sex and gender

I accept that female and male biology are not the same and that small genetic differences between the groups have small differentiating effects on behavior but from this it does not follow that women are better nurses or that men are better doctors, that girls are better at second language acquisition while boys are better at math and science. The nature of the differentiation is always being determined and will be determined differently in different places and times. The one constant is attempted domination.

nihilism

Meaning is hijacked early on in life. You enter a mythical forest around age two, reeling as your pre-verbal infancy narrative falls apart, swarmed by comforting tales of mommy love or being cradled in the bigger, safer arms of God or society, and the path you're on goes to heaven or at least human betterment, you're told. You're going somewhere, to a better place and all sorts of horrors come to play a valuable role. The bad becomes good.

But the forest is a tightly bound ecosystem so when the first tree catches fire, the rest eventually burns down with it. You try to partition but can't. What you're left with is a charred, meaningless wasteland. Now you're watching the people you love talking to phantom trees.

What killed the forest doesn't discriminate between bad and good. What killed the forest evolved to destroy, not create. But it became who you are.

And yet, while you know the old meaning is dead, you know it's also not true that life is meaningless. Every action, every day, you are giving quite a shit. Despair is an extreme form of caring. Your life just doesn't have that meaning anymore, the one that had kept you cowering. Nihilism (I'm thinking Bright Eyes' "Waste of Paint") is an addiction to suffering, a failure to let go, a commitment to feeding the fire long after it's done its job.

waste of paint

As much as I can appreciate the efforts of Bob Dylan, it's hard to understand the relative lack of fanfare for a successor this obvious, as far as that narrative intrigues. Anyways, my favorite recorded live performance on the whole internet:

multi-millionaire jeffrey loria would like your sympathy, please

Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, who has $500 million to his name, hired some well-connected suits a few years back and got himself $2.4 billion worth of brand new baseball stadium. The stolen ballyard opened last year with high hopes and a star-heavy roster only to flop badly, at which point Loria and company dumped the stars and their salaries without getting major talent in return. Naturally he's been getting slammed for it so he hired a PR firm. In other words he hired people to deceive on his behalf, to convince the little people whose money he stole that he's doing the best he can. This AP story mentions the PR firm, then allows the PR firm to give Loria's story without rebuttal or analysis or mockery. Well played, I guess. But this is the good part:   

Loria is widely viewed as the culprit.

Angry fans have complained they expected the new ballpark to mean competitive payrolls for more than just one season. Instead they endured the latest in a series of payroll purges, which made the franchise the butt of jokes around the country.

"It's a constant, sometimes personal pounding," Marlins president David Samson said after Loria had left the room. "It's hard for anyone. On top of that, you're writing checks. It's hard. But I understand every side."

Poor Jeffrey, trying so hard. He's writing checks! With stolen money! And at the same time he has to listen to haters hating. Have they tried to lead? Do they know how hard it is to run a franchise (into the ground)? No one appreciates Jeffrey, sniff, sniff.

The projected payroll for this year is less than $45 million, which would likely be the smallest in the majors. Loria said he expects it to begin rising again, but it may be a long time before the Marlins return to last year's $90 million level.
"We're never going to get to $100 million," Loria said. "We don't have the TV contract to do that."

Did I mention he's a $500 million dollar man? Seems like there were some options taken off the table there that maybe shouldn't have been.

body and mind

These categories of affective and cognitive are clearly repositories for what was previously, and still is, stored in the notions of mind and body, subject and object, etc., and so, first, yes that's some resilient shit (in its insistence on remaining a dichotomy in human brains), whatever it is, and second, a better description involves some recognition of the layered-ness of human bodies, some realization that the tension described when I speak of cognitive dissonance is the sister of the tension felt in my bladder and that the tendencies of our brains to divide phenomena like human bodies into neat categories is a response to a bodily tension, felt in the brain region of the body, and an attempt to find satisfaction in the release of this tension. Considering how varied are the origins of our genetic developments -- so many contexts, millenia and more apart, a mishmash that exposes dichotimization as artifact-- I wonder about missing links, how it's connected, how these minds came to separate themselves from their bodies in theory, but not in practice.

true patriots

I once had a lengthy back-and-forth with a troop supporter who, after having defended every U.S. military action of the past century, took offense at my using the term "pro-war" to describe his position. Then this morning came a flashback when I saw this from an onliner who goes by the tag "Support our troops or get the f--k out": 

What do you do when your intellectual adversary has already self-reduced to absurdity, already brazenly claimed that A is not A?

Well, the contradiction isn't clear if you've been properly patriotized. All the terms have different meanings to a patriot. "Guns" refers to inanimate guns in a gun case, "people that don't value human life" means bad guys (aka, them), and "kill people" refers to killing good guys (aka, us). Translated, we have:

Guns in gun cases don't kill people. Bad guys kill good guys.

True, yes? So just as it's too simple to say that Obama lacks empathy when he clearly has it for wife and kids and pro athletes and fellow rulers, it's inaccurate to say that true patriots lack cognitive dissonance. Instead, I'd say that all the parts of the puzzle have been rearranged and marked up (or however distorted) and the true patriot has neither the intellectual skills to work through it nor the emotional makeup to find sufficient reward in accurate puzzle solving to outweigh the pain of rejection by internalized authority figures.

rational actors are delusional, Crispy conflates, and cognitive dissonance is an anchor

Steve Nash is a career 91% free throw shooter, which puts him in the running for best free throw rate in NBA history. I assume that he's very good at convincing himself that the ball will go in. He's surely aware that he has around a 91% chance and yet every time he goes through his motions, he's convincing himself (most likely he doesn't have to try very hard) that he has a 100% chance. This is of course the best way to proceed. Confidence in action has a very loose relationship with truth. Truth is not the object. The object is to rise above the truth or to deny a place in the future to those truths you don't like. Steve Nash at the foul line is a rational actor by the usual standard but he's delusional at the most important moment. Maybe "wise actor" is a better term.

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Crispin Sartwell isn't entirely wrong in saying that women are best off "taking responsibility" for what they wear and the state of women's fashion, and that they should try to change it if it's oppressive. Steve Nash's mentality is the right one. But Sartwell is conflating reality with intentionality. I used to teach high school in Baltimore and I'd frequently tell the prisoners how the odds were stacked against them but how irrelevant this should be going forward. It's true that people in rough situations sometimes find relief in self-pity and that this can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy problem but acknowledging the reality of the situation is not the same thing as using it as a crutch. Again, reality is not intentionality.

Another problem is that, in Sartwell's view, there's a fixed quantity of responsibility and to say "patriarchy" is to say that women are helpless and without agency and therefore deserve neither blame nor praise. At the risk of oversimplifying, it seems that certain people find themselves in 3-0 counts (baseball analogy time!) due to circumstances outside their control while others find themselves in 0-2 counts, where the odds of success are lower and level of skill required to come through with a hit greater so that if a person in an 0-2 count gets a hit, it's more impressive whereas if they don't, it's less unimpressive.

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"Reason" and "emotion" are set against each other like the categories "human" and "animal." There are differences worth mentioning between each pair but just as humans are animals, reason is an emotion. Reason is rooted in desire. Curiosity describes something felt, as does cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is one of the best guides we have, though we'd perhaps be wise not to let it mess too much with our free-throw shooting or politics. 

There are limits to how much one can control it. I can't convince myself I'm a bird, I couldn't make myself believe that Jesus was my Lord and Saviour, etc. The downside is that if you miss enough free throws, your ability to fight reality with intentionality might suffer, making you less likely to make the next one. Also, you might be unable to forget all the terrible things you've learned about being human. The upside is that it grounds and orders arguments, including those against unnecessary suffering. It's hard-wired so everyone feels it, though cultural violence amplifies other feelings. You can't compel someone to agree with you but your words can apply emotional pressure, hopefully to cognitive dissonance, until they can't help but see fatal flaws in their arguments.

"2+2=4" is not arbitrary. Every term in the equation is a product of human imagination but that's the imagination I have so I can't help but be impressed by the truth of it, even as I question it or reframe it, philosophically. The only chance geocentrism and creationism ever had was to somehow rope in superior ideas with widespread co-self-deception (I believe it, do you believe it? Oh yeah, I believe it, everyone believes it. My parents believed it and God believes it and the Bible is the most widely read book and the preacher has an inside connection to God...) Obviously it didn't work in the first case and isn't working very well in the second (one last sports analogy -- the creationists are down 35-0 in the fourth quarter). People resisted the new paradigms, tried to believe the scary new ideas were lies, but couldn't.

UPDATE:

"I always think I'm on fire. Like the old school game, 'NBA Jam,' you make a couple and the rim's on fire and when you shoot the ball, the ball's on fire. I feel like that at times. Well, all the time. When I'm in the game, I play with a lot of confidence and you kind of got to lie to yourself that you can't miss."

-- Bulls guard Nate Robinson, on his sizzling run that helped deliver a 3-1 series lead over the Nets.