I am soooo tired.

Spending from 9am-4pm on a bus sucks. A lot.


And LJ is eating my comments, dammit!

I'm gonna need the pope to shut up now

and turn his attention to properly dealing with pedophile priests. Back off science, back off atheists and back off his fellow Christians too. Here's his latest:

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL3189220620080131?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&rpc=22&sp=true

I want John Paul 11 back. Seriously.

And the good news is...

same-sex marriage conducted in Canada must be recognized in New York, according to appellate division of the State Supreme Court.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--same-sex-benefits0201feb01,0,7758658,print.story


Via: http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4374

Mistakes were made, but not by me: On rationalizations

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/01/mistakes-were-1.html



A quick summary. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts is about cognitive dissonance: the uncomfortable-at-best feeling you get when things you do, or things that happen, contradict your beliefs -- about yourself or the world. It's about the unconscious justifications, rationalizations, and other defense mechanisms we use to keep that dissonance at bay. It's about the ways that these rationalizations perpetuate and entrench themselves. And it's about some of the ways we may be able to derail them. The book is fascinating and readable; it's clear, well-written, well-researched, loaded with examples, and often very funny.

The basic idea: When we believe something that turns out to be untrue, it conflicts with our concept of ourselves as intelligent. When we make a decision that turns out badly, it conflicts with our concept of ourselves as competent. And when we do something that hurts someone, it conflicts with our concept of ourselves as good. That's the dissonance. And what we do, much if not most of the time, is rationalize. We come up with reasons why our mistake wasn't really a mistake; why our bad deed wasn't really so bad.

"I couldn't help it." "Everyone else does it." "It's not that big a deal." "I was tired/sick." "They made me do it." "I'm sure it'll work out in the long run." "I work hard, I deserve this." "History will prove me right." "I can accept money and gifts and still be impartial." "Actually, spending fifty thousand dollars on a car makes a lot of sense." "When the Leader said the world was going to end on August 22, 1997, he was just speaking metaphorically."

In fact, we have entire social structures based on supporting and perpetuating each other's rationalizations -- from patriotic fervor in wartime to religion and religious apologetics.

More on that in a bit.

I could summarize the book ad nauseum, and this could easily turn into a 5,000 word book review. But I do have my own actual points to make. So here are, IMO, the most important pieces of info to take from this book

1) This process is unconscious. It's incredibly easy to see when someone else is rationalizing a bad decision. It's incredibly difficult to see when we're doing it ourselves. The whole way that this process works hinges on it being unconscious -- if we were conscious of it, it wouldn't work.

2) This process is universal. All human beings do it. In fact, all human beings do it pretty much every day. Every time we take a pen from work and think, "Oh everyone does it, and the company can afford it"; every time we light a cigarette after deciding to quit and think, "Well, I only smoke half a pack a day, that's not going to kill me"; every time we eat a pint of Ben and Jerry's for dinner and think, "It's been a long week, I deserve this"; every time we buy consumer products made in China (i.e., by slave labor) and think, "I really need new sneakers, and I just can't afford to buy union-made"... that's rationalization in action. It is a basic part of human mental functioning. If you think you're immune... I'm sorry to break this to you, but you're mistaken. (See #1 above, re: this process being unconscious, and very hard to detect when we're in the middle of it.)

( Read more... )

What gov't should be for:

Gonna make a post tomorrow, and this one from Greta Christina is really helping me top clarify my thoughts.

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2006/08/katrina_and_wha.html



Here's what I think government is. Or rather, here's what I think government should be, and what it actually is at least some of the time. I think government is/should be the structure with which a society pools some of its resources for projects and services that benefit that society, but are too big to be handled privately by individuals or small groups. And it is/should be the structure a society uses to decide how those pooled resources should be used.

Think roads. Sewers. Parks. Fire departments. Public health services. Law enforcement, even. God knows I have mixed feelings about law enforcement as it actually exists in our society -- but as Ingrid pointed out recently, when there's a Ted Bundy on the streets, you want there to be people whose job it is to catch them. It's pretty much spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution, actually: "...to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."

And think emergency services. For fuck's sweet sake, think emergency services.

Except we have a government -- a federal government, anyway -- that's run by people who think government is a bad idea. We have a government run by people who think government should always be as small as possible, that taxes should always be as low as possible, that government is at best a necessary evil. (Or who say that's what they think, anyway. I think they're big fuckin' hypocrites, but that's a different rant.)

And when you see what happened a year ago in New Orleans, you see why government run by people who think government is a bad idea is a criminally bad idea.

Because when you think about what government is -- or what it should be -- you realize that people who think government is a bad idea are essentially opposed to the idea of pooling resources. To oppose the very idea of government, to think of it as at best a necessary evil, is to believe in the philosophy of "Every man for himself." It is to believe in the philosophy of "Screw you, Jack, I've got mine." It is to believe that sharing is bad. It is to believe in the atomization of society, the breakdown of social responsibility into smaller and smaller units. To believe that government is a bad idea is to believe that society itself is a bad idea.

Read rest : http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2006/08/katrina_and_wha.html