Archive Listing
April 18, 2009 - April 11, 2009
Monday, June 23, 2008
Milestones:
All-Time
Historical
Lowpoint in Sports
Lowpoint in Sports
A
scene repeated all across sporting America this weekend.
THE TIGER BLUES The longest day of the year always kind of sneaks up on me. But this weekend was the summer solstice, which begins both summer and the six-month long decline in the length of days. I was hardly expecting a sudden, coincident, all-time historical lowpoint. But that also occurred this weekend. Fortunately, there was plenty to keep us busy about the household -- mowing the acreage, cleaning out the garage, filling feeders to keep up with voracious goldfinches, hummingbirds, etc, and grilling burgers and gorging on homemade blueberry pie (w/fresh Jersey blueberries b'God) -- but in-and-amongst and after the domestic fun, we began to be aware of the shocking cultural milestone that had dropped on our heads.
The Hockey is done, except for their utterly inscrutable draft. The NBA season is over. The only NFL activity involves tracking which prima donna athlete refuses to tie his shoes in minicamp (Chad Johnson), and baseball entered the nadir of its season with a round of pointless inter-league games even the SportsTalk lunatics can't bring themselves to care about. Wimbledon wouldn't be playing out its boring early round matches till Monday. The Tour de France hasn't started yet, and are they really going to inflict that drug-infested scandal marathon on us this year anyway? And now, for the first time in over a decade in this customary dead spot of the sports year, there's no Tiger for the announcers to talk about during soporific tournaments like the one that's played a week after the U.S. Open. This is as close to zero as the sports world can get, now or ever.
We looked in vain through the weekend listings for the usual glut of sporting events covered by network and cable channels. Oh, indeed, there was a plethora of sad substitutes as programmers tried desperately to fill the void: Formula 1 racing, which hasn't raised my pulse above a flicker since the days of Niki Lauda and Jackie Stewart. Arena football -- who can watch that crap? -- it's like tabletop pool, a novelty that wears off within minutes of a first encounter. Olympic trials in judo (??) and women's gymnastics ("Oh, dear. She fell off the beam. How sad." How usual.) One of the cable channels was actually covering the NHL draft live! Live? Good God. ESPN was reduced to running professional bowling, automobile shows from last year, and promos for the -- wait for it! -- upcoming NBA draft! One of the Spanish language channels was showing "futbol" eliminations for the 2010 World Cup. 2010???!!! In what universe does that make any sense?
Which reminds me. Mighty ESPN also sank as low as devoting hours and hours of its precious airtime to the 2008 European Soccer Tournament. Worse, we actually watched some of it. Mrs. CP got a modest kick out of watching the hated Orangemen of Holland lose in the closing moments to Russia while I was mostly busy grilling burgers outside. And, then, on Sunday, out of a pitifully unfounded hope that something interesting would happen in the Italy-Spain quarter-final, we actually watched our second soccer game in one weekend.
The shame of it. What can I say? I am personally fond of Italy. There was nothing else on. The weather map insisted we were under imminent threat from severe thunderstorms all afternoon (which never came). And, yes, I should have known. As Instapunk regulars know, this site has assessed the appeal of soccer in some detail. But I, personally, had never sat there and watched an entire game of world-class soccer.
You'll never know. Words are inadequate. They played the entire 90 minutes of regulation with no score. Then they played two 15-minute overtime periods with no score. For the math-challenged, that's two full hours of "sport" in which nothing whatever happened. There are no 'plays' to speak of. One team starts out kicking the ball down the field, passing it to one another as if they have something in mind. But the other team always takes it way from them before anything can happen, and then they do exactly the same thing. Every once in a while two players make contact, one of them falls down and begins shrieking as if he's just been hammered into the turf by Brian Urlacher (no f'ing way, Jose) and the ref gives the guy who touched him a 'yellow card.' Then there's a 'free kick,' which is about as free as all other things European; the kicker faces a solid wall of opposing players between him and the goal. So he kicks the ball over their heads, over the goal, and into the crowd. Then they start again.
The only entertainment value is a kind of expanding wonder. What do they use for highlights on TV news/sports coverage? Crowd shots? Clips of players rolling around on the ground pretending to be hurt? Refs dealing yellow cards as deftly as Vegas poker sharks? All those kicks that go way left or way right or way o-o-o-ver that gigantic net? What statistics do the soccer encyclopedias compile? There's nothing to count or keep track of that might be a finite accomplishment or 'play.' Number of pointless steals of a ball from the opposition? Number of pointless losses of the ball to the opposition. The ratio of pointless steals to pointless losses? And what do their career statistics look like? A Hall of Famer like Beckham makes history by scoring, like, uh, three goals lifetime? And, uh, he played 19,000 hours of goal-free time in regulation?
I don't know. I don't know why the rules are systematically designed to prevent scoring. I don't know why players and teams are disqualified in the next game for routine fouls committed in this game, thus preemptively destroying the purity and fairness of tournament competition. I don't know why the rules deliberately remove the suspense of a down-ticking clock by adding unknown quantities of penalty time after regulation play, thus ensuring a built-in, premeditated anticlimax. I don't know why hundreds of thousands come to watch and weep and wail and sing and cheer. I don't know why I watched.
Somebody eventually won. On penalty kicks. Which, as far as I'm concerned, they could have done without wasting 120 minutes of running around futilely on the field beforehand.
Of course I do have some suggestions. I honestly believe, having watched, that there is a good game rattling around somewhere inside the boneheaded bore the current rules mandate. Adopt hockey's penalty box/power play format (pay now, not tomorrow), jettison the yellow card/red card bullshit, and penalize fakers just as sternly as those who commit fouls. (Who really wants to watch professional athletes making deliberate pussies of themselves? Not even Europeans should get off on that...) Quit adding penalty increments at the end of regulation. And, for God's sake, allow the fast break that makes basketball such a volatile and momentum-driven game. Let the lone superstar go one-on-one with the goalie in the heat of play on the field, as opposed to the artificial stasis of the post-game penalty-kick snore. If your game can't be decided by being played with all players on the field, it's not much of a game. It may be a kind of theater. But it's not a sport.
This
is a sport. The kind of truly extreme moment soccer can never produce.
Not without big rule changes anyway. It can't come down to refs and pussies.
For example, in this one NFL play I can count three/four 'yellow cards,' easy.
Sorry. I know it's tres inappropriate. But right now, I'm really missing sports.
Not without big rule changes anyway. It can't come down to refs and pussies.
For example, in this one NFL play I can count three/four 'yellow cards,' easy.
Sorry. I know it's tres inappropriate. But right now, I'm really missing sports.
Hey, though. I'm just a dumb American. An American who will remember the summer solstice weekend of 2008 as the all-time worst moment in sports in my lifetime.
Otherwise, it was a wonderful couple of days.
posted at
1:20 pm
by
CountryPunk
The Atheist Wars
(Cont.)
Seeing
more clearly by turning your back on everything.
REPORT
FROM THE FRONT. Since we threw down the gauntlet, they keep coming.
Not in a wave but in fits and starts, solitaries that they are. I've
contended with a few in the comment sections, but it occurred to me I
should share the kind of high-minded debate customary with the hard
core; that is, those whose tone is consistent with what Rachel got in
the post that inspired my
intervention. Here is an exchange that began with this comment
(Yes, he calls himself "My Comment Name"):
My
Comment Name
IP sez: "There is nothing -- no principle of science whatever -- to rule out the possibility that an intelligence capable of generating the universe, from string or quark to multi-galactic infinity, would not also be capable of observing or participating in everything, in perpetuity, without ever violating the laws of his own creation and yet accomplishing his will in everything"
Well, alright. There's also no principle of science to rule out the invisible leprechauns dancing on my eyelids, but I don't see anybody getting rich offa that shit.
You refer to "deists" quite a bit, but may I take it that we are talking about your belief in the Judaeo-Christian deity in particular? Why not Mbombo, or Mangala, or Kamui, or Brahma, or any of the multitudes of other cosmic individuals that have been lumbered with responsibility for this crazy universe we ride around in? After all, any of those stories is as useful as an explanatory tool the one you currently subscribe to; so why not?
It's worth thinking about, because only when you understand why you have written off all the thousands of other gods, will you understand why atheists have written off yours, too.
Basically, man, we are all
atheists. Some of us just believe in one less god than you do.
I chose to respond for reasons I made clear:
Instapunk
MCN:
"You refer to "deists" quite a bit, but may I take it that we are talking about your belief in the Judaeo-Christian deity in particular?"
No, you may not. You didn't read the post. Which is absolutely 100 percent typical of your ilk.
Preening arrogance has replaced not only logic but the ability to read a complete essay or a complete paragraph. You're an ignorant, presumptuous, time-wasting fool. Learn how to read before you come back here again.
I framed the argument carefully and deliberately excluded -- in the first paragraph -- all matters of specific religious preference. Your inability to perceive that is an indictment of whatever you BELIEVE constituted your education.
Sadly I must inform you you didn't receive an education -- merely a set of unthinking poses.
This made him angry, though it didn't change his argument by one jot or tittle:
My
Comment Name
Instapunk: "I framed the argument carefully and deliberately excluded -- in the first paragraph -- all matters of specific religious preference."
Well, that was always the other option, but your macho posturing must have blindsided me for a moment, because I momentarily considered that such a chickenshit tactic was beneath a man of your pectoral magnitude.
Do you subscribe to any particular creation story or not? Are you seriously telling us that you think all of them are just dandy, provided that "god/gods did it" forms the basis of that story? Do you expect us to accept that you subscribe to mere "deism"?
Do you accept the story of Mbombo or Vishnu, or do you not? Am I really so worthy of your scorn for suspecting that you do not currently worship, among others, Kamui? Or am I in actual fact absolutely correct about this?
Deliberately refusing to
pin yourself down - or, in other words, failing to stand up for what
you believe - is not just a sneaky argumentative sleight of hand; it is
pure moral cowardice. The swagger of your response is belied by the
lack of balls shown in your original post.
Time for the slam dunk, plus some exposition that may be useful to
the thoughtful:
Instapunk
MCN:
"Deliberately refusing to pin yourself down - or, in other words, failing to stand up for what you believe - is not just a sneaky argumentative sleight of hand; it is pure moral cowardice. The swagger of your response is belied by the lack of balls shown in your original post."
Interesting. "Pure moral cowardice"? What does that term mean to an atheist?
The question I posed sits at a far more fundamental level than any possible questions of morality. It's hardly swagger to point out that knowing there is no god is just as much a declaration of faith as knowing there is a god. What you don't like, and won't address, is that it's every bit as impossible to prove there is no god as it is to prove there is a god.
I'm fascinated by your insistence that I must reveal to you my specific religious beliefs before you can seriously come to grips with the rational basis of my argument. To me that's a sign that your own convictions exist only in opposition to the convictions of others. If I really were a religion-neutral deist who disdained all forms of organized religion, the passion of your opposition would begin to go limp. Which means it's necessary for you to evade the pure philosophical argument and make of me a secret religious fanatic hiding behind logic to prevent the death blows you can always wield against the foolish faithful.
You see, you are deluded by an assumption that is probably invisible, as deep assumptions often are, that specific sectarian religious beliefs come first and then result in convenient answers to the underlying philosophical questions. If this isn't the case, you're shit out of luck, because all your arguments are based on that inference.
I'm afraid I must disappoint you in this regard. As a very young man, I discarded anything like religious faith until I had taken the main questions all the way to their most basic elements, the ones I described in my post. All the steps toward what you would call religion were taken only after I had wrestled with those basics. To this day, whatever faith I have is a frail thing. I am no evangelist. The argument I made is all I am sure of, which regardless of how you deliberately misunderstand it, consists of asserting that atheists and deists bear an equal burden of proof that neither can meet.
My own religious faith is irrelevant, because it is not constant, not certain, not at times above the level of mere wistfulness and speculation. It does contain beliefs about morality and divinity, but these beliefs are subject to continuous questioning, doubt, self-examination, and, yes, hope.
I suspect this is something you know nothing of. Your own certainty sees its mirror image in those you despise the most. You demand that others reveal to you an exact set of postulates to which you can favorably compare your own. Then you feel prepared to go to war and win. Like any goddam lawyer whose idea of intelligence is destroying the other guy's argument by any and every means without actually having a fully realized synthesis of his own.
What you don't understand, and never will, is that those who aspire to religious faith, in all philosophically honest traditions, are not fixed and rigid cartoons of churchiness but constant questioners. They know they do not know, and they know that faith is a choice which is not made once but every day, every minute, every second, throughout their lives.
No thinking Christian would doubt that there are times when the Pope himself does not believe in the God of the New Testament, the resurrection, or even salvation. (Which does not make me a Roman Catholic, btw, because I'm not). The nature of faith is that it IS self-consciously faith, a matter of willing belief not certainty; a choice made repeatedly, not a pigeonhole one falls into and defends savagely against all comers.
You know nothing of this. How could you? Unable to confront or contend with my logic, you CHOOSE to see the most elemental matters of philosophy as a battle of balls. Which makes you a clown. With balls like a pair of infected peas.
To the extent that I swagger, it's only because the very basic logic I employ is incontrovertible. To the extent atheists are certain, they are deluding themselves. More than deists. Because there are too many primary questions no mere human being can presume to know the absolute answer to.
An example. One self-satisfied atheist (in the comments) cited as an example of his superior knowledge context the fact that we still don't know where the moon came from. He's right. We don't. It's the closest object to our home in the whole incomprehensibly vast universe, and we don't know for sure where it came from, why it's there, or why its size and orbit are so oddly synchronized with the earth's orbit of the sun, and he believes that's somehow proof that his atheism is scientifically justified.
That's insanity. As is your pompous posturing. You know next to nothing about the universe you live in. For you to claim otherwise (and I suspect you're dying to claim you do) is proof of every point of my argument.
Now. What of you? Who are you? What of yourself, your life, your values, your own beliefs about life and meaning and morality have you shared? Nothing. And I'm the coward?
I hardly think so. I'm on record here with hundreds of thousands of words about my beliefs, convictions, experiences, and tastes. You arrive like a thief in the night, anonymous, hidden behind your bluster and bile, and you point a headless, bodyless finger of accusation. You're a joke.
So why did I respond? Because my considered response may be helpful to other inquiring minds like my own. And because when an opponent goes out of his way to give you a perfect setup for a spike, it's hard to resist slamming it down his throat.
You're pwn'ed.
Now go away.
MCN:
"Deliberately refusing to pin yourself down - or, in other words, failing to stand up for what you believe - is not just a sneaky argumentative sleight of hand; it is pure moral cowardice. The swagger of your response is belied by the lack of balls shown in your original post."
Interesting. "Pure moral cowardice"? What does that term mean to an atheist?
The question I posed sits at a far more fundamental level than any possible questions of morality. It's hardly swagger to point out that knowing there is no god is just as much a declaration of faith as knowing there is a god. What you don't like, and won't address, is that it's every bit as impossible to prove there is no god as it is to prove there is a god.
I'm fascinated by your insistence that I must reveal to you my specific religious beliefs before you can seriously come to grips with the rational basis of my argument. To me that's a sign that your own convictions exist only in opposition to the convictions of others. If I really were a religion-neutral deist who disdained all forms of organized religion, the passion of your opposition would begin to go limp. Which means it's necessary for you to evade the pure philosophical argument and make of me a secret religious fanatic hiding behind logic to prevent the death blows you can always wield against the foolish faithful.
You see, you are deluded by an assumption that is probably invisible, as deep assumptions often are, that specific sectarian religious beliefs come first and then result in convenient answers to the underlying philosophical questions. If this isn't the case, you're shit out of luck, because all your arguments are based on that inference.
I'm afraid I must disappoint you in this regard. As a very young man, I discarded anything like religious faith until I had taken the main questions all the way to their most basic elements, the ones I described in my post. All the steps toward what you would call religion were taken only after I had wrestled with those basics. To this day, whatever faith I have is a frail thing. I am no evangelist. The argument I made is all I am sure of, which regardless of how you deliberately misunderstand it, consists of asserting that atheists and deists bear an equal burden of proof that neither can meet.
My own religious faith is irrelevant, because it is not constant, not certain, not at times above the level of mere wistfulness and speculation. It does contain beliefs about morality and divinity, but these beliefs are subject to continuous questioning, doubt, self-examination, and, yes, hope.
I suspect this is something you know nothing of. Your own certainty sees its mirror image in those you despise the most. You demand that others reveal to you an exact set of postulates to which you can favorably compare your own. Then you feel prepared to go to war and win. Like any goddam lawyer whose idea of intelligence is destroying the other guy's argument by any and every means without actually having a fully realized synthesis of his own.
What you don't understand, and never will, is that those who aspire to religious faith, in all philosophically honest traditions, are not fixed and rigid cartoons of churchiness but constant questioners. They know they do not know, and they know that faith is a choice which is not made once but every day, every minute, every second, throughout their lives.
No thinking Christian would doubt that there are times when the Pope himself does not believe in the God of the New Testament, the resurrection, or even salvation. (Which does not make me a Roman Catholic, btw, because I'm not). The nature of faith is that it IS self-consciously faith, a matter of willing belief not certainty; a choice made repeatedly, not a pigeonhole one falls into and defends savagely against all comers.
You know nothing of this. How could you? Unable to confront or contend with my logic, you CHOOSE to see the most elemental matters of philosophy as a battle of balls. Which makes you a clown. With balls like a pair of infected peas.
To the extent that I swagger, it's only because the very basic logic I employ is incontrovertible. To the extent atheists are certain, they are deluding themselves. More than deists. Because there are too many primary questions no mere human being can presume to know the absolute answer to.
An example. One self-satisfied atheist (in the comments) cited as an example of his superior knowledge context the fact that we still don't know where the moon came from. He's right. We don't. It's the closest object to our home in the whole incomprehensibly vast universe, and we don't know for sure where it came from, why it's there, or why its size and orbit are so oddly synchronized with the earth's orbit of the sun, and he believes that's somehow proof that his atheism is scientifically justified.
That's insanity. As is your pompous posturing. You know next to nothing about the universe you live in. For you to claim otherwise (and I suspect you're dying to claim you do) is proof of every point of my argument.
Now. What of you? Who are you? What of yourself, your life, your values, your own beliefs about life and meaning and morality have you shared? Nothing. And I'm the coward?
I hardly think so. I'm on record here with hundreds of thousands of words about my beliefs, convictions, experiences, and tastes. You arrive like a thief in the night, anonymous, hidden behind your bluster and bile, and you point a headless, bodyless finger of accusation. You're a joke.
So why did I respond? Because my considered response may be helpful to other inquiring minds like my own. And because when an opponent goes out of his way to give you a perfect setup for a spike, it's hard to resist slamming it down his throat.
You're pwn'ed.
Now go away.
And so it goes.
UPDATE. Talk about drawing blood. 'My Common Name' felt obligated to respond to his marquee status in this post and launched another verbose and convoluted attack. So I smacked him. Which pissed him off. The text of his explosion is quoted at the beginning of my response, which is, again, not for his consumption, but for everyone who approaches these questions not as an acid debater but as an inquirer.
"I don’t consider my position one of
certainty, either, even if you do. I’ve explained, very roughly, the
process whereby I have come upon my (current) position. I’m happy with
it, and really, that’s all that matters."
"Well, Jesus Mothercunting Christ. That… that’s truly awesome. I swear to your god that that is the lamest fucking thing that’s ever been addressed to me in my long and sordid history of internet roustabouts. Pwn’ed in your bollocks, you ridiculous pissarse."
"Bollocks?" "Pissarse?" Gordon Ramsay, I presume? You're just another foul-mouthed Brit (I include Aussies and all the various disaffected Celts in that) (and btw, haven't seen 'cunt' used as a verb since that literary giant William Peter Blatty introduced it in 'The Exorcist.' Hmmm. Is that what the limeys call contextual irony?) jacking off with words about ideas you don't really care about except as a demonstration of your assumptive superiority. Reversion to precious homo-erotic Brit slang is the indelible stamp of of an impotent 'arse' pining for lost days of Empire..
And you talk about lame.
What you'll never be able to see in a thousand years is that there's no point in talking with you. Because the only thing you're about is scoring points. And that really IS an atheist preoccupation.
Your rhetorical winding and twisting is very much like the last video from 'Love and Death' Wade Pelham posted here. You don't have anything against religious faith per se, but but But BUT... the faithful really do all have to admit that you are smarter. You have nothing against morality and if pressed, you will admit to moral feelings yourself, but, But BUT... that doesn't mean anything except when the moral outrage is expressed by you.
You are an atheist within limits, you say, with no presumption of certainty, because you're basing your lack of belief on the math of probability, but you're still superior to agnostics because their agnosticism exists only within limits which are (presumably) not based on the same understanding of mathematical probability you have achieved. And math, lest we forget, is a human invention which has a certain utility but no meaning and blah blah blah but but but. Aaaagh.
You exist in a vacuum. Your dudgeon is a meaningless artifice. Your life is a meaningless sequence of masturbatory gestures. YOU'RE NOT IN THE GAME. You're a pissed-off referee with a pocketful of yellow cards and red cards you fling about as if your rules were something other than a dry cough between the lines of 'Being and Nothingness.'
You're a (what do you chaps call it?) wanker. That's why I say you're pwn'ed. You're not at all interested in the deep questions; you're just fighting. Because you can. And because you have resentments so deep down in your nature that you can't resist roaring into the fray. Which means you're a fucking boring waste of time.
I'll grant you one nugget of response to your mumbo-jumbo creation question. My creation story, the one I believe, lies in the field of potentialities between Hawking's possibly nonexistent (because always -- Zeno's Arrow-like -- infinitely approaching the unreachable limit) Big Bang and Roger Penrose's quantum mind. There is a space in that conceptual interval which leaves room for all presently conceived possibilities and innumerable ones we can't conceive of. It may allow for all kinds of relationships that science cannot presently comprehend, including a universe in which ideas, art, poetry, symbols and allegories -- and Jung's synchronicity -- interact seamlessly with the physics we keep trying to reduce to (mere) math. In this context, there might be a place for humanity's many metaphorical creation myths and its curiously parallel religious convictions to be something more than fairy tales, fallacies, jokes, proofs of mankind's talent for self-delusion, and catalysts for your contempt. The continuously unfolding and infinitely reinterpretable story of Christ's sacrifice on the cross may -- may, I say -- actually be of a piece with the universe itself. These are conceptions which have the potential to expand minds and deepen the most minute aspects of human experience -- without consigning us all to fanaticism or irrational denial.
But every word you write demonstrates that you're not interested in such possibilities, even though you confessedly cannot rule them out. Worse, there's no way you could ever understand the dimensions of such a universe. Which would be like string theory rendered in an umpty-dimensional hologram embodying emotions and thoughts as well as particles and their components. I'm talking about a kind of imagination you're too smart to realize you're too damaged to aspire to.
You arrive here to deliver a series of sanctimonious jabs. I respond with one unanticipated uppercut, and you are shocked, shocked that anyone could dismiss your sheets of verbal diarrhea as, well, diarrhea.
Got news for you, mate. Life ain't about taking the integral of all equations to arrive at a bunch of falsely reassuring straight lines. Life is fabulously, wondrously, beautifully, even miraculously mysterious and interesting. All the stuff we don't know is a ticket to the most exciting ride any form of life has ever taken. But you'd rather be the smartest paramecium in the petrie dish. Excuse me. A Brit paramecium. That would be kind of the dictionary definition of a condescending, unimaginative twit.
I repeat. Go away.
"Well, Jesus Mothercunting Christ. That… that’s truly awesome. I swear to your god that that is the lamest fucking thing that’s ever been addressed to me in my long and sordid history of internet roustabouts. Pwn’ed in your bollocks, you ridiculous pissarse."
"Bollocks?" "Pissarse?" Gordon Ramsay, I presume? You're just another foul-mouthed Brit (I include Aussies and all the various disaffected Celts in that) (and btw, haven't seen 'cunt' used as a verb since that literary giant William Peter Blatty introduced it in 'The Exorcist.' Hmmm. Is that what the limeys call contextual irony?) jacking off with words about ideas you don't really care about except as a demonstration of your assumptive superiority. Reversion to precious homo-erotic Brit slang is the indelible stamp of of an impotent 'arse' pining for lost days of Empire..
And you talk about lame.
What you'll never be able to see in a thousand years is that there's no point in talking with you. Because the only thing you're about is scoring points. And that really IS an atheist preoccupation.
Your rhetorical winding and twisting is very much like the last video from 'Love and Death' Wade Pelham posted here. You don't have anything against religious faith per se, but but But BUT... the faithful really do all have to admit that you are smarter. You have nothing against morality and if pressed, you will admit to moral feelings yourself, but, But BUT... that doesn't mean anything except when the moral outrage is expressed by you.
You are an atheist within limits, you say, with no presumption of certainty, because you're basing your lack of belief on the math of probability, but you're still superior to agnostics because their agnosticism exists only within limits which are (presumably) not based on the same understanding of mathematical probability you have achieved. And math, lest we forget, is a human invention which has a certain utility but no meaning and blah blah blah but but but. Aaaagh.
You exist in a vacuum. Your dudgeon is a meaningless artifice. Your life is a meaningless sequence of masturbatory gestures. YOU'RE NOT IN THE GAME. You're a pissed-off referee with a pocketful of yellow cards and red cards you fling about as if your rules were something other than a dry cough between the lines of 'Being and Nothingness.'
You're a (what do you chaps call it?) wanker. That's why I say you're pwn'ed. You're not at all interested in the deep questions; you're just fighting. Because you can. And because you have resentments so deep down in your nature that you can't resist roaring into the fray. Which means you're a fucking boring waste of time.
I'll grant you one nugget of response to your mumbo-jumbo creation question. My creation story, the one I believe, lies in the field of potentialities between Hawking's possibly nonexistent (because always -- Zeno's Arrow-like -- infinitely approaching the unreachable limit) Big Bang and Roger Penrose's quantum mind. There is a space in that conceptual interval which leaves room for all presently conceived possibilities and innumerable ones we can't conceive of. It may allow for all kinds of relationships that science cannot presently comprehend, including a universe in which ideas, art, poetry, symbols and allegories -- and Jung's synchronicity -- interact seamlessly with the physics we keep trying to reduce to (mere) math. In this context, there might be a place for humanity's many metaphorical creation myths and its curiously parallel religious convictions to be something more than fairy tales, fallacies, jokes, proofs of mankind's talent for self-delusion, and catalysts for your contempt. The continuously unfolding and infinitely reinterpretable story of Christ's sacrifice on the cross may -- may, I say -- actually be of a piece with the universe itself. These are conceptions which have the potential to expand minds and deepen the most minute aspects of human experience -- without consigning us all to fanaticism or irrational denial.
But every word you write demonstrates that you're not interested in such possibilities, even though you confessedly cannot rule them out. Worse, there's no way you could ever understand the dimensions of such a universe. Which would be like string theory rendered in an umpty-dimensional hologram embodying emotions and thoughts as well as particles and their components. I'm talking about a kind of imagination you're too smart to realize you're too damaged to aspire to.
You arrive here to deliver a series of sanctimonious jabs. I respond with one unanticipated uppercut, and you are shocked, shocked that anyone could dismiss your sheets of verbal diarrhea as, well, diarrhea.
Got news for you, mate. Life ain't about taking the integral of all equations to arrive at a bunch of falsely reassuring straight lines. Life is fabulously, wondrously, beautifully, even miraculously mysterious and interesting. All the stuff we don't know is a ticket to the most exciting ride any form of life has ever taken. But you'd rather be the smartest paramecium in the petrie dish. Excuse me. A Brit paramecium. That would be kind of the dictionary definition of a condescending, unimaginative twit.
I repeat. Go away.
P.S. btw,
InstaPunk is a persona of this website. If you did any research, you'd
find that most of the regular commenters think they know who he is in
terms of a real-world identity. But they're wrong about that, sometimes
to their discomfiture. His is a virtual identity, an emergent
electronic property of this website, and his name is InstaPunk.
It's true, my friends. I am, on these screens, only electrons and thought forms. Forgive me for any misunderstandings and hurt feelings that fact sometimes causes.
Brilliant. The myth of superior Brit education.
Okay. This thread is all done now. I
promise.
OVERSTATING THE CASE. Okay. I made a joke yesterday about Formula 1. I was going for a laugh. Truth is, I have always been mesmerized by Formula 1. They're the ultimate competitors in all of human sport. As a boy, I had the privilege of watching Mark Donohue when he was still an amateur. He drove an Elva numbered "000," and in a 20 lap race on an incredibly narrow 1.2 mile sports car track he lapped everybody. Everybody. He was also a Brown-educated engineer, which to the Hugh Douglases of this world probably means that he simply outsmarted the competition with a lot of tech trickery and hand skills. But nothing that required the talents of an athlete. I was a fan of Mark Donohue. I was in awe of Jimmy Clark and Jackie Stewart. Two of the three died in cars. It doesn't get much more serious than that.
It's a funny thing. InstaPunk (The Boss) has been having his fun with atheists of late, sending them into predictable spins of illogical, emotional self immolation. But it takes a blizzard of words and days of osmosis for him to do his damage to the callow pretenders who think their Internet experience qualifies them as philosophers. The amazing thing about cars is that they can make you confront God in an a split second. I literally could not list every internal combustion engine powered vehicle I have driven (or ridden) at one time or another -- Dodge PowerWagons, John Deere tractors, Triumphs, Nortons, Harleys, BSAs, Jags (a bunch), Bugattis, Cobras, Chrysler 440s, Trans Ams, ChrisCrafts, 60 mph speedboats, airboats -- and I have streaked across the land and watery expanses of the rural southern counties of my state at speeds which, at my present age, make me blush. In those mad rushes I have had occasional brushes with the prospect of sudden death, but there was only one experience that made me appreciate the true stature of professional race car drivers.
There used to be a franchise called Malibu Grand Prix. You piad your money for five or ten laps on a tiny but demonically intricate course behind the wheel of an open-wheeled, under-powered race car for the privilege of having your lap times displayed to everyone as you drove. Initially, it was a blast. Those of us who knew something about driving turned in stunning lap times that impressed our girlfriends and even the girlfriends of other less fortunate drivers. But after the third lap there is a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and your timing starts to stutter, and your body and brain grow weary, and what was once exuberant fun becomes work. Labor. Then you begin making mistakes. You're actually out of breath. The legs you never gave any thought to at all are suddenly leaden, slow to do their automatic business with the pedals. Your arms, hands, whatever, aren't quick enough with the steering wheel. And here you are -- a guy who risks his life successfully every damn day on real world roads at much higher speeds than this -- gradually losing control of a vehicle on a f___ng carnival ride.
I'm not up to discussing philosophy at the level InstaPunk has set. But here's what I know. There are flashes, somewhere between the crises you create for yourself at free high speed and the exhaustion of trying to do it in a disciplined state of endurance, that put you face to face with death, eternity, and your own shortcomings. I'm thinking the atheists who are so damn sure InstaPunk is a fool haven't experienced moments like this.
Is that the 'foxhole' argument? Maybe it is. I don't know. I really don't care. I'd settle for Hugh Douglas watching the YouTube video up top and then reassessing his bullshit position that race car drivers aren't athletes. Of course, he'd probably be willing to make an exception for Lewis Hamilton, once he finds out who he is. Any progess is still progress after all. Hugh concedes that Tiger Woods is an athlete, though all other golfers aren't. And when he looks into it, Lewis Hamilton might be an athlete, too, though all other race car drivers obviously aren't. We're waiting for the next step of your enlightenment, Hugh.
posted at
2:54 pm
by
InstaPunk
Update:
Correction &
Elaboration
The
Hugh Douglas Files: Only NFL and NBA players are athletes. Right.
Driving these things is exhausting, dangerous, and, yes, an athletic feat.
Driving these things is exhausting, dangerous, and, yes, an athletic feat.
OVERSTATING THE CASE. Okay. I made a joke yesterday about Formula 1. I was going for a laugh. Truth is, I have always been mesmerized by Formula 1. They're the ultimate competitors in all of human sport. As a boy, I had the privilege of watching Mark Donohue when he was still an amateur. He drove an Elva numbered "000," and in a 20 lap race on an incredibly narrow 1.2 mile sports car track he lapped everybody. Everybody. He was also a Brown-educated engineer, which to the Hugh Douglases of this world probably means that he simply outsmarted the competition with a lot of tech trickery and hand skills. But nothing that required the talents of an athlete. I was a fan of Mark Donohue. I was in awe of Jimmy Clark and Jackie Stewart. Two of the three died in cars. It doesn't get much more serious than that.
It's a funny thing. InstaPunk (The Boss) has been having his fun with atheists of late, sending them into predictable spins of illogical, emotional self immolation. But it takes a blizzard of words and days of osmosis for him to do his damage to the callow pretenders who think their Internet experience qualifies them as philosophers. The amazing thing about cars is that they can make you confront God in an a split second. I literally could not list every internal combustion engine powered vehicle I have driven (or ridden) at one time or another -- Dodge PowerWagons, John Deere tractors, Triumphs, Nortons, Harleys, BSAs, Jags (a bunch), Bugattis, Cobras, Chrysler 440s, Trans Ams, ChrisCrafts, 60 mph speedboats, airboats -- and I have streaked across the land and watery expanses of the rural southern counties of my state at speeds which, at my present age, make me blush. In those mad rushes I have had occasional brushes with the prospect of sudden death, but there was only one experience that made me appreciate the true stature of professional race car drivers.
There used to be a franchise called Malibu Grand Prix. You piad your money for five or ten laps on a tiny but demonically intricate course behind the wheel of an open-wheeled, under-powered race car for the privilege of having your lap times displayed to everyone as you drove. Initially, it was a blast. Those of us who knew something about driving turned in stunning lap times that impressed our girlfriends and even the girlfriends of other less fortunate drivers. But after the third lap there is a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and your timing starts to stutter, and your body and brain grow weary, and what was once exuberant fun becomes work. Labor. Then you begin making mistakes. You're actually out of breath. The legs you never gave any thought to at all are suddenly leaden, slow to do their automatic business with the pedals. Your arms, hands, whatever, aren't quick enough with the steering wheel. And here you are -- a guy who risks his life successfully every damn day on real world roads at much higher speeds than this -- gradually losing control of a vehicle on a f___ng carnival ride.
I'm not up to discussing philosophy at the level InstaPunk has set. But here's what I know. There are flashes, somewhere between the crises you create for yourself at free high speed and the exhaustion of trying to do it in a disciplined state of endurance, that put you face to face with death, eternity, and your own shortcomings. I'm thinking the atheists who are so damn sure InstaPunk is a fool haven't experienced moments like this.
Is that the 'foxhole' argument? Maybe it is. I don't know. I really don't care. I'd settle for Hugh Douglas watching the YouTube video up top and then reassessing his bullshit position that race car drivers aren't athletes. Of course, he'd probably be willing to make an exception for Lewis Hamilton, once he finds out who he is. Any progess is still progress after all. Hugh concedes that Tiger Woods is an athlete, though all other golfers aren't. And when he looks into it, Lewis Hamilton might be an athlete, too, though all other race car drivers obviously aren't. We're waiting for the next step of your enlightenment, Hugh.
