I haven't been posting very regularly, I've been pimping the Surviving Retail Blog pretty heavy. I disconnected myself from my life to finish writing it and have not been able to reconnect since. There's part of me that would love to lay it all on the line and be bluntly honest about how I've been feeling the past, oh, year and a half but I don't think the consequences are worth it.
The creator of the funky and surreal Howard The Duck comic book died a little while ago. I liked it OK (don't confuse this with the historically awful movie), but the real impact it had on my life was that I've often adopted Howard's slogan- "Trapped in a world that he never made"- as my own. I am constantly being reminded of this fact when things happen like spending millions of dollars to make my favorite breakfast cereal crunchier in milk. Or when they release Meet The Spartans, The Hottie and The Nottie, Bar Starz and Superhero Movie, but release The Onion Movie direct to DVD. NSFW.
You know what I realized is not as easy as it might seem? EVERYTHING!
My ex-roommate Ed and I talked about the Democratic field of candidates when they were first emerging and we said the great thing about it was there was a black candidate and a female candidate where race and gender was secondary to their ideas and appeal. That was until people actually started voting, then the choice seemed to be whether you were more sexist or racist, not who you actually wanted to be President. It reminds me of the complaint that promiscuous men are called "studs" while promiscuous women are called "sluts". But in my experience, men are only called studs ironically and slut is much more of a gender-neutral insult. There might be people that think this way, but I don't know any of them personally.
When I first learned of the concept of "Intelligent Design", I thought that it was basically an acknowledgment that evolution and natural selection exist, but working through the divine. I thought, great, people are finally putting aside the ridiculous notion that the universe is a few thousand years old. But what it actually is backdoor creationism. Which brings me to Ben Stein's movie Expelled:
I will see this movie at some point, but he misses a couple of inconvenient truths in this trailer. He talks about the scientific community ostracizing people putting forth theories on Intelligent Design, but there's a good reason for this: it doesn't hold up to the scientific method, and that is kinda important to scientists. Saying "God did it" without being able to put it through the scientific method or prove it tangibly is flat out not how science works. I recognize that I could be overlooking some more scientific evidence that the movie features, but I'm going by the trailer.
Stein talks about the belief that life started, as he says, "Mud animated by lightning" like it's so much more ridiculous than God creating everything in seven days. If these scientists want to find a venue for their alternate theories of life without having to prove it scientifically there are tons of venues and groups that I'm sure would love to give them a voice, like Ben Stein for example. The problem is when ANYONE hears something that seems dumb to them, they don't take it very seriously, facts or not.
The story of creation was written in a time when we thought that the universe revolved around us literally instead of figuratively like we do now. It would have been impossible for people to handle the theory of evolution back then, look at how we're talking about it now! It's interesting that Stein says that Intelligent Design wouldn't have seemed so crazy in Galileo's time. You know whose idea's seemed crazy back then? Galileo's! Then he wasn't "The Father of Modern Science", he was an oppressed teaching the heretical idea that the Earth went around the Sun.
update: Darwin was also called crazy in his day, I forgot to mention. He kept his theory of natural selection secret from almost everyone for many years because it went so far beyond conventional (read :creationist) thinking.
These latter-day oppressed scientists may be vindicated by the same history that will vindicate George W. Bush, but I wouldn't put any money down on it.
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