Friday Tuesday Metal: Snow Day Edition

Mavericky!

Interesting spin offered by the WaPo on Sarah Palin’s reported $100,000 speaking fee for her Tea Party speech:

By delivering a paid keynote address at a convention other politicians had avoided because of allegations of profiteering, Palin displayed one of the traits that has electrified her anti-establishment followers: a talent for persistently and defiantly flouting the conventional rules of politics.

Because nothing says "flouting the conventional rules of politics" like raking in big cash.

Friday Metal: Mastodon, “Blood and Thunder”

Causal impotence and reasons for vegetarianism

Scu at Critical Animal says:

I think a lot of people spend time explaining why we shouldn’t (or should!) kill animals and/or treat them as property. But where are explanations on the justification for vegetarianism/veganism as a necessary component of opposition, besides arguments about economic boycott?

If you define an economic boycott as something intended to effect actual change in the practices of using animals, then there are good reasons to think that personal vegetarianism/veganism is not a particularly good way of bringing about such change. The reason is that the market for animal products is nowhere near sensitive enough to register one person’s abstention. So, while everyone going veggie would presumably have the desired effect, it’s hard to see how my (or your) avoidance of animal products can be justified on those grounds.

Some philosophers, while accepting (at least arguendo) that personal vegetarianism won’t “make a difference” in the sense described above, have tried to offer alternative justifications.

One that I came across just recently is this paper by Nathan Nobis, a philosopher at Morehouse College in Atlanta. In it, he tires to marry consequentialism and virtue ethics to provide a justification for personal vegetarianism. A moral person, he contends, will exhibit virtues such as compassion, sensitivity to suffering, and a sense of fairness–all of which point to vegetarianism. But, he says, virtue ethics has a hard time explaining why the virtues are good–is this just a brute fact about the world? A better strategy, he says, is to ground the virtuous life as a whole in the consequences that it has for overall happiness. A virtuous person’s life is likely, all else being equal, to increase the sum total of happiness (or goodness more broadly). Thus, you end up with an indirect consequentialist case for personal vegetarianism even if it doesn’t directly reduce animal suffering.

Another approach, offered by Tzachi Zamir, whose book Ethics and the Beast I’ve blogged about before, is to argue that buying and/or consuming meat is, essentially, the completion of an act of wrongness. An animal would only be raised and killed for meat if someone was willing to buy and eat it at the other end of the chain of events. Thus, Zamir says, we are, in a sense, “commissioning” the killing and “completing a temporally extended wrong through consumption” (p. 48). A version of Zamir’s argument can be found here.

Whither amateur theo-blogging?

Readers may have noticed something of a drop-off in theology blogging in these parts recently. Partly, this is just because my interest in things waxes and wanes, and I’ve found that my attention has alighted on other subjects lately.

I’ve also been considering the question of what niche the “amateur” theology blog is trying to fill. In the past several years, blogs by pastors, theologians, theology grad students, and other “religious professionals” have proliferated. It’s increasingly difficult for the layperson to engage on a substantive level in the increasingly sophisitcated blogospheric debates about, say, the finer points of Karl Barth’s views on election.

Since starting this blog I’ve always had in the back of my mind the idea from C.S. Lewis that there’s some value in the equivalent of “schoolboys comparing notes” on theology, as distinguished from the authoritative dissemination of specialized scholarly knowledge. Theology, almost by definition, is something that all lay Christians should take some interest in because, at its broadest, it’s simply the attempt to understand one’s faith and relate it both to our knowledge about the world and how we live our lives. No thoughtful person of faith can avoid doing that to some extent.

The lay person who lacks the time, inclination, training, or ability to delve into the thickets of scholarly argumentation will always be at something of a disadvantage compared to the professionals. Perhaps, though, the amateur theo-blogger has the advantage that he or she is attempting to apply theology to life outside the academic cloister–to kick the tires and see if theological concepts can do some work in the “real” world. Hopefully there’s some value in that.

Where else can you do a half a million things all at a quarter to three?

Well, not quite half a million things, but my sweetie and I took a whirlwind trip to NYC this weekend to vist friends and managed to pack a fair amount of stuff in.

• The Tim Burton exhibit at the MoMA is really cool. It’s fascinating to see his evolution from alienated kid to Disney hack to someone with his own really unique vision. Also, the props from the Burton Batman movies–which I unfashionably maintain can hold their own against the recent Chris Nolan ones–were nifty to see. The MoMA cafe is also excellent.
• On Saturday night we ate at this rather shi-shi locavorish restaurant in Brooklyn that was really tasty, if a bit overpriced. I was also introduced to the “Brooklyn,” a slight variation on the Manhattan with rye whisky instead of bourbon. (Though, according to Wikipedia, rye is actually the traditional choice for a Manhattan too.) Either way: yum!
• The Strand. Oh, the Strand. “Eighteen miles of books” is the tagline. I consider myself a truly dedicated book browser, but even I find the Strand a bit overwhelming. Maybe that had something to do wtih it being really crowded and the fact that I was lugging a heavy backpack. Still, I did pick up a copy of Jean Kazez’s new book Animlakind, a good chunk of which I read on the train ride home. (And I may blog about it a bit later.)
• It was really, really cold.

UPDATE: Note to self: dial it back on the use of “really.”

Friday Metal: 3 Inches of Blood, “Battles and Brotherhood”

I saw these guys last fall at the 9:30 Club and they are old skool: big, shaggy dudes in denim vests covered with patches. Awesome.

McCarraher on Christianity and politics

Here’s a very interesting interview with lefty Catholic intellectual Eugene McCarraher (via). He has a lot to say about the Manhattan Declaration, Radical Orthodoxy (the line about the cult of Wendell Berry–ouch!), Herbert McCabe, and socialism.

Literalists, progresives, and Lost

I like this, from Newsweek:

Lost’s viewers fall into two categories, those who adhere to reason and those who follow their faith. The Lost literalists believe that the show is infallible, that it’s not only an engrossing, entertaining television show, it’s holy writ–divinely inspired, all-knowingly conceived, and absolutely inerrant. In other words, the show’s many, many loose ends–the smoke monster, the polar bear–have to be resolved. The progressives like the show just fine, but they accept its limitations. They know that television shows adapt, that actors leave or get pregnant, budgets get cut, writers go on strike. More than that, they know that ideas change, that good ideas are orphaned in favor of great ones, that Lost doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be important. In short, Lost has gone beyond being just a show about faith to being a meta-commentary on faith.

Maybe not entirely surprisingly, I’m firmly in the progressive camp. I’ve always found Lost most compelling when seen as a parable of human existence, not a meticulously constructed imagined reality. Obviously, some degree of continuity and–I won’t say plausibility–coherence are necessary for any satisfying storytelling, but I really couldn’t care less about the polar bear, Walt’s super powers, etc.

It’s interesting how many SF fans take a “literalistic” approach to the genre’s products. The “continuity police” types so familiar on message boards (and, in days of yore, in comic book letter columns) seem strangely incongruous with the suspension of disbelief necessary to get fantasy and SF off the ground.

ADDENDUM: Nice pre-S6 write-up from the AV Club’s Noel Murray (whose Lost reviews I read faithfully).

The rehabilitation of U.S. Grant

Interesting review of a new biography of Ulysses S. Grant from historian Sean Wilentz. At the time of his death, and for quite a while thereafter, President Grant was among the most revered men in the nation. But his reputation took a sharp turn downward, in part, according to Wilentz, because of the rising school of pro-Southern “revisionist” Civil War history, which flourished during the early part of the 20th century. Wilentz argues that it’s high time for a rehabilitation. Particularly interesting is the way, in Wilentz’s telling, Grant’s reputation fluctuated according to the political currents of the time (he was a Northern imperialist to “Lost Cause” Southern apologists, a white, racist imperialist to the 60s New Left, etc.).