Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Culture

Why Isn’t Wonder Woman Fat?

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In an article which must be satire but isn’t, a woman asks:

When Will Wonder Woman Be a Fat, Femme Woman of Color?

Never.

  1. She’s not sedentary.
  2. She’s from an island without men, so modern day women’s issues would have little import to her.
  3. She’s Greek, so she can’t be.

If Wonder Woman became any of those things she wouldn’t be Wonder Woman. If somebody wants a fat, non-white, super-heroine who doesn’t need a man, that person can just do what normal creative people do: pick up a pencil and draw the comic.

If a film review says something like, “When will the movie (good or bad) deviate from the outdated source material?” rather than “Is this deviation from the source faithful to it while still creating a good film?” then the reviewer doesn’t care about the movie or the source.

A Hulk fan being concerned about the Absorbing Man somehow being Hulk’s father in the 2003 film or the Absorbing Man being too weak to be a Hulk villain in Marvel’s agents of shield, that makes sense. Complaining that the work of other people is poorly designed art or even fundamentally immoral garbage makes sense.

Complaining that an adaptation of somebody’s art doesn’t fundamentally fail to represent that art is stupid. Complain about Wonder Woman as she was, make a new hero, complain about the coherence of the film, or the film’s intrinsic morality…but why complain that the film doesn’t adequately reflect moder social movements foreign to the creator when you could just make your own?

Islam and the Political Left

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I remember last year when the HuffPo article Muslims are the True Feminists came out and I thought it was a joke. In the past, I had considered creating a feminist character who wrote articles for them claiming that the only way to be a true woman was to have an abortion in order to prove that they would publish anything. But alas, they did publish it. And the author does point out some true things, such as the liberating power of modesty. But what is interesting is that this article was seen as explicitly empowering by left leaning types who sympathize with social justice, despite having selections like this:

So I urge my Free the Nipple gal pals to take a look at your Muslim sisters and collaborate with them to create a feminism that treats the female body as a temple and not as a toy. Let us see feminism in a different light—through modesty and the courage to savor our sugar. Let us call on the Muslim feminists of the world.

In other words, don’t fall for stupid ideas, such as the idea that displaying your body nudely on the Internet is a rebellion against the male gaze. To overcome such stupidity, she argues, feminists should look to the traditions of Islam.

Now, I’m no Muslim and I don’t think that hijab chic is the answer to issues of self-esteem and women’s rights. But the argument isn’t utterly insane. But what is weird is that the argument was accepted and applauded by people who write endless articles connecting modesty with rape culture, body shaming, and eating disorders when Christians care about it. One article even goes so far as to say that Jesus doesn’t care how people dress, despite the Biblical call in several places for men and women to be modest with their dress. Why is modesty enforced by Muslim men (by legal penalties) a sign of feminist liberation, but modesty recommended in Christian circles a deadening force of patriarchal oppression? I mean, even in very secular cities, the main restriction on women’s dress is that they can’t walk about topless…but most women don’t want to anyhow as people naturally tend to cover erogenous zones in circumstances in which they aren’t soliciting a mate.

As bizarre as the example above is, Edward Feser made a few more observations:

All of this is, of course, well known.  My point in rehearsing it here is neither to compare Islam unfavorably to other religions, nor, for the moment, to suggest that any of the facts rehearsed reflects inherent (as opposed to historically contingent) features of Islam, though I will address that question below.  The point is rather this.  Western Christianity has largely accommodated itself to liberalism.  Give or take a few standout episodes (such as the French Revolution), it has less political power now than at any time since before Constantine.  And the more any of its tenets are out of sync with liberalism, the less likely even prominent churchmen are to talk about those tenets in public or to put much emphasis on them in private.  Christianity, in short, has effectively been “tamed” by liberalism.  And yet liberal Christophobia has only increased.  You might think, then, thatIslamophobia would be an even greater tendency within liberalism, given how very much farther out of sync contemporary Islam is with contemporary liberal mores and policy.  And a few prominent left-of-center voices — Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Bill Maher — have indeed been highly critical of Islam.

But in fact most liberals exhibit exactly the opposite tendency.  Probably many liberal readers of this article, including those happy to rehearse the purported sins of Christianity, will have been made uncomfortable by the list of facts about Islam rehearsed above.  To say anything which might seem in any way to put Islam in a bad light is to risk having flung at one the now-routine accusation of “anti-Muslim bigotry.”  The tendency is to downplay every aspect of historical and contemporary Islam which is irreconcilable with liberalism, to search out and call attention to aspects which are (or can be interpreted as) favorable to or at least compatible with liberalism, and to insist that the latter alone are representative of “genuine” Islam.  In his New Criterion article, Minogue noted how Christophobia has been conjoined with an “extraordinary solicitude for Islamic sensibilities in Western states since 9/11” — since 9/11, take note.  Despite 9/11, and indeed, one is tempted to say evenbecause of 9/11.  Every new jihadist attack seems, as if by a kind of reverse inductive reasoning, to make some liberals even moreconfident in their judgment that there is no essential connection between Islam and terrorism, and that Islam and liberal values are ultimately reconcilable.

The concomitant of Christophobia, then, seems to be not Islamophobia but rather a kind of Islamophilia, and the condemnationof Islamophobia as itself a manifestation of the purported evils of traditional Christianity.  Nor is it only in liberal perception of current events that Christophobia and Islamophilia are conjoined.  As Minogue also observed, one of the ritualistic liberal expressions of Islamophilia is an incessant “apologizing for the Crusades” — this despite the fact that the Crusades, while far from morally spotless in their execution, were essentially defensive responses to medieval Islamic aggression, as actual historians of the Crusades like Jonathan Riley-Smith andThomas Madden never tire of demonstrating.   Modern Westerners apologizing for the Crusades is like Eliot Ness’s descendents apologizing to Al Capone’s descendents for some of Ness’s men having gotten a bit rough with some of Capone’s men.

Feser has some reasons as to the apparent compatibility between Western Liberalism and Islam. My thought is that for both sides it’s strategic and naive. Leftists find in Islam a useful rhetorical tool to use against Christians and Christianity. But because they don’t believe that anybody sincerely believes their religion, they think that once Islam is on the rise, it can be modified (it won’t work). Similarly, Muslims who genuinely believe that dar al Islam should encompass the world see liberalism as a tool against Christianity without realizing that the deep hatred that leftists typically have for tradition and hierarchy could eventually be used against them.

Anyway, any layer of this commentary might be wrong, it’s impressionistic at best.

 

Random thoughts and links 5-29-2017

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  1. Does Capitalism Hurt Women?
    The article answers no. I think the abbreviated explanation is satisfactory.
  2. What might actually be leading to apparent increases in autism?
    I am aware of no scientific evidence for the connection between autism and vaccines, but all that bluster might be a bit of a distraction from several contributing factors that are less politically correct to mention:

    1. Maternal Age
      Women have children later and later in life. It’s not just that they’re continuing to have children, it’s that they’re having their first children much later (in the upper classes, anyway…women continue to have children prior to marriage in lower socio-economic rungs). But because careerism is pushed so hard, the biological realities are rarely explained to women who want a family and a career, but advancing maternal age predicts autism spectrum disorder
    2. Maternal Obesity
      We’re fatter than ever. There are several risks for this state of affairs to anybody residing in the womb of an obese person, but it is rarely hinted that autism is one of them.
    3. Maternal Antidepressant Use
      A few studies suggest a link between autism and maternal antidepressant use. While the link is small, the most recent look into the issue (2016) suggests that more research needs to be done. It does appear to be true that boys are more susceptible to ASD from in association with SSRIs. This particular issue is of some importance in light of the fairly recent revelation that 21% of American women are on psychiatric drugs.
    4. Paternal Age
      Because of several factors, ranging from delayed marriage, delayed reproduction, or the remarriage of older men to younger women (after men age physically, they’re typically more resource rich, so they seem to remain in the dating pool potential for younger women), men are fathering children at older ages than in the past. And the data on autism spectrum and paternal age is “robust.”
    5. Endocrine Disruptor Exposure
      While air pollution is verified to have neuro/psychological effects, another key environmental factor to consider is endocrine disruptor exposure. These chemicals are quite common in plastics. Based on Simon Baron-Cohen’s research on the connection between in-utero androgen exposure and autism, it’s worth a look. And as it turns out, some evidence is beginning to emerge.
  3. Yale University has awarded those who oppose free speech. There are several solutions to problems of this sort. My favorite is solution is that the universities should continue to cater to this small but noisy coterie of agitators while a group of smaller schools follow a market model designed around product quality and efficiency. People underestimate the possibility of this because they assume that sports or other interests will overtake a school if it becomes market oriented, but this is simply untrue. Most schools take donations and government money which determine the sort of product that can be offered. If a school taught specific skills at a high level, even the skills of the humanities, such a school could thrive if is was reasonably priced and owned/managed by the professors. Churches did this in the past.  Of course, that’s all idealistic, somebody has to build it.
  4. Jordan Peterson’s lectures on the Bible have started:
  5. Vicki Larson writes that marriage shouldn’t receive social benefits of privileges. The thesis is interesting. The argument is not only boring, but unconvincing. Insofar as a society exists in which parents prefer to take prime responsibility for their own children, marriage will continue to exist. And insofar as procreation is how society continues to exist, then marriage will be the prime theatre for social responsibility and therefore privilege. Why? Because privilege and responsibility usually go together.

The Best Article I’ve read in the WSJ

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In an unusual occurrence, I found a pretty good WSJ article today in which the author argues that nationalism (what I’ve called friendly-competition nationalism or neighborly concerned nationalism in private conversations) might solve some of the problems with poorly assimilating Islamic cultures around the world:

To wit, for most people everywhere, humanity is “too large and too diverse” to provide meaningful communion. “I cannot prove that the nation-state is the only viable form,” he says. “But what I’m sure about is that to live a fully human life, you need a common life and a community. This is a Greek idea, a Roman idea, a Christian idea.”

And:

Then again, the 19th-century marriage of liberalism and nationalism ended in a very ugly divorce in the first half of the 20th century. What about the dangers of reviving nationalism today? “There is no a priori guarantee that it could not devolve into something nasty,” Mr. Manent says. “But if we don’t propose a reasonable idea of the nation, we will end up with an unreasonable idea of the nation. Because simply: However weakened the idea of the nation, nations do not want to die.”

The article was written in response to what is, regardless of what people think of its source, a piece of political wisdom of an older, saner age:

America is a sovereign nation, and our first priority is always the safety and security of our citizens. We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.

The reason I was always, and will always be reticent to identify with a particular political party is the tendency of the current parties to frequently engage in endless wars, endless invitations to those dispossessed by those wars to live here, and endless nation-building in response to the destruction wrought by said wars.

Does Religion Cause All Those Wars?

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Reposted from my old blog.

This post was meant to be a brief response to Sam de Britto’s short article on the relationship of God-belief to war. It mostly became a rambling essay spring boarding from his thoughts.

Atheists are goofuses

Sam de Britto posted a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald about God and war. He’s one of those brilliant brights who intentionally mischaracterizes what most believers in God claim their God-belief constitutes. So he calls God a sky-wizard and gives up his effort to prove a point by saying, “Build your churches, mosques and temples – I’m building a bomb shelter.”
The article has some statements that might be factual, but that is disputable. What interests me is that based upon his own logic (not mine) he’s wrong:
It must be frustrating worshipping an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful being and He does nothing to smite, humiliate or deter those who do not. Violence or discrimination in God’s name thus seems to be the ultimate redundancy because surely the point of divine omnipotence is setting the chessboard just as you’d like it…
Take the same stand against God [that I take] in the US and you’ll never see high public office, which means every “leader of the free world” now believes in the Sky Wizard or is so fearful of a pious backlash, they lie about it in public and toddle off to church every Sunday to complete the charade…
So, according to his presupposition, “nothing happens to humiliate or deter unbelief” he is incorrect. This is the case because he whines that atheists are persecuted and that world leaders have to pretend to believe in God to be elected.
This should have been obvious to him because on his (wrong view) of divine omnipotence, God very well could have set it up so that the leaders of the free world believe in the sky wizard, and indeed has done so. De Britto even sarcastically identifies the alleged persecution he faces , at the hands of religious fanatics in Australia, with God: “God is very much with us and he’s coming to get me…” With respect to his first premise, if these persecutors are real, then things do happen to deter unbelief.
So, if God is setting up a chess board (which I doubt) and God’s work is to be identified with what believers do without qualification (which is a stupid idea, but de Britto accepts it), then God did make the state of affairs difficult for atheists.  The author is wrong on several levels since most religions really do claim, in their own holy books, that there is a right and a wrong way to do their religion. This means that one cannot attribute the works of every religious person to the deity to whom they give allegiance. There’s a heuristic in a holy book, tradition, or aphorism.

The imaginative atheist

Aside from barely rising to the level of writing a self-consistent article, the author ran into other troubles as well. He also accepts the idea that the west, in general, isn’t friendly toward atheists. He appears to have imagined a version of western civilization that is more akin to a Caliphate than any actual Western nation. But when it comes to the data available, some polls show that even atheists distrust atheists,  but it still remains the case that in general Christians and non-Christian religious types are quite friendly toward atheists.
This might be because Christians were identified as atheists by the pagan roman empire. Christians who know that might feel some kinship with atheists. We understand why people worship other things, we just find said worship to be unappealing on the basis of our other commitments. It is also the case that my atheist friends, many of whom I befriended after they made fun of me and I joked back with them, eventually reveal that they make fun of religious people or start debates with them in the midst of non-argumentative conversation. In other words, they pick fights. Everybody argues with that guy, whether a Christian a libertarian, or an atheist. If you act like the weird uncle and then also act shocked by people thinking you’re a jerk, then you are the weird uncle.

The Historically Errant Atheist

The main error is obvious, but he makes more. It’s not even his identification of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Hitchens as esteemed thinkers (of then, only Hitchens stands out). He steals their hypothesis that moderate religious people somehow enable extremists (no citation?!?! Sad!):
As has been pointed out by many esteemed thinkers, this is the insidious nature of “moderate” religion. It makes it all so reasonable to respect and treasure “fantastic propositions” that can be believed without evidence and that it’s only extremists who distort the “truth”.
If the religion has a heuristic, you can tell if its followers are doing it right or wrong by checking:
  1. the source text (Bibles, Vedas, etc.)
  2. how the mainstream sects interpret said text
  3. what are people doing that either contradicts or comports with that interpretation.
In other words, any religion that judges its extremists according to it’s orthodoxy is, by definition, not enabling them. As an aside, atheism, as simple belief that God is not, has no orthodoxy, so it’s weird to hear atheists criticize atheists for not being atheistic correctly.

The Potentially Violent Atheist

Another problem problem is the over-all premise that because he identifies certain social ills that have a connection to God belief, that he’s found the solution to all wars: Get rid of God belief, get rid of violence. He’s not as violent about it as Sam Harris, who famously recommends preemptive violence against others based on their beliefs, but he does allude to Harris, so one wonders if he buys Harris’ argument that killing religious people for their beliefs is a good idea. Harris mentions this in his book The End of Faith:
The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

The Historically Errant Atheist

Now, Mike Bird deals with his argument on the level of articulating what Christians actually believe or at least what their holy book articulates (some Christians do not know that the New Testament says to love your enemies).
But I’m more interested in the fact that the “religion causes wars trope” has been refuted. Vox Day refuted it by actually checking the Encyclopedia of Wars (don’t buy it, it’s pricey, several libraries have it, check worldcat.org). I have a digital copy and searched through its religion references. He is potentially correct when he notes that the Encyclopedia of War lists as religious “123 wars in all, which sounds as it is would support the case of the New Atheists, until one recalls that these 123 wars represent only 6.98 % of all of the wars recorded in the encyclopedia” (Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist, 105). As an aside, Vox includes more wars than the authors do in the “religiously motivated wars” category. It’s honestly difficult to even find that many.
So, are there atrocities that are apparently happening as a logical consequence of certain forms of God-belief? Yes. Or more clearly put: Are people doing evil things for which they use God-belief as a justification and warrant? Yes. But is it the case that horrible conflicts, strange evils, and injustices would end if we got rid of religious belief? No. People find lots of reasons that are disconnected from God to go to war, to cheat, to steal, to wantonly mistreat others, destroy property, and so-on.

References

Phillips, Charles, and Alan Axelrod. 2005. Encyclopedia of Wars. New York: Facts on File, Inc.
Vox Day. 2008, The Irrational Atheist. Benbella

The Dark Knight Trilogy and Intertextuality: Stallone, Dumas, Hugo, and Dickens

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I’ve always loved intertexuality. I especially love the interplay between books and film.

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy is a great example.

The movies have many resonances. For instance, the trilogy is intentionally based upon Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. Most obviously, when Commissioner Gordon reads from the book:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

But there were other allusions as well. Some outside of French literature. For instance, there’s an almost plagiarized line from Rocky III in the film:

“I was wondering what would break first…your spirit…or your body!”

And then:

“If I can’t break your spirit, I sure enough can break your back.”

And then, of course, the movie also follows the pattern of Rocky III as well as the Rocky III theme song, Eye of the Tiger:

So many times it happens too fast
You change your passion for glory
Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive

And again:

“Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you.”

While Thunderlips couldn’t break Rocky’s spirit, Clubber Lang did. But his former opponent, Apollo Creed invites Rocky into a dangerous and new training environment in order to come back and attempt one last fight against Lang. Similarly, Bruce Wayne, after having his body and spirit broken by Bane ends up in a prison filled with the criminal element of the world (Wayne’s primal enemy). But it is the criminal element that understands the fear of death and the desire for life and freedom that allows the Batman to fight Bane with renewed vigor, “Rising up to the challenge of survival.”

But aside from Rocky and the Tale of Two Cities, what other literature adds meaning to the films? Two examples are Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.

The character Bane, is essentially a combination of Javert from Les Miserables and Dantes from Monte Cristo.

For instance, Javert and Bane are both born in prison. Both are deeply obsessed with the idea of innocence. To the extent that both are willing to die rather than be implicated in actual wrong doing. Bane is willing to die in a nuclear blast in order to cleanse Gotham of evil as well as for the sin of allowing Batman to escape prison. Similarly, Javert ends his life when he realizes the contradiction between the law and his own life. Also, in Javert’s confrontation with Valjean (I’ll quote the musical for familiarity’s sake), he claims that he can easily understand and defeat Valjean despite Valjean’s superior strength because of his personal familiarity with the scum of the earth:

Valjean

 I am warning you, Javert
I’m a stronger man by farThere is power in me yetMy race is not yet run!I am warning you, JavertThere is nothing I won’t dareIf I have to kill you here

I’ll do what must be done!

 Javert

 Dare you talk to me of crime

 And the price you had to pay

 Every man is born in sin

 Every man must choose his way

 You know nothing of Javert

 I was born inside a jail

I was born with scum like you

I am from the gutter, too

This is essentially Bane’s line when the Batman attempts to use the power of the shadows to defeat him:

“I was born in the darkness…the shadows betray you because they belong to ME.”

Both Bane and the Batman are painted with shades of Edmond Dantes. For instance, in the comic books and in Bane’s backstory in the movie, he was trained in prison by a priest who taught him deeply in philosophy, mathematics, science, and linguistics. And Bane, in the film, can perform advanced nuclear physics in his head, not only so, but he was picked up and trained by the League of Shadows partly due to his already considerable fighting prowess. But this training is what Edmond Dantes received when he was wrongly imprisoned, with the addition of fencing. Bane, after further training from the League of Shadows, seeks to do anything possible to cleanse civilization from any elements which are dangerous or corrupting of children. But Bruce Wayne is also an allusion Dantes. When Bruce Wayne is wrongly imprisoned, he sinks into despair and wishes to simply die until a wise sage-like character (perhaps Bane’s teacher) who encourages him to regain his strength and escape and gain vengeance upon the man who broke his spirit and left him to languish unjustly in prison. This is, of course, very important in the Nolan Trilogy, because Bruce Wayne becomes the Batman from prison in the first film, for there he means the leader of the League of Shadows.

While I doubt anybody still thinks about those films, they really are rich with intertexts as well as archetypal figures (remember, in the first film the penultimate villain is a Jungian psychiatrist!). The key archetype is the relationship of vulnerable humanity to the chaos and danger in the world. For Bruce Wayne (or Bane) to overcome evil in the world, they must descend into the depths of the underworld as well as their own souls. This is analogous to the Christian discipline of confession. One must truly discover one’s own filth and admit it in order to take any steps to clean up the world. Or, to put it another way, one must gain the cunning abilities of the serpent, but only use them innocently in order to avoid becoming the serpents prey (Matthew 10:16). You have to have the teeth of the predator in order to be a protector, etc.

Because the movies touch on such universal themes, they will remain significant to any who watch them regardless of whether their legacy will endure.