Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • Preferred Position

    I really like Neil deGrasse Tyson.  He’s my kinda scientist and he speaks well.  Please watch the entire video before continuing with my little bit.

    Okay, there’s a lot in that with which I agree.  In fact, he gets to my preferred stance on the whole issue, that I would rather not have to deal with the categories and all the rhetorically inevitable garbage that comes with them.  The problem is that most people actually won’t let you do that.

    If I am asked honestly about my thoughts on whether or not there is a god, my answer is usually predetermined, not by me but by the person asking the question.  You can pick this up from context, from body language, from tone of voice, from a hundred small cues that accumulate into the preferred position of the asker.  And while there are many permutations, and shades of gray, it usually—not always, but usually—comes down to two formats.

    There are those, few though they may be, who are honestly interested in a philosophical discussion.  This is the “how do you see this god question” conversation, which can lead to very interesting and fruitful dialogues and can be immensely enjoyable and even enriching.  These are people who, while they may have a preferred position, aren’t interested in pushing it on anyone, they really want to explore the topic.  One key feature of such people is that they are not threatened by the unorthodox, the heterodox, the outre, the radical.  They want to have a conversation about this admittedly complex topic.

    Then there are those who are looking for a reason to pigeonhole and proselytize.  They don’t want to know your ideas, they want to know if you’re With Them or Against Them.

    Atheists and Believers fit into this description and I unhesitatingly claim that there is no functional difference between them if this is all they are interested in.  They don’t want a dialogue, they want a chance to tell you how wrong you are, or hold forth on all the idiots who don’t think like them.

    I’ll admit right here that I’ve fallen into that paradigm on many an occasion.  There’s no real defense for it, but there are reasons.  I do get tired of certain positions on certain topics and the shortcut to ending the harangue often seems more desirable than any possible benefit that may come out of trying to address the questioner as if he or she belonged to the first group.

    Do I believe there is a god?

    Depends on what kind of a god you’re asking me to believe in.  But right there you see the potential for a long explanation.  The concept is not reducible to a simple statement of fact, because all gods have been believed in and it is an insult to suggest that such belief automatically meant one set of acolytes was dumber than another.  When belief faded, the god became an artifact of history.  Do I then belief there never was such a god?  Depends on your requirements for a god.

    There are many aspects of the proposition with which I can categorically disagree.  But the thing that makes it impossible to dismiss out of hand is Belief.  To me, asking if I believe there is a god has many of the same characteristics of asking if I believe there’s such a thing as an idea.  You can’t see either one, there’s no physical evidence for them other than how they motivate people, it is easy (and done all the time) to say that ideas aren’t real.

    It’s in the realm of human action where the problems with both the discussion and the notion of a god pop up, but to my mind that’s a separate issue.  If someone creates a great good—hospitals, art, music, a new way to see—in the name of a god they believe in, it is easy enough to accept that they drew their inspiration from that god and except for some diehard ideologues no one has an issue with the conflation.  No one goes around beating them up for that belief.  If, on the other hand, some one goes around killing, maiming, stirring social ill-will against groups of people because they claim their god wants them to, everyone gets uncomfortable.  The people who may believe in the same god have a problem, atheists use it as an excuse to deny agency, and the zealot feels justified in his or her isolation and martyrdom.  Nothing is solved.  We seem hard put to separate out the issues because inevitably questions are raised as to the nature of belief and the nature of god.

    To me, all gods are real and at the same time they are all irrelevant.  They’re real because people believe in them.  They’re irrelevant because I don’t and do not wish to.  And yet the world functions, regardless which position is true.

    You want to know where I think god is?  In the dialogue.  Whatever it may be.  God, however you choose to define it, appears in the midst of honest communication.  When someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson talks to us about the stars, the universe, the cosmos, and we listen—there’s god.

    When that doesn’t happen, when people don’t communicate—there is no god.

    I invite you all to chew on that idea for a while.

    Unless you think ideas aren’t real.

  • Storm Impressionism

    We had a bit of a violent rainstorm last week.  Made for an interesting Impressionist work.

     

  • More Music

    I wish I had recordings.  Sometimes, these monthly jam sessions just turn out sweet.

    I don’t have much to say about this past Saturday night’s coffeehouse other than everyone had a good time and we had some surprising performances.  So rather than try to recapture the musicality, I offer a few images.

    Bob is a multitalented player, whose skill I envy.  A pleasant surprise was his daughter, Diane, showing up, who turned out (not very surprisingly) to be musically adept as well.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The guy on the right is one of my oldest friends, Tom.  Back in The Day we had aspirations to be rock stars.  For my money, I got something better—a lifelong friend.

     

     

    I “premiered” a piece I’d written a long time ago for a friend and colleague, Allen Steele.  He wrote a delightful story called Blues For A Red Planet and I couldn’t resist doing something musical with it.  Aside from a quote from Holst, there’s not a lot Martian in it, and I’ve never played it publicly before because it requires a decent drummer—which I finally got with Bob, providing the appropriate thunder.

     

    Ended the evening with an unexpected bongo number with our two drummers.  Reminded me of some of the percussion moments from Santana concerts.

  • Embassytown Aurality

    I don’t post music videos normally, but I thought this was exceptional. It’s music based on China Mieville’s truly excellent novel, Embassytown, which I urge everyone to get, read, immerse yourselves in. This novel goes on my list of “novels to be used to teach science fiction” along with a handful of others. Enjoy.

  • New Tree

    So what do you do with a bare patch of backyard?  Why, put a tree on it!

    Donna wanted something for the front yard, which is admittedly rather plain and neglected.  We spend most of our time in the back part of the house where the bay windows look out over an increasingly eclectic yard.  (Donna keeps saying we need to simplify, get it more low maintenance, but…)

    So we bought a Japanese Maple.

    We both love Japanese Maples.  We bought one shortly after moving into the house and it thrives to this day, but what we wanted was a red one and that first one, after an initial showing of red leaves, turned a lovely green and stayed that way.  So we’d always planned on getting another and trying again.

     

     

    Donna found it, of course, and after some negotiation, we brought it home.  You see it here, newly arrived, next to a piece of scultpure I will now have to move.  (We were going to move it anyway, but this has just hastened the day.)

     

    Now, I do not enjoy yard work.  It was sort of understood when we bought the house that I wasn’t going to be real big on it, and we agreed to a division of labor.  It’s worked out pretty well.  I do enjoy the results of good lawn care and the kind of aesthetic experimentation Donna likes to get into.  Of course, there’s been overlap, but mostly the yard is her creation.

     

    Usually, the hard part involving me is in deciding where to put what.  This time, it was just obvious.

     

     

    It’s a beautiful tree.  We “swiped” some concrete edging from next door (long story, it’s all cool) and after an afternoon’s work we have a new member of the forest in our yard.

    Now, of course this wasn’t the end of it.  Oh, no.  Donna’s last job resulted in considerable neglect of the actual lawn, half of which had become overrun with weeds.  So in order to make the new tree more at home, we have proceeded to put down new sod—fescue, to be precise.  And that got a little muddier.

     

    Obviously, she’s having a good time.

     

     

     

     

    I think she does great work.

    This brief interlude of domestic engineering was brought to you by my fascination with a woman I’ve been in love with for over three decades and who I can’t say enough good things about.  I don’t get to brag about her very much…at least, it feels that way to me.  So I thought I’d share this.

    Now back to our regularly scheduled diatribes.  Later.

  • Melinda Gates on Contraception

    As she says, this ought to be utterly noncontroversial. Yet it is, because a toxic meme has been released into the public discourse.

    She’s more polite—more “politic”—than I might be, so I’ll just leave this to stand on its own for now.

  • Work and Mothers

    I don’t have a lot to say about this kerfluffle over the remarks of someone who, as it turns out, is not actually working for Obama regarding Ann Romney never having worked a day in her life. This kind of hyperbole ought to be treated as it deserves—ignored.

    But we live in an age when the least thing can become a huge political Thing, so ignoring idiocy is not an option.

    I remember back in the 1990s a brief flap over Robert Reich. I’m not certain but I believe it was Rush Limbaugh who started it by lampooning the Clinton Administration’s Secretary of Labor for “never having had a real job in his life.” Meaning that he had gone from graduation into politics with no intervening time served as, at a guess, a fast-food cook or carwasher or checker at a WalMart. Whatever might qualify as “real” or as a “job” in this formulation. In any event, it was an absurd criticism that overlooked what had been a long career in law and as a teacher before Clinton appointed him. It’s intent was to discredit him, of course, which was the intent of the comments aimed at Mrs. Romney by asserting that she has no idea what a working mother has to go through.

    A different formulation of the charge might carry more weight, but would garner less attention. It is true being a mother has little to do with what we regard as “gainful employment” in this country: employees have laws which would prevent the kinds of hours worked (all of them, on call, every day including weekends and holidays) for the level of wages paid (none to speak of) mothers endure.

    Hilary Rosen raised a storm over remarks aimed at making Mrs. Romney appear out of touch with working mothers. A more pointed criticism might be that Mrs. Romney does not have any experience like that of many women who must enter employment in order to support themselves and their families, that a woman who can afford nannies (whether she actually made use of any is beside the point—the fact is she had that option, which most women do not) can’t know what working mothers must go through.

    But that’s a nuanced critique and we aren’t used to that, apparently. Soundbite, twitter tweets, that’s what people are used to, encapsulate your charge in a 144 characters or less, if we have to think about it more than thirty seconds, boredom takes over and the audience is lost.

    Unfortunately, the chief victims then are truth and reality.

    So the president gets dragged into it for damage control and the issue becomes a campaign issue.

    Which might not be such a bad thing. We could stand to have a renewed conversation about all this, what with so many related issues being on the table, given the last year of legislation aimed at “modifying” women’s services and rights. Whether they intended it this way or not, the GOP has become saddled with the appearance of waging culture wars against women, the most recent act being Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin’s repeal of that state’s equal pay law. Romney is the presumptive nominee for head of that party and one of the things he’s going to have to do if figure out where he stands on these matters and then try to convince the country that he and his party are not anti-woman.

    Yes, that’s hyperbolic, but not by much. This is where the culture wars have brought us—one part of society trying to tell the other part what it ought to be doing and apparently prepared to enact legislation to force the issue. Ms. Rosen’s remarks, ill-aimed as they were, point up a major policy problem facing the GOP and the country as a whole, which is the matter of inequality.

    That’s become a catch-all phrase these days, but that doesn’t mean it lacks importance. The fact is that money and position pertain directly to questions of relevance in matters of representation. Ann Romney becomes in this a symbol, which is an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of our politics, and it is legitimate to ask if she can speak to women’s concerns among those well below her level of available resource and degree of life experience.

    The problem with all politics, left, right, or center, is that in general it’s all too general. Which is why Ms. Rosen’s remarks, no matter how well-intentioned or even statistically based on economic disparities, fail to hit the mark. She can’t know Ann Romney’s life experience and how it has equipped her to empathize with other women. Just as Ann Romney, viewing life through the lens of party politics, may be unable to empathize with women the GOP has been trying very hard to pretend are irrelevant.

    Like with Robert Reich’s critics, it all comes down to what you mean by “real” and “work.” And that’s both personal and relative. Isn’t it?

  • Some Tribble Time

    Last Friday, the 6th of April, I had the pleasure of being on-stage host to Mr. David Gerrold, writer.  If you’re not familiar with his work…but what am I saying?  Of course you are!  Even if you may not know it.  David Gerrold wrote one of the most loved episodes of the original Star Trek, the marvelous The Trouble With Tribbles. Even those who don’t especially care for the show tend to like that one.

    But if that’s all you’re familiar with by him, then I urge you to correct that lack.  David Gerrold is one of the best SF writers in the business.  I pointed that out last Friday to a packed house.

     

    Me as host as photographed by Robert S. Greenfield

     

    Donna and I had dinner with David prior to the evening’s performance.  We’d met him long ago so could not say we knew him.  Conversation ranged over the map, but kept coming back to writing and voice.  I sometimes find it hard not to go on about how much I liked someone’s work, but the fact is he wrote some stories that stuck in my head, chief among them being The Man Who Folded Himself.  We talked short fiction, novels, politics, the ill-fated St. Louis Worldcon of 1969 (which he attended and I didn’t) and then did a quick tour with the estimable Jenny Heim of the St. Louis Science Center.  The Star Trek exhibit really is very good and it amazed me how much there was, just how long we’ve been living with this fictional universe.

    I did a quick minute or two song-and-dance to introduce him, then he took the stage and regaled us with behind-the-scenes stories of working on the original Star Trek and related minutiae (for instance, the episode was initially called A Fuzzy Thing Happened To Me but had to be changed because of a potential conflict with H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy stories).

    David Gerrold, April 6th at the St. Louis Science Center, photo by Robert S. Greenfield

    I still pay too little attention to the credits on television shows, a habit from a childhood like, probably, most others in which the stars of the show were the most important aspects.  I did not know till that night that he had written one of my favorite episodes of Babylon 5, one called True Believers, which I thought then and still consider one of the most powerful of a strong series.

    Anyway, it was a great evening and I am thrilled to have been invited to be part of it.

    Oh, and please note—the photographs were taken by Robert S. Greenfield.  You should check out his online galleries.

  • TBR

    My To-Be-Read pile.  Not everything is here, but this is a sort of “wanna read” for the coming year.  I plan to follow up in December with a picture of then.  We’ll see.

    That’s all for now.

  • Marriage, Politics, and Dogs

    I must at the outset state that I personally don’t, as the good ol’ boys like to say, have a dog in this hunt. There was a time I might have, but at this stage of my life—our lives, my partner’s and mine—there is no personal blowback. At least not yet, but I’ll make a point about that later. I say this in order to assure people, some of whom will assume what they will no matter what, that I’m grinding no axes here other than my usual intolerance for duplicity, hypocrisy, and related misapplications of do-goodism.

    First, watch this video:

    https://www.c-span.org/video/?311757-1/national-organization-marriage-nom-rally-national-mall

     

    Okay, the aspects of that report I wish to draw your attention to are primarily the shenanigans to which the NOM finds all manner of, surprisingly honest, excuses to indulge. Some borderline, some blatant, many violations of legal and ethical standards. They don’t like playing by the rules—rules, by the way, they would be the first to accuse their opponents of violating should the tables be turned—so they have written a playbook for evading, avoiding, or just ignoring them in order to accomplish their higher purpose.

    Which is…

    I’m still not entirely clear on this. The one aspect of religious intrusion into public and private life that has never made sense to me—sense in terms of what rational people might do or consider appropriate—is the insistence that even those who don’t accept their premises should nevertheless live according to their ideas. I mean, what is so hard about “live and let live” that they find it impossible to tolerate…differences.

    Yes, you caught me, I’m being rhetorical. Satiric. Perhaps ironic.

    We all do what we can to advance our agendas when compelled. I don’t deny it. I have no doubt that there are many underhanded, backdoor actions taken in behalf of things I approve in order to break down social and political resistance to them. Sometimes I shake my head at them, thinking “we didn’t need to do that, did we?” Other times, I look at the iron wall put up in opposition to things which I believe would be a net positive and I think “there’s only one way to get through that” and tacitly give my blessing to the party or organization that gets it done. I do have a moral metric about these things (and, of course, if you’re on the other side from me, ideologically, you will refuse to accept that I base anything on any kind of moral principle) and I take pains to adhere to my own set of restrictions, lines I would not cross.

    Here’s where I get a little frosted over this kind of stuff, though, in this instance. Religion presents a facade of divine moral adherence. As such, it is supposed to stick to a code of conduct, regardless of what it faces. That is, after all, what it’s selling—doing right regardless, being moral no matter the cost, representing Truth. So when it stoops to dirty politics, social shit-disturbing, and underhanded tactics, not to mention lying outright, I have to wonder just what it is they think they have to offer that is any different from those they oppose. Sure, if they pull this kind of thing off and keep the details quiet so most people never find out about the dirty tricks, they can claim to have won a moral victory. But the claim, whether believed or not, is based on a false representation. So by their own set of values, what have they gained? After all, won’t God know they lied and cheated, fomented bad feelings, misrepresented people, caused hurt and harm? Isn’t this a species of the end justifying the means?

    Which we’ve come to accept from many quarters. Some millionaire wants to step up and advocate on behalf of his or her personal beliefs, just because, we are free to disagree or agree as suits our temperament. We might question his character over certain practices, but it remains an open issue as to whether or not he or she is right or wrong in what gets done in the course of advocacy.

    We expect, however, a certain degree of consistency of principle, and the more entangled that principle is with the activist, the less we tolerate deviation.

    Religions are supposedly the final arbiters of moral consistency. So when we find them institutionally engaged in unethical or outright illegal actions, whether in the name of a stated good or not, there is, or should be, a commensurate destruction of confidence.

    Basically, if a church stands up and declares “This is wrong” and takes that stand publicly, fine. If it lends support to groups that also advocate in behalf of that stated principle, fine.

    But if it colludes in essentially caustic moral actions in order to undermine a position and by so doing violates other principles for which it is a strong advocate, then at the most basic level, what value does it retain as a moral arbiter? If, in other words, it has to foment hatred in order to destroy a social policy, what makes it any different than any other group with an agenda?

    Now, to be clear, I realize NOM is not itself a religion. But “close working relationship with the Catholic Church” kind of makes that a questionable claim. Whatever NOM wants to do, that’s their business, more power to ’em. But just from this (not to mentioned other things that have drawn considerable media attention) NOM is working hand-in-glove with Catholic hierarchy and given the Church’s position, they are ideologically on the same page. My questions here are about tactics and moral choices.

    (I should say here that a couple of things puzzle me even more. I’m not sure why NOM is advocating keeping Guantanamo open. What does that have to do with gay marriage? Unless they expect some day to be able to send gays there? Ridiculous. Still, it’s in their playbook, so…)

    I said I don’t have a dog in this hunt. My partner and I never “got married” in the traditional sense. I’m an atheist and both of us, back when it may have mattered, resented the “marriage penalty” in the tax code, so we let it slide. We’ve been together for 32 years. Obviously, we didn’t need a ceremony. We have our love.

    But I have to consider the possibilities of activists like NOM. If they have their way, what we have would be in some form or other, illegal. There was, in fact, a time in this country when we could have done jail time for simply living together.

    Here’s my sentiment. No one, especially not institutions to which I have no regard, has the right to tell people how to be together. Life is short, bliss is hard to find, and there has been enough ugliness in the world from one set of people trying to force another set to conform to standards that ultimately make no difference—unless we insist they do. Such insistence comes in many forms, mostly economic, but also social. Ostracization is harsh enough for nonconformity, but it rarely stops there, and we’ve had recent very public examples of how far it can go, with gays beaten and killed simply for being different.

    So when our political institutions take steps in the direction of alleviating some of that, to make a space for people to live as they choose as long as they harm no one else, to strip away the pall of obfuscatory excuse-making that masks bigotry, and we see such steps opposed by the institutions that have always laid claim to being the source of moral activism by seeding suspicion and disaffection and causing rifts and advocating the dissolution of bonds of affection in order to achieve an ideological conformity that quite frankly no longer maintains, it ought to give people pause over just how far we’ve drifted down the road away from other ideals of community that held that religion and politics ought not mingle.

    Lately there have been many things which have brought this to the surface in our politics. We’re brushing up against raw skin with sandpaper too often recently over what amounts to an attempt to inject into our politics an overt religious sensibility that appears to care nothing for people’s needs and everything for conformity to a set of practices only to mollify the prickly intolerances of people who, to put it bluntly, hate. Most of them probably don’t even realize that it’s hate, but when you put someone you don’t know, whose life experiences you are ignorant of, in a box constructed of saidisms, platitudes, and archaic phobias, you are indulging a kind of sterile hate. “Those People” becomes an anthem leading a charge to disenfranchise, with no regard for where they’ve been or what might happen to them should you get your way. Using your religion to justify intolerance is a slap in the face to everything most religions claim loudly to represent.

    Hm. Maybe I do have a dog in this hunt.