Sometimes, People Suck

Seems like a week where all of the news, even when it's good, comes from bad roots. The stories from this week make me want to find a cave to live in, far from the selfish, the deluded, and the stupid.

• Topping the list of this week's assholes is Major Nidal M. Hasan, who decided that his best option in the face of frustration was to shoot a few dozen people at Fort Hood on Thursday. The mind boggles. The people he shot didn't start the wars he opposed, and they were no more involved in it than he was. The people he shot didn't deny him his release from his commission. The people he shot didn't determine his deployment to Afghanistan (if that's what pushed him over the edge). Get ready for a bunch of yahoos who lament "those people," the foreigners who cause so much trouble--even though Hasan was born in Virginia. Prepare for the religious bigots who will undoubtedly decry "those people," the Muslims whose religion provokes them to violence--even though millions of Muslims live violence-free lives in America and around the world. (UPDATE: No need to wait--it looks like vile conservative shit-spewer Michele Malkin has already stepped up for that faction.)
• Overshadowed by the actions of Major Hasan is Jason Rodriguez, a disgruntled Floridian who decided that his best option in the face of frustration was to shoot a half-dozen people at the company from which he was fired two years ago. The people he shot didn't fire him. The people he shot didn't deny him unemployment benefits. Again, the mind boggles.
• The saga of Louisiana Judge Keith Bardwell has finally come to a close--except for the civil suit he still faces for his idiocy. You may recall that Bardwell came to the public's attention for refusing to marry an interracial couple, the fourth time in the last two-and-a-half years he's done that, and the who-knows-how-manyth time he's done it in thirty-four years as a judge. Now he's resigned, and that's at least a positive development, even though it doesn't go far enough. Religious figures get to determine who they will and will not perform services for based on their interpretations of their various mythologies, but civil servants don't get to defy US law based on some whacked-out perception of "suffering" the possible children of such a union would experience.
• Maine voters, or at least 53% of them, who voted to reject gay marriage. I'm confident that eventually common sense will win out, but for now it looks like the assholes are still numerous enough to block this simple measure of equality.
• Michele Bachmann and her merry band of morons, who congregated to chant Faux News talking points and compare Health Care reform to the Holocaust. In addition to the idiotic signs, the crowd consisted of people like Judith Garloch, who traveled from Ohio to display her ignorance. She was enthusiastic, but like all of the other reform opponents, "Ms. Garloch, like many in the crowd who while visibly angry, could not articulate the main problems in the health care system or how they should be solved." That's because they don't have a fucking clue--they just hear "socialism" and "communism" and "death panel" and they don't want their taxes to go up (an unfounded fear) and they don't want their health care to change (another unfounded fear), so they froth at the mouth and repeat the nonsense they've heard.

The mind truly boggles. This planet is doomed.

Okay, Now He's Awesome

For a while now I've considered the Schwarzenegger phenomenon underwhelming. He's unimpressive as an actor. He's been in a small collection of good movies (consider Terminator, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop) and a whole bunch of kickass--but ultimately inane--movies (Commando, Terminator II and III (I admit I have never watched the fourth one)) and some bad movies (Twins (not a good film), Junior, Jingle All the Way). Not great work, overall.

Circumstances have allowed him, though, to redeem himself. He opposed a proposal recently, and--this is cool--down the left margin of his veto letter Arnie spelled out "Fuck You." Now, what is the likelihood of that? I don't even care--that is pure awesomeness.

Here's what his veto letter looks like.

Have I Mentioned That John Scalzi Is a Smart Man?

This is a pretty good assessment of the White House-Faux Noise feud.

This is Amusing . . .

. . . but it seems like a strange article to appear on the website of a Catholic newspaper. It amuses me. I am amused.

Just Link-Surfing

Some time ago I read somewhere an explanation about how one can choose beliefs that struck me as extremely silly. The author claimed that since "believe" is a verb, and since verbs are actions, and since we have to choose to act, that it just stands to reason that we can choose to believe things. I've been writing about that argument as I remember it, but since I can't find it I don't feel comfortable sharing my argument yet. It could be that I misremember, or that I've invented a memory. I don't know. I thought it was in Paul E. Little's Know Why You Believe, but a quick flip-through hasn't even revealed a sensible section of the book for that to appear in.

So I was tooling around the internet trying to find some references to that argument when I came across another at a site called 1 in Faith: A Christian Bible Study. The sentence I liked about this argument was this:

In English the verb for faith is "to believe," as faith does not have its own verb.

The author's right of course. If I have a belief about something, I believe it, but if I have faith in something I don't faithe it. This contributes to the confusion in our discourse about belief. There's more to their argument that I don't appreciate as much--such as trying to completely separate faith in something from the belief that the something exists--but this is a useful nugget.

Now I just need to find that original bit I was looking for.

Excuse Me While I Nerd This Out

I've been reading The Atoms of Language by Mark C. Baker for the last month or so, and it's fascinating. He's approaching Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistic position in a way that can classify language syntax into a system analogous to Mendeleyev's early versions of the Periodic Table of the Elements. He has only identified eight "parameters" that would correspond to elements in the periodic table, but this is just the beginning of a line of thought. Maybe it won't yield any useful ideas, but the construct is interesting.

Anyway, the book is about syntax--sentence structure and word order--and draws on languages across the globe. Baker discusses polysynthetic languages such as Mohawk, which don't express ideas in sentences so much as they do in elaborately modified words. He also describes the differences between subject-verb-object languages (like English) and subject-object-verb languages (like Japanese). The entire book is about how communication in each language determines the order in which words appear in sentences.

And that's why I started laughing uncontrollably when I read this sentence on page 204:

A contemporary of [Franz] Boaz, [Ferdinand de] Saussure is famous (among other things) for emphasizing the arbitrary relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning.

Just think about how that sentence is put together for a second.

Ready? Do you see it? Of course you do, but let me blather on about it anyway. The problem is in the placement of the parenthetical "(among other things)." It's clear that Baker means to say that Saussure is famous for "emphasizing the arbitrary . . ." among other things. But the way this is printed it says that "emphasizing the arbitrary relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning" has made Saussure famous and other things. What other things? Nefarious? Athletic? Immortal? A hat? A brooch? A pterodactyl?

This isn't to diminish the work Baker has done--it's interesting, approachable*, and has potential--but despite the amazing amount of attention paid to word order in this book, the garbled word order in this sentence managed to escape an author, who knows how many reviewers and proofreaders, at least one editor, and maybe several more people. I have to giggle.

This is an illustration of the fallibility of even the most intelligent, the most qualified, and the most vigilant people in their respected fields. What chance do the rest of us have for living error-free?

*I say "approachable" because I had only one semester of linguistics and the jargon here didn't throw me. Even the numerous models were interesting.

Another Interesting Article

Karen Armstrong has an article at WaPo discussing the differences between faith and belief. She seems to suffer from a healthy dose of the genetic fallacy, and also seems to put a bit too much stock into vocabulary dictating reality, but it's a pretty interesting read.

Even more interesting is Paula Kirby's skeptical response.

Been a While

It's been too long since I've written here, and I have a silly reason to write tonight. Today Michele was browsing in a store and I felt the need to wait outside, as the lone employee's casual attitude toward cashiering was becoming tiresome--to me and, I'm sure, to the other six people in line.

So while I was outside, I looked at the stores to either side of the one Michele was in. On the left was a women's clothing store called the Dress Barn. I can't imagine how that ever seemed like a good idea to anyone involved in the naming of that store.

For one thing, when one thinks of desirable fashion, one rarely thinks of farm life, or a barnyard context. This alone would keep most people away, I would think. Overalls, straw hats, checkered shirts, gingham dresses, clunky brown boots--at WalMart, sure, but not outside of goonville.

For another thing, the "barn" concept applied to people in general isn't flattering. When you call someone a pig, that person is generally going to be displeased. The same with "chicken" or "sheep." And that's just when you're talking about people in general. The farm-animal references to women specifically are even less flattering: chick, mother hen, hen-pecked, sow, cow, heifer, mare. These are just not ideas one attaches to a woman with whom one wishes to maintain good relations.

So, I'm back. How relieved are you?

Interesting Article

Something else that's interesting to only a few people, but I'm going to mark it here so I can return to it if I get the chance: A professor of sociology at Berkeley makes a distinction between belief and theory. There's a lot of sloppy language in the middle, where he's making his main points, but I want to dissect them.

The Marxists are Coming! The Marxists are Coming!

Seems that conservatives are content to toss buzzwords around when they're not upping their dosage of crazy. Sometimes, the two get blended. Not only are "Socialism" and "Communism" applied to the Democratic side of the Health Care Reform debate, I've been informed that

[t]he pile we are in did not start because of capitalism it began with FDR - even before that as the Marxist movement began to purposefully and openly (at least in Provda[sic]) target our schools and our media as early as 1900.

Where the hell do they come up with this shit?