Odds and Ends Vol 36

Odds and Ends

I’m so tired. Part of it is being sick. But a bigger part is just mental fatigue. The world really sucks these days. Gone are the days of Trump gaslighting me. But it’s been replaced with most of the right doing something similar. We are still in the middle of a pandemic and they are denying it.

And the only “coming to Jesus” moments are from people like Dick Farrel below. Ron DeSantis will never admit that he was wrong. And I doubt seriously he will ever be punished. More likely, he will be rewarded. It’s just horrible. Speaking of which…

Political Hot Air Can Kill You

Right-wing radio talker Dick Farrel died of COVID-19 Friday. He was until recently very much against the vaccines. He called them “poison” and said, “I know I don’t need it nor ever will.” Well, after he got very sick, he changed his mind. You know: wisdom comes suddenly to some. And then they die.

Much has been made of how he told others to get the vaccine from what turned out to be his death bed. I have a bit of a problem with this. You spend months telling your very large audience not to get the vaccine. And then in your dying days you tell your close friends and family? That’s not really enough.

But I’m sorry for those who were close to him. It sucks to care about loud-mouth idiots.

Paulogia

If you look back at my writing on religion, you will find that in late 2014, I started moving away from the online atheist community. And it wasn’t just people like Sam Harris (or worse: The Amazing Atheist). Even people like Hemant Mehta, who was reasonably respectful of others, showed some pretty sloppy thinking.

But recently, I watched some videos by Genetically Modified Skeptic. I’m not that interested in his videos. But I do like that he is respectful of others and doesn’t seem to be engaged in culture war. And that’s all I really want. I don’t really care if people are Christians as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their lives. Humans are generally irrational and I don’t get upset that people believe foolish things. I’m sure I do too.

Via GMS, I discovered Paulogia, who creates videos I’m more interested in because I find textual analysis interesting even if it sometimes makes my brain hurt. But I couldn’t get into this if the tone of the videos weren’t respectful. Here’s a good example:

Another issue is that I do think that most people would be better off without their religious beliefs — especially considering how devoid most of them are of theology. But the only way to convince theists is to respect them — at least the ones who are honest and sincere.

So I hope that GMS and Paulogia are indications of the direction that the atheist/skeptic community is going.

(There is one thing I’m not too keen about with both these guys: their apparent admiration for Christopher Hitchens. He’s fine. He was a good rhetorician. But he was not a serious thinker and the atheist/skeptic community needs to move past him. He was a big part of what poisoned the community starting a decade ago.)

I also got reintroduced to Bart Ehrman whose book Misquoting Jesus had a huge effect on me. Here’s a lecture about it but the book is really worth reading:

Good Filmmaking vs Bad Filmmaking

Recently, I was watching M Night Shyamalan’s film The Happening and I came upon a featurette that explained how they had accomplished the “amazing” Jeep crash scene. And I thought: what bullshit! They spent a huge amount of time and money to create an absolutely boring scene in one shot that would have been better if they had created it via editing.

And it got me thinking about the amazing meathook scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s done with just two camera set-ups and is incredibly effective. I’ve spoken to people who have never gotten over the scene decades after they saw it!

So I wrote an article comparing these two scenes. I’m pretty happy with it, so check it out: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre vs The Happening: Comparison of Two Scenes.

If We Were Treated Like We Treat Cuba

Janine Jackson made an excellent analogy to the way the US continues to treat Cuba and the way many have reacted to the pushback against our horrible international meddling.

Imagine if China used its power to cut off international trade to the US, including for things like medical equipment, because they didn’t like Joe Biden, and hoped that if enough Americans were made miserable, they would rise up against him, and install a leader China thought would better serve their interests. How would you think about Chinese media that said, “Well, we heard a lot of Americans say they were unhappy; they even marched in the street! Obviously, that was a call for foreign intervention from a country that understands democracy better than they do.”

And then what if some Chinese people said, “Wait, you can’t immiserate ordinary Americans to push them to overthrow their government; that’s illegal and immoral,” and other Chinese people explained, “You don’t get it; US politics are very complicated”?

COVID-19 Is Back

I used to check the CDC COVID-19 tracker every day. But a month ago, our 7-day running average of deaths got below 200 and I decided to stop. I shouldn’t have. I should have known that there are vested interests in this country that will keep this pandemic coming.

For almost a week now, our 7-day running average of deaths has been up over 400 with every sign of a continued trip upward. I think we are just going to have to get used to more people dying. And being vaccinated won’t help us. Soon, we will have a variant that isn’t controlled by the current vaccine.

And this is all because our authoritarian neighbors really want to make a statement. It boggles my mind that people are upset about mask mandates. How does this harm anyone? I can see people being upset that others don’t wear masks. But how did this minor inconvenience become a matter of “liberty”? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

For centuries, governments have taken extreme measures to fight pandemics. But suddenly, among the American right, doing anything at all is tyranny. It’s absurd.

Be Nice

I got some good feedback on this tweet over the weekend:

It’s weird to me. For one thing, these insults don’t even make sense. Sure, Apley was overweight but that wasn’t why he died. Ben Shapiro isn’t that short. And I don’t know why anyone claims Melania Trump is a slut.

But that isn’t the point. I don’t believe in shaming anyone for these things, right or wrong. And I don’t think people on the left think we should either. I just think it’s easy. But we should stop.

One person replied, “But Melani Trump is easy, cruel, and off-point.” But she thought better of it and later deleted it. If you are going to be offensive, at least be funny.