Qatar is not, when you look more widely, some kind of rogue state peopled by a different kind of human being. In fact, the best way to look at it is perhaps as a very literal-minded and efficient expression of the forces at work across every other modern state. Qatar just does it wilder, harder and without apology. It is a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of supremely wealthy overlords, of the surveillance state, of an underclass of workers, of increasingly repressive laws, of the global carbon addiction. Do any of these sound familiar? In many ways Qatar is like your furiously able and efficient younger colleague; who has essentially looked at this, learnt the mannerisms, and said, yeah, we can do that.
Sam Harris on Whether Religion Really Does Make Everything Worse:
Sam Harris: The God of Abraham is explicit in the Bible and in the Quran that the document you're reading is the Word of God, and that it is not of human manufacture. And it's just obvious that that can't be. You look at the books, and there's just no way they're the product of omniscience. They betray their merely human origins on every page….
Only worth noting for one point: Sam Harris has been writing against religion for a couple of decades now, and still has only the vaguest idea of what any particular religion believes. When he started out, he had no idea what the Christian understanding of the inspiration of Scripture is and how radically it differs from the Muslim view, and he has no idea now. You would think that after all these years of polemic he would’ve learned something just by accident, but he’s done a remarkable job of making his ignorance invincible. Just shows what you can achieve if you put your mind to it.
I fervently hope that when I’m gone people will say “He was a right rumptydooler, he was.”
Sun’s out after a few days of (very welcome) rain.
What We Owe Our Fellow Animals | Martha C. Nussbaum | The New York Review of Books:
Behind these biases lies a more general failing, which the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial”: the denial that we are animals of a certain type (the anthropoid type), and the tendency to imagine ourselves, instead, as pure spirits, “barely connected to biology.” This mistaken way of thinking has a long history in most human cultures; it remains stubbornly lodged in people’s psyches even when they think they are examining the evidence fairly. Anthropodenial has led, until recently, to a reluctance to credit research findings that show that animals use tools, solve problems, communicate through complex systems, interact socially with intricate forms of organization, and even have emotions such as fear, grief, and envy. (This is a bait-and-switch: emotions have long been denigrated on the grounds that they are not pure spirit, and yet humans also want to claim a monopoly on what they despise.)
The same idea — that we are “barely connected to biology” — underlies the idea that one can be born into “the wrong body.”
Final analysis: same as halftime. A solid performance by the USMNT: they were composed and competent throughout, but had no cutting edge. ⚽️
Halftime analysis: USMNT dominating in midfield, but has no finishing. ⚽️