I just saw a commercial for Reese's version of Nutella, and I must say I'm intrigued. I have had good luck with Nutella, but, to be honest, I could do without its pretentiousness. It's all European and hazelnutty and what not. What is a hazelnut? I'm not convinced it's not an invented flavor by coffee shops like how wine tasters say that a Merlot tastes like chocolate and leather. Leather in my wine is neither probable nor desirable.
Reese's has to potential to close that gap with the lovable peanut, which all of us can easily identify. There is a question, however, about Reese's that I really can't believe I hadn't already written about by now. What does Reese's rhyme with? I had a bevy of coworkers about a year and a half ago challenge me on this to the point of calling the question line phone number located on the wrapper of the cup. Unfortunately, they gave them bad information -- citing their famous slogan of "There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's" -- they said there's no wrong way to say Reese's, either. If I called it Rice's or Race's, that would be ludicrous, right?
In short, I think that anyone who calls Reese's Pieces Reesey's Piecey's deserves at minimum a night in the drunk tank. I don't think they belong in the general prison population or anything, unless there are multiple offenses and lack of remorse. Saying Reesey Cups deserves a harsher sentence, because there's no cutesy but tempting gateway rhyme built in. It's going straight to the hard stuff. Reese rhymes with piece. Reese's rhymes with pieces. Piecey's isn't anything.
I really like peanut butter desserts, and Reese's has got some fine products. I enjoy the cups in any context and the pieces especially on my ice cream. My favorite specialty variation is the eggs at Easter, giving us a delightful twist on the chocolate/peanut butter ratio. So I may grab some Reese's spread at the store, and with any justice, that will be the product that ends this Reesey madness, since their is no melody to Reesey's spread. Only the cacophonous nightmare that follows me everywhere there is a piecey.
Showing posts with label arguing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arguing. Show all posts
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
That's an important o
I read an interesting article on the New York Times blog the other day. It's a philosophy professor at Amherst, Louise Antony, trying to defend her point of view of moralistic atheism. The basic premise is that she considers there to be a natural right and wrong in nature independent from God, whether He exists or not. She breaks down two concepts of morality that she calls the Divine Command Theory (DCT) -- where things are good because God wills them -- or the Divine Independence Theory (DIT) -- where God wills only things that are good.
She talks about how the second is a more enlightened way to think because, well, it allows people not to need God and people like her to feel better about the fact that they are living in a similar fantasy that she thinks people like me do. She has a long explanation about how different the two theories are, centering around the arbitrariness of DCT versus the steadiness of DIT. If "goodness" were a natural property, like mass or electrical charge, then for us to make any use of it, there must be a way to measure (or at least detect) this property. She posits that we can, and cites some examples involving home invasion, slavery and torture. And I think we can all agree that those are in fact, wrong. However, they weren't always.
Private property is a very old concept and violation of it has been considered socially unacceptable behavior outside of wartime in just about every culture as long as we have written things down. Slavery was practiced by just about every major culture for a very long time, with most Western countries banning it in the 19th Century and some Middle-Eastern countries acting as late as the 1960s. The Geneva Conventions were adopted in the 20th Century, not because we became enlightened and grew out of it like witchcraft, but because the practice was rampant and the countries that did not abandon a Judeo-Christian worldview wanted to stop it.
That's not to mention cultures like the Aztecs who practiced human sacrifice, Indians who had the institution of sati until the British outlawed it, the Arab concept of honor killings, and our very own policies of institutionalized racism that were finally taken off the books in the 1960s. I think we can also agree that they are wrong as well.
So why didn't we know enough then that it was wrong? The simplest answer is that there is no universal and innate natural "goodness" outside of an agreed upon standard. The laundry list of sins that humankind is evidence that we need such a standard, and Western culture (and Middle-Eastern culture as well) has adopted the Abrahamic traditions as that standard. Prof. Antony's concept, absent some sort of evidence that this idea of natural goodness can be identified is no different than pagan pan-theism -- there are petty gods in everything (or a single universal force permeating everything) providing its intrinsic value -- not unlike George Lucas's Jedi religion.
She also makes a point about how it is better to be good absent the threats of punishment or promise of reward. Maybe. But if there are no consequences to our behavior, why is it better? We call electrical charge positive and negative, and I always preferred working with positive charges in class because it's easier to work with, and the word negative carries bad connotations. Think of another example. The NCAA has myriad arbitrary rules about what college students can or cannot do in order to play their sport. Reggie Bush used his talent to provide a house for his family beyond their means. However, that was against the rules. Did he do anything wrong? According the NCAA, yes. Is that rule right or wrong? Does it matter?
The largest point, though, is that her worldview requires faith. Just like mine does. And it is intellectually dishonest of her to argue that she is morally superior because she subscribes to DIT and thinks she can arrive at moral behavior without needing God because she's smart, without regard to the moral infrastructure that was built by a history of religious people. The two concepts ultimately are different only in the academic sense that she presents, not in the real world in which we live, because the objectivity she claims cannot be divorced from the culture that surrounds us.
She also discusses interpersonal relationships, and says that by acquiring value through God you are essentially denying the human value of everyone else. We kind of do that now, as well; society determines value by the law, and for a while in the United States, even, black people were worth less than white people, and we even defined the ratio. Fetuses are worth very little in the eyes of the law. That changes when society decides it would. We, as enlightened smart people, changed our minds.
Tribalism, where we prefer and value people who are like us or related to us more than others, kind of fits the mold as well. Most of history was driven by this or the similar idea of nationalism. In many places, history still is driven by them. We look at the Janjaweed and know that they are doing wrong, but they see themselves as looking out for their own people, because they feel that their people are worth more. The Japanese thought they were worth more than the Chinese in Nanking. I could go on.
I suppose her counter-argument would be, "Those things were wrong even then, we just disobeyed them. We were wrong, too." Maybe, but how would we have known? She cites Plato as positing this argument before the birth of Christ, so it's not like we haven't had the material to work this out until the 20th and 21st Centuries.
If there really is a natural goodness we can identify without God, humans suck at it. Christians already knew that, though. We need a standard. Christians identify that as the unchanging Bible and the life of Christ.
There are good arguments about the ability of atheists to be moral people. However, this one, this particularly condescending one, is not it. (That's why people don't like atheists: they tell you that you're wrong while claiming to be morally superior. It's not a very becoming look.) An example is quite simply to follow the Golden Rule -- but then again, that owes its origin to millenia of religious thinking.
She talks about how the second is a more enlightened way to think because, well, it allows people not to need God and people like her to feel better about the fact that they are living in a similar fantasy that she thinks people like me do. She has a long explanation about how different the two theories are, centering around the arbitrariness of DCT versus the steadiness of DIT. If "goodness" were a natural property, like mass or electrical charge, then for us to make any use of it, there must be a way to measure (or at least detect) this property. She posits that we can, and cites some examples involving home invasion, slavery and torture. And I think we can all agree that those are in fact, wrong. However, they weren't always.
Private property is a very old concept and violation of it has been considered socially unacceptable behavior outside of wartime in just about every culture as long as we have written things down. Slavery was practiced by just about every major culture for a very long time, with most Western countries banning it in the 19th Century and some Middle-Eastern countries acting as late as the 1960s. The Geneva Conventions were adopted in the 20th Century, not because we became enlightened and grew out of it like witchcraft, but because the practice was rampant and the countries that did not abandon a Judeo-Christian worldview wanted to stop it.
That's not to mention cultures like the Aztecs who practiced human sacrifice, Indians who had the institution of sati until the British outlawed it, the Arab concept of honor killings, and our very own policies of institutionalized racism that were finally taken off the books in the 1960s. I think we can also agree that they are wrong as well.
So why didn't we know enough then that it was wrong? The simplest answer is that there is no universal and innate natural "goodness" outside of an agreed upon standard. The laundry list of sins that humankind is evidence that we need such a standard, and Western culture (and Middle-Eastern culture as well) has adopted the Abrahamic traditions as that standard. Prof. Antony's concept, absent some sort of evidence that this idea of natural goodness can be identified is no different than pagan pan-theism -- there are petty gods in everything (or a single universal force permeating everything) providing its intrinsic value -- not unlike George Lucas's Jedi religion.
She also makes a point about how it is better to be good absent the threats of punishment or promise of reward. Maybe. But if there are no consequences to our behavior, why is it better? We call electrical charge positive and negative, and I always preferred working with positive charges in class because it's easier to work with, and the word negative carries bad connotations. Think of another example. The NCAA has myriad arbitrary rules about what college students can or cannot do in order to play their sport. Reggie Bush used his talent to provide a house for his family beyond their means. However, that was against the rules. Did he do anything wrong? According the NCAA, yes. Is that rule right or wrong? Does it matter?
The largest point, though, is that her worldview requires faith. Just like mine does. And it is intellectually dishonest of her to argue that she is morally superior because she subscribes to DIT and thinks she can arrive at moral behavior without needing God because she's smart, without regard to the moral infrastructure that was built by a history of religious people. The two concepts ultimately are different only in the academic sense that she presents, not in the real world in which we live, because the objectivity she claims cannot be divorced from the culture that surrounds us.
She also discusses interpersonal relationships, and says that by acquiring value through God you are essentially denying the human value of everyone else. We kind of do that now, as well; society determines value by the law, and for a while in the United States, even, black people were worth less than white people, and we even defined the ratio. Fetuses are worth very little in the eyes of the law. That changes when society decides it would. We, as enlightened smart people, changed our minds.
Tribalism, where we prefer and value people who are like us or related to us more than others, kind of fits the mold as well. Most of history was driven by this or the similar idea of nationalism. In many places, history still is driven by them. We look at the Janjaweed and know that they are doing wrong, but they see themselves as looking out for their own people, because they feel that their people are worth more. The Japanese thought they were worth more than the Chinese in Nanking. I could go on.
I suppose her counter-argument would be, "Those things were wrong even then, we just disobeyed them. We were wrong, too." Maybe, but how would we have known? She cites Plato as positing this argument before the birth of Christ, so it's not like we haven't had the material to work this out until the 20th and 21st Centuries.
If there really is a natural goodness we can identify without God, humans suck at it. Christians already knew that, though. We need a standard. Christians identify that as the unchanging Bible and the life of Christ.
There are good arguments about the ability of atheists to be moral people. However, this one, this particularly condescending one, is not it. (That's why people don't like atheists: they tell you that you're wrong while claiming to be morally superior. It's not a very becoming look.) An example is quite simply to follow the Golden Rule -- but then again, that owes its origin to millenia of religious thinking.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Here are a couple of phrases that I hate
I probably come across as an authoritarian agressor when it comes to proper speech usage, commercial likes, and decision making. That's not that true. I respect your preference to like stupid stuff, so long as you respect my right to criticize it. You can, of course, defend yourself (as you should), but chances are you are wrong anyway and will not win.
This is especially the case if you make a habit of using a particular set of words or phrases. My mom has a huge list, while most of hers are common errors made with actual words, notably the inexplicable "supposably" pronunciation for supposedly, which, in her mind, is grounds for sterilization. I have issues with that sometimes too, but I also have issues with words that are used that probably should not be nearly as often as they are. Let's take a look, shall we?
- Myself - This is one of the former complaints. This is misused all the time. It is the reflexive pronoun used for emphasis or reflection, like when the subject and object of a verb are the same: for instance, "I laughed so hard at their grammar mistakes that I peed myself." It is not a replacement for the standard nominative (I) or objective (me) pronouns like, "John and myself will empty the tiger's cage" or "Please send the shoes filled with champagne to either Hector or myself." No dice.
- Utilize - This is a longer word that means the same thing as use without bringing anything extra to the soup. This word should be used never.
I used an unnumered list, the inferior form of list, because I could only think of two at the time of writing this and a numbered list of 2 looks tacky, and quite frankly, we're all better that that. If you feel the need to demonstrate, please add your distasteful phrases in the comment section.
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