An American In Taiwan

Posted By 美國人 on June 29, 2009

So, the death of Michael Jackson got me thinking.

We have this thing called “reverence”. It can be defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:

1. Deep or due respect felt or shown towards a person on account of his or her position or relationship; deference. Now rare or Obs. b. Deep respect and veneration for some thing, place, or person regarded as having a sacred or exalted character.

c. In phr. to have or hold (a person or thing) in (great, etc.) reverence.

d. In phr. to pay, do, or make reverence to, to show respect or veneration for (a person or thing) by some action. (In early use implying sense 2.)

2. A gesture indicative of respect; an obeisance; a bow or curtsy. (Cf. prec.)

3. The condition or state of being respected or venerated.

We tend to bestow more of this upon someone after his or her demise. Even when someone is of “questionable” morals, immediately follow his or her death, that person is lovingly placed on a pedestal and, for all intents and purposes, did no wrong. Mother Teresa is a good example of this. I think I’ve mentioned that before.

I don’t know why he died. I don’t care why he died. Cardiac arrest is extremely vague. It basically just means his heart stopped. To put it in perspective, technically, both Heath Ledger and Ted Bundy both died of cardiac arrest. Hell, my father died of it. I’m pretty sure even that if the sacrifice victim in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom wasn’t lowered into a pit of molten hot magma he would’ve died of cardiac arrest. If I had to put money on it, I’d say it had something to do with Jack-O’s intense prescription drug abuse. Drug addicts experience weakening of the heart? No way! Yes, way.

Perez Hilton, whom I don’t care for and have no reason to defend, is coming under a lot of fire for his skeptical post about Jack-O’s condition:

What’s wrong with that? The blogosphere is apparently quaking with terror over this if you believe Mashable, but why? Jackson did it before, just like Perez says. He was exhibiting the same behavior this time. Why is that insensitive to point it out? Perez was doing what he should be doing as a celebrity blogging whore: showing and telling.

Good for you, Perez.

But now we have another interesting phenomenon to deal with: the rule of threes. They say (and when I say “they” I mean the superstitious morons who actually believe correlation equals causation and there’s no such thing as coincidence) that these sorts of things happen three times in quick succession. So, with the addition of Billy Mays, voila, we have our three.

Yeah, I don’t buy it, either.

To tell the truth, I’m more upset about Billy than the other two. Sure, Farrah was hot back in her heyday and I’m sure if I were a pubescent boy when that ubiquitous poster was released, I’d feel a lot more broken up about losing her. As it so happens, I was not. I was more infatuated with Kathy Ireland back when she was an SI cover model. But honestly: a bug bazooka. How cool is that?

You know what would clean that really, really well? A ShamWow.

I still have no idea what sha’mon means.

Category: Complaints, Entertainment, Non-Taiwan Related, Thoughts | No Comments »
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Posted By 美國人 on June 8, 2009

I’m thinking about starting one. I have a page for Chinese language learning with some recommendations, reviews, etc., but how about for those of us who teach English to non-native speakers? Resources for them. Good idea? Thoughts?

Category: Blog related, Thoughts | 1 Comment »
Tags: esl, materials, page, resources, teaching, tefl, tesl, textbook, toefl

Posted By 美國人 on June 6, 2009

I’m not a vegetarian. I would probably starve. Just want to get that out of the way.

I don’t get a lot of flak for my secular worldview, though I imagine some people see my anti-religious ranting or tweeting as offensive or unnecessary. My response to them is: it is no different from youth ministers or the very devout discussing how wonderful Jesus is or how blessed they feel or how they need to evangelize more. No difference. They just don’t like it when I do it. Some people really don’t like it.

A friend of mine decided, after two years of being a vegetarian, to fall off the wagon. He and his girlfriend went to a restaurant, watched the Cavs game and had fish.

Sounds fairly innocent, and it is. When he posted something about it on Facebook, he received a mixed response of cheers and questions about what took him so long. He described the feeling to me:

When you eat meat, nobody asks why. But, if you say you’re a vegetarian, they immediately begin to question you: ‘What are your motives? Do you feel bad for the animals? Do you not like meat? How can you not like meat?’ That, or they try to corner you with inconsistencies: ‘Well, I see you’re wearing leather shoes, so you’re obviously not vegetarian because you care about animals.’ Then, when you tell people you’ve started eating meat again, it’s like they welcome you back into society. You’re one of “us” again. It’s absolutely bizarre.

He wondered if I ever get that sort of thing about my worldview choice. Some of us get it more than others, I’m sure. Being in a very liberal college town, I’m surrounded by secular people. My wife is from Taiwan, where the population ratio of secular to religious is the even smaller than the inverse of what it is here. I’m definitely looking forward to that, when public policies are based on the wellbeing of the people, rather than the ideology of some religious nutjobs.

It got me to thinking, though, that atheists and vegetarians aren’t really that different. Here, I’ll show you:

Atheists are atheists because they believe that it’s fully possible (and, many would contend, preferable) to have a great life without religion and still maintain high moral and ethical standards. In other words, you can still be good without God.

Vegetarians are vegetarians because they believe that it’s fully possible (and, many would contend, preferable) to have a great diet without meat and still maintain high dietary and culinary standards. In other words, you can still eat without meat.

Now, I’m not going to say that I feel good that animals die so I can enjoy how they taste. I just don’t feel bad enough that I’ll stop. Can’t remember which comedian said it, but I did not climb to the top of the food chain to be eating broccoli. Still, it’s important to know, if you’re eating meat, where it comes from and show it due respect.

Jamie Oliver did a show examining chickens, eggs and how they get from the farm to your plate. It’s a very revealing look at modern chicken farming and the difference between battery and free range. Or, if you’re a seafood kind of person, just watch the former Iron Chef Michiba Rokusaburo take apart an Angler fish (Monkfish, Goosefish, depending on where you are).

Delicious. I guess. I’ve never had it. I’d love to try it, though. That’s one of the things I’m really looking forward to about living in Taiwan: best seafood around.

I’m sure at this point you’re thinking, ‘How is he going to tie this back into refuting a religious worldview?’

Well, atheists have looked at religion and deemed it disturbing, painful and unnecessary enough that they prefer to live without it, just as the vegetarians have done with meat. The big difference being that atheists do it because they care about human lives rather than animal lives.

I think people are more likely to give a vegetarian shit than an atheist because there’s no clause in the social contract that says you cannot be intolerant of what people eat. Even at our wedding, we had three vegetarians out of 60 guests, and we devoted 1/6 of the menu to them.  If you have a group of 60 people and 3 of them are atheists (which is about the national average; if you throw non-religious, agnostic and Buddhist/etc in with that group, it’d be more like 12 or 13 out of 60), what are the chances that they’ll be considered at all? Pretty slim, I’d say.

The steak and the cross: two sides to the same coin, it seems. Having said that, I think I’ll have steak for dinner tonight. Pan seared.

Category: Daily Life, Differences, Food, Non-Taiwan Related, Thoughts | 2 Comments »
Tags: Food, quotes, vegetarianism, worldview, youtube