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Category: foolishness (page 11 of 14)

More on the Maharishi’s empire

24 February 2008 / / Comments Off on More on the Maharishi’s empire

The New York Times reports that the Transcendental Meditation folks are trying to expand into suburban neighborhoods. There’s some nice snark in the ‘background doctrines’ part of the article.

Though the movement is admired for its finances, many independent critics question its belief that large groups of people meditating or practicing yogic flying — where people meditate and hop while sitting cross-legged in the lotus position — can spread peace.

The organization cites studies that it says found that large groups of yogic fliers helped temporarily lower crime in Washington, D.C., end the cold war and briefly reduce hostilities in the Middle East.

It has also been shown that insane people who make bizarre claims has caused a temporary rise in me wanting to jack them in the gut.

Is it possible to construct any idea or belief so horrendously stupid that no one will believe it? I would try, but despair at the human condition overtakes me before I get very far.

Let the bodies hit the floor

19 February 2008 / / 2 Comments

Christian showman Benny Hinn seems to be famous mainly for making people fall over. Put it to a Drowning Pool song, and you get a quite good video, actually.

The boys asked why people were falling over, and I had to remember back to my psychology training. It’s good old participant bias: When there’s an authority figure, people tend to act in ways they think the authority figure will like. And don’t forget communal reinforcement: if the values of the group are confirmed when you roll around on the floor… well, why wouldn’t you roll around on the floor?

Or it could be Gawd.

Scientology protests

8 February 2008 / / 1 Comment

We are fast approaching the day of reckoning — hackers against the Church of Scientology.

Anonymous internet users who have previously crashed Church of Scientology websites have named February 10 as a worldwide day of protest in a bid to “destroy” the controversial religion.

The group – called Anonymous – which includes skilled computer hackers, has posted a message on YouTube declaring war on Scientology, accusing it of trying to censor the internet and conducting “campaigns of misinformation”.

Advocating acts of vigilante vandalism is always fraught. Encourage the mobs, and the next target of their ire may not be to your liking. YouTube? Wikipedia? Blogger?

And yet, it’s hard to imagine an organisation that has done more to earn the enmity of Netizens more richly. Scientology has a long history of using malicious lawsuits (and even raids) to intimidate and harass people who publish the mythology of their money-making religion. Not to mention the really scary stuff, like infiltration and wiretapping of government organisations. So I’m excited to see what will happen on the 10th. It couldn’t happen to a nicer church.

I know it’s late, but does anyone have info on protests in Perth?

Maharishi dies

7 February 2008 / / 1 Comment

In contrast with my earlier post, the news of the Maharishi’s death is bringing up no complex feelings at all for me; just glee. It’s terrible, isn’t it? I didn’t even know him, but that’s not my fault — I didn’t have a million dollars to give him for the pleasure of hanging out.

I just hate gurus and frauds, and he was both.

He made some pretty astounding claims:

  • Transcendental Meditation is a scientifically valid way to attain enlightenment.
  • TM was responsible for lowering crime rates in cities.
  • Using TM, you could learn to fly.
  • If someone would give a billion dollars, he could train 40,000 expert meditators to combat terrorism

Sadly, even though people gave him tons of money, no one ever learned to fly or to attain enlightenment, as far as anyone knows. And the claims about crime fall apart if you try to examine them with statistics (but how Western!).

The really sad part is that if a mystical movement manages to survive its founder, it usually goes on forever. These people may be bouncing on their butts for generations to come.

Westboro Baptists picket Heath Ledger

25 January 2008 / / 6 Comments

Well, well, well. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church are planning to picket Heath Ledger’s memorial service. You know them; they’re the ones with the “God Hates Fags” signs. Apparently protesting the funerals of US soldiers isn’t bringing in the attention like it used to, so they’re kicking it up a notch.

Doesn’t look like they’re actually going to make it to Perth (the likely spot of the funeral).

In a news release from the church, Shirley Phelps-Roper says that she and other members will picket Ledger’s memorial services in the United States, not those held in his native Australia.

Too bad — there’d be all kinds of fun. But flying the entire congregation over would be expensive and time consuming. Then there’s accommodation. Would other Christians billet them? I think even the Potter’s House people would hesitate to have them over.

One thing I will say: the WBC folks are truly living their religion. They have absolute faith that they’re going to heaven and everyone else to hell. The theology they’ve settled on is certainly one of the possible Christianities that one could derive from the Bible, and who are other Christians to say that their theology is wrong? Other Christians claim to believe that homosexuality is a sin, but they don’t act like they mean it. The WBC folks have taken a normal mainstream Christian belief to its logical conclusion.

For my part, I notice that everyone creates gods in their own image. That’s why I’m sort of encouraged to see humankind make the transition from Old Testament genocidal maniac to New Testament groovy love god. Everyone picks and chooses from the scriptures according to whatever’s inside of them. By that standard, the Westboro Baptists are very scary people indeed.

Liberal fascism?

18 January 2008 / / 1 Comment

There are only a couple of people on my automatic ‘punch in the face’ list. One is Jonah Goldberg. (The other’s Dinesh D’Souza.) It’s not anger. I’m not a violent person. I’d rather go verbal than mano a mano. But when someone has made the choice to argue the opposite of what everyone else knows to be so in a perverse attempt to rewrite history — truth be damned! — really, you can’t have a normal discussion with that person. It would just give them an opportunity to spew crap. Spewing crap is what they’re good at, and it’ll only make it worse. But a punch in the face transcends discourse. And it may provide that person with the reality check that reality never gave them.

The crap I’m talking about is, of course, Goldberg’s book, ‘Liberal Fascism’. Sadly, No! has done a great job taking down the Doughy Pantload’s premise, which is basically the associative fallacy spread over 400 pages: Nazis and Fascists liked organic foods, liberals like organic foods, ergo liberals are fascists. Fascist states are totalitarian, and totalitarians tell people how to live their lives. Liberals would like to tell people what to do (e.g. the environment, good parenting); ergo, liberals are totalitarians. Utterly fallacious, and remind me again whose vision of the state involves legislating people’s bedroom behaviour?

You might enjoy Jon Stewart’s interview with Das Lodenhosen, if your eyes don’t hurt from all the rolling.

If people didn’t have religion, they might turn violent.

29 December 2007 / / 2 Comments

Awesome:

Priests brawl at Jesus’ birthplace

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) — Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests attacked each other with brooms and stones inside the Church of the Nativity as long-standing rivalries erupted in violence during holiday cleaning on Thursday.

The basilica, built over the grotto in Bethlehem where Christians believe Jesus was born, is administered jointly by Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic authorities.

Any perceived encroachment on one group’s turf can touch off vicious feuds.

I’ll bet they’ll be going for payback at Easter.

And now, a thought on language.

7 December 2007 / / 2 Comments

An excerpt of a column from Marilyn vos Savant, who is a very smart person (putatively), but I’d say not a linguist.

My students increasingly question the value of learning basic grammar. They say that, in the future, computers will correct their mistakes automatically. What would you tell them?
—Name withheld, Sanford, Maine

Even if computers could discern what students wanted to say (despite their errors), students must learn not only basic grammar but also sophisticated and highly complex grammar. Otherwise, the students won’t be able to comprehend what they read to the fullest extent. Almost as important, they won’t realize their limitations.

She’s not making sense here, but perhaps I haven’t studied enough sophisticated and highly complex grammar.

And another gem:

Marilyn: I’d like to add to your answer about why students should study basic grammar. Not only must they be able to comprehend the written language, they must be able to speak it. If you can’t speak grammatically, you will not rise beyond the lower levels in most job categories.

Marilyn responds:

John: How true. Although spoken English doesn’t obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn’t know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.

This moment of surrealism has been brought to you by the letter ð.

It’s official: Mitt Romney is a fucking douche

7 December 2007 / / 6 Comments

I am all kinds of pissed-off about Das Speech. I was expecting Romney to say that he wouldn’t take orders from Salt Lake (and he did), but he also went out of his way to malign people of reason.

I’ll just comment on the greasiest morsels.

America faces a new generation of challenges. Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us. An emerging China endeavors to surpass our economic leadership. And we’re troubled at home by government overspending, overuse of foreign oil, and the breakdown of the family.

Fear buttons activated. The audience is now primed to reject rational thought and swallow authoritarian dogma.

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

Obstreperousness requires pomegranates just as pomegranates require obstreperousness.

Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

Tell that to people in secular countries. Japan. Norway. Most of Europe. You can use your freedom to commune with any beings your imagination can contrive, but don’t go saying religion is some kind of prerequisite.

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It’s as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

Us them, us them. I know Republicans like to hold up this imaginary scarecrow, but it’s so dishonest. If secularism were a religion, I’d be paying tithes. And it’d be a lot better organised.

Do you ever wonder how it is that Mitt knows the ‘original meaning’ of the Separation Clause so much better than the rest of us? Was it a result of personal revelation? Was Romney doing Jefferson’s proxy temple work, and have a visitation? It’s as if he was intent on establishing a new religion in America – the cult of revisionist channeling.

Yes, I do think religion is a private affair. I don’t think all this public god-posturing is a good use of airtime (and no small amount of money as well). I’d love to see less of it in public life. If, just for once, a candidate for office were to able to express an honest doubt about theism, I would fall over. I might also think that maybe rational thought in the public sphere were possible. But that will never happen in today’s America because religious folk have a stranglehold on the discourse. It’s not the secularists.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation “under God” and in God, we do indeed trust.

I think this just shows how insidious religious faith can be. All that God stuff is a relic of the Eisenhower years, and now it’s entrenched.

Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: Does he share these American values – the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another and a steadfast commitment to liberty?

Which Romney has already explained is predicated on religious faith.

Listen: we’ve tried having a person of faith as president. He had so much faith that he could believe anything he wanted was true, without any evidence at all. It was a disaster. Why don’t we try a person of doubt? See how that works for a while.

If you’re a secularist, or if you’re not particularly religious, or even if you’re just suspicious of religious involvement in government, you now know exactly where you stand in Mitt Romney’s America: on the other side of the Wall of Separation.

That does it! This relationship now has 50% fewer people in it!

5 December 2007 / / 3 Comments

People are concerned about divorce. I keep hearing that half of all marriages end in divorce. I happen to think that half of all marriages bloody well should end in divorce, but that’s beside the point.

And then there are people who are somewhat inappropriately concerned about divorce, viz two Michigan State researchers. They’ve released a study that divorced people are harming the environment.

The analysis found that cohabiting couples and families around the globe use resources more efficiently than households that have split up. The researchers calculated that in 2005, divorced American households used between 42 and 61 percent more resources per person than before they separated, spending 46 percent more per person on electricity and 56 percent more on water.

Their paper, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found that if the divorced couples had stayed together in 2005, the United States would have saved 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water in that year alone.

Wow, people who live in separate houses use more energy? I could never have thought of that. By this reasoning, single people are also hard on the environment. And kids who move out of their parents’ house. But the article doesn’t seem to mention them. That’s because divorced people represent Some Kind of Problem.

And the researchers haven’t taken into account the extra energy usage of unhappily married couples who stay together even though they despise each other.

  • Keeping the lights on when you stay up late and fight.
  • Extra petrol usage from driving around until you’re sure your spouse is asleep.
  • Petty toilet flushing when your spouse is in the shower.
  • Repeated hotel room trysting has an impact similar to a small apartment for that couple of hours or so.
  • And don’t forget all that seething with resentment, which releases a lot of heat into the environment.

I suppose all those extra houses full of divorcés could be a bit of a problem. But if you’re looking for reasons to stay together, and you’re down to ‘saving water’, it’s time to start looking for an apartment.

Thanks to Jessica for some ideas on the list.

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