inkbluesky

In America anti-intellectual? Now, let’s think this out a review of Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason Carlin Romano writes,

Yet if Jacoby were a more nuanced thinker, she’d be less abusive and more explanatory. Many secular thinkers, after all, grasp that religious thought persists not because believers are stupid or can’t reason, but because concepts like God, faith and design possess logical peculiarities that make it impossible to disprove religious beliefs without prior agreement on how one defines terms.

This little nugget appears about half way through his review. Thus being open minded enough to at least consider his issues with The Age of American Unreason when someone with some background in science, the scientific method and the philosophy of science gets to that point must consider as many will that those objections that hold some weight were arrived at most likely by chance. Someone that thinks”God, faith and design possess logical peculiarities” lacks a basic understanding of the difference between beliefs and knowledge. There isn’t much if anything logical about religion, one of the reasons that one doesn’t need to get a priest, a rabbi and a mullah in a room to get a good argument going; three rabbis or three Evangelicals will do fine. That is not to say that theologians and lay believers don’t use some of the tools of logic as Romano does, they’re just very inconsistent about how they use and apply them. There are flaws in Jacoby’s book, but Romano isn’t up to the task of being able to articulate what they are. Neither is the right-wing Spectator who writes in it’s head spinning review,

Arguably the cultural battle between elite, lettered Yankees and rowdy southern crackers commenced when Andrew Jackson challenged John Quincy Adams for the presidency in 1828 and won.

As Michael Graham notes in Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War, despite temporary setbacks in the War of Northern Aggression and Civil Rights Movement, the hillbillies have been winning ever since.

The fake homage to the working class and an appeal to the most base emotions has taken the Conservative movement a long way so it is little wonder that they view any cultural shift of the masses away from ignorance with a teary eyed nostalgia.

city song

I find mist and scattered water drops difficult to work with. These photos of Sony’s Walkman advertising campaign show just what professionals can do with rain. Behance is an interesting creative community for graphic designers, worth your time to poke around over there if you can find the time.