No doubt, Piper and others who would take advantage of this tragedy to tout a god many no longer believe in do indeed have something wrong with their heart. But he is more in line with the original authors of Job than we might like to think. There is serious doubt as to the originality of the prologue and the epilogue, as such genres as the protestations of the innocent are found in other literary groups of the time but absent the narrative structures. So, what if these are not original? What we have is a righteous man who suffers at the hands of an absent, angry god. If you strip away Jewish and Christian interpretations along with the non-original narrative features of the Book of Job you are left with a story of a man who is struck with complete misery for no reason, afraid to cry out to his god because the same God may inflict more harm. What is more abusive than a God who only shows up to inflict more harm? To be blunt, it’s his followers as they are the ones who stand around to either gloat over the destruction of the perceived unrighteous or worse, pretend to have the power to call down the destruction themselves. With broadcasts, books, tweets, or other avenues of social media travelled, these pseudo-prophets of today pretend to have a different theology than Westboro Baptist Church and glory in what they understand to be their answer for God to strike down the sinners, to finally show himself to a world they believe are anti-God. Joel L. Watts: Abusive Theology, Oklahoma and Us ☀
Although Mr Obama will not have gone nearly far enough to satisfy his critics on the left, the speech was attracting criticism from congressional Republicans almost before he had sat down. As ever with this cautious, reflective president, he was striving for balance. For the most part he succeeded: the drone campaign, already less intensive, should start to operate within a clearer legal context. Another effort will be made to scrub the stain of Guantánamo, although for that he will need more congressional help than he is likely to get. Finally, the commitment to strengthening civil liberties that have been eroded—including a promise to “pass a media law” to shield journalists from over-zealous government investigations into leaks—was welcome, if a little late. The Economist ☀
Ordinary people, or more precisely people with only ordinary computers, are the sole providers of the information that makes the big computers so powerful and valuable. And ordinary people do get a certain flavor of benefit for providing that value. They get the benefits of an informal economy usually associated with the developing world. The formal benefits concentrate around the biggest computers. More and more ordinary people are thrust into a winner-take-all economy. It is a 21st century reprise of the Horatio Alger stories from the 19th century. A token few will find success on Kickstarter or YouTube, while overall wealth is ever more concentrated and social mobility rots. Social media sharers can make all the noise they want, but they forfeit the real wealth and clout needed to be politically powerful. Real wealth and clout instead concentrate ever more on the shrinking island occupied by elites who run the most powerful computers. Free information, as great as it sounds, will enslave us all ☀
In 2011, a series of violent severe storms swept across the Plains and Southeast U.S., bringing an astonishing six billion-dollar disasters in a three-month period. The epic tornado onslaught killed 552 people, caused $25 billion in damage, and brought three of the five largest tornado outbreaks since record keeping began in 1950. In May 2011, the Joplin, Missouri tornado did $3 billion in damage—the most expensive tornado in world history—and killed 158 people, the largest death toll from a U.S. tornado since 1947. An astounding 1050 EF-1 and stronger tornadoes ripped though the U.S. for the one-year period ending that month. This was the greatest 12-month total for these stronger tornadoes in the historical record, and an event so rare that we might expect it to occur only once every 62,500 years. Fast forward now to May 2012 - April 2013. Top-ten coldest temperatures on record across the Midwest during March and April of 2013, coming after a summer of near-record heat and drought in 2012, brought about a remarkable reversal in our tornado tally—the lowest 12-month total of EF-1 and stronger tornadoes on record—just 197. This was an event so rare we might expect it to occur only once every 3,000 - 4,000 years. And now, in May 2013, after another shattering EF-5 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, residents of the Midwest must be wondering, are we back to the 2011 pattern? Which of these extremes is climate change most likely to bring about? Is climate change already affecting these storms? These are hugely important questions, but ones we don’t have good answers for. Climate change is significantly impacting the environment that storms form in, giving them more moisture and energy to draw upon, and altering large-scale jet stream patterns. We should expect that this will potentially cause major changes in tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. Unfortunately, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms are the extreme weather phenomena we have the least understanding on with respect to climate change. We don’t have a good enough database to determine how tornadoes may have changed in recent decades, and our computer models are currently not able to tell us if tornadoes are more likely to increase or decrease in a future warmer climate.
The economy is rebounding. The stock market is skyrocketing. We’re out of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan is winding down. Immigration reform is on the way. Gay rights and women’s rights have been advanced as never before. The health care system is slowly being reformed and millions of previously uninsured Americans have been or are about to be covered. Our first African-American president has battled the most virulently obstructionist congress ever in modern times. Liberal and conservative Americans who predicted doom, again and again, from early in the Obama presidency to the present have been proved wrong– again and again. President Obama Listened to a Heckler With Humility His Critics Are (Ususally) Wrong ☀
The story, in very simplified form, goes like this. For Nietzsche, and for other cultural elitists of late-nineteenth-century Europe, both the rise of the bourgeoisie and the specter of the working class were bad things—the former for its mindless materialism, the latter for its egalitarian ideals, which threatened to drown the exceptional man among the masses. One set of Nietzsche’s descendants was the political theorists like Carl Schmitt, who “imagined political artists of great novelty and originality forcing their way through or past the filtering constraints of everyday life.” Another, which Robin focuses on in this article, is the “Austrian” school of economics led by Friedrich Hayek.
People often like to think of the Austrians as advocates of liberty, both for its Economics 101 properties (free choice in free markets, under certain assumptions, maximizes societal welfare) and its moral properties. Robin ties Hayek’s conception of liberty, however, back to Nietzche’s. Hayek cared about liberty for ultimately elitist reasons: liberty is not an end in itself, but a condition that enables the select few to make the world a better place. In his words, “The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.” And those select few are likely to be the rich, for only they have the requisite time and freedom from material concerns: “However important the independent owner of property may be for the economic order of a free society, his importance is perhaps even greater in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs.”
This idea is obviously echoed in Ayn Rand’s novels, which celebrate the individual genius standing out against the backdrop of collectivist mediocrity. It has also trickled into the contemporary conservative worship of the ultra-rich. The phrase today is “job creators” (whatever that means), but it has the same moralistic overtones as in Nietzsche and Hayek—a class of people who are better than the rest of us, on whom we depend for our salvation and prosperity, and whom we should not presume to question or constrain through, say, safety regulation or higher taxes (“penalizing success,” in the jargon).
I used to say that most Americans voted against their class interests because they thought they would one day be in the upper class: there’s some poll statistic floating around according to which X percent of Americans think they will one day be in the top 1 percent by income, where X is some high number like 40 or 45. But today, five years after the financial crisis, with median income below where it was fifteen years ago and social mobility at developing-world levels, I can’t imagine many people really believe that vast riches are in their future. An alternative explanation is that many Americans just think the rich are better than they are and that it’s wrong to question your betters. (This is not inconsistent with George Lakoff’s model of the Strict Father and a hierarchical universe as the governing principle of modern conservative ideology.) Nietzsche would no doubt be horrified by most aspects of contemporary American society, but that might give him some comfort.
The Origin of Tumblr (Continued) ☀
Tumblr took the best of what Projectionist and anarchaia had to offer and combined it in one platform: anarchaia’s simplicity met Projectionist’s design appeal.
But what Tumblr did most importantly was bring the tumblelog to the masses. Karp, who at the time was sharing an office space on New York’s Park Avenue provided by studio owner Fred Seibert, allowed users to register their own Tumblr URL, customize their blog, and easily share videos, text, and GIFs. Tumblr marketed itself as a home for artists and paid homage to Projectionist on its FAQ page.
Anarchaia (though the creator now is active at another tumblelog site — Trivium) and Projectionist were the impetus behind me eagerly jumping aboard Tumblr back in 2007 (I believe I am Tumblr user #752).
There also was a link blog (cannot recall precisely but think that the blogger moved on to work with Al Franken or some other liberal webzine in the pre HuffPost era) that inspired, though it was entirely textual as opposed to the multi-variate post types supported by Tumblr.
And now after ingesting this Tumblr trivia moment I shall return you to the normal stream of numinous posts…
It is peculiar to me that nobody mentions LiveJournal & MySpace when they talk about the emergence of tumblr. Both were massively popular and played in the “Blogs for the masses” space. They commanded massive user bases. If they had not been so badly mismanaged they might be ubiquitous today, maybe instead of tumblr.
MySpace’s interface sucked in ways we all remember well. Murdoch spent billions to acquire it, and then did.. nothing. LiveJournal elected to impose selective censorship and badly thought out use terms on its users (like Instagram writ much larger) and never recovered from the exodus.
LiveJournal needed serious work on theming and the public appearance of blogs, and it never got it. On the other hand the “inter-user” experience was in many ways superior to tumblr’s, and that’s true even today. Commenting, threaded reblogging, displaying groups of friends posts on your dashboard, etc etc.
LIveJournal and MySpace were nifty blogging advancements (well, maybe not MySpace ;)) but I don’t think they fit within the tumblelog paradigm. Go look at Anarachaia and Projectionist layout again and note the differing post formats — at the minimum: links, quotes, images and text posts. Yes, you can use any blog platform to post varied content, but the “baking in” of multivariate post handling and formatting is the essence of a tumblelog:
Blogging has mutated into simpler forms (specifically, link- and mob- and aud- and vid- variant), but I don’t think I’ve seen a blog like Chris Neukirchen’s Anarchaia, which fudges together a bunch of disparate forms of citation (links, quotes, flickrings) into a very long and narrow and distracted tumblelog.
President Obama’s speech today was the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America. For the first time, a president stated clearly and unequivocally that the state of perpetual warfare that began nearly 12 years ago is unsustainable for a democracy and must come to an end in the not-too-distant future. NYTimes.com ☀
Twenty-nine bars and restaurants, nearly half of them TGI Fridays, filled premium brand liquor bottles with lower-quality booze and sold it to patrons who thought they were buying the good stuff, authorities said Wednesday.
Worse yet, investigators said at least one New Jersey bar was mixing food dye with rubbing alcohol and serving it as scotch. Officials would not say who used the rubbing alcohol. But they said no health issues were reported.
Socialists must urgently show progressives how alien the technocratic liberal worldview is to the goals of welfare-state liberalism—goals held by the rank and file of the liberal movement. The ground can be softened at the intellectual and cultural levels, but a schism will have to be forced through actual struggle. Broad anti-austerity coalitions, particularly those centered at the state and municipal levels like last year’s Chicago Teachers Union strike, point the way toward new coalitions between leftists and liberals committed to defending social goods, especially if that means standing up against pro-corporate members of the Democratic Party like Rahm Emanuel. Letter to ‘The Nation’ From a Young Radical ☀
Yesterday, I was sitting in my studio office—basically a converted garage—while a thunderstorm brewed outside. After wrapping up a conference call with some of Ars’ finest, I was getting ready to dive back into work when the storm really picked up. “Ahhhh,” I thought as I leaned back in my chair to stare out at the strange greenish light against a purple-clouded backdrop. “So beautiful!”
At that moment—and this part is a little foggy—a bright arc of electricity shot through the window and directly into my chest. I’m not sure whether the arc originated from the sky or the ground, but it knocked me out of my chair. I hit the concrete floor and bounced back up to my feet, which were shuffling at top speed into a bookshelf. I remember thinking, “OK, going to die now. Do not fall down. Do not pass out.”
I’ve read that being struck by lightning is akin to a being hit by a huge defibrillator. I’m not sure about that—but it did feel magnitudes worse than the time I touched an electric fence as a kid.
If this collection of voices is any indication, the traditional battle lines of the abstinence culture war are beginning to blur. A revisionist evangelical view of sexuality appears to be emerging, one that doesn’t revolve around that ultimate youth-group quandary—how far is too far? Although each of these post-purity perspectives diverges from the current evangelical narrative to varying degrees, the common thread among them seems to be a desire for a more holistic sexual ethic, one that remains thoroughly Christian while shifting away from the metaphor of purity to concepts of sexual health and wholeness. What is still unclear is whether these revisions will gain traction within evangelicalism or remain confined to progressive inlets of the evangelical subculture.
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