Generalizations

If someone said, "All engineers are the same. They're just working to further enrich themselves and to screw over the rest of us," you would respond that this is entirely incorrect, and that the speaker seems to know very little about engineers. And, of course, you'd be right.

The thing is, the statement is just as wrong if you substitute any other group for engineers. "All billionaires are the same," "all Jews are the same," "all Belgians are the same," "all Republicans are the same" -- all of those statements are making the same mistake: they are assigning characteristics to people based on their perceived membership in a group, rather than regarding them as individuals.

It's an over-generalization, an over-simplification, and it's mistaken, about 100% of the time.

Now, maybe you would respond, "What about Nazis? Weren't they all the same in some very important ways?"

I'm glad you asked! No, they weren't. You know Oskar Schindler, the guy played by Liam Neeson in that movie, the guy who saved all of those people's lives and sabotaged the German war effort in WWII?

He was a Nazi. A member of the Nazi Party. He joined the party for business reasons, and he started to work against it when he could no longer ignore the death camps and stuff.

Individual human beings will constantly surprise you, if you go to the trouble of paying attention to them. 

 

Billionaires

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and claim that billionaires aren't all exactly the same.

At least, I'd be going out on a limb if I said that in some of the places I hang out. I like those places, it's nice to have found places where nearly everyone hates Elon Musk, but all the same, the frequent, unchallenged assertion that all billionaires are the same is getting to be a pain in the ass. 

 

It's possible that I might dislike every single billionaire, if I examined each one closely. But I haven't examined each and every single billionaire closely. Which is why I'm unable to say that they're all the same.

But there's more than that. Yes, even more. There are differences which anyone can see. Some billionaires are Republicans, some are Democrats. The they're-all-the-same yahoos will respond that they're just pretending to be different, while they pull the strings behind the scenes in our one-party system. Have we gotten to the 100 mark yet, 100 times of me mentioning, in this blog, that brilliant remark of Kurt Vonnegut's, that we are what we pretend to be?

Gotta be at least close to 100 by now. 

There are differences, though. When Warren Buffett says publicly that he should pay more taxes, that's different from Elon Musk publicly saying that he shouldn't have to pay ANY taxes, because he's already publicly benefited mankind so much. And whether Musk really means that, or can barely keep a straight face while he says it and is as amazed as, for instance, I am, that anyone believes he's a public benefactor (we are what we pretend to be!), both Buffett and Musk are decidedly different than most billionaires inasmuch as they've talked about taxes at all in any way except privately.

Musk and Trump and Cuban, and very few other billionaires, seem to live for the spotlight, for public attention. They can't get enough of it, it seems. Many other billionaires seem to live very strictly by the code: "Fools' names and fools' faces often appear in public places." So that we've very rarely, or perhaps never, even heard their names.

Which would make it even harder to tell if they really are all the same, and also exactly the same as the publicity-hungry type of billionaire. 

As with taxes, so also with philanthropy: some billionaires practice it openly, some by stealth, some hardly at all. Instead of "hardly at all," I was going to say "not at all," but it seems even Trump and Musk may have engaged in some charitable giving. Not as much as they would like people to believe, but a little, milked for as much publicity as possible, timed to divert from scandal.

Now, even in the cases of billionaires who give the great majority of their wealth to good causes, it could be argued that they are not making up for all of the damage they caused while accumulating that money. The Andrew Carnegie Syndrome. I'd be more than glad to debate that. On a case-by-case, billionaire-by-billionaire basis. I'm still not going to even debate the nature of all billionaires at once. 

Because, as Denzel Washington said in Philadelphia: "This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics." Simple as that. I'm not having it.

But wait, there's EVEN MORE: I have come to believe that a great many of these people claiming that all billionaires are evil and all the same, are themselves millionaires who would much rather debate something else than whether and to what extent their own existence benefits society as a whole. The B-word gives them a very convenient way to change the subject. Might even work if the people they're talking to are also millionaires. Yeah, I bet in would work real well in those circumstances.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that the first two people I heard spreading the billionaires-are-all trope were millionaires. Gore Vidal, and then Bernie Sanders. 

In fact, in retrospect, I've got to wonder whether Gore Vidal himself was a billionaire when he warned the public to keep both hands planted firmly over one's wallet whenever in the vicinity of a billionaire. Vidal was not merely a bestselling author when he said, he had written a great many very big bestsellers, besides some screenwriting and having been born the grandson of a US Senator and being the first cousin of Al Gore and a cousin by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy, and living half the year in a villa in Ravello and the other half in the Beverly Hills Hotel. If he wasn't worth at least $100 million in the late 1980's, when he issued his dire warning about billionaires, then he must have given most of his wealth away, or followed terrible investment advice, or been a really amazingly big tipper, or something.

You know what, maybe Gore was a billionaire and knew it, and was ironically warning his more perceptive readers, those capable of reading between the lines just as he spoke between them, to watch out for him, and maybe go into business with less treacherous types. If so -- good one, Gore! and ain't I a dope.

My point was that when I read that article in Vanity Fair where Gore talked about the billionaires and the hands clamped on wallets just for safety's sake, it struck me as very odd that someone that rich was warning the public about the rich. 

And then in 2016, Bernie Sanders went on and on at such length about billionaires that he got a billionaire elected President. And I noticed that during 2016 he and his wife sold their second house for half a million. 

Their SECOND house. Making me very suspicious that the rest of their holdings might tally up to another half, making them the dreaded M-word, as are no doubt many if not most of Bernie's colleagues in the Senate and House. 

That was before 2019, when it became widely-known that Sanders' income in 2017 had been over $1 million, leading to his famous public gaff about how you, too, can become a millionaire if you write a bestselling book. 

Who knew it was so easy, right?

Seemed disingenuous to me, because Sanders seemed to be saying that only in 2017 had he become a millionaire. 

But again my point is: a rich person warning me about those evil, evil rich people like movie stars and the Clintons!

Also, I suspect that very many of the people around me these days repeating the all-billionaires-are-the-same trope, may have learned it directly from Bernie Sanders, thus adding to the reasons I dislike him.

Minds Ruined By Religion -- And I Don't Just Mean The Minds Of Believers

I believe I've just had an epiphany.

Nietzsche said that Pascal was the saddest case he knew of a fine mind being ruined by religion.

Last Friday, Richard Dawkins was the 1st guest on "Real Time" with Bill Maher. Bill's 1-on-1 guest. Dawkins appeared on the occasion of his new book, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science.



I haven't read the book, I have nothing to say about the book except that its title made me hope that Bill and Richard might actually talk about science -- the way that Neil deGrasse Tyson did later on in the very same episode. The way that Richard wrote about science up until 2004.

Up until he became a full-time atheist, a New Atheist, a professional atheist.

No, Richard and Bill said fuck-all about science. Within 30 seconds they were knee-deep in those tired old New Atheist cliches and claiming to be oppressed because some people, "deluded liberals," don't like their Muslim-bashing.

Bill isn't a full-time atheist, a New Atheist. Not yet. He still actually talks about a wide variety of issues. Unless he's around Dawkins or Sam Harris.

I'm not as familiar with Pascal's scientific and mathematical work as I am with Dawkins' work on evolutionary biology, and so, for me personally, the saddest case I know of a mind ruined by religion is Dawkins. I'm still an atheist, I haven't stopped being an atheist for an instant over these years of getting to know New Atheists better and better and becoming more and more appalled by them. But one thing which has changed enormously for me is that a person's religious beliefs or lack of them have come to mean less and less to me in my overall opinion of a person. (You notice I said "person," singular. Almost as if I regarded people as individuals or something.) Although I haven't stopped being an atheist for an instant, I still do think about things other than religion, and I sometimes even have very positive thoughts about religious things -- religious art and architecture and music and literature, mostly.

And to those of you who are offended by being compared to religious fanatics, let me quote Dawkins and Hitch and Stephen Fry and the millions of you human parrots who are constantly quoting them: "Oh, you're offended? So fucking what?!"

How New Atheists Can Make Even Someone Like Reza Aslan Look Bright By Comparison

You heard me, pardner: there's a feud a goin' on between Reza Aslan and the New Atheists, and I must take Aslan's side.

A lot of people, probably most of them Christians, heard about that awful woman who reads the diatribes posing as news on Fox News ask Aslan how he as a non-Christian could dare to write a book about Jesus, and naturally took Aslan's side. Maybe some of them first actually read something by Aslan after that interview and said, Hm, this guy isn't much of a writer, but still, between him and that lady on Fox, I'm totally on his side.

In a not dissimilar way, I and some other atheists have seen the Harris-vs-Aslan shitstorm gathering force, and been terribly unimpressed by Aslan, but still side with him immediately and unconditionally on topics of religion if it's a choice between him and Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.

Aslan has become famous with a supposedly nonfictional book about Jesus which is just as fictional as most supposedly nonfictional books about Jesus are. Like the authors of most of these books, Aslan has created a Jesus in his own image, or in the image of what he flatters himself to be. There's so little we actually know about Jesus that whoever writes an entire book about him, or even a book which long sections about him, has to make stuff up. Some of us, like me and Kazantzakis and Gore Vidal, have been honest enough with ourselves and the world to call these books what they are: novels. (And Kazantzakis' novel about Jesus, for one, is effin brilliant. Basically, he told the story of the Gospel of Judas decades before the Gospel of Judas was discovered.)



Aslan is no Kazantzakis and no Ehrman, but he's making a decent effort. Sam Harris is making a spectacle of himself. Aslan said that there is no relationship between religious texts and the lives of religious believers, and that was very silly, of course, but instead of acknowledging that of course he couldn't literally have meant that, the New Atheists have seized upon it and gone on an on and on about how ridiculous Aslan's statement is.

As opposed to making the slightest effort to understand what Aslan meant, which is that there are a wide variety of interpretations of the Koran, and a wide variety of beliefs and political positions among Muslims. Exactly the same way that they obsess on the few verses from the Koran or the Bible which cast Islam or Judaism or Christianity in the worst possible light, and ignore the rest of those books. (Let me take the opportunity to once again call BULLSHIT on the vast majority of New Atheists who claim to've read the Koran and Bible cover-to-cover.) Or the way that some of them reacted to Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist? by going on and on about some drawing of a bird in the Vatican and how that drawing supposedly exposed Ehrman as a fraud. That was bizarre, the way they went on about that drawing. I wish I could say it was atypical.

Aslan is attempting to point out the diversity in the actual lives of the actual more than one billion Muslims in the world, over the din of the New Atheists saying Oh there's some horrible stuff here in the Koran, Oh we've got to watch out for these Muslims, Oh, be very, very afraid -- a din which of course fits in very nicely with the islamophobic rhetoric of people like the aforementioned Fox News correspondent who asked Aslan how he got the nerve to write about Jesus without even being a Christian.

Of course Aslan pointed it out in a very unfortunate and clumsy way when he said that there is NO connection between the lives of believers and the texts of the holy books of those believers. Still, his point was against prejudice -- against assigning characteristic to Muslims because they are Muslims instead of looking closer and regarding them as the individual human beings they are. And that is a point which urgently needs to be made in our society which still suffers from so much prejudice against and fear of Muslims. Between Aslan's attempt to counter this prejudice and fear, and the New Atheists stirring it up, there's no question that any and every intelligent atheist must side with Aslan. In spite of the frequent facepalms over the clumsy way Aslan expresses himself, the message he expresses is far the wiser one. Stemming the tide of violence is far more urgent than whether or not someone believes in God. Identifying with and supporting Muslims fighting against extremism and Christians countering prejudice and fear is far more important than critiquing ancient texts.

And once again, New Atheists, if you're going to critique those texts, read the whole texts first. That's a bare minimum to have a chance not to look like fanatical fools. Don't keep telling me you already have -- like I keep telling you: I don't believe you. Show me you have, by saying something intelligent about the entire Koran or the entire Bible.

Prejudice & Paranoia

The Congressional aide who went berserk on the House floor during the vote to end the government shutdown was yelling about Freemasons. Do any of you wonder, like me, whether she also wanted to yell out some antisemitic insanity, but didn't have the guts because she suffers from paranoid delusions along the lines of "the Jews control the media and pull the strings of politics -- along with their good friends the Masons of course, and who knows how many Masons are crypto-Jews," yada yada yada? Raving anti-Masonic paranoia does often go along with antisemitism, and anti-catholicism, and anti- a lot of other ethnic and cultural groups. It's amazing that such idiocy still exists to such an extent that a congressional aide could be possessed of it.

Maybe exactly the same kinds of prejudice were just as amazing to many of the Founding Fathers. (Even the ones who weren't Freemasons.) Progress and enlightenment happen, but not to everyone. How old was I when I heard about Freemasons for the very first time? younger than when I first encountered anti-Masonic paranoia, that much is certain. Who knows how much creedence I might've given some raving fool like that Congressional aide, if she were the very first person I'd heard mention Masons?

But no. I lucked out, tolerance and opposition to prejudice were instilled in me from the cradle onwards. I was fortunate in that regard in my parents and the xenophilic, pro-civil-rights, anti-fear-of-the-unknown-or-exotic culture to which they belong. Messages like the one brought by that crazy Congressional aide never had a chance with me.