digital emunction

“Tastes Like Chicken”

The year is 1995, or thereabouts. Lunch is ending, we’re pulling into the parking lot of our high school, and the Grateful Dead are playing, as ever in those days, on the radio of my Bronco II. It’s “Sugar Magnolia”:

She’s got everything delightful
She’s got everything I need

Jimmy has a new girlfriend, and she’s a talker, one for whom the quantity of words are more important than the sense. For the sake of the song, and our sanity, we wait a moment before leaving the car and giving the lunch hour back to the gods.

Takes the wheel when I’m seeing double
Pays my ticket when I speed

“The Dead are so amazing,” the new girl says, gaining nods of agreement. “They always get it just right.” More nods. “Like that line, ‘Tastes like chicken when you’re on speed.’ It’s so true. Everything tastes like chicken on speed.”

No one nods now, nor do we look at each other, afraid (we tell ourselves) of laughing at her mistake, but also afraid (we do not admit) of how that flash of foreign knowledge had made our lives seem so small so fast.

(Photo: Trevor Paglen/New York Times)

In the words of its creator—er, redactor:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

More here.

(via Joel Calahan)

Forget McCain, here’s the really promising story out of today’s NYT: “More Americans Are Giving Up Golf”

Consider me swayed by the breeze of participatory democracy.

I’m hardly expecting a flood, but I figure it better to lay out some guidelines at the beginning:

1/ My general policy for now is that comments are welcome as long as they aren’t dumb or offensive. They’re especially welcome if they’re not boring.

2/ I will be the sole and final arbiter of what counts as dumb and offensive. You get to decide what’s boring.

3/ I will not modify comments without the permission of the comment’s author…

4/ …but I may delete a comment at any time for any reason. That means that a comment may be deleted even if it doesn’t fall into the dumb and offensive clause of guideline 1.

5/ A person who submits many (i.e. more than two) dumb or offensive comments may be permanently blacklisted.

6/ I may shut down the comments on the site at any time for any reason. This may include past comments. If you leave a comment that you are especially fond of, be sure to make a local copy for yourself.

7/ These policies may change at any time. For the latest version, click the link below the comment form on any single-post page.

A man got to have a code. —Omar, The Wire.

One of the central tenets of the New Atheist program lately being peddled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, et al., is that rational atheism does not entail moral nihilism. But what happens when scientists, working in the new field of moral psychology, find out that our moral thinking depends less on reason than it does on naturally-selected instinct?

Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Magazine, recognizes the threat:

“Morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

Pinker thinks that he can save the appearances, but his solutions aren’t very convincing. [Read more]

Today at Slate, Alex Halperin wonders why a Kenyan exit poll sponsored by the International Republican Institute hasn’t been released to the public:

The International Republican Institute, a democracy-fostering nonprofit funded by the U.S. government—and despite the name, officially nonpartisan*—commissioned an Election Day exit poll but has declined to release the results. Two people familiar with the results told me that they showed [Raila] Odinga with a substantial lead over President Kibaki—one reported eight points, the other nine points.

Why would the IRI withhold a poll that showed Odinga in the lead? I’d guess that it has something to do with Odinga’s political past: he trained as an engineer in East Germany and named his first child Fidel Castro, and his father was an open proponent of a socialist political program. From what I’ve heard from people in the country, Odinga’s (past/present/potential) socialist tendencies have been a quiet but recurring theme in pro-Kibaki political arguments. The answer to Halperin’s question might therefore be depressingly simple: the IRI won’t release their polling data because they don’t want the wrong guy to win.

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*Note: It may be true, as Halperin argues, that the IRI “missed an opportunity to advance its mission of promoting democracy and fair elections,” but if so, it wouldn’t be the first time. In fact, a person familiar with the organization’s activities in Haiti a decade ago might be excused for doubting the sincerity of that mission in the first place. Saying that the International Republican Institute is “officially nonpartisan” is a little like saying that Iran is “officially democratic”: it’s true but pointless.