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31 October 2004 
If you want a scary read for Halloween, this article from the NYT Magazine on religion in business ought to fill the bill. Scares the heck out of me, anyway. The author seems more concerned with the legal implications of combining "public" businesses with private religion. I don't care about that. Let the religious nuts have their own businesses and refuse to hire heathens if they want to. What worries me is the philosophical and cultural implications of the phenomenon. I mean, this story describes business people who are proud to accost people walking into their mattress store, or using their drive-through banking counter, and offer to pray for them. These are not people for whom religion is a social, Sunday-only thing. They take it seriously enough to build their whole working life around it. And they are confident about it.
To make it worse, most of these people aren't from traditional religious denominations. Religion is bad enough when it calls for accepting a creed on faith and obeying an arbitrary, but well-defined, set of commandments. But when a person's religion is "based not on a denomination's core doctrine so much as on inner voices and convictions" and "[a]n individual reliance on the voice of God," we have all-out whatever-I-say-goes subjectivism. And to repeat, these people are confident about it, which means it's far more likely to gain influence and spread throughout the culture.
If, like I was, you are a little skeptical at how significant religion is as growing a cultural force, take your extra daylight-savings hour and read this sobering article.
12:52 PM |
30 October 2004
01:34 PM |
The Winston Review is a weekly compendium of "inspirational writing in the blogosphere and beyond" intended as an alternative to "the defeatists and apologists of the mainstream media" brought to you by Ghost of a Flea. This week's edition is worth a look for the introduction alone. An excerpt:
...I spoke with a friend on the eve of the war to liberate Afghanistan. The words "infinite justice" provoked spluttering outrage from someone who could speak with complete impassivity at the motivations of men who had the moral incapacity to fly passenger airliners into office buildings. My friend's apoplexy was brought about by the characterization of such men as evil. How simplistic. How unhelpful. When you thought about it, she flatly asserted, it was just this sort of language that made people do the things they did.The introduction ends with a dedication to George W. Bush that, in my opinion, praises him in terms far more generous than he deserves. But when you see the "sputtering outrage" at the president's occasional, halting, contradictory, and flawed attempts to assert the moral superiority of America over savage Islamist terrorists, and the neck-and-neck poll results between him and the "global test" multilateralist Kerry, you realize he is probably the closest thing we have any hope of seeing rise to the US presidency in today's culture. And recoginizing those glimmers of hope where you can still find them, as the Winston Review does, is an important and praiseworthy endeavor I can get behind wholeheartedly.
12:21 PM |
28 October 2004
In Franciso's money speech in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand made explicit the difference between the source of capitalism's power — values (symbolized by the dollar) created through productive effort and offered to willing traders — and the source of government power — a gun pointed at our heads. When I hear leftists refer to the "power" of businesses to "force" people to buy inferior products or take low-paying jobs, implicitly conflating these with physical power and initiation of physical force, I usually attribute it to confused, vague thinking, or worse, deliberate equivocation intended to confuse others. But the person responsible for this can't claim fuzzy concepts as a defense. He has a crystal clear idea of what he's claiming. On the plus side, anyone who finds it convincing was probably hopeless to start with.
10:47 PM |
Arafat Deathwatch: There are few people in the world whose deaths would make me positively happy. Yasser Arafat is one of them. As James Lileks writes so succinctly:
All you need to know about Arafat was that he insisted on wearing a pistol when he addressed the UN General Assembly. And all you need to know about the UN, I suppose, is that they let him.If only the UN's death were so apparently imminent. (Via Damian.)
07:17 AM |
Anti-Bushite for Bush: Intellectual Activist editor and publisher Robert Tracinski has long advocated support for Bush in this election. In an article explaining why, despite the president's serious shortcomings on the domestic and foreign policy fronts, he gives the bottom line as this:
George Bush is a candidate who stands for a vigorous projection of American power to reshape the political structure of the Middle East, destroying the political underpinnings of Islamic terrorism--but whose execution of that goal is continually undercut by compromise and appeasement. John Kerry is a candidate who stands for American withdrawal and passivity--for whom any expression of American strength would be an act of compromise and appeasement.And if the president is re-elected, he says, we then need to
immediately and vigorously oppose everything that is wrong with the Bush agenda--to demand that he live up to his fierce rhetoric in prosecuting the war, and to oppose his attempts to expand the welfare state and to inject religion into politics.I think this would be my choice if I were eligible to vote. Either that or abstaining. It also doesn't hurt to imagine which side you most want to be staring in dismay at the TV screen as the election results roll in on the night of November 2nd.
06:27 AM |
26 October 2004
Finally! In addition to announcing its iPod Photo (which, even as a photographer, I must admit I don't immediately see the appeal of) Apple announced today that it's finally bringing the iTunes Music Store to Canada. After futzing with the klunky online music purchasing options available up until now, my iPod mini and I are eagerly awaiting a better experience with Apple's.
06:59 PM |
I Desperately wish we had a good morning news/talk radio choice in Toronto. I switch back every year or so between CFRB and the CBC — when I reach the point where I can't bear the current station's shortcomings. With CFRB, which I switched from a couple of months ago, the main shortcoming is Ted Woloshyn. I can't quite place my finger on it, but he manages to convey to me a strange mixture of boredom and tenseness that is not what I want to wake up to every morning.
With the CBC, my current choice, the host is also a big liability. Aside from Andy Barrie's constant coughing, a condition which I'd have thought would disqualify him from on-air duties, there's the left-wing bias. The examples are rife. This morning, for example, they had a segment that I could hardly believe.
You may have heard that Mohamed Elmasry, the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, recently declared all Israeli adults fair game for terrorist attackers. Last I knew he hasn't apologized for or this statement. What does CBC's Metro Morning include as coverage of this story (maybe even as its sole non-newscast coverage)? A panel discussion on how silly it is that the mass media picks individual members of ethnic, religious, or other groups, and unjustly portrays them as representative of those groups.
I remind you: Mohamed Elmasry is not some isolated crackpot. He is the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress. This is a group that describes itself as a moderate, umbrella, national organization representing the Muslim community in Canada. Until now at least, I was unaware of vast uprisings of Canadian Moslems arguing with this characterization. If there's one thing the Elmasry incident is not an example of, it's the media's unfair ascription of his authority to speak, in large part, for the group he claims to represent.
Maybe I'll switch to a music station.
09:05 AM |
24 October 2004
Elsewhere
I've cleaned up the Sites of Note list on the left, adding a few blogs that have been in my daily reading list for ages now. Have a look if you're not already familiar with them.
11:37 PM |
Alive. Well. Busy.
Once you don't post for a little while, the pressure to post something substantial to mark your return gets greater every day. This post's purpose is to break that vicious cycle. Better to do it with something insubstantial than not do it, I suppose.
School started again in September and the reading for my two classes (Intro Philosophy and Renaissance Art History) is has kept my non-working time filled. But mid-term exams are done and I think I may have worked out a routine that leaves me with some actual spare time. If so I hope to be able to post every few days, at least.
To add a little substance to this post, let me just say that for once I'm glad I'm not an American. Having to decide between Kerry and Bush is so depressing a prospect, it's good to know I don't have to do it. But the relief over not having to choose is tempered by imagining what it means for me and the rest of the world that the best the United States of America can come up with is these two. I mean, as a Canadian I'm used to uninspiring choices at election time, but I could always console myself that it's better in the States. Of course, it still is better there, but the gap seems to be narrowing.
If you do have to make the choice and haven't read these articles yet, plan to do so before November 2.
11:02 PM |