Shouzer

Joystiq linked to and gave a bit of commentary on this piece by George Will.  The whole editorial is a weak, elitist tirade against denim, of all things.  Honestly, I feel a bit bad about potentially wasting anybody’s time by contributing to his readership.  Perhaps that’s all he’s going for; I hear newspapers around the country are failing, but based on drivel like this, I’m starting to think it has more to do with “Pulitzer Prize-winning” authorship like this than anything else.

The crux of his argument seems to be that denim was created for poor, dirty laborers, and our uncivilized society has idiotically adopted it as our primary fabric.  He attributes it to a “thou shalt not dress better than society’s most slovenly” mentality, simultaneously revealing that he believes denim-wearers are unclean and–of course–that he’s superior (who didn’t see that coming?).

He goes on to bemoan this “misuse of freedom” (oh yeah, denim is far more damaging to society than the KKK), all the while revealing his jealousy of people more successful (“Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products”), who have more fun (“Seventy-five percent of American ‘gamers’ . . . are allowed to vote”), and of apparent inferior intelligence (“children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies”).  Boohoo.

Personally, I wear jeans because they’re comfortable, not as some fashion statement.  It seems that Will puts more thought into what I wear than I do, which he might argue is the root of his discontent.  In reality, I do like wearing suits, but there’s at least two problems with wearing one all the time:  1) I don’t feel like sweating in my office all day, and 2) frankly it devalues the few times in my life that I do dress up.

It reminds me of an early episode of House (yeah, George, I watch TV.  Fuck you.) in which House doesn’t hire a female doctor, because it’s apparent she’s more concerned with her looks than with being comfortable.  Assumedly, Will would prefer the opposite:  that we all dress uncomfortably to create false facades of importance and self worth.   He calls wearing denim “the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances”.  I call his editorial a carefully calculated attack on lower castes.

After all, his argument isn’t that, as a society, we’ve outgrown denim.  No, it’s that denim is meant for laborers and bums, and everybody else should have better taste–everybody else should dress their stature.  I suspect he would have loved to live in the middle ages.  Back then, everybody knew their place.  You had royalty, and you had peasants.  And they most certainly didn’t dress alike.

I really do not understand this bailout business, but it feels to me like the same sort of fear-mongering we had pre-Iraq. We have this government “expert” telling us that disaster is imminent, and if we don’t knee-jerk react to agree with him, we will all rue the day.

On the other hand, I have read many articles by independent experts agreeing that we do, in fact, need to do something to fix this crisis. So I guess I would reluctantly agree that this investment needs to be made.

What really angers me though, is that the administration is fighting Congress about garnishing executives’ salaries. I don’t have a problem with these guys making multimillion dollar salaries under normal circumstances. They are managing billions of dollars, and high salaries come with high risks. Plus, these companies should want the best of the best for their chiefs, and they must pay for that kind of talent. However, when these executives run those companies into the ground, we the tax payers should not have to pay their huge salaries. Really, they should pay us for screwing us all by causing our investments to drop.

Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary, opposes theses wage limits because he feels it will cause many companies to hesitate to take assistance from the government. My question is, how is that a bad thing? I think companies should be hesitant to seek assistance from the government. It’s a last resort, not some sort of incentive program or grant to build small businesses.

[Edit:] This ended up being a monster post. Despite that, I’d be really happy to hear what anybody else has to say about this. Comments are strongly encouraged!

There was a discussion on an email alias at work recently about intelligent design, and though the original conversation got extremely off-topic, I nonetheless spent quite a while thinking about it. From what I’ve seen, the typical debate seems to end up breaking down to religion vs atheism. Those that support religion are ostensibly religious, and those in favor of evolution or natural selection are typically perceived as atheist. What I don’t understand is why the two groups have to be mutually exclusive.

First–and I want to get this out of the way as quickly as possible–intelligent design is not science, nor should it ever be taught in school as a complement or alternative to evolution as science. Intelligent design’s sole purpose is to bring into science the requirement of a higher being. This mere fact alone precludes it from being science. Instead, it’s a giving up. Rather than actually trying to explain the way things are in physical terms, it’s a weak fallback to an unprovable, untestable, and intrinsically unscientific explanation.

Now, having said that, I don’t know why you have to be atheist to believe in evolution. I’m certainly not. I don’t understand what’s so “unintelligent” about evolution. The idea of natural selection explains a lot of things fantastically well. An organism’s or species’ favorable random mutations will become more common in successive generations furthering that species. It makes sense. It’s almost perfect.

So why can’t a typical Christian, for instance, accept this? Couldn’t it be the case that God created the world in this manner? We don’t have to remove the scientific randomness of it–God doesn’t have to be molding every single human, bug, and bacteria created. He doesn’t have to be actively carrying electricity over copper wires. No, science can explain it. If you believe in God, why not believe that He created things in a rational, explainable way? It would be well within his power.

The problem for me is that convservative religious groups often accept science when it’s convenient and condemn it when it’s not. They’ll write up blog posts from their laptops on their planes about how they didn’t evolve from monkeys. Oh yeah, and I suppose angels are storing those posts magically in the laptops while there’s no internet connection. They’re probably carrying the planes, too. Cell phones? They’re really work through a huge network of angels carrying our voices over vast distances. It has nothing to do with radio waves.

I’m a firm believer in science–real science–though I also mentioned earlier that I’m not atheist. I don’t accept the “general” notion of intelligent design, but I think natural selection is fairly intelligent. I don’t believe it’s too far-fetched to say some higher power designed things to work that way (i.e. it was an intelligent design…). In fact, I think it’s naive to believe that science will ever have all the answers.

The big bang, for example, while a fascinating theory, doesn’t actually explain the beginning of anything. Go far enough in the past and there was a single mass of infinite density, which then began expanding at an exponentially rapid pace? Honestly, what the fuck is that? Where did this magical ball (or point) of mass come from? Even if science can someday explain that, the next question will be what caused the thing that caused the big bang and so on? It’ll be an infinite series of questions and answers with no end.

The existence of life, of our universe, of anything is inherently beyond the realm of our scientific understanding. At the end of the day, taking all real science into account, “Why do I exist?” is still a valid question. That above all else necessitates my belief in a higher power, but it does not negate–nor should it supplant–actual science. And to attempt to do so with frivolous “theories” is a waste of time and a detriment to society as a whole.