Here’s what Douglas Hofstadter writes about relationship analogies in I Am A Strange Loop.

If two people are romantically involved (or even if they aren’t, but at least one of them feels there’s a potential spark), then almost any conversation between them about any romance whatsoever, no matter who it involves, stands a good chance of being heard by one or both of them as putting a spotlight on their own situation. Such boomerang-back is inevitable because romances, even very good ones, are filled with uncertainty and yearning. We are always on the lookout for clues or insights into our romantic lives, and analogies are among the greatest sources of clues and insights.

From Al Gore’s articulate and  nicely argued Rolling Stones piece, ‘Climate of Denial‘.

Maybe it’s just easier, psychologically, to swallow the lie that these scientists who devote their lives to their work are actually greedy deceivers and left-wing extremists — and that we should instead put our faith in the pseudoscientists financed by large carbon polluters whose business plans depend on their continued use of the atmospheric commons as a place to dump their gaseous, heat-trapping waste without limit or constraint, free of charge.

…

We haven’t gone nuts — but the “conversation of democracy” has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired. Throughout American history, we relied on the vibrancy of our public square — and the quality of our democratic discourse — to make better decisions than most nations in the history of the world. But we are now routinely making really bad decisions that completely ignore the best available evidence of what is true and what is false. When the distinction between truth and falsehood is systematically attacked without shame or consequence — when a great nation makes crucially important decisions on the basis of completely false information that is no longer adequately filtered through the fact-checking function of a healthy and honest public discussion — the public interest is severely damaged.

I really want to make rapture and zombie apocalypse jokes but this is the saddest thing I’ve read today.

In New York’s Times Square, Robert Fitzpatrick, of Staten Island, said he was surprised when the six o’clock hour simply came and went. He had spent his own money to put up advertising about the end of the world.

“I can’t tell you what I feel right now,” he said, surrounded by tourists. “Obviously, I haven’t understood it correctly because we’re still here.”

I suspect a lot of people are going to need counselling and hugs.

Once we admit that the extremes of absolute misery and absolute flourishing—whatever these states amount to for each particular being in the end—are different and dependent on facts about the universe, then we have admitted that there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

As much as I enjoy reading anything by Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape was a little bit of a letdown. Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, asserts that morality is simply another question that can be fully understood and answered using the scientific method, which is sort of the problem in itself – assuming morality to be an empirical property of the physical universe (see Sean Carroll‘s nicely argued rebuttal). The problem arises when he tries to define ‘well-being’ and goes on to state that questions of morality “relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures”; though it isn’t quite clear as to why he thinks of well-being as a quantifiable property.

That said, he does not shy away from subjects such as psychopathy and the nature of consciousness; which when you think about it, does pose a threat to his theory.

Highly enjoyable and most certainly, just the beginning of an extremely interesting and important debate.

Incredibly disturbing but relevant piece by Johann Hari.

And then he smiles, coming up with what he sees as his killer argument. “When I see Western journalists criticise us – don’t you realise you’re shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn’t oil, it’s hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We’re very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don’t have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn’t gloat at our demise. You should be very worried…. Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path.”

Very often, we tend to ignore the correlation between economics and religion.

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

Richard Dawkins’s new book is a strange animal. Marketed as a textbook to illuminate, it turns out to be a polemic of sorts and as a result, is bound to infuriate what should have been his core audience – deniers of evolution.

Being an avowed nontheist myself, I find it a little bothersome that Dawkins refers to creationists as ‘history deniers’ and often places them on the same allegorical boat as holocaust deniers. This is especially funny because Ben Stein and his ilk constantly draw parallels between evolutionists and the Nazis. Tangled web, this.

I’ve been a little wary of the ‘New Atheist’ movement spearheaded by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens (with the occasional cracker-defilement by a certain tentacled professor) mostly because they tend to come across as a tad intimidating. Make no mistake; I greatly admire their writings and have spent hours in front of my computer listening to them bemoan the stupidity of our species. However, I’m of the opinion that if one can’t be convinced by reason and logic, he/she ought to be ignored. There is only so much that can be done for people who insist on finding meaning in silly stories. If you believe that virgins give birth or that you’ll be a ‘well-hung billionaire with wings‘ in your next life, you mostly likely spend a lot of your free time away from what we call, the real world. Let evolution take its course, I say.

(See what I did there?)

The book, however, does a lot of things right. Dawkins explains in painstaking detail how evolution and dating techniques really work and dispels myths about the absence of transitional fossils and other such media fuelled fallacies. Personally, I feel very strongly about this; what is at stake here is the grandest theory in history that provides an all encompassing view of life. Despite the abundance of information out there in the public domain, I was asked why a worm still exists (sic) if we evolved from it . Nevermind that I threw a fit at the mere insinuation, it is imperative that one possesses a rudimentary understanding of what one wants to argue against. And for that, this book is a brilliant start. It is informative and dare I say, entertaining.

Dawkins’s book is a clear and lucid case against anti-evolutionists though he does resort to name-calling once every ten pages. If you can overlook that, the book will provide hours of great science reading. Despite being such an elegant theory, Dawkins reiterates what makes evolution truly remarkable. It can be disproved. But it hasn’t. Not by anyone credible, anyway.

Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart‘s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.

The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem – financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?

…

I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?

(PS: I did feel sorry for Cramer.)

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;  Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.

I remember reading Philip Roth’s Everyman a couple of years ago and then Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores more recently; both of which tell rather morbidly, the stories of old men who after living lives of  regret and philandering are faced with their imminent mortality and unfulfilled desires. Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino draws strong parallels to these stories. Walt Kowalski, however, shuts his emotions in and redeems himself in the strangest and, for a film with so much profanity and tongue-in-cheek political incorrectness,  most gut wrenching of ways.

Eastwood plays a tired and lonely version of Dirty Harry or even, Blondie, who finds himself as an antique from a bygone era in drastically different times. Like most scowling old people, Walt Kowalski is an irate old man who feels the world truly went under after the 60s. He invariably ends up helping a young Hmong immigrant find his bearings in a gang infested neighbourhood. Unlike the terrible Seven Pounds, Gran Torino lets us empathize with a character who learns how to finally let go of life. I do realize suicide is an ethically sketchy subject, but rarely has a film tackled it with such grace. 

And that final scene where Tao drives off in the Grand Torino – such catharsis.

8.5/10

PS: Oh yeah, spoilers.

There’s a series of brilliant articles on CNN IBN about being gay in India.

• Coming out, not a gay and glad experience
• Gay and Indian
• Law and Behold
• Six part video

Just so you know, the Indian equivalent of Proposition 8 in America is Section 377.