Abandon Text! - Comments

Linda Hyde: Prince Caspian

nospam@example.com (Linda Hyde) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:54:14 -0700

Just came across your blog, looking for the text of Prince Caspian on Google. I wrote one, when the movie came out, quite the diametric opposite of your impressions. If you're interested: http://lindahyde.blogspot.com/2009/02/urgent-call-to-paradise.html

Garrick Cheyne: True Story: Consumer-driven healthcare costs less

nospam@example.com (Garrick Cheyne) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 07:29:29 -0700

I recently discovered your site and have spent the last several weeks reading one or two of your past posts each day during my lunch break(I am a teacher). I just wanted to say thank you for your writing. Every post is not only enjoyable to read, but also thought-provoking. I would have sent this in an email instead of a public comment, but couldn't find a link. In specific regard to healthcare, I agree with most of your ideas. I recently switched to a high deductible program myself, and have had similar experiences to the one you describe here. I do think, however, that NFL commisioner Roger Goodell's recent quote in regards to the overtime workings is applicable to the Obama plan: "Don't let perfect get in the way of better."

Kenny Felder: True Story: Consumer-driven healthcare costs less

nospam@example.com (Kenny Felder) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:02:19 -0700

I keep ping-ponging between you and my mother. Both of you make very good arguments on both sides of this issue.

My mother lived in England for a year in the 1960s, and she is very convinced that the socialized medicine worked great. Standard, run-of-the-mill care was free and very good. If you wanted more than that, you paid through the nose. Costs were contained and no one went untreated for financial reasons.

For what it's worth...

Georg Buehler: Freakonomics, Incentives and ObamaCare

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:16:40 -0700

I agree that some sensible tort reform would help. The Democrats have completely ignored tort reform as part of the solution. It might have something to do with all the money they get from trial lawyers.

But I think a lot of the defensive medicine practices, and over-utilitization of testing, would largely disappear if we restored market forces to the healthcare industry. Once the consumer has an incentive to so "no" to useless tests, she will. Once doctors have an incentive to treat their patients like customers, they will respect their wishes.

Kenny Felder: Freakonomics, Incentives and ObamaCare

nospam@example.com (Kenny Felder) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:54:03 -0700

Welcome back, Georg!

I've already made it clear that I do not have any good solution to the health care problem. Overall, what you're saying makes sense to me. On the other hand, I have a much higher opinion of Obama than you do, and I'm inclined to want to give his solution a chance.

The only thing I feel very strongly about in this space is that the Republicans are right when they call for tort reform as part of the solution. It does seem apparent to me that multi-million dollar lawsuits every time something goes wrong lead to a tremendous amount of waste, not in the name of improving health, but just in the name of being able to claim that "we did everything we could, so you can't sue us."

April: Freddie Hayek rules

nospam@example.com (April) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:25:07 -0700

I like it. It is unapologetic, yet understandable to a layman. Plus, it is rap and we could all use economics set to rap.

Kenny Felder: Dollhouse goes into the Attic

nospam@example.com (Kenny Felder) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:52:25 -0700

Not too surprisingly, some things hit me the same way and some didn't.

I thought Eliza Dushku was brilliant in the show. I thought she successfully conveyed a remarkable range of people and a remarkable range of emotions and did it all well. (I also thought Sarah Michelle Geller was brilliant as Buffy.) So that's pretty different. On the other hand, I agreed with you that Adele Dewhitt's character transformations worked, and Boyd Langdon's did not at all.

The only time I was really impressed with Victor was when he did Topher, but OH MY GOSH that was awesome. Similarly, I thought the character of Topher was a bit one-dimensional and got old, but he completely saved it in the final episode, being so different.

Overall, bottom line, I think the Dollhouse worked. Thumbs-up. But it was no Dr. Horrible.

Kenny Felder: Axe the Dove

nospam@example.com (Kenny Felder) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:23:56 -0700

There is something in my brain that just refuses to think in feminism.

What was offensive about the first ad? As I understand it, the point of the ad was that women all love a guy who uses this cologne. That, in itself, sounds like a feminist statement to me, insofar as it reverses the classic trope that "men all love a woman who wears this perfume."

Maybe it was the behavior of the women? No, wait, they were acting like fierce jungle warriors.

Aha! It must be the fact that they were in bikinis! Any attempt to attract young men by showing women in bikinis is sexist. We're all supposed to pretend that men don't like looking at women's bodies, or at least, we're not supposed to cater to it. The feminists and the fundamentalists can agree on that.

Turning to the main point about advertising, I don't get that either. Is the implication that the people behind the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign don't actually care about what they're pitching, but are just cynically trying to tap into feminist sentiment to sell soap? If so, I don't think the world is that simple. Of course they're trying to sell soap. They may fully believe in what they're doing, too. When people rent my Wintergreen house, I give 20% of the rent to poverty-related charities. I make a big deal of this on my Web site. Am I really trying to help the poor, or just trying a publicity gimmick? Well, duh. I'm doing both.

"But wait!" you cry. "Doesn't the fact that the same company makes both ads prove that the second ad is purely cynical?" Nope. Even if we grant that the first ad is horribly sexist--and there's no denying that it plays upon the popular conception of beauty that the second ad decries--that doesn't prove a thing. Completely different people are behind those two campaigns, even if they both ultimately draw their checks from Unilever. This is where we run into trouble when we anthropomorphize companies.

Kenny Felder: Pantheism and Global Warming

nospam@example.com (Kenny Felder) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:13:23 -0700

I agree completely with what you're saying, and I think it's very well said. Interestingly, a lot of the environmentalists--including some of their most visible spokesmen, I've been told--are starting to suspect that nuclear energy might not be such a bad idea after all, at least compared with the alternatives. So clearly there are environmentalists who really are trying to just think through the issues of how to save the earth, instead of using the very real problem of global warming to push us toward a lifestyle that they really wanted anyway.

But I do think the word "lifestyle" is key here, because it's not just about sacrificing what we want in order to save the planet. In many cases, it's about sacrificing what we think we want, to get what we really want, a la Thoreau. Hidden behind a lot of environmentalist rhetoric is the sense that if we gave up all this technology and returned to a simpler way of living in harmony with nature, we would ourselves be much happier people. An extreme (and delightfully unhidden) version of this belief is in the book "Ishmael" which argues that the dawn of agriculture was the big mistake, and it was all downhill from there.

I have a lot of sympathy for that position. I had a dream a few months ago that still haunts me, where I visited this woman who was living in a very old house. The walls that did exist were made of concrete, but a lot of walls were just not there at all, and you couldn't never really draw a line of where the house started and where it ended. She lived only a few miles out of the city, but she was completely off the grid, and spent her time raising her own food, and I had this overpowering sensation that her life was better than anyone else's that I knew, and I couldn’t have it, and I practically woke up in tears. It isn't about saving the planet, it's about living a simpler life for its own sake.

And yet, I wouldn't want to go too far back technologically. I don't actually want to give up modern medicine, or heating and air conditioning, or (most of all) my ability to make a living teaching math while others do the farming. I know, I know, I'm way off topic now, but here's my point. The people who want us to save the planet by going backward, and are horrified that we might actually save the planet by going forward, are fantasizing about their own lives as much as anything else. And I am at least half-way with them. But I don't like the fact that they pretend they're only reacting to the latest scientific data, and I certainly don't like the moral superiority they feel over the rest of us.

Kenny Felder: Up

nospam@example.com (Kenny Felder) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:12:18 -0700

As far as Up goes, which I did see, I thought the first fifteen minutes were among the most brilliant I had ever seen in any film. Absolutely dazzling. And after that, I was bored to tears. Oh, well.

I do seem to be getting grumpier and harder to please in my old age. I didn't like "Avatar" or "Sherlock Holmes" either, which completes the roundup of probably all the new movies I saw in the past year. On the other hand, I do keep re-watching "Dr. Horrible" and thinking it's the most brilliant thing ever, so I know I can still be entertained!

Ralph: The Singularity is Not Even Close

nospam@example.com (Ralph) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:37:29 -0700

I'm not sure about the discussion about gamma waves, but in general I agree. A close examination of a neural mechanisms at the cellular level show that common estimates of how much computation power is really in a brain may very well be not only quantitatively wrong by several orders of magnitude, but qualitatively wrong as well. In any case, with our best technology we have yet to build anything close to intelligent as an insect. There are algorithms which capture the algorithmic essence of an ant-colony for instance, but as far as simulating a full insect goes, we've got nothing. Consider the up close behavior of wasps, the preying mantis, hunting spiders (yes, a spider is an arachnoid, not technically an insect), even the lowly house fly and the evidence quickly stacks up to say that all of the accumulated exponential growth of computational power we have experience in the last few decades (which incidentally, in terms of computation per area is starting to show signs of decelerated growth) falls woefully short.

Lauren: Avatar and Pantheism

nospam@example.com (Lauren) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:15:10 -0700

I'm with you both...this was a great article!

Georg, your comment and Douthat's writing here reminded me of Werner Herzog's reflections on nature in the documentary "Burden of Dreams" (1982). Herzog respects and even stands in awe of nature but sees it as neither redemptive nor Eden-like....instead, he understands it to be the playing ground for a "ferocious, ruthless competition for survival."

Personally, I see it as both...and neither. "Nature" and the "Universe" stand outside any supposed notion of cruel, loving, evil, or good that we humans project onto it. In fact, we all experience it to be all of these things at different times. As with the contradictory interpretations we encounter of holy scriptures, these intellectual perspectives seem to arise because "we do not see things as they are; we see them as we are." (~Anais Nin) Life simply *is*....but I understand how this is an "agonized position" to stand in.

My own answer to "The question [of] whether Nature actually deserves a religious response" is yes, absolutely. While I think there is room for considerable debate concerning what constitutes an appropriate and apposite "religious response," what I mean by "response" here would be better characterized as "recognition"--a recognition of the presence of Divinity that often occurs for me when in nature. I feel no need to assert whether it is most accurate to describe this divine presence as being in, or outside of, or part of, or comprising all of Nature...only that there is something about the "natural" world that most definitely facilitates my experience of the spiritual. (And yes, this has just as much to do with me as it does with "Nature")

Last week I read a most intriguing article about the reactions that people have had to seeing Avatar. It's worth checking out if you have not done so already: http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/11/avatar.movie.blues/index.html

In addition to pantheism, I find panentheism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism) to be another interesting belief system. It does a slightly better job of bridging the "God imminent" and "God transcendent" that Kenny is referring to.

Georg Buehler: Agency is Essential to Meaning

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:37:24 -0700

The promise of nirvana is exactly why I got into spiritual work. Like the Buddha, I wanted to find a permanent fix for the problem of suffering. I still want that.

Unfortunately, nirvana is supposedly difficult to achieve, and even harder to talk about, which makes it problematic.

Georg Buehler: Living in a Material World

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:17:16 -0700

It's that experience of meaning, which we may or may not be able to trust, that I find so maddening. I suspect most people pursue the experience of meaning rather than really thinking hard about the relative reality of that meaning. The more I analyze meaning and try to pin down what it is, the less I feel moved to action. Meanwhile, I spend the most time and energy working on whatever yields the highest number of people telling me I'm significant and important and meaningful: at my job, at my kids' school, and with my family.

Keli Y.: Living in a Material World

nospam@example.com (Keli Y.) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:55:57 -0700

I don't think much would change for me, because I'm essentially living as a materialist (though I'm not sure if I am one). For me the question is what would change if I felt more sure there was real meaning. Would I change my life to do more than I do now?
It seems that the experience of meaning can be enough to keep me from collapsing in despair at least, even if it is only complex biology that drives and governs it.