1. The NNP (New National Party) have hired Juan Duval Uys as their media liason.

Mr. Uys has been accused of being behind the SA Male Prostitute blog, where a male prostitute named Skye provided details of his liaisons with famous South African politicians and sportsmen. Skye’s disclosures would either be slander (if false), or a gross invasion of privacy (if true). But that’s not all. Uys is also alleged (a word that must precede any mention of him, in any context) to be Neil Watson, the man behind Crime Expo South Africa, a website that attempted to paint the gloomiest picture of SA possible, often using dodgy stats and false testimony to do so. The website has since been suspended, due to allegedly containing abusive content.

Having said that, I suppose the NNP wouldn’t see any of this as a problem.

2. New Contrast

New Contrast used to be – and sometimes still is – a fine local literary journal. They have, however, allowed their domain registration to lapse, and it’s now the home of some fine link-spammage and advertising for mortgages and other tawdriness. I’d provide the link, but I fear I may be putting money in the pocket of Juan Duval Uys by doing so – it’s journalname.org if you want to check it out, though.

In a further indictment of our literary culture, the burgeoning local-lit site Book.co.za links “New Contrast” in its sidebar.

.org registrations cost $8.99 per year.

3. And, yesterday in Parliament, an opposition MP was thrown out, then today suspended, for asking of our Health Minister whether she was convicted of theft in 1976, while working in a hospital in Botswana. I’ve heard the recording of the session, and many of the news reports don’t do justice to the extreme intolerance for debate demonstrated by the Speaker, a member of the ANC majority. As you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, there are various significant concerns regarding the Health Minister – not least that she may be utterly insane. More prosaically, she may have jumped the queue for a liver transplant, which she needed due to her alchoholism. She may also be a kleptomaniac. Unconfirmed reports suggest that the new liver is taking strain, but I have no new news on her (alleged!) acquisitive tendencies.

Anyway, I think asking for confirmation of these allegations of theft is a fair question for an opposition MP to put to the Health Minister. If not such questions, it’s unclear what the opposition is supposed to do.

But even if happiness is a subjective mental state, we can perhaps correlate measurables like life-expectancy, disease prevalence, literacy, economic and political freedom with our folk-psychological understanding of what it is to be happy. I’m certainly willing to say that in general, having more of those sorts of things do make us happier than having less of those things. And it’s difficult to dispute that the majority of the species do have more of those things than they used to.

There are complications: a more literate society could mean that people are able to learn more, and have richer intellectual lives. But it could also mean that the tentacles of consumer culture reach them more readily, and that they are sucked into intellectual trends that are far more a triumph of branding than sense (The Secret, Deepak Chopra, What the Bleep?, etc.). Having more disposable income could cause them to become increasingly obese, and to then subscribe to one or more of the ever-popular celebrity-endorsed diets.

So even if we have more potential (as a result of more income and the like), we don’t seem to be getting any better at using our resources optimally, and it starts sounding more reasonable to say that we are worse off in that we now have far more power to harm ourselves, given that our options are far less limited than they used to be. Which brings us back to Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

Perhaps this simply boils down to an issue of freedom: I’d far rather we have the means to enhance our lives, even if some of us use those means irresponsibly. The key failing is, as usual, that people aren’t taught to take responsibility, in that nanny-states and programmatic educations encourage us to imagine we’re living in a world with far fewer threats than our actual world has. And if it seems the case that most of us will never be able to engage with choice responsibly, one could begin to argue for the merits of their being fewer choices. But here starts the slippery slope, in that presenting us with fewer choices is the favoured trick of dictators throughout history. Who gets to choose which choices are good ones, and who chooses how many choices we should have? As always, I wish that we could simply trust evolution, and the gradual filtering of sense from nonsense.

And we could trust evolution to do so – if only we had the patience, and a lifetime long enough to see the results. In the meanwhile, pessimism regarding H. Sapiens is very difficult to shake…

INTERVIEWER

What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?

VONNEGUT

It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.

INTERVIEWER

I see.

VONNEGUT

I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I’m always offending feminists that way.

INTERVIEWER

I don’t quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.

VONNEGUT

In order to bite the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. That’s the only reason twerps do it. It’s all that turns them on.

If you haven’t read any, I’d recommend Sirens of Titan or Breakfast of Champions.

Hope you well. This may come as quite a surprise to you and in fact i did not think of it until this morning, but after praying about it, then seeing you this morning I knew I needed to. And before we get any further yes I am a christian so you dont have to be scared of me coming at you from some hidden angle or agenda which probably happens and you getting bible bashed. Christians are so often saying oh those philosophers talk nonsense, but that is not my heart. I really enjoyed [coursename] lectures and wanted you to know what i thought. I dont actually know where you stand in terms of belief, but really felt i just needed to say that you should check out this whole christian thing.
…
I believe it, and from personal experience know it to be true, you dont have to at all, but why not give it a shot, maybe read John or something. You may read it and say well that is a load of rubbish and want nothing to do with it and that is fine, completely your choice. But why not give it a try? You may just find it changes your life, and gives you a purpose you have never felt before. And if you have been hurt by some church/family member/christian before, that is not Gods intention, He wants to know you.

Have a great day and feel free shoot anything back at me.

Enjoying a fine whisky in deserving company starts with that particular sound of a whisky cap being unscrewed, followed by the careful metering of a drop of water into your glass. You can then recline, and (sometimes, depending on the whisky and/or your pedigree) allow the ice to serve as metronome, keeping your thoughts and dialogue in time. Without the ice, swirling the whisky in your glass serves nearly as well, if you pay attention to the tenacity with which the liquid resists settling, preferring to cling to the sides of the glass. This also works when alone, once everyone has departed or as meditation before their arrival.

Meditation is an activity always enhanced by whisky. When drinking single malt, we are acutely aware of place and time – especially of time, not only in the age of the dram but in the ages of geology and geography that are so essential to the particulars of the whisky. History lives in whisky, through place, time and also through the art of distillers and blenders, who carry the obligation to maintain standards set decades or even centuries ago. And it is for this reason that drinking a fine whisky sometimes takes the form of ritual, for in drinking it we celebrate a possible immortality that we, as individuals, can never fully know.

The essence of a whisky, just as with a person, is referred to and expressed by a name. And while many whisky drinkers may understand the name of a whisky to merely denote a certain flavour or bouquet, the name of that whisky – and consequently its essence – involves more than our tactile experience. Even if we are unaware of the circumstances, we still understand that this whisky, in its long life and journeys, has been a constant for thousands before us, and will be a constant for thousands after us. We also know that as individuals it is we that are fickle, while each measure or bottle of whisky retains an essence of the sort that we only experience through broader social connections such as family, nationality or religious community.

We sometimes try to ensure the immortality of our names through children, and in doing we attempt to write a certain sort of history. We then celebrate this history through birthdays, and likewise our broader histories are celebrated through anniversaries and similar events. If we are members of a community with shared ritualistic practices, what we are commemorating is, to a large extent, our connections to history. As Margalit points out in The ethics of memory, there is a “horror of extinction and utter oblivion” at the heart of commemoration, and in being able to commemorate a friendship, an event or even a fruitful day with a good whisky we are allowed, if only for a moment, to be able to feel what it would be like to not be as finite as we are.

Effective or not, what about promoting chastity is an “evil to be rooted out?”

But I said (4th comment):

Yes, we may all have dogmas, but some of us believe they are evils to be rooted out, rather than virtues to be cherished.

A classic instance of straw man, as no-one who is paying the slightest bit of attention could miss the fact that I’m saying dogmas are evil – not the promotion of chastity.

She says:

And what on earth has it to do with social engineering?

But I said:

The fundamentalist machine of Christianity – and its attendant programme of social engineering – is gathering pace at an alarming rate.

Again straw man, in that I claim that the fundamentalist machine is accompanied by a programme of social engineering, rather than the promotion of chastity being a form of social engineering itself. And notice the unintended consequence of her sentence: in trying to refute me, she now rules out the possibility of promoting chastity being a form of social engineering. And given that the motivation of promoting chastity – and purity balls – is to increase the likelihood of desired family values being adopted (and also to decrease the spread of STD’s, etc.), it seems quite odd to insist that it has nothing to do with social engineering, when that’s exactly what the programme is meant to accomplish…

She says:

I’m inferring here that one MUST be sexually active prior to marriage in order to escape life as one of the “socially retarded.”

I said:

Unless you manage to keep your (now socially retarded) child in familiar surrounds, surrounded by equally socially-retarded friends, they’re basically being set up for some form of world-view collapse at some point in their future.

A sincere reader would have read the piece I link to in the post under discussion. Once they had done so, they would understand that it’s the method of, and motivation for, promoting chastity that I argue can cripple human beings intellectually. I never claimed that being sexually active decreases your chances of being socially retarded – it’s more accurate to summarise my point as being something like: “being brainwashed into adopting moral views on the basis of specious and often contradictory evidence can contribute to social retardation”.

So it seems we have 3 possibilities:

1. That Dana is wilfully misrepresenting me, in order to “win” a staged battle and thus “prove” that my post was nonsensical. This wouldn’t be very Christian of her, so let’s imagine that it’s not the case.
2. Dana sincerely believes that she’s being fair to my post. Given how blatant her misreadings are, it would be quite sad if this were true. But having frequently observed how dogma can blind one to reason, this may be the most likely scenario.
3. That Dana is actually a mole, who is infiltrating the apologist circles in order to destroy them from the inside. Seeing as it’s very difficult to mimic the careful arrangement of misreadings and logical fallacies they specialise in, it wouldn’t be surprising that this attempt of hers would be somewhat transparent, especially if she was only recently tasked with her mission.

To conclude, in utter seriousness: the tagline of “Principled Discovery” is from Psalms 11:3. It reads: “If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do?”. The answer seems clear, at least on the evidence of Dana’s blog – they lie.

(Image found while browsing SomethingAwful.com)