video game, “Fate of the World,” challenges players to stop climate change without crashing economies or ecosystems:

Change is achieved by applying policies, in the form of cards, to a dozen geographical regions, with each turn representing the passage of five years. Players can promote nuclear power and institute cap-and-trade schemes, or pin their hopes on untested technologies like fusion power or carbon capture and storage — so-called “clean coal.” …

Far darker options are available for seriously unscrupulous planet savers. These include sending secret agents to overthrow recalcitrant governments and surreptitiously adding contraceptives to the water supplies of nations resistant to birth control. Those with apocalyptic leanings can even release a genetically engineered virus to crash the world population.

The Cannabis Closet: Pain Or Unemployment?

A reader writes:

I live in Northern California, and I voted Yes on Proposition 19. I smoked a little cannabis when I was in my late teens and early 20s, back in the late '70s. It didn’t make me want to try other, more potentially dangerous illegal drugs. In fact, because I was a student and broke most of the time, I rarely could afford to buy it (and frankly, I was too naive to know easily how to get it). For me, it was like having an occasional glass of very nice wine, usually during a party when a joint was being passed around. I enjoyed the experience and left it at that.

I’m in my early 50s now. I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis for more than 20 years, and while some treatments for the disease are effective, their efficacy varies from person to person, and they often only work for a while.

It’s a very painful and often disabling and even disfiguring disease; I've taken many, many different medications in an attempt to control it and relieve the pain. The latest "cocktail" of drugs I take for RA is, my doctor tells me, controlling the disease. Unfortunately, the joint pain remains.

About six months ago I finally got brave enough to take my medical records to a “pot doctor,” and got the “card” (it’s actually a letter) that makes it legal for me to use cannabis to treat my pain. I went to a dispensary and bought some.

It helps with the pain, but I discovered (this wasn’t a big surprise) that while I was under the influence, I shouldn’t try to do anything very productive, and certainly shouldn’t attempt to drive. Of course, it's the same with alcohol, and it's the same with opiate-based prescription analgesics as well. I drink very little, and I hate taking opiate painkillers for fear of becoming tolerant, dependent and addicted. Cannabis is a wonderful alternative, used responsibly and with care.

So while being able to use pot for pain has been nice, I've only used it in the evenings or on weekends when I know I’m going to be home and prepared to be unproductive while I'm in less pain.

But now I find myself in a conundrum. I’ve been unemployed for a couple of years. I continue to search for work, but so far have been unable to find a job. Here's the thing: If I do find a decent job and get an interview, what happens if they require a drug test? If I’m using cannabis, I’ll fail it. Goodbye, job.

So even though I have my weed tucked away in my cupboard, ready to use when I hurt badly, I haven’t used it for quite some time, just in case. When it comes to pain relief versus full-time employment, I have to be realistic and pragmatic and go for the latter. Prop 19 might not have changed this situation much (certainly it would have taken some time for the overall social culture to change), but it was something to look forward to. Now I guess that change will just have to wait. And as long as I'm unemployed, so will I.

How Video Games Are Like Real Life

They are policed. Brian Crecente reports on multiplayer online games and the occasional criminals who play them:

Modern massively multiplayer online games don't have to deal with just cheating and player hazing, but gold running, character theft, even real world crimes, like players targeting underage players for real-world sex or discussing crimes they want to or already have committed. … 

… if a player is signed in as an 8-year-old boy, but the program believes they are chatting or behaving like a 40-year-old, moderators will be alerted to watch them.

A World Without Political Parties

Scott Adams envisions one:

Imagine a democratic political system in which no one is allowed to be a member of a political party. How would things be different? My hypothesis is that confirmation bias, or cognitive dissonance, or something of that nature, influences voters to irrationally agree with the platform of their own party no matter what the facts suggest. My hypothesis is easy enough to test. All you'd need to do is come up with a phony issue and present it to your test subjects as something to which their party agrees, or disagrees, and see if party affiliation influences opinions. I think the effect would be large.

Debating Israel-Palestine

My little experiment in a three-post mini-essay concluded last week. I'm not sure it was that successful an idea, but there are many points in all three posts – here, here and here – that I hope can stimulate push-back and debate. So have it. Again, the point of this was to try and get away from tit-for-tat blog-spats and toward a bloggy attempt to air some ideas which require a little more space than a single post. The Dish remains open to any and all rebuttals or clarifications.

The Spiritual Center, Ctd

Reacting to this defense of agnosticism, a reader makes a vital point on the distinction between non-fundamentalist Christians and agnostics:

In many ways the agnostic is in an interesting place sociologically and dispositionally, which he shares with certain Christians, of being "between" the fundamentalists on either side, whether religious or atheist. At the functional level, and here I suspect that AGNOSTIC really means at the level of politics, the agnostic and the non-fundamentalist Christian can share a great deal. Both will be humble, aware of all that they do not know, and probably open to compromise as well as given to a political ethic of empiricism, prudence, and an acknowledgment of limits. The agnostic and the grace-sustained Christian might both be conservatives of doubt.

I have been thinking a great deal about this lately, and despite the above, have been more impressed by differences between the agnostic and the non-fundamentalist Christian — especially existentially. I can't help but think that the agnostic, at the end of the day, reads all the great old books that dwelt on all the great questions self-aware man has posed to himself, and shrugs. He acknowledges mystery but does not seem to care about the source of that mystery, or even if he is responding to something "real" when curious moments of spiritual transcendence actually occur. There is, of course, a certain sanity in this response — at the least he won't end up an ideologue. I wouldn't mind having an agnostic for my neighbor. Yet all this seems to amount to a form of evasion. Its a form of studied non-observance.

The non-fundamentalist Christian experiences doubt within the framework of faith, and above all hope.

We see through a glass darkly; but one day we will see Him face to face. Our unknowing is intrinsically related to eschatology — we experience doubt but dwell within it hopefully, waiting humbly and patiently for the day when all things will be made new. In other words, the uncertainty and humility of the Christian is not a mere admission that we "just don't know," but instead is given intelligibility by our hope. It Hope might be better to put it this way: the Christian acknowledges that we don't know right now. I also suspect — or at least this holds for me — that humility is related to original sin, our flawed and fallible post-lapsarian natures. It is not that our questions are unanswerable, or meaningless, it is that we can't answer them as finite, fallible beings with minds that still bear the imprint of our aboriginal catastrophe. So we hold our beliefs with some critical distance, knowing that a belief in any God that does not slip into utter anthropomorphism will be aware of the limits of language, of marking with mortal words immortal things.

I'm not sure a simple agnosticism ever can really be sustained. I'm not sure why, apart from a kind of existential self-positing, and thereby probably delusional willfulness, it does not turn to cynical despair. I'm not sure it is ever non-parasitic on more robust forms of faith (including non-fundamentalist religious faith). I'm not sure why you would continue to attend to questions that you think are not open to some kind of provisional answer, even the answer of humble faith. The Christian who doubts has reasons for both believing and struggling, and the two are held together and given intelligibility by sustaining hope. Ultimately I think the agnostic and non-fundamentalist believer are occupying two very different existential positions, whatever the resonances that exist between them politically or otherwise.

Cool It

An antidote to the fear behind climate change in Bjorn Lomborg’s upcoming movie:

Money quote from a review:

The way Lomborg explains it, current commitments are to spend $250 billion per year to combat the effects of Global Warming. And, if we continue to spend that same amount for the remainder of the century, in the end the temperature of the planet will have decreased by only a fraction of a degree. So, instead of wasting money on methods that aren’t providing results, Lomborg suggests the money should be spent to combat poverty and to provide education and health care in developing countries. Of the $250 billion, a portion should also be allocated to research and development for more efficient technologies such as renewable energy and geo-engineering.

The movie opens this Friday.