The Dish

Brian Knutson argues that the instantaneous pleasure of the internet creates a gulf between our present and future selves:

Thus, if the present self doesn't feel a connection with the future self, then why forego present gratification for someone else's future kicks? Even assuming that the present self does feel connected to the future self, the only way to sacrifice something good now (e.g., reading celebrity gossip) for something better later (e.g., finishing that term paper) is to slow down enough to appreciate that connection, consider the conflict between present and future rewards, weigh the options, and decide in favor of the best overall course of action. The very speed of the Internet and convenience of Web content accelerates information search to a rate that crowds out reflection, which may bias me towards gratifying the salient but fleeting desires of my present self.

Which means to say that Internet use is very close to an addiction in our culture. I sure understand that. It suspends time as you get lost in a miasma of thought; it creates another world – separate from the ordeals of the real one; it can even create a new persona for you; and you can't get away from it. That's a drug. And we need to figure out how to manage it and retain a human balance.

And don't ask me. I'm a lost cause. My addiction actually earns me a living as well!

Tyler Cowen highlights this critique by J. Hughes:

[W]hile most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their Enlightenment beliefs in human perfectibility and governance by reason can also validate technocratic authoritarianism. Even staunchly libertarian transhumanists appear to be blithely unaware that arguments for government by benign superintelligent beings that know human interests better than we do recapitulate arguments for totalitarianism from the French Revolution through Marxist-Leninism.

Gruyeres, Switzerland, 2 pm

The Chronicle compares:

If environmentalism is a substitute for religion—a way of validating certain emotions—then we might expect to find other secular surrogates for guilt and indignation. Our tendencies to sin, repent, and generally indulge in self-cruelty can be seen cropping up in our obsessions about health and fitness, for example. Struggling with our weight (diet and relapse) has risen above the other deadly sins to take a dominant position in our secular self-persecution.

Andrew Gelman tires of this "newest putdown," while Tim Harford attacks environmentalists "slow to realise that the fashionable eco-lifestyle is riddled with contradictions."

Katja Grace scratches her chin:

Humanity’s obsession with status and money is often attributed to a misguided belief that these will bring the happiness we truly hunger. Would be reformers repeat the worldview-shattering news that we can be happier just by being grateful and spending more time with our families and on other admirable activities. Yet the crowds begging for happiness do not appear to heed them.

This popular theory doesn’t explain why people are so ignorant after billions of lifetimes of data about what brings happiness, or alternatively why they are helpless to direct their behavior toward it with the information. The usual counterargument to this story is simply that money and status and all that do in fact bring happiness, so people aren’t that silly after all.

Another explanation for the observed facts is that we don’t actually want happiness that badly; we like status and money too even at the expense of happiness.

She has some theories about these contradictions. I have one too. Original sin. Or this from Merton:

"The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything."

For the "Know Hope" file: a major moderate Muslim statement in Britain.

A helpful video of the Amirault case, one of Coakley's true low-points:

As a YouTube commenter notes:

Martha Coakley was concerned only about political expediency and her party, she didn't care whether the Amiraults were guilty or innocent.

Maybe that should have been obvious, but with all the advances in gay rights over the past decades I started to take it for granted that we could have a referendum on this issue decided on the merits of gay marriage itself – not visceral reactions to the very fact of homosexuality.  I was naive.  As your recent post quoting DiA suggested, this issue can only be considered rationally, maturely, intelligently in a courtroom.  That is the only (somewhat) public forum at this point in time that is going to let these historical, cultural and sociological arguments actually be heard and weighed fairly. 

Regardless of the outcome, I think that this trial will be powerful and carry a great deal of weight.  The right conversations are happening.  The right questions are being asked.  And even though we don't get to see it, there are people like the bloggers at Prop 8 Trial Tracker making sure the country knows what's being said. 

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