31.7.04

Blog Crushes And The Real You

Milbarge has a guest post at Crescat Sententia on the subject of blog crushes. My own admiration of various bloggers has been surprisingly free of romantic overtones*, though I do have some experience with message board crushes and IM crushes. Milbarge is concerned to respond to the criticism that online identities aren't the "real you," and so someone with a blog crush is falling for a fictional or deceptive personality. Now, it's obvious that blog personalities don't always match "real life" personalities. Blog crush critics assume that the latter is the "real you," while the former is fake whenever the two diverge. Certainly the scope for deliberate deception is greater online, but in my experience few of the people you meet online are the fabled 40-year-old pervert pretending to be a teenage girl.

Milbarge (echoed by Belle Waring) points out that it's quite possible for people to be very deceptive in person. This is true. Indeed, I'd take it farther even than Waring does, and say that blogging is just another arena of social interaction, so someone who spills everything online can't be said to be "really" shy no matter how withdrawn they are offline (or vice-versa). However, I think Milbarge and Waring accept one of the premises of the critics' argument: the claim that unchosen elements of personality are the "real you," while chosen elements are just an act. Stated so baldly, it seems strange to me. The real you is things that just happened to you, while things you put effort into shaping are less important?

When I think about who I am, and what I'd want others to know about me, I think of things that I've chosen to make part of myself, things I've worked on or fought for (or at least deliberately laid claim to out of my stock of natural traits). Indeed, a big part of the appeal of the internet is that, by giving you more control over your self-presentation, it helps you express the "real you" better than you can in real life. For example, I'm not just putting on a show in this blog -- I really am very interested in politics. But you'd hardly know that if you only knew me in person, because I'm no good at in-person political discussions. And if it weren't for the internet (or for print journalism before that, which shares some characteristics with political blogging) I never would have been able to create that aspect of my personality. In some respects, readers of my blog can see who I want to be, whereas real-life friends see only how I was born to be.

There is a reason that the premise that the automatic is more fundamental than the chosen has some validity in judging crushes. There is an assumption that still colors a lot of our thinking about romantic relationships, that once a long-term commitment is made, peopl relax and let it all hang out. By this view, the main reason people would swim against the current of their own inborn personalities is to impress a potential mate, so once the agreement is sealed, they don't need to keep up appearances anymore. If this is the case, then it is in one's best interests to find out about the unchosen elements of a prospective mate, and ignore the ephemeral chosen ones. But I don't think it's necessarily the case. People are acting all the time. What matters is the outcome, not whether it's natural or deliberate.

*(stupid comment removed)
Stentor Danielson, 16:25,

Kerry Speechifies

As of Thursday night, it looks like some people are moving from anti-Bush to pro-Kerry. I find this weird, especially coming from political junkies who have been following the campaign for over a year. Kerry hasn't changed who he is. He didn't lay out any new directions in how he'd handle the presidency. The same arguments about the merits of his candidacy still apply. He (or his speechwriters) just thought up a more inspiring spin to put on it. I can see how a speech like this could convince someone who hadn't been paying much attention to the race, because they would learn new information about who John Kerry is and what he stands for. But seasoned political observers shouldn't change their views over a prettier bunch of words.
Stentor Danielson, 11:14,

NJ DEP vs. PA DEP

Earlier this week, I went to a workshop about the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's brownfields cleanup program. It seems NJDEP has just recently realized that involving the community in cleanups is important. The big issue on most attendees' minds was a recently passed law setting a 45-day deadline for approval of some redevlopment projects. Citizens were concerned (with good reason) that such a tight timeframe would hinder the public's ability to have meaningful input, since communities are slower to organize than developers. The career DEP employees seemed to share the citizens' concerns. The best spin they could put on it was that it was unclear how the bill would translate into implementation, and they'd do their best not to let it cramp the community participation initiative. Then we heard from Bradley Campbell, the political appointee who heads the DEP (he praised "this governor" often enough to show where his loyalties lay). He claimed that the fast-track permitting would benefit anti-development interests, because it's easier to say no right away than to say no after the process has dragged out and developers have invested so much in it. It's an interesting hypothesis, though I'm skeptical. And today I discovered that the Pennsylvania DEP doesn't agree:

[Army for a Clean Environment leader Dante] Picciano supported Weinrich's comments by reading from the minutes of an Oct. 23, 2003 meeting of the Mining and Reclamation Environmental Board of the DEP, where one official allegedly said a network of groups could pose a problem for pro-coal ash groups. "The more time DEP takes to issue a permit, the more time Dante's Army has to network with more environmental groups," Picciano quoted from the minutes.

Stentor Danielson, 00:05,

30.7.04

"I'm Your Deity, That's Why"

Will Wilkinson raises the old question of whether non-religious morality is possible. The claim as he states it is a factual one (whether people actually would act morally without God) rather than a moral one (whether morality can be justified without God) -- though people often use a sort of vulgar pragmatism to slide from the former to the latter. Such a move is basically a "noble lie" position -- it assumes that you and I agree that morality exists (whether for secular or religious reasons), but only religious reasons can keep the masses in line.

I can say anecdotally (corroborated somewhat here*) that the factual claim is untrue, as I know a large number of quite moral secular people. But I can see there being a little something to the religion-only viewpoint during a transitional phase from religion to a secularism. If all along you're hearing that God's decree is the sole basis of morality -- particularly if it's framed in the selfish-Santa Claus way of "if you're good you'll go to heaven, if you're bad you'll go to hell" -- then it's not surprising that an initial reaction upon deciding that God doesn't exist would be to give up on morality as well. (Indeed, I suspect the temptation of giving up on morality can be a motivation for questioning God's existence.) The fault here, though, lies not with the transition to secularism, but with the crude way that popular religion teaches ethics. A more mature ethical position, one going beyond an arbitrary "because I said so," would be more robust in the face of theological doubt. This is not to go so far as to say that religious people must justify their moral beliefs in purely secular terms, or even to give up on the divine command theory's central idea that God's can make anything he pleases moral or immoral. God's say-so need not be the only evidence of an obligation that he created any more than his say-so is the only evidence of a physical fact that he created.

While a person's morality can be expected to change when they undergo a religious change, they would be unlikely to decide they can kill babies and so forth. This saps the force behind the pragmatic appeal, since it's based on the threat that without religion, people will do things that even atheist hearers will agree are really really bad. So you're left with the relatively trivial assertion "if people don't believe in my religion, then their behavior won't match the details of my religion's commands."

*The Wikipedia article seems to be using evidence about the factual claim regarding how atheists actually do behave to address the moral claim that atheists have no justification for acting morally. This is an argumentum ad popularum ("millions of atheists can't be wrong about whether their behavior is justified").
Stentor Danielson, 23:49,

29.7.04

Against Obama

Here's some evidence for my deeply cynical disposition at the moment: I'm getting to dislike Barack Obama. I didn't see his speech, and I haven't read more than a few excerpts of the transcript. But I'm put off by the way the entire liberal commentariat (and some conservatives, too) has gone head-over-heels for him. The general principle here is something I worked out while trying to figure out how I felt about Howard Dean (back when it looked like Dean might actually make a difference). Regular politicians like George Bush and John Kerry are unprincipled and scheming. But at least they have trouble hiding their unprincipled scheming. The politicians you really have to watch out for are the ones who look like straight talkers, the ones who look like they really understand the public and care about doing the right thing. I'm pretty convinced that political Darwinism will quickly weed out any actual principled politicians.

Unfortunately, years and years of being led by scumbags has left Americans desperate for a leader they can love, someone they can feel good about having at the helm, someone they can trust to look after them. This has been amplified in the modern Democratic party, as we've been confronted by the depth of the Bush's mendacity and the crowd of losers that wanted to take him on in November. It surprised even me that "Anybody But Bush" is still, at this late date, the dominant theme on the left -- that even the worst partisan hacks, while they've pragmatically refrained from attacking Kerry, have been unable to convince themselves that he would make a really good president.

Obama is a dream politician for disenchanted Democrats. He's charismatic and tells us exactly what we want to hear. He's a safe crush, too -- only the people of Illinois will have the chance to vote for him, and even there he doesn't face a serious Republican opponent who would eat a truly sincere candidate alive (as many -- incorrectly, I think -- feared Bush would do to Dean). And so it seems everyone has fallen for him.

I plan to keep a wary distance. Maybe Obama really is trustworthy -- I hardly know anything about him, so I can't make a personal judgement. But trust is too easily exploited, especially when the truster really wants to be able to trust someone. Every other politician I've ever encountered has left Obama with a big burden of proof.
Stentor Danielson, 16:18,

I-93 Is Closed For "Democracy"

I'm sort of lying low for the duration of the Covention. Seeing the blogosphere wet its collective pants with excitement about how it gets to be one of the cool kids who can go to this wasteful and meaningless charade isn't helping my cynicism about politics.
Stentor Danielson, 11:22,

26.7.04

Earth Monitoring

Nations Collaborate To Take Planet's 'Pulse' The grandly titled Global Earth Observation System of Systems, which boasts nearly 50 countries as participants, is an ambitious attempt by governments, scientists and industry to launch a network that will continuously monitor the land, sea and air. If it meets expectations, it could transform the way farmers plant their crops, sailors plot their voyages and doctors work to prevent the spread of disease in remote regions. For starters, the network would link data from 10,000 manned and automated weather stations, 1,000 buoys and 100,000 daily observations by 7,000 ships and 3,000 aircraft, officials said. Ultimately, it would vacuum up information from myriad other sources, including satellites monitoring ground and air movements, and feed it all into computers that will process it. ... "This is not a power grab by the United States or ultra-extremist organizations trying to seize control of the Earth," Lautenbacher said, adding that some nations are joining even though they "don't like our Iraqi policy. They certainly don't like our Kyoto policy" -- the Bush administration's decision to reject the 1997 pact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

It's not a power grab to sieze control of the Earth because the people doing this already control the Earth.

From the persepctive of a human-environment researcher, this is an exciting development. However, the data being produced is highly one-sided. It's easy to set up global monitoring of physical processes like ocean circulation and land cover change. It's much more difficult -- and often unethical -- to create comparably rich databases about human systems. This contributes to a natural-science bias in thinking about, and dealing with, environmental problems. On the other hand, it's an open question whether the people that already control the Eath can be trusted with that more detailed human information.
Stentor Danielson, 18:19,