Prometheus Unbound

Okay, I couldn’t resist. After making one YouTube video, I tried another one:

Today I made my first foray onto YouTube by setting up an account at XtraNormal.com.

XtraNormal.com is a FREE animated video production site where you can mash together scene and character templates to create stories. You can then download them to YouTube. It’s an amazing technology, and easy to use.

Here’s my first short. I hope you like it:

Benjamin Netanyahu, as Israel’s new prime minister, will be bringing renewed attention to Iran and its desire to produce a nuclear weapon, and he’ll be pressing President Obama to move swiftly on the diplomatic front, because if diplomacy doesn’t work Netanyahu has signalled emphatically that Israel will not stand by and allow an existential threat to its existence take shape. Barack Obama better start paying seriously close attention to this, because neither Netanyahu nor Iran are going to just go away.

Iranian leaders have expressed, in numerous instances, an intent to destroy Israel. And having a nuclear weapon would give them opportunity. In 2005, Harvard historian Daniel Goldhagen gave historical perspective to President Ahmadinejad of Iran, and his publically declared desire to “wipe Israel off the map.” The historical perspective that he offered in 2005 continues to be relevant to decisions facing us today:

In 1904, General Lothar Von Trotta, the German governor of its colony of South-West Africa (today’s Namibia), publicly proclaimed, “within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot.” In 1939, right before starting World War II, Hitler declared to the world his intent to take advantage of a world war to bring about “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Last week, President Ahmadinejad of Iran publicly called for the annihilation of Israel. A few days later, he repeated his call to “wipe Israel off the map.”

For genocide to occur, two components must be present, intent and opportunity, with intent often long preceding the acquisition of the means and circumstances necessary to implement it. In South-West Africa, the intent could not have been clearer, and the opportunity was also present, given the overwhelming German military superiority. The Germans systematically slaughtered three-quarters of the Herero people. Hitler had already articulated his wish to “exterminate” the Jews in 1920, but not until the German conquest of Europe did the opportunity exist for him to carry out his wishes, which he promptly did, murdering 6 million.

How has the world reacted to Mr. Ahmadinejad, von Trotta and Hitler’s rhetorical heir? With the exception of the Palestinian Authority’s spokesman, the leaders of Arab and other Islamic countries have been silent. Their countries’ newspapers, with tacit approval, have printed on their front pages Mr. Ahmadinejad’s speech without commentary. In the democratic world, political leaders and editorialists alike have roundly condemned Mr. Ahmadinejad’s words. Yet the critical questions remain unanswered: How seriously should we take Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements? More specifically, what is the relationship of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s words to any real intent? And will intent find opportunity?

Benjamin Netanyahu speaking today to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg about Iran:

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have not had a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest. People say that they’ll behave like any other nuclear power. Can you take the risk? Can you assume that?

I think I’m with Netanyahu on this. I don’t think that you can remove HEAVEN from the nuclear calculations of Iran’s mullahs.

In other words, an Islamic Republic (unlike an atheist Soviet Socialist Republic) might bring its religious beliefs in another world and an afterlife into the equation of whether or not to use its nuclear weapon, thus putting “zealotry above its [this worldly] self-interest.” Seriously believing in a literal world “above” leads to unpredictability about how nuclear weapons might be used by Iran in this world “below.”

Those of us in the West have our fundamentalist equivalents, of course, as in this example below of a congressman making huge environmental policy decisions based on his naive and literalist readings of the Bible:

What makes us think that Iranian mullahs are any more sane or sophisticated than John Shimkus, or take their scriptures any less seriously? What makes us think that they wouldn’t use their scriptures to direct their thoughts and actions in the same way that Shimkus does? A theocracy with a nuclear bomb is something that we have not yet encountered in history—and we shouldn’t be complacent about encountering it.

Barack Obama needs to listen to Benjamin Netanyahu on this, and get really focused.

Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as Israel’s new prime minister today, and he was interviewed by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg:

In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

History teaches Jews that threats against their collective existence should be taken seriously, and, if possible, preempted, he suggested.

I have to say that I agree with Netanyahu here, and that Obama cannot, under any circumstances, allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. But Netanyahu’s unflinching focus on Iran is also extremely nerve generating. By calling Iran’s nuclear program a “hinge of history” Netanyahu is clearing signalling that Israel will not let that hinge swing in the wrong way. Period. 

Thus we may be heading for a global-historic encounter between the West and Iran before the end of the year. Obama better hunker down and get focused on this.

Here’s the idea: Take already existing YouTube videos of musicians and singers, pull snippets from them, mash them, and turn them into NEW and original pieces of WORLD MUSIC.

That’s what a brilliant 26 year old Israeli has started doing, bringing YouTube to another creative level. His name is “Kutiman”:

God decides when the earth will end (so we don’t have to think about it too much):

I feel so much better knowing that John Shimkus is in Washington making environmental policy decisions based on his reading of passages from Genesis and Matthew. It’s such an advance over the old ways of divining the future (entrail reading and horoscope casting). Human intellectual progress has been truly breathtaking over the past several thousand years, don’t you think?

Studio portrait, from 1922, of two-year-old Kurt Klein.

In 1937, Kurt Klein’s parents sent him to live with relatives in Buffalo, New York. His parents, unable to immigrate, died at Auschwitz in 1942. According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum archives:

Kurt was inducted into the United States army in 1942. When the army discovered he was fluent in German, they sent him to Camp Ritchie in Maryland for intelligence training. He became attached as intelligence officer to the 5th Infantry Division to conduct interrogations of German POWs. Towards the end of the war, soldiers from his unit discovered 130 starving, emaciated Jewish female death-march survivors in a factory near Volary, Czechoslovakia. Kurt went to investigate the following morning and help arrange for medical help. He addressed the first woman he met in German, and she showed him where the others were staying. He soon fell in love with the woman, Gerda Weissman (born in 1924 in Bielsko Poland). They married in Paris on September 1945.

During the 2008 primary, both Rush Limbaugh and Paul Krugman wanted to see Hillary Clinton defeat Barack Obama. And since Obama has become president, Limbaugh and Krugman have both been in a pissy public funk about it. They remind me of William Blake’s Urizen (in Blake’s poetry, Urizen is a binder and restrainer of energies). I think, therefore, that Obama’s dynamic right-left Urizen opposition tag team deserves a name mash up: Limpaul Krugbaugh.

And here’s Blake’s “Ancient of Days,” a classic Urizen-like restrainer image:

Josh Marshall just read a book on his wife’s Kindle, and quickly perceived its implication for the old tree-based technology. Marshall thinks that the book is going down in the same way that the newspaper is going down.

Timber!:

I’ve always been an inveterate collector of books. Not in the sense of collectibles, but in the sense that once I buy a book, I never let it go. As I made my way through adulthood it was while dragging a tail of several hundred books along with me.

Finally, only a few months ago, I purged a decent chunk of my collection. And most are now in storage. But in our living room we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sitting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.

Literary critic Terry Eagleton, who is, insofar as I can tell, an atheist himself, nevertheless engages in a nuanced take-down of some of the pretenses associated with contemporary atheism. He focuses in particular on the two most articulate writers within the neo-atheist movement—Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. For purposes of convenience (since Dawkins and Hitchens, in numerous instances, offer similar arguments) Eagleton amusingly conflates their names into a singular entity that he calls “Ditchkins.”

Eagleton sees the neo-atheist movement as a reaction to the resurgence of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism after 9-11, and he sees that reaction as largely obtuse, both intellectually and psychologically. Eagleton, for example, sees real value in the Bible, and in the story of Jesus in particular, and what it can teach us about life and social change. Eagleton’s readings of the Ten Commandments and the story of Jesus are especially dazzling, and illustrate his point that one needn’t throw the religious/mythic babies out with the fundamentalist bathwater.

Eagleton is also an unreconstructed Marxist, which I think is a rather dubious intellectual position itself. Nevertheless, it gives him a vantage for making sharp and astute critiques of Ditchkins’s complacency with regard to the role that capitalism and Modernism have played in creating a world of religious fundamentalist reactionaries. Eagleton sees fundamentalism as the West’s psychological shadow—and points us to Euripides’s Bakkhai as a play we would do well to study. In that play, King Pentheus treats Dionysus, who inhabits the borders of his realm, with enormous arrogance and without self-critical awareness, and the result is his own destruction. In this part of the book, Eagleton is rehashing material that he dealt with in more detail in a previous book (Holy Terror).

Eagleton’s book is strongest in its first half. The first chapter is especially thought provoking, for in it Eagleton offers a brilliant aesthetic defense of God’s existence that could (almost) make me a believer. Eagleton’s argument is a reversal of Liebnitz-like utility, in which God must do everything perfectly—and this must be “the best of all possible worlds.” To the contrary, Eagleton suggests that God may have made the universe for a very different purpose. The universe may be (if we are to attribute it to God) a contingent art project, utterly inefficient and without utility—an act of freedom, not necessity. This, of course, has its own problems, but Eagleton has nevertheless offered a clever retort to traditional theodicy.

Why did Eagleton write this book? If I may engage in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis, I think it is because Eagleton perceives the universal acid of reductionist rationalism heading his way. It’s coming after religion now, but it’s coming after poetry, literature, and Marxism later. In other words, Eagleton’s book is, at one level at least, a battle against an obtuse utilitarianism which sees the price of everything and the value of nothing. I see Eagleton’s (perhaps unconscious) motive leaping from page 34 of his book, in which he writes: “That a great deal of [religion] is indeed repulsive . . . is not a bone of contention between us. But I speak here partly in defense of my own forebears, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.”

In some sense, this book is Eagleton (as a Marxist critic) fighting for his own life—defending the importance of nuance and measured judgment against the crassest forms of reductionist cynicism—and making a case for the value of some form of hope for POETIC JUSTICE in the future.

Eagleton’s book can be found at Amazon here.

CNN does a segment on a paranoid, violent, and authoritarian Russian subculture:

I generally support these types of demonstrations. It keeps democratic pressure on politicians. But the hanging of bankers in effigy? No thanks to that emotionally sick man’s hate projections and dehumanization of others. Keep the demonstrations nonviolent, hippie-positive, and life affirming. No leftist authoritarianism, paranoid conspiracy mongering, or barely sublimated antisemitism, please.

In January, Mike told Ann he’s against them Sodomites. Scout’s honor:

Ain’t the contemporary Republican Party grand?

A reader at Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish makes an interesting observation:

One of the most powerful lessons of history was certainly played out in the 43 year period between the end of Word War II and 1988. By the end of that time, it was completely obvious that people living under communism were not doing as well as most people living under some form of capitalism (at least in Europe). This became well known to the folks living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and contributed greatly to the downfall of communism, among other factors.

For the last 21 years, we have been following a similar social experiment between different styles of capitalism: more regulated and less regulated. Several western countries including Ireland and Iceland, as well as some of the Baltic countries, got rid of many regulations, particularly regulations regarding finance. For a while, their economies were shining stars, but now they are a mess. The US and Britain, the least regulated large economies, are now suffering greatly as well from the financial bubble. While Old Europe (to steal a phrase from Don Rumsfeld) is not nearly as affected by the recent debacle.

Who are all these people who have time to follow the tweets of stars and politicians? And could anything be more pathetic—or wasteful of a human being’s time? Well, yes, there is something more pathetic and wasteful. It turns out that most stars and politicians don’t even write their own tweets, but have them ghost written, wasting the time of the employed ghostwriters—who could be doing something actually productive with their skills—and wasting the time of those who follow them (imagining that they are hearing from actual stars or politicians).

The New York Times today:

The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.

Slightly?

Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, says NO (at least according to Time magazine’s Joe Klein):

Gelb believes that the way is clear for productive negotiations [with Iran], with “a real possibility” that Iran’s nuclear ambitions can be limited to peaceful uses.

But Obama’s moment of truth will come if Iran doesn’t, ultimately, want to play. Will the “demons” rot away his policy judgment? Will he exaggerate Iran’s power, as the Israelis and neoconservatives routinely do, turning a relatively modest regional player into an existential threat — mad mullahs ready to blow up the world? Will he allow Republicans to force him into a tough-guy pose for domestic consumption? Will he suffer the delusion that U.S., or Israeli, power can “take out” the Iranian nuclear program without disastrous retribution?

Gelb, who believes the proper reaction to an Iranian bomb is containment and deterrence, not force, may be reacting to past American arrogance with undue humility. “If you try for the perfect solution, you’re asking for failure,” he says.

We can live with a nuclear Iran? I’m not so sure. I’m no fan of neo-conservatism, but if a nuclear Iran is not an existential threat, what is? Iran is not the former Soviet Union (a nation that was led by atheists who did not have an interest in blowing themselves up for religious purposes). Iran is a country that is literally run by fundamentalist mullahs who support suicide bombing as a means to forwarding their ends. Iran is, therefore, inherently a wild card. It is a country that could literally use a nuclear bomb in a gesture of religious collective suicide (exchanging millions of Iranian lives in exchange for the destruction of Israel).

There are, afterall, a billion Muslims and only a few million Israelis in the world. In the warped religious logic that no doubt dances in the head of Iran’s supreme Ayatollah, who is willing to bet that the old man might not calculate that a few million fewer Muslims in exchange for the extinction of Israel is a desirable option—a God inspired means—for achieving a final solution to the Jewish problem in the Middle East?

Really, with a nuclear Iran, how far-fetched is Holocaust 2.0? My guess is: not terribly. 

Religious fanatics have, in the past, committed collective acts of suicide (think of Jim Jones’s cult in the late 1970s). And Iran is a country run by religious fanatics. A nuclear Iran—so long as it is a theocratic, fundamentalist state—would be profoundly dangerous. Rational stand-off nuclear deterrence would probably not apply with Iran. And Israelis would wake up every morning wondering if their tiny country might, that day, be literally obliterated in the blink of an eye.

Obama must surely know this. He certainly cannot let Iran get a nuclear weapon on his watch. And my guess is that he won’t.

Naturalism starts with the assumption that there is only one world, not two. It’s one of the things that distinguishes atheists and agnostics from theists (who think that there is a “universe next door”, a supernatural world, too).

So what could atheist, and UC Berkeley philosopher, Alva Noe, in his new book, Out of Our Heads, possibly mean when he says that WE ARE NOT OUR BRAINS? And how, as an atheist, could he contradict Nobel Prize winning biologist Francis Crick, who said:

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Salon.com interviewed Noe and got some interesting answers.

Noe’s view is that we are no more our brains than our cars are their engines. In other words, an engine is necessary, but not sufficient, to explain the interaction of a car with its environment. In short, to really understand things like free will, love, religion, and consciousness, we need to step out of the neurons of our brains and think about our embeddedness in the universal “ecosystem” around us.

Money quote:

It’s one thing to say you wouldn’t be you if not for your brain, that your brain is critical to what you are. But I could say that about your upbringing and your culture, too. It’s another thing entirely to say that you are your brain.

I don’t reject the idea that the brain is necessary for consciousness; but I do reject the argument that it is sufficient. That’s just a fancy, contemporary version of the old philosophical idea that our true selves are interior, cut off from the outside world, only accidentally situated in the world. The view I’m attacking claims that neural activity is enough to explain consciousness, that you could have consciousness in a petri dish. It supposes that consciousness happens inside the brain the way digestion occurs inside the GI tract. But consciousness is not like digestion; it doesn’t happen inside of us. It is something we do, something we achieve. It’s more like dance than it is like digestion.

Even if we had a perfect way of observing exactly what a brain was doing, we would never be able to understand how it made us have the kinds of experiences we do. The experiences just aren’t happening inside our skulls. Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of its engine. It’s bad philosophy masquerading as science.

Noe also talks about DELUSION, and our pleasure in unmasking delusion, and how it may be clouding our thinking about who we are, and how we should study ourselves:

For a long time now, going back at least to Descartes and Galileo, we’ve liked to be told that things are not what they seem. When we go to a magic show, there’s a feeling of delicious pleasure when the wool has been pulled over our eyes. Similarly, to be told that the love you feel is actually just a chemical reaction, or that your depression is just a malfunctioning of your brain, is surprising and in some paradoxical way satisfying. There’s a modern pleasure in the unmasking of our everyday experience. We feel like we’re seeing behind the curtain, seeing how the trick is done.

It validates our suspicion that the world is different than it looks?

Yes. Galileo said that the apple in your hand is colorless, odorless and flavorless. That color and so on are effects that the apple has on you, comparable to the sensation of the prick of a pin. The flavor of the apple, he said, is no more in the apple than the prickliness is in the pin. The taste and the prickliness are in you. Galileo thought we were radically deceived by the world around us. The contemporary neuroscientists simply extend this even further — this idea that the world is a kind of grand illusion that the brain creates.

Sure, it’s an important fact that the perception of colors depends on the physics of light and the nature of the nervous system. If our physiology were different, our ability to detect colors would be different. But none of that speaks to the unreality of color, any more than saying that I can’t see anything in my room if I turn the lights off speaks to the unreality of my desk. We’ve almost made a fetish of this desire to be told that things are not what they seem.

Or, at least, I hope this is the future of the Republican Party. I like Meghan McCain’s self possession, social tolerance, and emotional expansiveness. She is the jewel of the Republican tribe. Now watch, in the near future, the self-righteous right savage her and try to throw her away. Let’s hope she hangs in there and opens a space for greater sanity and humanity within her party: