The Daily Overdose of Logic for Tuesday, 1 November 2011: The Teeming Masses Become Ever More Teeming

The Overdose's absence on Friday was intentional; its absence yesterday most certainly was not. To wit: yesterday was the worst day I've had for Internet access in probably ten years--the law school, my apartment, and my preferred lunchtime watering hole all had essentially no usable access. Lame excuse, I know, but I doubt that anybody spent the whole day on the edge of his/her seat yesterday (and if you were, I strongly encourage you to get a life). --Ed.

I am not an old person, but I distinctly remember when the world population hit six billion. It wasn't that long ago--only twelve years--which makes yesterday's proclamation by the United Nations of the birth of No. 7,000,000,000 a really rather remarkable thing. The comparisons speak for themselves--there were fewer than one billion people when the United States became a nation; right at two billion when Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a season; well under three billion when my parents were born in 1954. Even a relatively conservative estimate of the growth rate (and of my longevity) predicts that there will be over nine billion humans when I die, more than twice as many as when I was born.

I know you're all waiting with bated breath. Sorry to disappoint you.

The Overdose is taking the day off today. Why, you ask? Well, leaving aside the fact that "Fuck you, that's why" and "It's my blog and I'll do what I wanna" are perfectly sufficient answers, several reasons:

1. My first mock trial competition ever is less than a week away and I still have not a single fucking clue what I'm doing, so I should probably prepare for that.
2. It's time to catch up on some much-needed sleep and do various other mental maintenance tasks, including but not limited to watching The Big Lebowski for the first time in a long while (what? it's homework! my Contracts professor said I should!).
3. Related to #2, tonight I plan to watch Game 7 at the pub with some law school peeps (and if you missed Game 6 last night, shame on you), then party with more law school peeps, then hopefully spend some time with my mother outside the confines of a hospital room.
4. Most significantly for you all: because I love you, I'm preparing a few pieces of new content for EL that should appear sometime this weekend. Keep an eye out for that.

Enjoy your Friday. --Ed.

The Daily Overdose of Logic for Thursday, 27 October 2011: NATO's Kabuki Theater

Last week, NATO said it would be out of Libya by Monday. Today, the UN Security Council told it it must be out of Libya by Monday.

By metaphorical show of hands, who thinks NATO will be out of Libya by Monday?

The Daily Overdose of Logic for Wednesday, 26 October 2011: In Which I Am Immune to the President's Shameless Pandering

Programming note: I have a backlog of issues about which I'm hoping to write longer-form, standalone pieces in the next few days. I apologize for the recent lack of content outside the DOoL--real life, i.e. law school, has intervened of late--but that should be corrected soon. I know, I know, you can all hardly wait.

And yes, the Overdose is really late today. So sue me.

--Ed.

I know what you are doing, President Obama. And even if you are trying to do it in the greatest city in the world,  it's not going to work.

I understand that you need people like me. I understand that by not responding to your generous "offer" to me, I am in the distinct minority among my peers. I even understand that what you're putting out there would probably confer some substantial benefits upon me.

And I'm still not impressed.

The Daily Overdose of Logic for Tuesday, 25 October 2011: Netflix's Tragic Hemorrhage

Netflix is, in my opinion, one of the most innovative companies in a long time. It has made it both easy and cheap to access an incomprehensibly vast universe of diversions. For people young enough that electronic amusement has always been a staple of their daily lives, it's a true godsend (just ask my sister). Netflix has literally changed the way we think about entertainment; it is no longer necessary, or even desirable, to maintain a library of physical copies of TV shows and movies at home when one can watch something new, every day, anywhere one wants. The more one thinks about it, the more incredible Netflix is.

The Daily Overdose of Logic for Monday, 24 October 2011: The United States Plays Charades in Syria

Robert Ford is a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is (he is from This the Finest of All States, after all). The Obama administration's recently installed ambassador to Syria is a highly competent career diplomat who speaks five languages. More than that, he has the incredible strength of the United States Foreign Service at his disposal to, among other things, keep him safe.

The Daily Overdose of Logic for Friday, 21 October 2011: America Polices the World (Again)

The United States of America has a long-standing policy of justifying its military interventions in the affairs of other sovereign states on humanitarian grounds, with varying levels of ingenuousness. We had to save the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam from the horrors of communism. We had to save Afghanistan from Islamic fundamentalism. We had to save Iraq (twice, no less) from a demented tyrant. And this is all to say nothing of military actions that, for reasons not always entirely clear, don't seem to rise to the level of a war in the general discourse, e.g. Kosovo.

The Daily Overdose of Logic for Thursday, 20 October 2011: Colorado Springs Sings the Blues

I regret to say that we must begin this morning with some very sad news.

Extraordinarily talented blues musician and painfully decent human being John-Alex Mason died yesterday at the age of 35 after suffering a major internal bleed during what was supposed to be an outpatient surgery three weeks ago. John-Alex was a highly prominent and respected figure in Colorado Springs' tight-knit musical community; he was especially well-liked by students and faculty at the Colorado Springs School, from which he graduated in 1994 and where he was a frequent guest musician and instructor. (I graduated from CSS in 2007.)

Occupy Wall Street has a point, but will they stop being morons and make it?

On Tuesday, the ever-excellent Leah Gould (who is now officially famous on the Internet) pointed me to an amusing article in that most notorious of right-wing rags, New York magazine, in which Alex Klein asked fifty Wall Street Occupiers nine really rather simple economic questions. Honestly, they were the sort of thing any mildly interested person who's ever taken even the most basic macro course should be able to dispatch with ease; I wouldn't expect your average American, woefully undereducated in econ as he/she is, to be able to handle these questions, but surely somebody who's willing to camp out in Zuccotti Park for weeks on end to change a system has a rudimentary grasp of that system, right?

Yeaaaah . . . I don't think I need to tell you how that turned out.

The Daily Overdose of Logic for Wednesday, 19 October 2011: Herman Cain's Flying Circus

The idea that Herman Cain has a very real chance to become the next Republican candidate for President of the United States continues to utterly bewilder me. The man's "9-9-9" tax proposal is beyond preposterous--akin to using a disgusting parasite to lose weight, it would cause more than four out of five American households to owe more than they currently do. He has never held elective office at any level. He still seems to genuinely believe that the War in Iraq was a good idea. As chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve (now there's an indication of sound monetary policy, eh?), he apparently "missed" every warning sign of the worst economic disaster in 75 years. And his pizza? Meh.

The Daily Overdose of Logic for Tuesday, 18 October 2011: Gilad Shalit Goes Home

Ed.: We're going to try something new--a daily feature (maybe with weekends off) in which I'll write mid-length commentary on one item of particular interest, plus quick hitters (a link to the story, plus a few sentences of opinion) on each of several others. If you prefer my long-form, standalone screeds, don't worry, they'll still appear as circumstances warrant. My hope is that this will help keep me in the habit of writing here on a regular basis, and that it will keep my readers interested.

Let's get one thing straight right now: Gilad Shalit's capture and detention involved multiple gross violations of international law. Israel, its Western allies, and the United Nations were right to issue strident demands for his release. Those parties' celebration today is, at least partially, deserved.

But let's get another thing straight: Shalit's release does not mean a corner has been turned in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, nor does it wipe away the various problems that delayed it for so long, nor is it even an unequivocally good thing.

The Iowa Hawkeyes say "America Needs Farmers." But does it?

Ed. Note #1: For those of you who are reading the blog for the first time, welcome. As an introduction to the basic ground rules of the site, you may want to read the initial welcome post here. I do hope you'll stick around (and comment! This whole blogging thing is much more fun for me that way).

Ed. Note #2: One may argue that if I'm going to restart this endeavor after nearly five months away, especially at this particular juncture, I'm doing my readers a disservice by not using the first post back to talk about what is almost certainly the most significant social movement in this country in some time, namely, Occupy Wall Street (or, if you prefer, #OccupyWallStreet). To which I say: you're probably right, and trust me, plenty will be written on that topic here. But just as one doesn't reintroduce a starving man to food by serving him a five-course meal, one doesn't start off an out-of-practice blogger with a topic on which he could probably write 50,000 words.

Ed. Note #3: If I'm going to keep this blog going (and I really, really do want to), I need help from you, dear reader. I'm simply not creative or insightful enough to feel confident in selecting a topic and writing (well) about it day after day after day. So I'm asking all of you to e-mail me if you have topics you'd like to see discussed here (don't be afraid to use the comments, either). My e-mail address is in the sidebar.

Now, then . . .

For those of you who are unaware (though, if you're my Facebook friend, you almost certainly are aware), I am a huge Northwestern Wildcats football fan. This may explain my persistent bad mood over the last several weeks, but in any case, on your average fall Saturday, I can be found in front of a television, cheering on a bunch of guys wearing purple and hoping that Dan Persa's Achilles tendon decides it doesn't hate him, and me, anymore. This past Saturday's opponent: the Hawkeyes of the University of Iowa.

If you don't follow the Big Ten Conference that closely, you may not know that Northwestern/Iowa has, in the last few years, become a rather intriguing rivalry (though don't say that to an Iowa fan, as he/she will promptly inform you that his/her Hawks have no rivalry with a school as inconsequential as Northwestern). This has a lot to do with the fact that, prior to last Saturday's 41-31 loss, my Wildcats had beaten Iowa in five out of the teams' six previous meetings, including three straight times at Iowa, despite Iowa usually being, on paper, the better team. Various theories have been put forward for why, to be stereotypical, a bunch of rich Chardonnay-sipping pencilnecks have recently had the number of a bunch of strapping corn-fed young lads, from the usual revenge hypotheses (Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald is avenging a broken leg he suffered as a player in Northwestern's 1995 game against Iowa that kept him out of the Rose Bowl) to the truly bizarre (something about evil magic and baked potatoes, and if you're a college sports fan and you don't read SBNation's absolutely spectacular Iowa Hawkeyes blog Black Heart Gold Pants, shame on you).

(I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.)

The most offensive stick figures you've ever seen

Now that 21 May has come and gone with, shockingly, no Rapture, I offer the following for your consideration:

(courtesy friendlyatheist.com)

If you weren't aware, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris proclaimed 20 May 2010 to be Everybody Draw Muhammad Day as a protest against the death threats and persecution that artists like South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, among many others, have faced for violating Islam's supposed prohibition on likenesses of their prophet, no matter how benign (I say supposed because this is far from a consensus view among Islamic scholars). The event gained an extraordinary amount of press and was a leading news story for several days last spring.

I am not content with Everybody Draw Muhammad Day being a one-time event. I think it needs to be annual, if not more frequent. To use a non-gender-neutral idiom, it takes a great deal more testicular fortitude to take a stand for free speech repeatedly, even if on the same topic, than to defend it once and move on. I therefore announce my intention to draw a respectful, non-threatening image of Muhammad every 20 May for the foreseeable future. I implore you all to do the same (and if this blog is still going at this time next year, send them to me and I'll share them on the site!).

Does atheism imply liberalism?

To me, it has never seemed logically inconsistent to be both an atheist and a libertarian (I wouldn't be both of those things if it did). As a matter of fact, I've always thought it was quite natural--each philosophy is, in its own way, a rejection of the necessity and/or legitimacy of an authority higher than oneself. Of the few serious libertarians I know, a fairly large proportion of them, while they may not necessarily classify themselves as atheists, tend to be sharply critical of organized religion. When, as a teenager, I realized* I was an atheist, one of the things that appealed to me about the atheist community was that it was an open-minded bunch of people, who, I hoped, would not belittle or denigrate my political beliefs, as is all too common.

The cowardice of political correctness

I mentioned in this blog's inaugural post that the creation of the blog was inspired by an event which "really pissed me off." This is the story of that event, and why I think it matters.

Those of you who know me personally will probably know that I recently ended my four-year-long membership in Northwestern University's Model United Nations club (NUMUN). NUMUN was an incredible experience for me and contributed more to my enjoyment of my four years at Northwestern than just about anything else; I met most of my best friends at NU through NUMUN. I served as a member of the staff for our annual high school conference my first two years in the club and on the club's Secretariat, in roles primarily pertaining to the quality of simulation at the high school conference, in my final two years. I also represented NU as a delegate at quite a number of collegiate conferences. (Lest you misunderstand my motives, I left the club not because I didn't like it anymore--quite the contrary, in fact--but simply because I won't be back next year.)

What will probably end up being my last NUMUN meeting was on Wednesday night, when we selected the committees the club will simulate at next year's conference. Even though I won't be back for next year's conference, and despite the fact that I still consider everyone who was in the room a good friend, the meeting left a sour taste in my mouth.

Welcome to Excessively Logical

Note: Thanks to a massive disruption in Blogger's service, my blog was wiped off the face of the earth early this morning. I apologize to anyone who followed my blog or commented on it yesterday; it appears that I just have to start over from a clean slate and that your contributions have been lost. Below is the initial welcome post, which I'm glad I had the foresight to copy/paste into a word processor on my computer after the disruption started.

I have to admit, I started this blog on something of a whim. Something really pissed me off (you will, I trust, soon find that this is an extremely common occurrence), and I decided I had to tell somebody--anybody--just exactly what I thought about it. I suspect that this is how a great number of blogs, most of them completely unreadable, begin their existences.

But, despite the hurried nature of its eventual creation, this blog has been a long time in coming. I have thoughts--a lot of them, in fact. Most of them are probably of no interest whatsoever to anybody besides me, but that has never stopped me from posting them on Facebook. In the past, those few intrepid souls masochistic enough not to hide my updates from their News Feeds have never been shy about agreeing or disagreeing with me in one of the most public fora imaginable. It is mostly for me, but to a certain extent for them, that I begin this endeavor--if you know me and interact with me on Facebook, I hope you'll follow me over here, as I'm very eager to have a place where I can air my opinions (and hear the opinions of others) without character limits or inexplicable formatting and layout problems. (Facebook is, no doubt, an incredibly useful tool, but its many vagaries will probably constitute the topic of one of my early rants posts.)

In other words: this blog is a vanity project, an ego-stroker. I am here because I like seeing my own words on the Internet and people's reactions to those words. I have never claimed that I am not a narcissist.

I am currently enrolled in an academic course which studies the institution of marriage from a practical point of view--in essence, it is designed to teach undergraduates how to make a marriage work. One of the readings in this course defines "excessive logic" as an unhealthy defense mechanism used to hide one's feelings during a conflict. The title of this blog derives from the fact that I have absolutely no conception of how logic could possibly be "excessive," or how it could be employed negatively. To me, logic is the only tool a human being can use to understand the world in which he or she lives. The guiding principle of this blog is that without logic, we are lost.

I have no idea how long I will continue this project. So long as I do, I have no idea how often I will update it. Three years from now (that length of time is currently significant to me, for reasons I will probably talk about at some point), there may be two posts on this site or two thousand. I might talk to myself half a dozen times a day, or I might leave my thousands of devoted readers without new material for weeks at a time. I don't consider myself a particularly impulsive person and rarely do anything that might be considered spontaneous, so the fact that I have not the tiniest inkling where this will take me is exciting for me.

There is one thing you should know before you begin following me, and it is that I have never pulled a punch in my life. I originally wanted to call this blog Equal-Opportunity Offender; I didn't, because a) that would have made it seem like I like to insult people just for the hell of it, which isn't true, and b) that URL wasn't available on Blogger, but the one guarantee I will make to you is that, at some point, I will almost certainly say something you find utterly repulsive. When that happens, it is extremely unlikely that I will apologize for it. I don't like upsetting people, but I find it preferable to being mealy-mouthed and ambivalent. I am direct. I am outspoken. I do not believe in the concept of profanity and use words others consider truly vile with absolute impunity. This blog will not be for the faint-of-heart or the thin-skinned.

If, during your wanderings through the vast constellation of the Internet, you happen to have stumbled across my tiny piece of it, and what I've described above doesn't sound like your cup of tea, I don't begrudge you a thing. Go back to Google (please tell me you are using Google, not Bing or Yahoo or some such), type in something interesting, and enjoy yourself. For those who stay, I hope you will find the content of this site, by turns, fascinating, puzzling, enlightening, infuriating, and a thousand other things.

Welcome, and please excuse the following posts, which some may find Excessively Logical.