John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

Two nice things about the air:
It wraps itself around my love
And brings her voice to me.¹

For my love: something to remember on nights when loneliness surrounds you as profoundly as midnight’s darkness.

1. Frank Herbert : The Poetry of Frank Herbert – Songs of Muad’Dib : Airgram↩

We are seldom so disposed to complete an task we have delayed as when we are given a new task we want to put off.

3. Experiment with dope (as in dopamine).

Before moving on, it helps to add some psychoactive chemicals. Some people achieve social confidence only when they use alcohol or drugs. I can never remember to buy these things, but I always have a few mood-altering substances on hand — or rather, in my head — and so do you.

For example, dopamine increases when we face something unfamiliar and difficult: working a crossword puzzle, knitting a complicated sweater. Epinephrine is released when we sustain moderate exercise. When we take a chance (for example, by expressing an unpopular opinion or displaying something we’ve created), we produce more epinephrine. All these hormones can increase our confidence enough to help us release our old, supposedly protective thoughts and behaviors.

So once you’re used to unthinking your physical self-image, give yourself a little chemical boost to compensate for the emotional shields you’ll be dropping. Complete a challenging task, work out until you sweat a bit, take a risk that makes your heart speed up, or all three. You’ll feel more confident for several hours. Use that time for real-world experimentation.

With a head full of crumbling misperceptions and happy hormones, go out in public and pretend for, say, half an hour that you’re lovely enough to be loved. Now go to a coffee shop and have a tasty beverage.¹

While James Flynn may be partly (or even largely) correct when he claims that the spread of scientific thinking in the First World population is the cause of the Flynn effect, I think he fails to realize that science has simultaneously become a new form of superstition for the masses. Thankfully the above-cited article can help to remind us how easily scientific concepts can be perverted.

1. Martha Beck : CNN.com : March 19, 2008 Article↩

I found on Thomas Sowell’s personal website:

…mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent…

It’s a matter of fact, studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades.¹

Considering how unsurprising these words were, do others share my consternation that so many of my countrymen wanted to deny Ahmadinejad entry into our nation? From what I’ve seen of existing American views on most issues, Ahmadinejad could easily be a Congressman, though I will admit he could probably not be a President.

1. Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern via Mainstream Baptist↩

This week, I finally read Bryan Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” which I had been looking forward to reading for some time now. I loved the book, as could probably have been expected by most informed readers given my own discontent with democracy as an institution and Caplan’s, as well as my recent fascination with economics.

That said, I’ve decided to take up a new hobby: proposing new electoral systems to circumvent some of the worst excesses of democratic government. Here’s my first approach, which I’ll call the dehumanization approach, by analogy with desalinization systems that remove a toxic element (salt) to create drinkable water from an unsafe source. The human element in politics is one of the things I think most toxic in democratic countries’ elections, because a focus on the “human side” tends to corrode rational analysis of platforms. (As a suggestive bit of evidence, consider this research bit from Stanford indicating that voters might choose candidates based on facial similarities.)

My proposed solution is simple: elect platforms, not candidates. Remove the candidates’ personalities entirely from the race, so that ideas alone determine the victor. You could so by creating an ordered list of essential issues and, for each, an spectrum of possible positions. Survey the American public on their preferences. Then survey the candidates (who are kept secret until after votes are cast) and perform a least squares analysis to determine which candidate comes closest to the mean positions and the median positions. One of these matches is the elected official.

Obviously, there are flaws with this approach, but I think it would be interesting to compare and contrast it with our current cult-of-personality-driven democratic elections in the US.

Cone’s groundbreaking 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power announced: “The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people…. All white men are responsible for white oppression…. Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’ … Any advice from whites to blacks on how to deal with white oppression is automatically under suspicion as a clever device to further enslavement.”¹

The above-cited passage is supposedly directly taken from a work by Cone, the theologian who was the main inspiration for the theological views of Trinity Church, which Barack Obama attends. Having read this passage, I have but one thing to say: I hope that Obama will have the political sense — to say nothing of the moral decency — to disavow Cone as readily as he disavowed Samantha Powers just recently, especially when I personally feel that Powers acted rather admirably, albeit foolishly, when she spoke so candidly of Hillary Clinton. If not, I hope that this passage will be sufficient to destroy Obama’s campaign, which I formerly thought highly of.

These words constitute the worst sort of hate speech and derive from what may be the font of all hatred: the eternal search for scapegoats. If it is not clear enough how horrid these words are, simply replace “white man” with “Jew” everywhere, and the probable speaker of these words should be become apparent.

1. Quoted today on the Volokh Conspiracy↩

I have a question for any bilingual readers: what is the best way to express in English the “cuanto/tanto” construction that the Romance languages have?

The size of your audience increases as the accuracy of your views decreases.

It struck me this morning, while I was reviewing one of Augustine’s book, that God, as presented in Christian theology, is rather like the set of all sets that made naïve set theory impossible to defend and that therefore led Russell to pursue his great, and ultimately futile, attempt to construct a consistent system of logic that would give rise to all of mathematical truth. God is given, by the theologian’s definitions, a set of mutually irreconcilable traits, and theology consists largely of the attempt to create enough ad hoc rules and to redefine enough items of daily-life’s vocabulary that one can sustain discussion of God’s nature without patently contradicting oneself. God’s omnipotence, His foreknowledge of all events, His absolute beneficence, His omnipresence: together these traits demand that the believer abandon reason itself and make of himself a great sophist to sustain his beliefs.