RE-ELECT EDDIE

Bloomberg ranks my home state Georgia the biggest sucker in a lottery expenditures-vs.-winnings index:

Players in Georgia, whose per capita income is about 10 percent below the U.S. average, are doing the most damage to their personal finances. …

Georgia residents spent an average $470.73 on the lottery in 2010, or 1 percent of their personal income, while they received the sixth-highest prize payouts, 63 cents for each dollar spent, the Sucker Index shows.

My sister and I got our undergrad degrees for free in GA—with extra money for fees and books—because the lottery paid for it. We’re grateful but also aware that we went to school for free on the backs of mostly poorer people.

Now the situation is sickening for different reasons: 

In the fiscal year ended June 30, the Georgia lottery gave 25.3 percent of revenue, or $846.1 million, to education. … In 1997, the lottery gave 35 percent of revenue, or $581 million.

The state lottery is making more money than ever but giving 10% less of its proceeds to education. Meanwhile that college tuition program has been slashed; fewer students receive any money, and all students receive less money. Bad food, and such small portions.

I remember when the lottery legislation was passed in the early 90s. The only pushback was from the Religious Right—radio ads by James Dobson—so opposition to the lottery became another annoying marginal opinion like anti-same-sex marriage stuff. Georgia’s governor currently wants to legalize casinos and open three of them, so hopefully broader opposition forms this time. Money is being channeled up the pyramid: it’s a justice problem.

I went to grad school on the backs of the very richest people so that I could have these opinions.

1. Yesterday was her first birthday as a Facebook user, and she was disappointed that no one left birthday greetings on her wall; “I guess people just don’t want to.” Her birth date was marked private. I made it public, but now I wish that I had set it to today’s date so that people would see it and write on her wall.

2. On Problem Child 2: “Every time it’s on, it’s so funny that I just about tee-tee myself!”

I keep trying to watch “Mystery Science Theater 3000” on Netflix, but it feels dated. The premise is unrelatable now: they must watch movies without selecting what or when they’ll watch.

When MST3K aired, it aired six hours a day, more on the weekends, and occasionally as an all-day marathon. I watched it because it was the only thing on—the same reason I watched anything on TV—and in that way I was like Joel and the robots.

Now that I can choose to watch a particular MST3K episode whenever I want, some of the Stockholm-Syndrome-style fun is gone. I no longer have the patience to conspire with the robots. Instead of accepting that I must watch this poorly made movie, I can choose to watch a better movie.

Lately I think a lot about how we project character traits onto animals

My parents talk about their dogs smiling

and, they’re right, Ted does appear to be smiling sometimes

but of course he’s not

not in the sense that we use the term

even though it is so easy and so tempting to read that happiness onto him,

because you want him to be happy

and you want to think that you have done something to make him happy

dumbassfils:

shousui:

i just wanna sext

sext is actually short for semiotext(e) is case yall didnt know

thats why parents are so worried about teens doing it

they have a lot at stake in the current system of power relations, after all

Here is Jeffrey Stout, himself a “secular liberal,” beginning a rebuttal to Rorty’s assertion that religion is a conversation-stopper in politics:

It would be unrealistic to expect membership in religious groups to have no influence on democratic decision making and debate, for one function of religious traditions is to confer order on highly important values and concerns, some of which obviously have political relevance. Yet some prominent political theorists and philosophers are suspicious of individuals who use religious premises when arguing publicly for a political proposal. They ground their suspicion in the notion that reasoning on important political questions must ultimately be based on principles that no reasonable citizen could reasonably reject. I find this notion extremely implausible as an account of what we could conceivably have in common, but here I am less concerned with proving it wrong than with developing an alternative understanding of public reasoning. All democratic citizens should feel free, in my view, to express whatever premises actually serve as reasons for their claims. The respect for others that civility requires is most fully displayed in the kind of exchange where each person’s deepest commitments can be recognized for what they are and assessed accordingly. It is simply unrealistic to expect citizens to bracket such commitments when reasoning about fundamental political questions.

Religion is not essentially a conversation-stopper, as secular liberals often assume and Richard Rorty has argued explicitly. Neither, however, is religion the foundation without which democratic discourse is bound to collapse, as traditionalists suppose. The religious dimensions of our political culture are typically discussed at such a high level of abstraction that only two positions become visible: an authoritarian form of traditionalism and an antireligious form of liberalism. Each of these positions thrives mainly by inflating the other’s importance. They use each other to lend plausibility to their fears and proposed remedies. Each of them needs a “force of darkness” to oppose if it is going to portray itself as the “force of light.”

Democracy and Tradition, 9-10

We don’t want to defend a turd like Santorum—and are in no danger of doing so, since he fails to participate in the type of good-faith public discussion that Stout calls for—but if we’re going to live in a liberal democracy with people who disagree with us, we want to speak about them with nuance and understanding, right? Which a lot of journalists and bloggers fail to do. So the point does not concern Santorum at all but is a larger one about religious reasons in public debate and, maybe, people on the Internet who thoughtlessly use the word “theocracy.”

Everyone has principles that organize their ethical priorities; no one’s principles are universally accepted.