I'm Weird

There seems to be very little doubt about it: I'm odd. There doesn't seem to be much I can do about it. You want an example? When I drive, I don't just sing along to the music I play on the car stereo. I sing and dance. In the driver's seat. You want another example? I talk baby-talk to some of my pets who died years ago. I picture one of my former cats as an angel, with a white robe and a halo, standing on her back feet, holding a tiny little harp in her front paws.

Then again: who isn't odd? Maybe the answer to that one is: some of the people you don't know very well yet, and if you got to know them better you'd see that they're weird too.

Did you watch that sitcom, "3rd Rock From the Sun" ? It ran from 1996-2001 on NBC, it starred John Lithgow and Jane Curtain, they were the biggest stars in the cast then. I guess the biggest star now who was in the cast is Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Gordon-Levitt played a little kid and then a teenager on the show, it's still a little weird to me that he's all growed up now.

I think I got the central joke of the show: it featured a group of aliens from far away outer space posing as a family of humans, and constantly getting into embarrassing situations because they're completely unfamiliar with out planet. The central joke of the show is that they're never exposed as aliens, and are completely convincing as human beings, precisely because they are so awkward and clueless in their interactions with humans. Their weirdness makes them the same as the rest of us.

Just now it occurred to me that the names of the 3 aliens who are impersonating human males, Tom, Dick and Harry, underscore the joke about how typically human these aliens are: "any Tom, Dick and Harry" is an expression which means "any 3 guys taken at random."

Some of the most convincingly realistic moments on the show are when real humans are show behaving even more weirdly than than aliens: for example, when Bronson Pinchot plays the visiting brother of Jane Curtain's character, and they behave according the rules of the private world which human siblings often inhabit.

So, I think the central joke of the show is that, although it is centered around a group of aliens, it is really about humans, and about how our veneer of -- what's the term for "un-weirdness" ? maybe something like "grace and aplomb" -- isn't very deep. And so: it's okay. So you're weird. Welcome to the human race.

Notice how people don't say "Welcome to the human race" to you in response to your handling some situation with remarkable grace and aplomb?

People Say Things Which Amaze Me And I Hurry Over Here And Blog About It

You know the drill.

In this case it was somebody who was in a strictly monogamous relationship. Very very strictly, from his point of view. He said that even flirting was unacceptable. And this wasn't a Jihadist, it was an atheist who claimed to be very liberal. Still, I sort of wish there were some way I could encourage his friend to blink twice if she's being held against her will. (Hmm. Maybe not blinking twice: who knows, he might interpret that as batting her eyelashes in a flirtatious manner, and then who knows what he might do.)

I certainly know what it is to get jealous, but I don't know if I could respect a woman who never, ever flirted. Flirting is sort of like farting: it may be offensive to a lot of people, but it's perfectly natural, and it's far from the end of the world.

There is such a wide variety of human behavior in sexuality. One of my favorite moments from "Rosanne," one of my favorite sitcoms, is when Fred and Dan are talking about their sex lives with Jackie and Roseanne, respectively, and it seems that Dan and Roseanne are much more adventurous than Fred. Actually, the problem seems to be that Jackie wants to be much more adventurous than Fred does. Jackie and Fred have had sex in the bedroom, and that's it, and Fred would like it to stay that way -- Jackie, not so much. Fred tells Dan that the subject of having sex in the car has come up. The very idea seems to appall Fred. Dan is trying to tell Fred that he needs to loosen up and be more open to some of his partner's ideas, that being more adventurous could help their relationship. And here comes my favorite moment:

"Dan, do you ever have sex with Roseanne in your car?" "Hell, Fred, I've had sex with Roseanne in YOUR car."

My point in this post is not that people should have sex in cars, or that they should avoid having sex in cars, or that it's better to be adventurous or unadventurous. My point is that people are very different in many ways. Sex is only only one of many examples. Or I should say: sex is just one category of human behavior, which offers many examples of differences from one human being to the next.

Flirting and farting: some people have said that one of the highlights of intimacy for them is when they get so close to someone that they can enjoy each other's farts. I haven't been there. It's one thing if you're asleep, people fart now and then in their sleep, they can't help it. But to me -- even if I'm in love with you -- if you're awake, and you feel a gaseous moment coming on, it would be nice, if it's convenient, if you would excuse yourself and go a certain distance away until you've got that all worked out.

So who's the freak here -- me? Am I some sort of cold, unfeeling robot, since I've never allowed myself to get that close to someone? Or are the fart-sniffing connoisseurs disgusting, dog-like animals because they sniff each other's butts? No: I'm not unfeeling and they're not disgusting. We're human. Human ideas, opinions and behavior are diverse. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Big And Little Ideas

I'm an idiot. I'm not being modest, I really am. Undoubtedly, some of you are muttering to yourselves, "We KNOW you're not just being modest," but in case some of you are reading along who need more convincing, I will give you 2 very striking examples of my idiocy: in the first case, I ran out of scotch tape. This lack of tape was very inconvenient on quite a few occasions, I was annoyed by this lack of scotch tape for years, literally for years, before it suddenly occurred to me that it was within my financial means to go to a store and buy more scotch tape. Years. I'm not exaggerating. I really am that stupid. The second example: where I live there are 2 different spaces, each one lit by a single light bulb. One of these spaces was too bright when you turned on the light, the other not bright enough, and this too went on for years, it went on until today, when it occurred to me that there was a solution even simpler than the solution to the tape problem, a solution which required no money and no trip to a store. And so about a half hour ago a third light bulb went on over my head -- a very dim blub, certainly, but finally I switched those 2 light bulbs, and already the improvement in the quality of my life has been immense.

So you see, when I tell you I'm an idiot I'm not joking. And yet, there are some things I'm smarter about than average. I've scored very high on IQ tests, and the uselessness of IQ tests is demonstrated not only by their not having caught the idiocy demonstrated by my problems with things light tape and light bulbs, but also by the fact that they wouldn't have given anybody a clue about the following.

I'm good when it come to grasping certain realities having to do with macroeconomics and politics. For example, when I read in Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution



that events in political revolutions are directed not by changes in political classes but by sudden psychological changes within political groups which had already formed before the revolution, I was very pleased, not because I read an idea which was new to me, but because I was relieved to know that someone else besides me had had that insight, and wrote it down in a book which many people have read. For example, when I first saw Zipcars, I was relieved to see that someone was realizing the idea of car-sharing which had occurred to me as a child in the 1960's, the first time I saw a large city with huge parking lots absolutely full of cars going nowhere, lots surrounded by streets clogged with cars going slow.

I'm not as smart as Trotsky. I got the thing with the psychology of classes before I read Trotsky, but I'm 53 years old and I haven't actually done much of anything. By the time Trotsky was 53 he had published many books and articles, helped overthrow the Romanovs, been the 2nd most powerful man in the Soviet Union for several years, then been toppled from power and eventually exiled by Stalin but still remained one of the world's most influential political writers. I saw the situation with cars in cities but was never able to do anything about it. Right now I'm able to see more clearly than many Americans can the benefits which proportional representation would bring to our country, but I don't seem to be able to communicate those benefits very well, or to convince very many people at all about much of anything. Or to get the attention of the publishers or literary agents who would be able to put my writing before the eyes of large numbers of people who would like it and find it useful.

I NEED HELP. I'M AN IDIOT AND I NEED ALL THE FREAKIN HELP I CAN GET. I'm not kidding.

Is This An Autistic Thing?

The following remarks were all contributed by one person to an online discussion about Jesus' historicity, over the course of the past day and a half:

"[...]you have no hope of answering that question with anything but gross speculation[...]With so little evidence you cant make a case for or against his historicity. You can only speculate and give your opinions[...]these were books that were being edited and put together to express a message being fashioned in real time by a panel of church elders. They chose the message they wanted to send and made sure it was reflected in the writings that made it into the bible. In one of those cases the mention of Jesus was out of context with the rest of the text, as if it was added later, or at least, that was the conclusion of the folks who study such nonsense. I stick to science[...]I think speculating is worth less of my time then doing things for which there can be answers. Not that I dont do it, but I don't squander it - i save it for speculation that I care about[...]the point is what does it matter? you will solve nothing, you will accomplish nothing, the conversation has been ongoing for hundreds of years. Do something useful instead. Go feed a hungry dog[...]this is what I mean by a waste of time[...]"

The last remark was made just a few minutes ago, and I have no idea whether or not the end is in sight yet. I fear we're not nearly there yet.

Jumping into the discussion so many times just to say that he doesn't think the discussion is worth having.

I don't understand this guy. And it's not just him. I run into this sort of thing a lot: People interrupting discussions about whether or not Jesus existed to inform the discutants that they don't care whether or not Jesus existed. And when I told him that his behavior mystified me, he got very mad.

What is he mad about? Why is he wasting so much of his time to insist that he won't be wasting any of his time on this? I don't think it ever occurred to him to apologize for wasting MY time, or the time of other people trying to discuss the topic at hand. And implying that discussing whether or not Jesus existed makes dogs starve? Is that any less irrational than insisting that cuss words make Baby Jesus cry?

I don't think people barge into discussions on other topics very often just to express their disinterest in those topics. Clearly, the topic of Jesus makes people go a little nuts.

Still. Behavior like this baffles me. I'm just about at the point where I think that trying to understand this may be a waste of my time. I'm past the point where I've concluded that responding directly to this guy is a waste, or worse. (Seems to fire him up and egg him on.) So this blog post, besides being motivated by the fact that it's been 4 days since I posted anything here, is also me sort of winding the issue up and tying a bow around it.

But besides that, I'm wondering whether this is an instance where someone's behavior baffles me because I'm autistic and the other person is (I'm assuming in this case) neurologically-typical. I also assume that the majority of you, my readers, are neurologically-typical. And so, before I do my utmost to put the subject behind me and return to topics which I find more interesting -- such as, for example, whether or not Jesus existed -- I'm asking whether any of you might possibly find this person's behavior not so bizarre, not so mystifying. If you'd like to comment, if you could possibly explain some of this to me, explain why a person would interrupt a conversation with so many assertions that he doesn't care about the topic of discussion, that would be very helpful. I've got to live among you, the neurologically-typical, and greater understanding eases the co-existence.

Is he motivated by kindness? It doesn't feel at all kind to me, but hey, I misunderstand people very drastically on a routine basis. Is he trying to be helpful by warning me that I'm wasting my life? Is he actually obsessed with Jesus, but in denial about it? Those are just wild guesses on my part, I really don't understand this.

Do you also find his behavior bizarre?

If You're An Atheist, That doesn't Necessarily Mean We're Pals (Maybe You Noticed That Already)

AN ATHEIST-BUT-NOT-NEW-ATHEIST MANIFESTO

About like-mindedness: there is so much more to people's minds -- well, to some minds -- than that one freaking issue of whether God exists. Over the past several years I've met so many atheists online whom I do not like at all. There's at least one, Richard Dawkins,



whom I used to like quite a lot, until I started to read what he had to say on religious topics. Well, there were warning signs already in his work on biology. Right there on p 1 of The Selfish Gene Dawkins announces,

"We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: "'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'"

Besides warning me that I probably wouldn't like G G Simpson either, Dawkins gave a big hint there that he might turn out to be the kind of moron who'd go around making sweeping statements about Islam while admitting that he hadn't read the Koran and didn't plan to.



There's so much worthwhile stuff which was written before 1859.



And it makes my head whirl that I need to point that out because somebody as brilliant in biology as Dawkins is so fucking stupid about so much else. And yet here we are. The fish which is New Atheism stinks from the head, which is Dawkins. I agree with them about atheism. I agree that humans invented God and not the other way around. But that's just one question. Answering it correctly doesn't necessarily mean you're a genius, and getting wrong doesn't necessarily mean you're not. Dismissing so much written before 1859 as glibly as Dawkins and Simpson is a pretty good sign (I saw it, I saw the sign, it's right there in black-and-white as big as day p 1 of The Selfish Gene) that they might have other remarkably stupid things to say.

And Dawkins has been saying and writing stupid things for a living for over a decade now, having given up what he was good at, biology. And he's been so hugely successful at it that millions of people are now following the 2nd part of it, saying stupid banal inaccurate uninformed things against religion, without having emulated the more honorable 1st part, having become brilliant at something else first, be it biology or what have you. Coyne and Myers are accomplished biologists like Dawkins, but Harris skipped straight to the stupid, banal, inaccurate and uninformed anti-religious part, and is probably the 2nd-most commercially successful New Atheist behind Dawkins.



I have no problem with them saying things against religion, I say things against religion myself all the time. It's the stupid banal inaccurate uninformed part that annoys me, and which should concern any atheist who wishes to see the influence of religion wane and die its natural death at long last. I don't think this stuff is helping. And I don't think that I'm being excessive when I say that what Dawkins and Coyne and Myers and Harris have to say about religion is stupid. Ignorance is one thing. It's simply not knowing, and it can be remedied. But stupidity is not knowing and not wanting to know, it's being ignorant and proud of it. And stupidity is tenacious.

If you want religion to go away you have to know what it is, you have to study it like an epidemiologist studies disease. Otherwise you're just jerking off and getting in the way, like Dawkins, Harris & Co.

I'd love to talk to Dawkins about biology. Sadly, he doesn't seem much interested in biology anymore. It's a waste and a shame.

So much for atheists whom I dislike. Now to religious people I love: I don't see the problem here, I don't know why it should surprise anyone that there are religious believers with whom I get along very well, with whom I love to talk about all sorts of things -- even religion, sometimes. The most interesting people to talk to on any subject tend to be the ones who know the most about that subject, duh. And on the subject of religion, those people aren't the New Atheists, big duh. You want to talk about the Council of Nicea or the Merovingians or the Templars or the origins of the Grail myth with someone who knows more about them than



Dan Freaking Brown, there's a good chance you're going to end up talking to some very interesting and well-educated Christians. (And enjoying yourself, perhaps to your shame, if you're used to hanging with New Atheists.)

If you want to talk to some experts about Tolkien and Harry Potter and



Spider-Man, a gathering of New Atheists might be an even better place to look for them than a Comic-Con. They'll probably be well-above average in their knowledge of biology and physics, too. Credit where credit's due.

I'm So Over Pessimism

BUNNY: Uli doesn't care about anything. He's a Nihilist.

THE DUDE: Ah, that must be exhausting.



I get exhausted just READING pessimistic remarks. I can't imagine how awful it must be to actually THINK that way: "Democrats won't turn out for the mid-term." "Amending the Constitution will do no good." "Voting for either of the two major parties is just screwing yourself." "It's too late to save the human race from the pollution and warming it's caused." "You can't fight Big Coal." "Socialism doesn't work." "There's nothing reasonable people can do about the rising tide of fanaticism." "Efforts to fight corruption and short-sighted greed are hopeless."

And so forth. Yuck, yuck, phooey and forget all of that! And yet it would seem that the great majority of people are pessimistic in a way I've been blessed never to have experienced.

There was a guy in Shoah who seems to have a mentality much more like mine.



When he was interviewed for the film in NYC in the 1980's, he told about how, when he was being rounded up with the others to be shipped off and killed, he ran away. Just ran. Off into the woods, or over the flimsy fence, I don't exactly remember, except that he saw a possible way out, and rather than passively surrender to certain death, he took a chance at escape. And I remember that he was surprised at the time, and remained surprised decades later, that so few others resisted. And watching the movie, I said to myself, Now this is a guy I can relate to.

It flabbergasts me, how people tend to behave. An executioner tells them to kneel, and they kneel. Why? I don't think one can know beforehand how one would react in extreme situations, but if I were handed a shovel and told to dig my own grave, it's hard for me to imagine that the person who'd handed me the shovel and/or a few of his friends wouldn't immediately get smacked in the face with a shovel. What would they do about it -- kill me? Maybe. Or maybe I'd escape. Maybe I'd take a few other prisoners with me when I escaped. Or maybe I'd be killed. Sure. That's always a possibility. Maybe I'd be tortured and then killed. We're all on the way out eventually, it's just a matter of the route we take.

Humans. They're hard for me to understand. Yes, as hard as I try to get Democrats pumped up about turning out in the mid-terms, they might still not, and the "pundits" might turn out to be right -- but why not try anyway? Why not try to convert to clean energy -- and I don't mean natural gas -- until petrochemicals are a tiny boutique industry, supplying mostly backyard barbecues, plus a very few eccentric hobbyists with antique loud smelly vehicles? Why not try to convert the US to a system used in so many other countries, where a vote for the Green Party actually helps the Left, instead of helping the GOP like in does in this country, by taking the vote of someone too dumb to see the difference between Democrats and Republicans away from the Democrats?

Why not try? Why on Earth do people prefer no chance at all over a chance?

Maybe pessimists don't know how much fun it is to try, because they've never tried? Maybe they tried once, and failed, and haven't stuck their necks out since then, so that they don't realize that if you fail nine times in a row and then succeed once, it more than makes up for those nine failures?

I don't know, I'm just guessing. I don't know how those Eeyores'



minds work, and when it comes down to it, I don't much want to know. I'm just glad I'm inclined not to give up as a way of life, and that of course includes not giving up on converting pessimists to giving a shit and trying, whether or not that effort, too, may be successful. It's just more fun not to give up.

The End Is Near, Certainly, But It's Not Here Yet

The end I'm talking about is not the judgement of a wrathful God visited upon a sinful humanity, but the end of the human species brought about by climate change and other effects of human pollution. It's interesting to me how much some green-minded people proclaiming this coming apocalypse sound like the more traditional Christians warning of the more traditional imminent doom. In both cases there's often a misanthropic satisfaction at the thought of a misbehaving humanity finally getting what it deserves.

Well, I'm an animal lover, and I think of us humans as animals, and I'm not rubbing my hands gleefully at the prospect of our doom. I'd rather try to avert that doom. Besides the occasional misanthropy, green apocalypticism also often shares with the older Christian variety a sense of the inevitable. ("It's much too late to save ourselves now, the trends toward catastrophe are irreversible.") This seems to me to irrationally ignore two huge factors in future climate conditions, both unknowns: how much human behavior will change, and how much green technology will improve. Green predictions that The End Is Near tend to assume a certain amount of continuation of current behaviors. I, on the other hand, see possibilities for huge rapid changes in human behavior as 1) people become more educated about climate science; 2) people notice that the Right's talking points about green energy have been lies: this stuff does work. They've been doing their best to get you to focus on this one wind-energy company, over here, which failed as a start-up, but eventually you're going to notice all the other green start-ups that are working. You may even notice the right-wingers who have noticed this and invested in green energy, presumably for the money and not for nobler reasons. A possible 3) could be a great dying-off of the Right. It's true that many of them have many children, but don't forget that children by no means always follow in their parents' political footsteps. Tipping points occur not only in the climate, but in human behavior as well, and in the history of human civilization such changes have not usually been forseen. They have tended to be surprising.

The sudden proliferation of wind farms and solar energy plants in the TV commercials of oil companies should make you stop and think. It certainly shouldn't make you suddenly have a warm and trusting feeling toward the oil companies, which is no doubt what they're going for, nor should it fool you into thinking that they're suddenly going green. It should demonstrate to you that even oil companies are starting to give up on trying to make green energy look ridiculous and impractical, and that should give you some idea of how drastically and suddenly the hardcore anti-green-energy demographic has shrunk.