if transgendered people are trannies, does that make cisgendered people cissies?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090317.wgoodyear16/BNStory/National/home

"Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution.

“I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail."

___________

The only possible reason why belief or non-belief in evolution would be a religious question is if one thought that Christianity and evolutionary theory are mutually exclusive. He calls it a religious question. He then states that he is a Christian. The logic of the situation isn't complicated.

I'm more disappointed than anything else. I rather thought this is the kind of thing that happens south of here. I find it embarrassing.

The transition from the 16th century mode of understanding to the Classical mode was a transition from divination to signification. In the 16th century, the world itself was a series of signs, which existed previous to our knowledge of them, placed by God waiting for us to divine them. The early 17th century brought a transformation of this mode of knowing, into a world where there was only arbitrary signifiers and what they signified, a world of measurement and ordered series. Everything became what it is, and not anything else. Now, we're in the modern age, typified by organic (autopoeitic) unities.

Speculation: evangelical atheism represents a regressive tendency, a desperate attempt to return to the classical episteme. Notice: the worldview of someone like Dawkins is virtually identical to someone like Bacon, or Hume. He is a man of the 17th century. The feigned target of his vitriol is the 16th century world of magic and divination. But that mode of understanding is 5 centuries away. The real (semi-conscious) target of these attacks is the modern episteme, the cutting edge of thought. In the autopoeitic unity, there is a kind of teleology; each part exists for the sake of the others (cf. Kant on the telology of organisms). This mode of understanding is implicit in the kind of 'explanation' utilized by complexity theory - unities and holism are beginning to speak again, not in the 16th century mode, but in an entirely new one. The evangelical atheist is one who sees this, but cannot tolerate it, cannot even understand it - it appears as nothing more than the even older mode of understanding. But it is not that - it is a new unity, where holism (16th century episteme) and analysis (classical episteme) exist in a synthesis, a dialectical relation rather than a relation of one dominating the other.

As seen at the Eaton's Center today. This eased the trauma of having to go to the mall somewhat.

At work, someone asked me if I could explain the difference between modernism and postmodernism. Like any sane, reflective person, my immediate answer was, "No." That kind of question is murky at best, and hopeless at worst. But given that my only options were to come up with something more verbose or go back to work, I felt the need to spin something together. It went something like this (only shorter):

( We could define the beginning of modernism as the moment when the subject appears in discourse. )

Live updates on whether the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the earth yet:

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/


Also, the word of the day is: geoid.

The tiger dances; the dragon mounts the wind and waves;
the principal seat of the true centre generates the mysterious pearl.
Fruit produced on the branch will, in time, ripen;
could the baby in the womb be any different?
South and north accord with the Source [through] inversion of the signs of the trigrams;
at daybreak and dusk the five phases [of the adept’s body] accord with the celestial axis.
[You ]must be able to understand this great mystery [while] dwelling in the chaotic market place;
what need is there [to retreat] deep into the mountains to preserve peaceful solitude?

ch.5, Chapters on Awakening to the Real: A Song Dynasty Classic of Inner Alchemy
Attributed to Zhang Boduan (ca. 983-1081)

This is something I'm posting over in neurotheology too...

( Studies on Qi-Gong... )

I knocked off work a bit early today, because the boss accidentally dropped a tablesaw on my knee. No shit.

Well, not ON my knee, per se. It glanced off my knee, leaving me with about a square centimeter of skin missing (not scraped, gone) and a joint that smarts considerably. There was very little blood. We were moving it off a dolly, and it just tipped over.

Hey, at least I got off early.