Atheists deal with Death

“”—‘’
This is a timely and fascinating topic.

The main source for me would be here; please go and take a look, while I figure out what to write!

There seems to be no doubt that, when we are faced with the death of a loved one, those of us who believe in a life after death find more comfort in their beliefs than those of us who are atheists, and rationalists, and have no beliefs in the supernatural at all.  To us, the loved one is gone, and only the physical shell is left behind.

To us, of course, the physical shell is definitely a large part of what the person was; all the thoughts and attitudes and personality of the person was contained in the brain that now lies unfunctioning, and uncaring, in the lifeless body.  We should gaze on the body with more love, and more loss, than a religious person would; to them, the person was some indefinable thing that has fled, to what they deem to be a “happier place”, in what we would consider an act of sorry self-deception.

The writer of the article, however, has an angle on this that is interesting, and possibly useful.  To a materialist, who believes that matter can neither be created nor destroyed (except in very special circumstances), the loved one is never destroyed completely.  His or her matter continues to exist, and becomes part of the life of the planet.  In these sad times, however, because of how much space a body occupies in the ground, we tend to cremate our loved ones, which means they add to the pollution of the air, but in principle they fall to the ground in good time, and nourish other living things.  It is a more definite continued existence than the imaginary one postulated by the religious.

All of this does not serve to mitigate our grief very much; death is a more real thing to us atheists than it is to those who believe in an afterlife.  They are very firm about their claim that the belief in an afterlife is not merely a fiction that makes life and death easier for them.  They claim that the afterlife is real, and not merely a comfortable fairy tale.

Descartes worried about reality.  Is all our perception a mere dream in the mind of some being?  Are we all figments of someone’s imagination?  But ultimately Descartes reasoned that, if he was worrying about whether he was real, he must exist.  An imaginary thing cannot worry about its own existence; whoever is imagining it has to worry on its behalf.  So if we are real enough to be self-conscious, we are real enough for the purposes of philosophy.

On the other hand, unfortunately, if enough people imagine that there is an afterlife, that does not make it real.  We do not believe in an afterlife simply because there is no evidence for it.  We don’t find it useful to believe in anything for which there is no evidence, unless it is an actual abstract construct, such as the number 5, which is infinitely useful.  Perhaps someone can create an abstract construct which is the afterlife, but to claim that we can actually enter it is unreasonable.

So I offer no comfort, really; when they die, we lose them.  They exist as memories only, and they cannot respond to our actions or our love.  Whatever love we mean them to have, we must give it while they live.  Do not waste your time.

Arch

Passwords!

“”—‘’
At this point in history, almost everyone has a password for something or other; at least a PIN for an ATM (a Personal Identification Number for an Automatic Teller Machine).

If you stop to think about it, you can enter your password, or your PIN, in lots of places widely scattered throughout the world, and it can be checked.  Does that mean that your PIN or password is known all throughout the WORLD?  There are probably some who do believe that this is so, but being the innocent souls that they are, they probably think, “Oh well, the passwords are probably safe, right?  They have ways, don’t they, of keeping these things secret?”  Some others probably wonder how these passwords are verified.

As a matter of fact, passwords are not widely held, as far as I know; most reputable banks and computer systems keep the passwords of their users safe inside a certain file in their computer system.

Then how do they verify passwords?

It all depends on the fact that certain formulas in Math cannot be reversed.  What does this mean?  This means that you can put some number x into the formula and get some result y, but even a really clever mathematician, or even a clever computer, can’t tell you the original x if you give them the result y.

Make no mistake, some formulas can be solved backwards.  Suppose the formula is just x², or just “x squared.”  So suppose you put in 7 for your x, and you get 49.  Many of us know that, working backwards from 49, x has to be 7 (or maybe -7).

For all equations of degree 4 or smaller, you can always work backwards, and retrieve the original x.  But from degree 5 on upwards, people have proved, notably the mathematician Niels Henrik Abel Abel of Sweden, I believe, now dead of Tuberculosis around 1829, actually proved that there is at least one equation of every degree higher than degree four, that cannot be solved.  This means that we can create a formula such that if a number is put into the formula we have a definite result, but based on the result, the original number cannot be figured out.

So suppose you are asked to create a password for a new bank account, or a new e-mail service, or whatever.  You make a lovely password such as hold me kangaroo down, sport, or something like that, and they
(1) convert the whole password into a set of numbers.  This is not hard, because every symbol you can type on your keyboard is already a number.  ("a" is 97, "b" is 98, and so on.)
(2) they run each of these numbers through a formula, obviously of degree greater than 5.  This creates a new set of numbers, which they carefully store.  Now you have a password.
(3) Every time you enter your password, wherever you are, they run that through the same formula, and check the results.  Of course, they resulting number must match up with the numbers they have stored as "your password", though they can’t actually tell what the original password was.  But they can usually tell if somebody enters the wrong password.

The only reason I qualified the last sentence with “usually” is because they can use a formula for which two different x values could give you the same y value.  The likelihood of this could be very tiny indeed.  The chances that your entire password and a completely different word or phrase is converted into the same list of number is almost inconceivably small.

This also means that you could enter an obscene phrase as your password.  The computer systems should not be actually checking your password against a list of naughty words, because that really does compromise the security of the password system.  But a lot of password systems are managed by rank amateurs, so they could be looking at your passwords as they are created —with the best of intentions— to see whether you’re using an obscene phrase.  They really shouldn’t.  Checking to see whether your password has an uppercase letter, a number, a symbol, and Kim Kardashian’s middle initial, is probably OK.  But I wish they would get off that whole kick.

Arch

“”—‘’

"Why You Hate Work": The New York Times claims to know

.
In a recent article in the New York Times, the co-authors Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath* detail the various reasons White Collar workers in a number of occupations have described why they hate their jobs.

Well, don't bother to read it: it's just a lot of psychobabble about what aspects of their work puts off the people who have been studied.  We're all being overworked, because management has increasingly specialized in how to get more work out of fewer workers.  I'm astounded that anyone is naive enough to want to tinker with band-aids to the Employee-Productivity Problem.  You just have to stop firing your employees, and giving their responsibilities to the remaining employees.

I'm sure some employers will come up with anecdotes about why decreasing the size of their workforce was just the ticket.  Fiscally conservative employers are past masters at this game, and graduate schools pay a lot of money to business executives who can persuade their students that this is how it should be done: fire employees, cut costs, and increase dividends.

Throughout the ages, the stereotype of a do-nothing employee has been popular.  Those who have co-workers who don't do anything except keep checking the price of their stocks on Wall Street know all too well that these sorts of do-nothings are anything but rare.  They do tend to be found among upper-management, though.

The antidotes for employee burnout offered by Schwartz and Porath are: making employees feel wanted and appreciated,  Encouraging employees to take a break every 90 minutes, and other brilliant ideas along the same lines.  Now, I would be the last to claim that taking a break every 90 minutes is a bad thing to do.  But will this enable the same old tired staff to manage without that employee that was just fired, and whose workload was distributed among two workers who can no longer take breaks every 90 minutes?  Whom are we kidding here?

Do please read the article.  I could be wrong; perhaps it is possible by following their suggestions, to make an office so fantastically productive that you could fire a couple of people, and still get the same jobs done even better.  That's what this country needs: fewer, and more productive employees.  Give me a break.

Arch

(*Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of The Energy Project, a consulting firm. Christine Porath is an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and a consultant to The Energy Project)

What's Happened to US? Making Sense of Recent US History

“”—‘’
A lot of us look at the country in which we live, baffled by what goes on!  Many of our fellow-citizens, I suspect, identify with various camps —political camps, on the face of it— without actually paying attention to what those camps really stand for, and how they have evolved.  Among less thoughtful individuals, you see knee-jerk reactions to everything.  Unfortunately, if your periscope into society is in large part via faceBook, as mine is, you see a larger proportion of cranks in these days than we would ever have seen in earlier times.

All through the post-WWII years, as Americans began to look out on the world with greater interest, and as high-school education began to be something everyone could aspire to, and as students came into contact with liberal intellectuals in colleges and universities (yes, institutions of higher learning were less hidebound and conservative than the towns and villages from which the students came), young people could no longer see the logic of racism and sexism and classism, which had kept US society so tidy and stratified.  On the wake of the recovery from the great depression, and the industrialized economy that offered jobs outside farms and old-time professions, it was convenient for the richer strata of society to allow minorities and the flood of immigrants, and returning GI's to get a basic level of technical education, to help with manning the assembly-lines.

But, in the Sixties and Seventies, the Vietnam War drove American Youth to identify more strongly with minorities and the poor, and the privileged classes began to think that things were going too far.  An educated workforce was one thing, and a few drugs for the kids of wealthy parents was fine.  But it was repugnant to see blacks and hispanics grabbing themselves a joint, and demanding the right (as it appeared) to a free ride, on the back of high taxes.  It didn’t matter that the upper classes had a pretty good time, despite the taxes.  Their appetites had grown, and it irked them to see that their taxes helped the poor enjoy such things as State Parks and the new superhighways.  Fat cats flying First Class were appalled to see the scum that dared to fly Economy class.  (Never mind that the airlines were owned by yet other Fat Cats whose purposes it suited to allow scum to fly Economy.)  Worst of all was the young fat cats having to hobnob with scum on scholarships to colleges and universities.

Ronald Reagan offered the wealthy classes the prospect of reduced taxes, and something approaching the comfortable social stratification whose absence was so disturbing.  But now, confusing the issue, the younger members of the wealthy classes had already been acculturated to accept many principles of social justice: access to education should not be denied, segregation was wrong, women should be given equal pay, skilled immigrants were useful additions to our society, and so on.  So a set of artificial principles had to be assembled, to put the Liberals in their place.  And so the list of Conservative planks began to take shape, even if they had contradictory philosophical implications:
.

• Taxes were too high.
• Deficit spending was bad.
• Contraception was bad.
• Drugs were despicable.
• Social Welfare was bad.
• Guns were good.
• Law and order was good.
• Immigration had to be controlled.
• Inflation was bad.
• Social Injustice in Foreign Countries was bad.
• Freedom of Speech was good.
• Flag burning was bad.
• Science was good.
• Evolution was bad.
• American primacy in Space was good.
• Funding NASA was bad.
• Reigning in energy exploration was bad.
• A clean environment was good. 

.
and so on and so forth.

Many of our Conservative friends have bought into these precepts despite their inherent inconsistency.  To make things even more confusing, they have bought into one-line slogans that purport to counter Liberal assertions that these principles are contradictory.

Now, a generation and a half after Reagan, racism has to go underground.  So the almost insane hostility to Barack Obama as a black man has to be hidden, and people have to find other reasons why he is the Worst President in US History, which drives our Conservative friends to find slogans that make even less sense than any that we have seen thus far.

Accustomed to making reasonable-sounding arguments that could never be supported by even a seven-year-old who was even vaguely aware of the facts, our amateur political pundits are learning to make fallacious arguments from high-school age on up, and we are raising new generations that have no idea what reasoned debate is.  All around the country, one half of the population believes that argument means a defense of prejudices.  Being consistent is no longer an option to many.

It wasn’t very long ago that, to say that one was embarrassed by the actions of one’s country raised a hysterical howl, especially among the spokesmen for the Conservatives.  But I recently read that Rush Limbough had allowed himself the heretofore forbidden privilege of stating that he was embarrassed to be an American.  (I’m paraphrasing; I forget the exact wording, and I got the news secondhand.  The link was added later.)  This is not an isolated instance.  Sauce for the goose is often not sauce for the gander.

What I’m trying to do is to explain why ordinary conservatives, who do not have the advantage of the new Voodoo Economics that more expert conservatives can invoke, have to rely on such patently silly arguments to defend their self-contradictory stances on so many issues.

Arch

“”—‘’

GOP Rhetoric

.
Later tonight we will hear Barack Obama's State of the Union address, and this liberal group called The Young Turks have got hold of a proposal that The President is going to make and was analyzing it.

It is a very modest plan to change a few tax rates: increase capital gains taxes on people making more than half a million per year, and lowering taxes on couples making less than 120,000 a year in combined income.  Seems reasonable.  But The Young Turks were predicting that conservative news --- i.e. Fox News, of course --- will jump all over it, saying that it will be playing politics.  Why?  Because the proposal has no chance of passing the overwhelmingly Republican House and Senate.

But recall how the GOP tried to repeal Obamacare forty times over the last several years, though it failed every time!  The point was to keep Obamacare in the news as a program the conservatives disliked intensely.  So the GOP plays the same kind of politics, even if it resents President O doing the same.

Arch

The Fly in my Depressing World View Ointment

.
I was overwhelmed by how bad everything was a few weeks ago, but pretty soon the real world muscled in on my thoughts.

Things are not as bad as they should be.

Racism
For those of us who have come to the reluctant conclusion that racism is bad for everyone, it becomes plain that a lot of the worries of the world can be boiled down to racism.  The manic attitude of Islamist extremists (or, more logically, Extremist Muslims) can be viewed as a sort of racism.  The attitude of those who hate Barack Obama is at least partially racist.  Religious chauvinism, apart from being driven by religion in the first place, has elements of racism in it.  Those who get all fired up by either immigration reform or the lack of it might have racists behind them.  All this Us-Against-Them-ism is a close cousin of racism, or a generalization of racism: I don't like people different from me.  Getting out and meeting different sorts of people tends to wear down racialist and prejudiced attitudes among most intelligent people (though there is a minority of creeps whose prejudice is reinforced by actually meeting people of other races).  But I'm observing that there is an ever-growing core of young people who are willing to speak out for racial inclusiveness and to champion the causes of minorities.

Conservatism
Liberals are a demoralized and tired lot.  Republicans and conservatives have more stamina, because they're fighting for themselves.  That's the big fact about conservatives: they're fighting for themselves, and strictly for the short term, except when it comes to keeping their money in the family.  They don't want a better world for their offspring; they just want their offspring to have a lot of money so that they can better handle a crappy world.

Liberalism
Liberals, in contrast, are fighting for a better life for other people, a safety net when there are no jobs, for the elderly, for the poor.  They want health care even for those who cannot afford health insurance.  It's not that liberals are unconcerned for situations where someone below the poverty line might, someday, demand the right to plastic surgery.  Having to deal with those sorts of extremes are tedious, but we don't let these sorts of contradictions get in the way of providing health care for everyone.

So the liberals ought to be a tired and demoralized lot.  But then Obama comes up with this free two years of Community College plan, and suddenly the sun is shining, the lark is on the thorn, and Conservatives are totally pissed off, because they didn't think of it first.  But of course, it has to get through Congress first.  (Or am I missing something?)

This Congress, of course, is as likely to go for it as an armadillo would go for a kangaroo steak (I'm hoping armadillos don't go for kangaroo steaks, if not I must find a different simile).  This is obviously not the congress we voted in.  We did not vote any congress in; we sat on our couches at home, watching The Game of Thrones, or whatever, while these geniuses from Carolina and Florida and Alabama and Texas voted in a No To Science, Education And Taxes Congress, and a Yes To Creationism, Wars And Guns congress, and incidentally a total science-o-phobe to be in charge of NASA.  Way to go.

We must now watch, while an anxious Congress furiously attempts to persuade everyone who dreams of going to college to actually believe that education is bad for them.  It's going to be a tough sell, because now we liberals are fighting for ourselves.  Once congress begins dismantling legislation controlling environmental pollution, Social Security, and starts making life easier for the energy companies, we've got our backs against the wall.  It's going to get ugly, but it's good to get these battles out in the open.  These conservatives had better watch themselves.  We're not going to be tired forever.

Of late, elections have gone in a direction that seems to indicate that we're now a nation of millionaires (even if the statistics show that we're a nation of paupers).  What are we?  Inquiring minds want to know.  Millionaires can stay home.  Paupers must get out and vote.  Don't let them scare you with threats of jail.  There are reports of some conservative activists in Carolina and Mississippi and other southern states threatening specific voters with common names such as David Jackson (a common first name, and a last name very common among the African American community) with charging them with election fraud (because there are several men with that same name, registered in different voting precincts).  Elderly African Americans are easily intimidated, and only a class action suit against this sort of ploy (which discourages African Americans from voting) will restrain GOP bullying in the future.  The bullying is getting ugly.

My memory is going! What's Happening in Archland: Miscellany

.
Damn.

About ten times a day I get a brilliant idea for a post, and by the time I sit down at the keyboard, I have forgotten it.  This is the first time in a while that I have remembered, and it's about forgetting!!!!

Some of you probably know that I have a program on a Community Radio station, and in a small town like ours, this means that this is almost the only station in which minority folks have some control over the programming.  So there's Hip Hop (which a lot of middle class white youth listen to, but in our conservative community it's still considered black music), classic soul, mellow soul, cool soul, Disco, and so on.  Suddenly, classical music is sticking out like a sore thumb on the programming.  You get a very good idea as to what minority folks are up against everywhere.

A lot of the time, it is a huge battle to prevent some of the volunteers who have come on board from wanting to exclude everybody else from having some control over the programming, and how it's run.  Sometimes it's minority folks fighting to hang onto their cultural turf, other times it's white Middle Class folks who resent what they see as a wholesale slide into the station becoming dominated by non-white volunteers.  We seldom realize how much our mental image of what we expect the Radio Station to be, colors our decisions, often unrecognized by us.  Often, too, we assume that everyone's mental image of the Station is our own, and it is difficult to communicate our image to anyone else without appearing to have a cultural bias of some sort.

Health Care and Health Insurance are major topics in the Talk aspect of our station.  A major syndicated radio show is hosted by someone of whose existence I was not aware: Rick Smith.  He's on in the late afternoon, and at lots of other times, and from all I have heard, he seems to have really sensible opinions, and his correspondents have interesting and reliable and timely information.  Generally speaking, Rick Smith is right plumb spang in the middle of the Left, though I haven't heard his opinions on Health Insurance.  But I would imagine that he has a healthy distrust of any sort of insurance company, but I suspect that, having been born and raised in the US, he would regard Insurance as a necessary evil, whereas I regard it as just an evil.

Many our people at WXPI are innocent, religious, heart-on-sleeve folks, all about prayer and kindness, and most of the others are street-smart, suspicious idealists, if there is such a thing.  Some others are Charlie Browns: "I love Mankind all right; it's people I can't stand!"

Generally, as you can imagine, since our Station is generally about giving the underdog a voice, our volunteers have generally a liberal bias.  There certainly are some enlightened conservatives among them, and even some unenlightened ones, I daresay.  Most of us are neither one or the other: some of my own views would be considered conservative by some.

[To be continued.]