religions

Roger Ebert on the movie Enduring Love:

Jed is clearly mad. He exists at the intersection of religious hysteria and erotomania, and confuses God’s love with his own sudden love for Joe. But what can Joe do?

Wikipedia on erotomania: “Erotomania is a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person is in love with him or her.”

There are those who believe in a distant God. This God does not love humanity. But it’s nothing personal. This God is beyond love – or any other human feeling. This God exists in the patterns of snow flakes, the function of lava and of supernovas. This God lives in the depths of infinite space and in the orbits of subatomic particles. For many, this God is not a discrete force but a logical inevitability.

Conversely, there are religions that present God with a human face and human feelings. In some cases, this God is a personal and a loving figure. You don’t just believe in this God, as you might an idea – you feel his presence and his love.

That’s quite a remarkable achievement if you think about it. (Of all the feelings, isn’t love the most pleasurable?)

But according to our sciences (to which we owe medicine, economics and engineering, for example) a person is delusional when she or he feels a love that can’t be proven. As in erotomania: “a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person is in love with him or her.”

This is no rare condition. Erotomaniacs are a staple of our crime blotters. For example, what would you make of a character who testifies:

She does love me. Even though she hasn’t called me or returned my letters, I see the signs she leaves for me. What’s more I feel it. She doesn’t need to tell me. I can feel it.

Which puts the person who feels God’s love in a bit of a pickle.

Or it might if the U.S. had not gone down a path of religious pluralism in the 1700s. We allow all sorts of beliefs. Even those that resemble erotomania.

ideas/people

sports

My translation of a comment by Oscar León Bernal, on the imminent USA vs. Mexico game:

The most logical and, perhaps, in the long run, the best outcome for the sport: Mexico gets eliminated and that forces the media networks and the entire country to restate our development model. But that won’t happen and we’re not playing against an illustrious power – rather against the Nouveau riche empire of emo kids like Donovan..entonces, let’s take it to the yankees. Mexico 3–US 0!! Greetings from Brooklyn.

The comment in the original Spanish:

Lo mas lógico y quizá, a largo plazo, mejor para el deporte: que Mexico sea eliminado y eso oblige a las cadenas mediticas y al país entero a re plantear nuestro modelo de dearrollo. Pero eso no sucederá y no jugamos contra una potencia ilustrada, sino contra al Empire nouvo riche de jóvenes sufridos como Donovan..therefore, a rifarsela contra los yanquis!! México 3-EU 0!! Saludos desde Brooklyn!

ideas

movies

The Machinist is a well-made and for that reason very enjoyable mystery thriller. But as the movie progresses, it loses its center and becomes somewhat hollow: a wind-up box where the gears turning is the main attraction. Lots of small delights but when the joker pops out it’s kind of a let down.

The Usual Suspects, on the other hand…

things

someone’s memory

we say that we remember our ancestors but in fact we are their memories. we are, each and every one of us, a remembering of another generation.

confronting death, our ancestors put what they could of themselves in their children. and their children did the same. we are what is left of them. not a distant but a very strong echo of the past.

ideas/people

politics

Josh Marshall:

We get desensitized to this stuff. But it’s worth taking a moment to give that a long think — comparing the president’s reform plan to the Holocaust.

Most significant here is not the right-wing liars and demagogues making this stuff up but the fact that they’ve convinced a significant number of their followers that this stuff is true. That’s a very dangerous situation.

people

code

however it was we all learned to use seat belts, we should be able to learn how to do the honorable thing and commit suicide before killing any other human being. from the BBC:

A man has killed four people at a gymnasium in the US state of Pennsylvania, before shooting himself.

Another 10 people were injured by gunfire in the town of Bridgeville near Pittsburgh, after the incident at the LA Fitness Center.

An eyewitness told a local TV station that a man entered an all-female dance class, turned off the lights, took two guns out of a bag and began firing.

people

politics

Josh Marshall navigates contemporary politics with ease:

Marc also has this line …

I posit that there is no meaningful distinction b/w grassroots, organized and spontaneous gatherings in the modern world.

First, there’s no such thing as spontaneous gatherings. I think the distinction we’re getting at is whether in the ‘modern world’ there’s any distinction between actual grassroots organizing and astroturf rent-a-riots put together purely for media consumption by monied special interest groups. The two categories often bleed into each other. But in broad strokes they’re fairly distinguishable. To the extent that there’s ‘no meaningful distinction’ in the modern world that’s almost entirely a factor of reporters not doing their jobs poorly.

people

dept. of lost & found

like finding a $20 bill in one’s pocket: i just read the name Bharati Mukherjee for what must be the first time in nearly 20 years and it sparked pure delight. the context was Nicholson Baker’s slick review of the Kindle in the New Yorker. which is, in fact, a plug for the Apple iPhone and Touch.

things

anticipation

Frank Rich:

If there was a teachable moment in this incident, it could be found in how some powerful white people well beyond Cambridge responded to it. That reaction is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments.

What happened in California in the mid 90’s was a dress rehearsal. The show is just getting started.

people

movies

If The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) asks why one man would want to kill and then impersonate another, its predecessor Purple Noon (Plein Soleil, 1960) asks how he might get away with it. In its pacing and dialogue, Purple Noon is a more modern, abrupt and violent story. Only at the very end does it feel dated. A mass movie studio today would have no qualms delivering the original novel’s intent. Or would it? (Michelle, thanks for the recommendation!)

things

we’re doing it wrong

MIchael Pollan:

Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.

ideas/people

import, export

A wonderful, bitter tasting story about Venezuelan chocolate:

With its reliance on cheap labor, the industry seems hard-wired for conflict, though chaos afflicts some cacao areas are more than others. Barlovento, near here, is plagued by thievery of cacao pods, score-settling murders and the torching of storage facilities.

Built with slave labor, the industry here became the mainstay of Venezuela’s colonial economy. For centuries, the nation was the world’s top producer. European monarchs sipped concoctions made from Venezuelan cacao.

Then, in the 20th century, there was oil. Dictators came and went. Venezuela, despite its vast fertile lands, became a net food importer. The legendary strongman Juan Vicente Gómez seized cacao plantations in this forest and made them part of his personal empire.

Bureaucrats later assembled a monopoly over the industry, eroding incentives to produce high-quality cacao. Yields plunged. Still, cacao cultivation survived, attracting growers obsessive enough to weather policies bedeviling exports of anything but petroleum.

Venezuela is widely known as a difficult place to do business. But the peculiar resilience of the conflict-ridden cacao trade is evident from a ride on a fisherman’s skiff to Chuao, an isolated forest village founded in the 16th century that knows a thing or two about the cycles of Venezuelan history.

people/things

software

Facebook is free (ad-supported) software for communicating with friends and family. Google will compete indirectly with Facebook when it introduces Wave. Both are a continuation of the web portal which in its day replaced the BBS. The apices of the BBS were probably AOL and CompuServe, likewise of the portals it was Yahoo and MSN. Surely there will be another Facebook in the next two years. I wonder who that will be.

ideas/things

practical action programs

From the NYT, In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable

The study complements a growing body of work suggesting that the speed with which the brain reads and interprets sensations like the feelings in one’s own body and emotions in the body language of others is central to avoiding imminent threats.

“Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”

ideas/people