The Dish

Alex Tabarrok ponders cow philosophy.

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day," – David Foster Wallace.

Big Gay Al somehow escaped from South Park to do some ad voice-overs:

I can’t stop watching this. It fucking cracks me up every time.

Razib Kahn compares:

The typical hostility toward atheism emerges out of ignorance, and preconceptions. Most Americans are at least moderately religious, and take it is a given that morality comes from God. It does not take a logician to infer from this model that those without God are particularly amoral and lacking in character, and because most Americans do not know anyone who is an atheist, or more accurately, they do not know that some of the people they know may be atheists, all they have to go on is a superficial model.

When I was younger and socialized mostly with conservative white Protestants and Mormons (because of the demographics of where I resided) my atheism had an initial shock effect, in part because I was notably “straight edge,” and did not exhibit the amorality which was expected. But this issue quickly faded into the background, as the lack of religion had little pragmatic consequence.

In contrast, the few open homosexuals at my high school were subject to a far greater level of harassment.

Jonathan Rowe:

If time is infinite on both ends, then we have infinite rolls of the dice of probability. That means, however infinitesimally small the probabilities that brought “you” into existence, with enough rolls of dice, “you” will come into existence again, and again and again forever. And if time is infinite in reverse, “now” isn’t the only time “you” existed.

Accordingly, “you” have always existed and always will.

Discuss. But get some coffee first.

A photo of a model taken by Peter Kun Frary outside of a MAC cosmetics store at Ala Moana outdoor shopping center in Hawaii. Frary:

Although carrying a heavy SLR can be a drag, it's worth it when a great image leaps out and bites you on the arse. Recently I walked by the Ala Moana Mac cosmetic store and noticed a crowd of Japanese tourists gawking and snapping pics. Amazingly, a model in full body paint was posing against a set. She was a darn good simulation of a late 19th century oil painting. At first I though she was nekid–wearing only makeup–but she sported a few scrapes of cloth in the right places. Also, she hardly ever blinked…

(Hat tip: URLesque. More of Frary's work here.)

Tom Downey profiles online vigilantes:

Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

From Flowing Data:

FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.

Greg Scoblete trounces Jonah Goldberg:

Obviously we don't know what might have been in Iraq. Maybe Saddam and his brutal minions would have killed an equal number of Iraqis before they gave way to a new government – which may have been even worse. Maybe the country would have come apart after Saddam's death and led to an equal number killed. Maybe all possible roads that diverged from America's decision to invade involved considerably more dead Iraqis than the one we took. All of that is very plausible. But you can't ignore the fact that the road we took resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Iraqis. If Goldberg and other war supporters want to make the omelet/egg argument about their lives and the creation of a new democracy, fine. But I think it's difficult to try to take credit for the emergence of a democratic government in Iraq without simultaneously taking "credit" (or rather, responsibility) for the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed to get there.

Or the trillions of dollars. Or the thousands of American fatalities and tens of thousands of crippling life-long injuries. Or the massive damage to American credibility. Or the wreckage to the European alliance. Or the boon to the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. Or the likelihood that well over 50,000 US troops will be there for the duration. Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, the play was quite fabulous.