Wintry Christmas plans foiled by technology

It’s been a wintry Christmas Day here in Seattle, and so my cunning plan was to curl up in front of the TV and watch all three Lord of the Rings DVDs, back to back – the extended versions. Unfortunately when I turned on my DVD player, it emitted a ghoulish death-rattle and refused to work. So I logged in to Amazon, ordered myself a replacement ((I wanted a decent name-brand unit, and it turned out to be only a little more to get an HD-DVD player. So I did. I know that this may be a future Betamax, but never mind.)), and settled down to read philosophy texts on my Kindle. Along the way I talked to family and friends, by phone or Skype. ((I always use Skype to connect with folks back in England.))
Speaking of Skype, I just received email telling me that my old “Skype Unlimited” package was about to expire, and urging me to sign up for the new “Skype Pro” package. The email and web materials do a lousy job of explaining the relative merits of the various plans; surely they couldn’t be hoping that I’d follow the path of least resistance and sign up for the most expensive option?! Since my present Skype usage is 40% Skype-to-Skype chat, 40% Skype-to-Skype video, and 20% (prepaid) calls to England, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to go “Pro”.

Power glitches, rain, blood, razors, and meat pies

It’s been a cold and wet weekend here in Seattle, and my PowerBook has been acting up again. I thought of taking it to the Apple store over in Bellevue, but I couldn’t face the prospect of going to a mall just before Christmas. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, double-check the Time Machine backups, and hope that it keeps going for a few more days. The PMU is obviously starting to fail, but it’s still under AppleCare…
So I had a quiet couple of days. I went to see the movie version of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and thoroughly enjoyed it in a twisted sort of way. Avoid if you’re squeamish, though. ((I started looking up the Greek names for all the relevant phobias – blood, razors, etc. – until I read that most of those terms are completely inauthentic.)) I finished Pullman’s “The Amber Spyglass” (UK edition, no bowdlerization.)), read some more philosophy books, and had lunch with a friend who’s joining Google. The rest of the time was devoted watching football: Liverpool putting on a great show against Portsmouth, Manchester United scraping a win over Everton, and a gritty win by Chelsea.

The worst book review ever written

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad,” begins Colin McGinn‘s review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. “It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.”

Thus begins the story in today’s Guardian about the controversy that has erupted around McGinn’s review of Honderich’s book. The two protagonists have issued charge and counter-charge, both personal and professional, and the philosophical blogosphere has weighed in with opinions ranging from “unprofessional” to “right on the money” (not forgetting “great fun to read”).
It so happens that I have a small contribution to make on this subject. Back in the spring of 2005 I was attending Dan Dennett’s Philosophy of Mind course at Tufts, and inevitably I had to write a term paper. ((This was the first academic course I’d taken since the mid-70s, and my paper-writing skills were not merely rusty but positively fossilized!)) We were free to use any (relevant!) book or article as the starting-point for the paper, and after considering Hornsby’s “Simple Mindedness” and Noë’s “Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?”, I decided to work with Honderich’s “On Consciousness”. I’d picked it up at the Harvard Coop some months before, for reasons that are now entirely forgotten.
Within a couple of days I knew that I was in trouble. The more I read and re-read the book, the more it seemed to be no more than a sustained argument from personal incredulity. Honderich repeatedly declared that certain propositions were “unswallowable”, as if this constituted a knock-down argument. I checked in with Dan and told him that instead of identifying, expounding, and critiquing Honderich’s thesis, I would only be able to address the fatal weaknesses in one of his core motivations. And so I did. (PDF here.) It wasn’t a great paper, but I felt that it was a reasonable effort given my unfortunate choice of material. As I wrote:

Beyond his unshakeable belief that functionalism is unbelievable, Honderich offers no argument. Indeed he acknowledges that “it is not easy to construct an argument against strict functionalism”, and that is is perhaps impossible to find a premise more secure than his inescapable conviction. In a note, he acknowledges that his objection can be said to beg the question. Nevertheless he argues that this “shows that there is a role in inquiry for something other than arguments.”

Something other than arguments? Not, apparently, if you want to be taken seriously in Philosophical Review.

Natural reaction

When I saw this story:

Thick black smoke billowed from a fire Wednesday in Vice President Dick Cheney’s suite of offices in the historic Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. Cheney’s office was damaged by smoke and water from fire hoses, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

I’m sure I’m not the only person whose first reaction was that one of Cheney’s memos required more than shredding….
UPDATE: Looks like TPM got there ahead of me…

Jane Fonda's "weak-ass faith"

Greta Christina look at the recent Jane Fonda-Ted Turner divorce. The turning point was Fonda’s sudden religious conversion, about which she said:

“My becoming a Christian upset him very much — for good reason. He’s my husband and I chose not to discuss it with him — because he would have talked me out of it. He’s a debating champion.”

As Greta put it, Fonda…

would rather get a divorce than allow my faith to be seriously questioned.
Or to put it another way:
I know that my faith probably doesn’t stand up to reason. I know that I could be argued out of it. But I still want to have it — even if it means divorcing my husband of ten years. I’d rather get the divorce than be convinced that my faith is mistaken. I’d rather get the divorce than even take a chance on being convinced that my faith is mistaken.

Farewell, Salon

Back in the mid-1990s, I started reading a new online magazine called Salon.com. At that time it seemed that Salon and Slate were the only games in town, and I liked Salon’s (relatively) contrarian and feisty style. ((Slate seemed far too concerned with proving how cool and professional they were. Odd, that.)) I was enough of a Salon fanboy that when they launched their paid Premium service in April 2001 I signed up immediately, as a gesture of solidarity. I can’t remember if I kicked in a few bucks when they made their appeal to stave off bankruptcy in 2003, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Although the content was uneven, there were a number of regular contributors that kept me coming back, particularly Patrick “Ask the Pilot” Smith, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Miller, and – above all – Joe Conason with his excellent – and relentless – political work. The resident “agony aunt,” Cary Tennis, was occasionally insightful but increasingly self-indulgent, and Tom Tomorrow provided essential political cartoons.
At some point I switched to using RSS feeds for my web content, which meant that I rarely saw the Salon home page. Instead of being a magazine, it became for me just another collection of feeds. Around about the same time, the Huffington Post kicked in and eventually swamped the rest of the liberal political news sites. Salon had attempted to combine both news and commentary, but after HuffPo arrived Salon’s commentary became less incisive. Conason gave way to Blumenthal, who (while better connected) is much too much of an insider.
And so I found myself skipping more and more of the Salon content, and not really missing it. So when my Salon Premium subscription came up for renewal a few days ago, I paused. I took a look at the current issue, to see whether there was anything worth subscribing to, and my eye fell upon this interview by Steve Paulson with the theologian John Haught. Once again a quirky liberal theologian – someone who would never be able to pass for a Christian in a Red State – was lambasting “the new atheists” for being ignorant of religion, and the Salon interviewer was serving up softball questions that did nothing to expose the serial contradictions in Haught’s so-called argument. I thought about adding a comment, only to find that 333 people had got there before me.
If I want that kind of stuff, I can get it for free on any one of a dozen blogs. It’s as bad as HuffPo’s love affair with the ridiculous Deepak Chopra.
And so, Salon, this is goodbye. I appreciate the pioneering work you did in helping to define online journalism in the late nineties and early oughts, but I won’t be subscribing any more. Good luck.

They can't do that to my favourite Christmas song!

From (ironically) the BBC NEWS:

BBC Radio 1 has said it will stand by its ban on the word “faggot” from the Pogues’ 1987 Christmas hit Fairytale of New York to avoid offence.
The word, sung by the late Kirsty MacColl as she trades insults with Shane MacGowan, has been dubbed out… Another line, where MacGowan calls MacColl “an old slut on junk”, has also been edited.

The strange thing is that this bowdlerization only applies to Radio 1. Radio 2 will be playing the original version. When I lived in England, Radio 1 was the cutting edge, while Radio 2 was Jimmy Young and Max Bygraves territory; no bad language allowed. How times change.
The only thing this story needs is an announcement by the Beeb that the decision was made on “health and safety” grounds; that seems to be the standard excuse for institutional stupidity these days.
Anyway, here’s the original version, with Kirsty. (Sigh… why did you have to go and die like that?)

UPDATE: Sanity has prevailed!