Rust Belt Philosophy

Because I don't know much about college basketball, I typically stay away from pre-NBA-draft analysis. What I do know about is pro ball, so without further ado here is my take on the draft and the preceding trades (ordered by draft pick):

LA Clippers: Griffin looks okay, I guess, but this team is cursed. They won't have much success until they figure out what kind of team they are - Baron Davis and Chris Kaman? Really? - and/or move out of LA.

Memphis Grizzlies: I like their pick cause I'm a sucker for defense, but I'm having trouble seeing how it helps them all that much. Their bench in particular is really lacking, especially in a deep division.

OK City Thunder: Should've taken a big man, in my opinion. Durant's developing nicely and they have some good talent around him, but you can't play Jeff Green as your 4 and win. Phoenix and Golden State have tried small ball for years now: it just doesn't work.

Sacramento Kings: This team needs a superstar or a great coach (or both), because they have enough diverse talent to do much better than 17 wins. Probably this Tyreke Evans kid ain't it, but apparently this wasn't a deep enough draft to trade their pick for someone more emulsifying.

Minnesota Timberwolves: You got me. They certainly needed a point guard, but three? Hopefully Al Jefferson will find a way to get out of there and finally join a winning group.

Golden State Warriors: Are addicted to scoring. Their pick was an embarrassment.

New York Knicks: I really don't think it matters what they do. They're Phoenix Lite, and Phoenix Regular could only ever get to the conference finals. Still, if they're going down that road, I guess it can't hurt to have a talented PF.

Toronto Raptors: Paging Avery Johnson...

Milwaukee Bucks: Blew up their team, or tried to. We won't know if this worked for a while, but at least it's something. You can only hope that this Jennings kid has the mental toughness to stay with them until they have the chance to be good again.

NJ Nets: Let's see - you're in a division with New York, Boston, Philly, and Toronto, which means there's not a lot of competition. But you don't have much offense to speak of and you just traded away your scoring star. So in the draft you take...an 11-point-per-game scorer? Good luck with that.

Charlotte Bobcats: Remember how the way to win in the NBA playoffs is to adjust? Charlotte just missed the playoffs last year and appear to be okay with that, as they've made zero adjustments and didn't help their teensy front line at all in the draft. Still, it's the east, so...

Indiana Pacers: In lieu of my own analysis, I quote Away We Go (to the best of my memory): If you think Mike Dunleavy can carry anything more than a bucket of water..."

Phoenix Suns: It was fun while it lasted. Hopefully they can get some value when they trade Stoudemire.

Detroit Pistons: Stop making the playoffs and things will go much better! Their core is still pretty solid, but there's only so much you can do with a bunch of late-round picks.

Chicago Bulls: As fun as their late-season run was, their draft pick was that bad. Drafting a 6'8" power forward onto a team overloaded with size could add flexibility; doing so on a small team just makes things worse. Derrick Rose also now faces the 2nd-year-star's dilemma: can he improve his skills and exceed his first year or will the scouting catch up with him?

Philadelphia 76ers: Well, they did need a backup PG. But they also need, much like Houston, to get rid of their injury-prone salary pit - er, I mean, star.

Atlanta Hawks: Between this and the Crawford trade, it was like watching Golden State all over again.

Utah Jazz: Did they draft a player who'll magically make them a better road team? No? Well, then that's that.

New Orleans Hornets: They've run into what I will now term Phoenix Suns syndrome, wherein their system relies entirely on the production from one player's unique skill set. Until they find an imitation Chris Paul to back up the real Chris Paul, I don't see them departing much from the Suns' depressing example.

Portland Trailblazers: Can you imagine how good they'd be if Greg Oden could just develop a post game? If you can, I have bad news: it doesn't matter, cause that'll never happen. Just settling into a rotation would help them a lot, though, and they're not a team that needs much help.

Dallas Mavericks: Are and will ever be Mark Cuban's video-game team. If they ever win, it'll be cause he got lucky.

LA Lakers: Fuck these guys.

Cleveland Cavaliers: This will be either the most uplifting sports story or the longest-running circus of 2009-2010. My money's on the latter.

Washington Wizards: If I believed in God, this would be the team I prayed for.

Denver Nuggets: Denver needs to find the psychological equivalent of Phoenix's physical training staff. Everybody on this team with the exception of Chauncey Billups has been a head case basically their whole career, and it didn't even take one year for Billups to begin showing signs. I dunno if it's the thin air up there or what, but they need some serious head-shrinking.

San Antonio Spurs: Well, they drafted somebody from Pitt, which means I have to give them some credit. And they got more athletic, which can't hurt. But they're still soooooo old, and I just don't see Jefferson or Blair pushing them past a team like the Lakers.

Miami Heat: Failed to get help for Dwyane Wade. The best conceivable result for their 2009 season would be if he stayed healthy for another year and gave them another shot to get better.

Orlando Magic: No draft picks, but they did find someone to replace Hedo. Try to keep Jameer Nelson on the floor this year, okay guys?

Houston Rockets: Yao might be out the whole season?! Somebody put this team out of their misery, please.

From what I understand of academia, authors must typically work within page limits. To get published in a journal or accepted to speak at a conference, for example, your work just can't exceed a certain length. For writers, I assume that this causes some problems towards the end of works, as most people tend to save the important stuff for last. For readers, however, I think this causes bigger problems at the start of works: that's when people define their terms (often badly or incompletely), discuss their methods (often with little or no justification and sometimes even no detail), and make other miscellaneous remarks to prepare the reader for what's to come. The problem is that the writer has been working within these limits for so long that they've become familiar and thus somewhat inexplicable to any audience that would need such an explanation. Our subject today seems to fall into precisely this pattern.

As part of a book club-type thing, Clay Littlejohn has been reviewing Paul Moser's The Elusive God. Though I'll be looking at Moser secondhand, it's also worth pointing out that he wrote a whole book, not just an article or a precis - if ever you would expect him to lay the groudnwork properly, this would be the context. Trusting Littlejohn's summary, however, reveals exactly the opposite.

Moser defines a religious skeptic as "someone who doubts the reality of God or doubts that an affirmation of God's reality has positive epistemic value." This is, put lightly, an odd definition. The word "skeptic" typically connotes a stronger attitude than agnosticism, but agnostics fit quite snugly into people who "doubt that an affirmation of God's reality has positive epistemic value." Also, Moser really owes his readers a more robust definition of what it means to have positive epistemic value: epistemology, after all, is precisely the sort of thing that varies by individual,* so it'll be very hard to say whether idea x has positive epistemic value in general. Finally, these two categories of skeptics - atheists and agnostics, basically - are hugely different in their approach and their conclusion, so Moser needs to be extremely careful not to make arguments that only apply to one group.

Given that this is within the first 50 pages of his book, though, Moser ditches this caution altogether - and, worse, Littlejohn falls for it. According to Littlejohn, Moser "reminds us (rightly) that the religious skeptic cannot be satisfied with showing that some particular individuals lack adequate evidence for believing that God exists as the skeptic wants to show that people in general lack adequate evidence." Already we've run into problems with Moser's definitions and scope. Atheists - those who seek to prove the nonexistence of gods - needn't show that nobody could possibly have evidence that (under some definition of the phrase) puts "an affirmation of God's reality" into positive epistemic status: when you draw the lines as Moser has, atheism is an ontological pursuit and not an epistemological one. As for the agnostics, I for one have no idea whether they "want to show that people in general lack adequate evidence," because neither Moser nor Littlejohn has taken the time to explain what it means for people in general to lack evidence.

Continuing on in his weird and ill-described mission, Moser next comes to his version of how to "understand the demand for 'sufficient' evidence." (Remember this bit for next time, as we'll see it basically repeated in its entirety.) In order to find "a truth-indicator for the proposition that an authoritatively and morally perfect agent worthy or [sic] worship actually exists," Moser puts aside "spectator's evidence (i.e., evidence that we can receive without bending our wills to the will of the source of the evidence)." In particular, he rejects the notion "that we can exert a kind of control over the evidence whereby we can reproduce the evidence again for ourselves or for someone else. ... He remarks, 'Much of the inferred original evidence in cosmology, astrophysics, and geology ... is neither under our control nor reproducible by us.'" This analogy is far more important than Moser realizes: even in non-laboratory sciences, evidence is required to fit into a systematic understanding. When cosmic events aren't repeatable in and of themselves, for instance, we build models to simulate them mathematically and experiments that can recreate certain physical aspects of those events. Obviously Moser has nothing to compare to these extra methods, but this damages him more than he lets on.

First, Moser does identify (as he must) certain predictions, like one against finding "a world of nothing but unrelenting pain and suffering." So in fact some parts of Moser's hypothesis are reproducible, but (a) these can't really defend God (many, many hypotheses are compatible with the lack of an all-suffering world, notably including atheism) and (b) "there [are] individual lives that are filled with pain and suffering with little relief." As Littlejohn points out, such lives seem to provide "strong evidence either for God's non-existence or God's lack of concern for some individuals."

Likewise for the idea of spectator evidence, Littlejohn worries that "those with flawed characters ([Bertrand] Russell? Me?) will likely never receive evidence that could rationalize a commitment to the God of Judaism or Christianity." Especially on the assumption that God would seek a personal relationship with us, "a morally perfect being would not want these sorts of tragic situations to arise." In both this and the previous case, Moser eliminates the worst case scenario (an all-suffering world, a world with no possibility for rational faith) and then dusts off his hands. Since this falls well short of describing a world where all humans are treated fairly and lovingly, Littlejohn is right to criticize Moser's haste.

Last, there's the small issue of Moser getting his opponents' view right. To this point, he's managed to ignore all of the best skeptical reponses, including (but not limited to): the problem of evil, the existence of failed God-seekers (those who "bend their wills" but still don't get the evidence), parity issues with other religious theories (i.e., how to argue for one and only one religion), religion-specific criticisms (e.g. the moral obtuseness of the God of the Jewish Bible), and the relative historical utility of various modes of thinking (in particular, why would a relationship-seeking God make a world full of people who can only thrive by using spectator evidence?).

Maybe Moser fixes all of these problems later - we have, after all, only looked at the first 60 or so pages of his book - but I doubt it. This bears all the hallmarks of someone who rushed through their opening chapter so they could get to the good stuff quicker. Depending on what comes next, I may or may not continue to follow Littlejohn in reviewing Moser's work: it's possible that things get better, but it seems far more likely that these early missteps will skew the rest of the book's results to the point where I just won't care.

*Think of poker: the entire point is that everybody has different levels of epistemic access to the information they would need in order to determine who has the winning hand.

So we all know - or had damn well better know by now - about comically inept and tragically violent attempt by the government of Iran to rig that country's latest election. And yes, this deserves probably still more international attention, as it represents a brazen attempt to deny people a level of freedom they evidently want and so on and so forth. But they say every cloud has a silver lining:

"According to the pro-government newspaper Iran, four players – Ali Karimi, 31, Mehdi Mahdavikia, 32, Hosein Ka'abi, 24 and Vahid Hashemian, 32 – have been 'retired' from the sport after their gesture in last Wednesday's match against South Korea in Seoul."

This gesture was to wear "green wristbands...in protest against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election," and "retired" here means "banned from the sport forever." Now don't get me wrong: for these four guys this is awful news, and if they're smart they'll get the hell out of there before things get worse. (Oppressive governments do not exactly have a glowing record of forgiveness or restraint when it comes to this sort of thing, and the requirements for membership on a national team are not as stringent as one might imagine.) But just think - there are now four open roster spots on Iran's national team!

Okay, so I'm being a little glib, but seriously: I can only guess how trying it must be to work all your life at a grueling sport like soccer and then be the first runner-up for the last spot on your national team. Whoever takes the place of Karimi, Mahdavikia, Ka'abi, and Hashemian ought to first appreciate their countrymen for their relative courage, and when that's done they ought to appreciate the life of a national-caliber soccer player. For their sake and especially for the sake of the protesting citizens in Iran, I hope that country finds peace and progress soon: athletics may only contribute entertainment, but it's surely better to live in a situation where entertainment is in rarer supply than basic human liberties.

Though I don't know a whole bunch about John Calvin or Calvinism - other than the disappointing fact that Calvinism doesn't preach the lessons of Calvin & Hobbes - I know bunk when I see it, and Marvin Olasky's take on Calvin is bunk. In particular, Olasky seems to have a vested interest in modernizing Calvin so as to take some of the edge off of him.

Twice, Olasky finds some Calvin quotes, blows them out of proportion, and then uses that exaggerated version to make Calvin seem friendlier than I guess he was. He first tries to show that Calvin wasn't as misanthropic as people apparently say: "He wrote, 'We cannot but behold our own face as it were in a glass in the person that is poor and despised . . . though he were the furthest stranger in the world. Let a Moor or a barbarian come among us, and yet inasmuch as he is a man, he brings with him a looking glass wherein we may see that he is our brother and neighbor.' Everyone is created in God's image and worthy of respect." You can guess at this point that Olasky isn't much of a feminist: when people only talk about men and brothers they pretty much usually only mean men and brothers, especially when those people were born in the 1500s. Though we know better now and it's become custom to interpret "he" as a genderless pronoun in cases like this, Olasky takes too much license when he does so here.

He errs in a similar fashion when he defends Calvin's (relative) hedonism. Though some people apparently say that he "want[ed] us to abstain from all material pleasures," Olasky disagrees: "He wrote that God 'meant not only to provide for necessity but also for delight and good cheer'...He opposed any doctrine that 'deprives us of the lawful fruit of God's beneficence.'" So okay, Calvin liked some "material pleasures," but that's not really saying much - ultimately, it's nearly impossible not to. However, Olasky could've been satisfied with this, I think: especially with the sizable theological tradition of finding beauty in nature (even if it's from afar), he could've at least pretended that "God's beneficence" sufficed to show that Calvin wasn't some crazy ascetic. But Olasky goes several steps too far when he tells his readers to get "a cake and know that Calvin was not against enjoying it." Unless Olasky knows something I don't, cakes just don't occur naturally; there is no cake tree or cake vine or cake animal. Cakes, again unless I am very much mistaken, are precisely the sort of thing we couldn't just get from God or nature. Sure, cakes make for "delight and good cheer," but from Calvin's talk of flowers and fruit and so on, it seems pretty clear that he had a pretty limited scope in mind.

This is, to me, a bit like saying that torture isn't torture because it's morally right or that discrimination against a given group isn't discrimination because they're bad people: if you're really a big enough fan of a person or an action or a theory, you really ought to be able to bite the bullet sometimes and admit that the thing you like isn't perfect (or, perhaps, won't please everyone).

Hope to be back next week; if not I'll update this appropriately.

For all that I talk about basketball, I had a truly lousy fantasy season and postseason. Here's my best result:

Yeah...the 70th percentile is not exactly where I want to end up in my worst result, let alone my best. I did pretty much perfectly on the true/false thing from before the Finals, but honestly I'd rather have screwed that one up and won a car than vice versa.

Ah well - there's always next year.

Last year, during what may well turn out to have been the halcyon days of the Obama era, I said that partisanship and bipartisanship were highly overrated measures of legislative success. Back then, we in the U.S. only worried about this in the abstract - the GOP had fucked up to such an outrageous extent that there wasn't really any one issue they could hold hostage until something like bipartisanship showed up. Now things are different: Obama, for all of his smoothness regarding Iran, doesn't look like at all like the man we voted into office and the Republicans, for all their continued ineptitude, have regained the leverage they need to play for bipartisanship.

EJ Dionne, Jr. discusses this in the context of health care and seems initially to agree with me. "Where," he asks, "did we get the idea that the only good health-care bill is a bipartisan bill? Is bipartisanship more important than whether a proposal is practical and effective?" Exactly! Practical, effective legislation should always have priority over legislation that's just bipartisan; if we can get a practical, effective, and bipartisan bill so much the better, but if not we need to understand which descriptor to sacrifice.

But then he goes way off-track, and I'm not sure I get it. When it comes to health care, Dionne says, "the two parties are far apart on the fundamentals." He also defends "Obama and the Democrats" against claims that they're "being insufficiently bipartisan" on the same topic. Why, though, do they need such a defense? And why should it matter where the parties start off with respect to each other?

If, as he seems to say initially and as I believe, bipartisanship has literally no relevance to a bill's merits, the term "sufficiently bipartisan" is incoherent - what would it be sufficient for? At best this would miss the point, because even though one can always define an arbitrary condition (e.g., "bipartisan enough to make person x happy") such a condition would exist on a totally separate plane from what would make the legislation "practical and effective." Likewise, the fact of two parties agreeing matters just as little as the fact of two parties disagreeing. This, in fact, is precisely the reason why bipartisanship is a stupid metric: the success or failure of a bipartisan effort depends not on where both sides start with respect to each other but rather where they stand compared to the (or a) good solution to the problem.

Granted, the Republicans are almost certainly being immature just for the sake of being immature, but that doesn't mean Dionne should respond in kind. His reflexive "yeah huh" to their "nuh uh" points in a worrying way to the success of the GOP strategy: when even those who acknowledge the worthlessness of bipartisanship bend to its capricious will, it's not hard to see why our legislative process goes so wrong so often.

Shocking, I know. But when the shoe fits...

"Being a racist is not part of mainstream politics."
-Heidi Beirich, SPLC

Nooooo, of course not. Nobody in mainstream politics ever sends around racist emails or plays on racial stereotypes or uses racial slurs or practices casual anti-Semitism or recommends returning to the open, public oppression of minorities or anything like that. And obviously nobody in politics is a secret racist, just like nobody is, to pick a random example, secretly gay. Nope - everything is fine and dandy!

A longtime favorite of yours truly, Peter Kreeft is one of those pop apologists who has nothing better to do with his time than think of ways for every single thing in the world to relate back to God and, worse, thinks he can pull that off humorously. It's not that the bad comedy itself bothers me, cause I've always said that I'd rather be a smartass than a dumbass - it's just that Kreeft manages to be both at the same time.

Take as an example his amazingly doltish claim about Santa Claus. Though "the laws of physics prevent anyone, even if he had magic flying reindeer, from flying to every child’s house in the world and depositing Christmas presents in one night," Kreeft does "not think that magic flying reindeer are refuted in the same way by the laws off [sic] empirical physics." But okay, no big deal: people have been wrong before, and anyway this isn't exactly an area of heated debate, whether or not Santa's reindeers might possibly exist. Kreeft being who he is, though, he's not satisfied just with being wrong - he has to be wrong in a clever way. So here we go: the Kreeft argument in favor of magical flying reindeer is, and I am not making this up, that "[w]e ourselves defy gravity whenever we decide to jump, because while we live we are not merely physical entities, but have souls or minds or wills, which interfere with matter, as a hand interferes with a sword’s tendency to fall whenever that hand swings the sword." I'll leave the dismantling of these analogies (magical reindeer:humans; humans free will:any random physical action) to the reader.

A bit later on in the same linked article, Kreeft presents something rather less stupid (but still, as it turns out, quite stupid). Heading into much more traditional apologetic territory, he produces an argument with the conculsion that "the claim that we can know that there is no God logically implies that the person who makes that claim has omniscience, that is, is God. So to claim to know that there is no God is to imply that there is a God, and that he is now speaking." For Kreeft, in other words, atheism refutes itself: one can hold to atheism only if one already has good reason to reject it.

Part of his reason for thinking this should be familiar, as it has a pretty well-established place in the theological debate life-cycle. Except in certain special circumstances, Kreeft says, "in order to justify the assertion that there is no God, we must know that there is no corner of reality, no kind of reality, and no dimension of reality, in which God can possibly exist." This, however, would be tantamount to omniscience, thus giving Kreeft his pithy "he is now speaking" line. Ah - but what about those special circumstances? How do we know when Kreeft's argument is relevant? Well, he puts it this way: his argument works "if the idea of God is neither logically self-contradictory nor refuted by any empirical fact."

...yep.

Really, I don't know who this argument is supposed to impress. So he means to tell us that, disregarding all of the arguments in favor of atheism and against theism, atheism wants for plausibility? No kidding! Hey, you know what else I just noticed? If you ignore all the arguments in favor of mind-body identity and against dualism, the fact that you're even thinking about it proves that your mind isn't material, right? Cause we assumed that nothing could possibly indicate that matter can think and yet here you are thinking about it, so your mind must be immaterial! Yay philosophy!

Okay, but seriously: I've had just about enough of this stuff. If Kreeft's overriding priority is to get himself into Bartlett's, he might want to get out of the truth-finding business.

I have to admit, I don't listen to the lyrics of songs as often as I should. Partly this is because I have a hard time focusing on them, but mostly it's just my laziness. So after probably 5 or 6 years since I'd first heard the song, it finally hit me what Andrew Bird was saying towards the end of his "Dear Old Greenland":



"Friends, Greenland is a place where souls go to dry out
It is a vast and terrifying place of ice fields and tundra
Bereft of fire and in the horror of its imposing irrelevance
There is a peace
The peace of pain
The peace of nothing"

Holy shit - is Greenland really that bad? Probably there's an element of facetiousness here (or, at the very least, dramatic exaggeration), but still: damn.

(See also: "Fargo" and maybe "Ancestral Legacies")

Awful though William Craig's argumentation usually is, his guest contributors often do an excellent job of making him look like a philosophical prodigy. This week's stand-in, Michael Murray, addresses the problem of animal suffering with several apologetic arguments, two of which just so happen to be mutually exclusive.

The anthropocentric nature of Christianity makes the problem of animal suffering one of the more irritating versions of the problem of evil for apologists, because if humans are the stars of the show then animals are at best extras and at worst innocent bystanders. This divide prevents the immediate divide of evil into necessary and gratuitous parts, as all of the human-based apologetics are impossible to apply to animals (soul building, for instance). But Murray thinks he's solved this by appealing to something more general than souls or God's plan for the universe: what it means to be a living creature.

For animals, Murray asserts, living might entail deception of a certain kind. "We do think it an item of common sense," he says, "that animals experience pain and suffering. But the scientific evidence for this is not as strong as you might think." Just like some people display blindsight - the ability to "use visual information to regulate their behavior" without being "consciously aware of the fact that they can do this" - animals might just have "something like 'blindpain'--showing all the behavioral symptoms of real pain, but without the conscious awareness" that's a necessary part of suffering. Various scientific objections aside, this is, I guess, remotely plausible: we'll just never know firsthand what it feels like for a non-human animal to get stabbed or burned or fall ill, so an extreme skeptic could always say that we'll never know for sure that animals feel pain or suffering. The thing is, though, Murray isn't an extreme skeptic.

A bit later on in his response, he considers the case of "Paul Brand ([author of] The Gift of Pain), who worked with leprosy patients in Asia for many years." Leprosy often leads to numbness, which in turn leads to neglect and injury. Apparently a fan of Spider-Man, "Brand tried to fix this problem by creating pressure sensitive gloves and shoes," and then later "battery packs that would cause a light to come on or a sound to appear in the ear," "that would warn people when their bodies were in danger." These spider-sense gadgets didn't work, from which Murray concludes "that animal pain and suffering might be an unavoidable consequence of creating embodied organisms that live in a law-governed world" - that, in other words, "pain and suffering [might] be necessary for embodied organisms to avoid injury." An interesting idea, even if it's totally unsupported by the evidence he provides - but how does it get along with that earlier point?

As it turns out, not real well: if animals have to feel pain consciously in order to keep from running into trees all the time or whatever, we can pretty safely conclude that their behavior is indicative of real suffering and not just blindpain. On the flip side, if animals really don't experience pain but instead are in a state of blindpain, then it should be quite obvious that animals don't have to experience pain consciously in order to survive. Murray recognizes that there's some tension here but fails to accurately characterize that tension: far from the latter argument just being a backup for those who consider the first "to be extraordinarily implausible," these two arguments are utterly lethal to one another. When he talks about having "powerful reasons for" believing one, then, he inadvertently also gives powerful reasons for denying the other, which is not acceptable in rigorous discourse.

We've seen people intentionally cover up the flaws in their arguments before, but I think this is the first time I've ever seen those flaws detailed later in the very same article. Murray can dither as much as he likes about how the problem of animal suffering asks "a very large and very complex question that cannot be adequately handled without writing a full length book," this is just unacceptable: when two theories preclude one another it's misleading to speak of both as being convincing, especially when they're well short of an exhaustive list[*]. If one has a clear evidential advantage, say so and drop the other; if neither does, admit that the question is still wide open.

[*And, I should have added, even more especially when they're probably both bullshit.]

From time to time I see it said that this or that demographic is naive. Andrew Sullivan, for instance, complains relatively frequently about the way in which Christianists (far-right Christians) allow their commitment to backwards social policies blind them to the fiscal idiocy of their candidates. (Don't believe him? Two words: Sarah Palin.) On the left, we liberals are sometimes attacked for (ostensibly) forming a cult of personality with regards to our candidates - anybody remember the "Obama = liberal messiah" meme? Today I add another counterexample to this story.

Fuck you, Barack, and that bullshit about DOMA. Let's get the easy stuff out of the way first: I appreciate what you're trying to do for the environment, the economy, healthcare, and so on. And I sure as hell don't regret voting for you; probably I never will. But don't think I won't switch horses in 2012 if you don't fix this shit right quick.

Dan Savage, his neighborhood of blogosphere, and the major pro-LGBTQ groups have it totally right: this is a stab in the back, plain and simple. Defending this outdated, discriminatory piece of legislation not only suggests a hugely disappointing return to politics as usual ("Maybe if I go after the queers they'll leave me alone about that Cairo speech," e.g.), it serves as yet more evidence of a potential anti-gay streak in our president. This cannot be tolerated or ignored, and not just for moral reasons: the political benefit of gay-bashing is diminishing rapidly. Thus, if he's got any sense at all, Obama will realize the harm he's doing himself and cut the crap sooner rather than later. The contrapositive of this deserves equal attention: if he continues down this road, we can pretty safely conclude that Obama is simply not capable of bringing this country to where it needs to be on this issue.

I still think I agree with Savage - we (here meaning "queers and their allies") are still winning. It'd be ideal if we could win marriage equality with this president still in office, but I'm certainly willing to settle for just the equality part.

Upon doing some research - yes, research! Gasp, etc. - it turns out there's way more to this than I first thought. First and foremost, let me take a moment to appreciate wikipedia: without it, I would have been totally at sea with this. Now, to business.

Widely-read people should, upon some reflection, be able to recall to mind various different kinds of second-order fictions: invented stories occurring within other invented scenarios. As I said before, this seems to happen far more often in narrative literature; the reasons for this should be relatively obvious. I'm interested in cases where the second-order fiction bears the same name as the first-order fiction that includes it.

So far as genres go, fantasy seems particularly inclined towards second-order fictions, as its characters typically encounter all kinds of mythologies and folktales. (Never mind the fact that literacy in low-tech civilizations is typically an extreme rarity.) This is not, however, to say that the phenomenon is absent in other areas - far from it, really, since it occurs in everything from the dramas of a Barbara Kingsolver or a John Irving to the surrealism of a Flann O'Brien. Nor are other media left out: Colin Meloy invents a nameless fictional movie in his "Tristan and Iseult," movies frequently invent fictional artists complete with entire fictional careers (see, just off the top of my head, "Love Actually"), and presumably other art forms have similar examples.

But it's easy to slip far enough in one direction or another so as to disqualify oneself from my interest here. It would be tempting to list Nabokov's Pale Fire but for the fact that the poem of the same name is a real poem, as Nabokov wrote the whole thing himself. Fake singers also tend to have real songs attributed to them - I think maybe they did this for "Music And Lyrics." On the other hand, some people invent entire museums full of fake artworks only to have all of them bear different names than the work in which they reside: Mark Danielewski, who I mentioned in my last post, made up who knows how many books in his House Of Leaves and only one of them fits the description. Still others have fake artworks with the same name as the real artwork in which they appear but of different types, like the fictional song "Kafka On The Shore" in the Murakami novel of the same name.

Even with all the near misses, it turns out this fake-novel-within-a-novel-of-the-same-name thing is at least slightly more common than I thought it was. Wikipedia turns up at least twenty-four more in its list of fictional books, including a few I ought to have remembered - The Princess Bride, for example, or If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. I also learned that some exact matches have occurred in other media. Sadly, one of the three examples I found was "Tropic Thunder," which is not exactly the film analog of a novel by Calvino or even Zafon. (The others, for the record, was Deathtrap and apparently the Doctor Who TV show.) This is at once encouraging and frustrating: the fact that it's easy to find some kinds of identically-named second-order art makes me that much more curious about other kinds.

Where, for example, are all the fictional poems referenced by real poems of the same name? Or all the fictional songs in real songs of the same name? Or graphic novels or paintings or statues? There must be some artist out there creative enough to take a photo that depicts another, fictional photo, right? Mark my words, I'm not yet done with this.

I wonder if Ophelia Benson has seen this yet:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Saad Mohseni
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

If you're having trouble with the video, here's my very amateur transcript - Jon and his guest, Saad Mohseni, are discussing a female contestant on Afghan Star (think American Idol) who broke Afghanistan's informal ban on dancing:

JS: She moved a little bit, and - but she received death threats. She was from Harah[?], and-

SM: I'm glad to say she's alive, nothing's happened to her. She's made film clips and she doesn't wear a veil and she does do a bit of dancing. And it's a happy ending (touch wood) [like "knock wood," maybe?] so far.

Obviously Saad, who serves as the executive producer of this show, has an interest in making it out to be a positive thing. Some amount of spin, then, can be expected. But let's make one thing clear as an azure sky of deepest summer: the receipt of death threats does not a happy fucking ending make.

And yes, there's some chance that a man would've elicited a similar reaction (not that that would be an improvement), but did you see the people queued up to compete on the show? By my rough count, there were approximately no women in line. As in, zero. As in, something is still deeply wrong over there, the kind of deeply wrong that generally precludes happy endings.

For me, I have to wonder how many women would have shown up if not for the looming threat of physical violence and the apparent complicity of their general culture in that threat. I also have to wonder why Mohseni, who says proudly that he wants his show to be a force for change, is willing to set the bar so low.

If so, are all your universities this bad? I thought I'd seen some poor argumentation about evolution, but apparently nobody does it quite like Swedish professors.

In that relatively old piece, Mikael Stenmark tries to investigate and evaluate the claim "that biology somehow shows that life lacks a purpose and direction. The universe and its inhabitants are the result of change and apparently nothing more." To give this some relevance, Stenmark quotes several biologists who he says endorse this view. Their quotes, with my emphasis throughout, are as follows:

"Darwin argues that evolution has no purpose. Individuals struggle to increase the representation of their genes in future generations, and that is all." -Stephen Jay Gould

"Modern science directly implies that there … is no ultimate meaning for humans."-William Provine

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. … DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music." -Richard Dawkins

"...no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history." -Edward Wilson

"Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." -George Simpson

Notice a pattern? Only one of these quotes actually references the universe - the others simply discuss evolution as it pertains to humans and other life forms. Where Stenmark gets this claim about the meaningless of the universe, then, is largely an open question: to attribute a minority view to the vast majority (by Stenmark's count, 80%) is flagrantly disingenuous.

Still, Stenmark wants to look at both claims, so look at them we will. He describes them thusly:

"(1) Evolutionary theory implies a meaningless universe, that is, that there is no ultimate meaning or that the universe is not here for a reason.

(2) Evolutionary theory implies, more specifically, that there is no meaning to be found behind the emergence of human beings in natural history, that is, we are not here for a reason and in particular we are not planned by God or anything like God."

In order to investigate the latter of these claims, Stenmark first makes a terminological distinction. Meaning, he says, takes on two forms: "the meaning of life and...the meaning in life. The former is a claim about whether the universe and life have any overarching purpose or ultimate meaning. The latter is a claim about what particular values and interest we ought to structure our lives around to give them meaning." Here he returns to Dawkins again, who says "that 'we are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA… That is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object’s sole reason for living.'" Very well: for Dawkins, on Stenmark's vocabulary, there is no meaning of human life. This is the only reasonable interpretation of that quote, as Dawkins never speaks of any "particular values and interest we ought to structure our lives around to give them meaning." While he does outline a sense in which we ought to act in the best interests of our DNA, he stays well clear of saying or even intimating that this would imbue our lives with any meaning.

This, however, doesn't stop Stenmark from discussing Dawkins in the context of the meaning in life: "Human activities and convictions exist that do not favor and may even hinder the survival and reproduction of the individuals and their genes. ... We have a freedom to give our lives meaning by structuring them around other values than maximizing fitness, such as appreciation of beauty and music, friendship and moral virtues, and interests such as football, sailing, science, caring for the poor and travel." Because of this kind of meaning, Stenmark concludes that "there are good reasons to believe that it is false that evolutionary theory undermines the religious belief that the meaning of life is to be found in a loving relationship with God and with other human beings." But - at least in the part Stenmark quotes - Dawkins never said anything at all about this! For all of the vigor with which Stenmark attacks this view, it's a straw man plain and simple: neither Dawkins nor any other biologist I've ever heard of denies that religion adds (the feeling of) meaning to people's lives. The question is whether this meaning reflects any objective facts about reality, and this is precisely the kind of question that cannot be answered with Stenmark's bizarre "let's all sightsee and play sports" objection.

Continuing his campaign to misread Dawkins as badly as possible, Stenmark then criticizes him for writing "that 'natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind.'" Believers, Stenmark says, "are not committed to believe that natural selection had any meaning in mind simply because natural selection is not an agent and as far as we know only agents can have purposes in mind." I can't imagine why Stenmark finds this objection compelling unless they don't have figures of speech in Sweden - anybody without a serious mental handicap ought to be able to interpret Dawkins non-literally, but this ability somehow escapes Stenmark here.

Finally getting around to the real point - whether in his (2) there is a meaning of life or whether his (1) is accurate - Stenmark presents the following short argument as his interpretation of the biologists' claims (I've changed his numbering scheme to a lettering scheme so as to avoid a conflict with the earlier (1) and (2)):

"(A) All individual species that come into existence through the process of evolution are random (that is, have a low probability) with respect to what evolutionary theory (or more broadly, the sciences) can predict or retrospectively explain...

(B) Therefore, the existence of human beings lacks an ultimate meaning, in particular, their existence is not the result of a divine purpose or intention."

Obviously, this argument is not logically valid - it has the form "P; therefore, Q," which is probably the least reliable argument form possible. It's worrying enough that he thinks this accurately depicts the real state of the debate; it's more worrying still that he proposes the following additional premise as a fix to the brokenness of his original try:

"(C) The only things that we can know anything about are the ones science can discover."

Besides the fact that (C) is a middle-schooler's idea of what scientists actually believe, it doesn't even help - that just changes the form from "P; therefore, Q" to "P and R; therefore, Q," which is not exactly a major improvement.

Finally putting something like thought into it, Stenmark comes up with the following, much improved (but still far from perfect) formulation (again, with my letters in place of his numbers):

"(D) The existence of Homo sapiens is planned by God only if the species’ existence is intended by God and it is likely that its emergence will take place for that reason.

(E) But all individual species that come into existence through the process of evolution are random (that is, have a low probability) with respect to what evolutionary theory (or more broadly, the sciences) can predict or retrospectively explain.

(F) Therefore, the existence of human beings lacks an ultimate meaning; in particular, their existence is not the result of God’s purposes, intentions or plans."

He suggests two sane responses to this and one that's so far gone that I won't even bother addressing it. The latter, and easier to dismiss, of these is yet another straw man. Though he seems to accept the truth of (D), Stenmark objects to it on rhetorical grounds because it "is not a scientific premise but rather an extra-scientific or philosophical one, and it is also a premise that needs to be supported by philosophical arguments... Hence, it is not true that science (or evolutionary biology) per se undermines the religious belief that there is a purpose or meaning to the existence of the universe and to human life in particular." But a look at his original five quotes reveals that, again, only one (Provine's) makes this specific argument. Without having read all of those authors I can't say for sure, but it seems likely that the prevailing view among atheist scientists is that science contributes to the proof but does not prove in and of itself that life lacks the meaning that religions often claim for it.

Looking at his earlier complaint, we come at long last to something worth our consideration: the notion of classes of evolved beings. Quoting Holmes Rolston III (who is a philosopher of science and not an actual scientist), Stenmark argues that, "[a]ssuming more or less the same Earth-bound environments, if evolutionary history were to occur all over again...there would likely again be organisms reproducing, genotypes and phenotypes, natural selection over variants, multicellular organisms with specialized cells, membranes, organs," and so on. In particular, Stenmark suggests that "it is likely that something like us will reappear" no matter what happens in evolutionary history. As tempting as this premise seems, I have to ask for a little more.

My question is, simply, what does "like us" mean? Without having more information, this phrase could mean practically anything, from "sentient" or "social" or "religious" to "mammalian" or "bipedal" or "aerobic" - or any combination thereof. This makes Stenmark's argument impossible to evaluate in two ways.

First, religions don't typically directly address the metaphysical importance of our biological attributes. The things that we can quantify or analyze using simulated evolution, then, might not even be relevant to whatever God's purpose supposedly is. But metaphysically different creatures would still be "like us" if they were biologically similar, so Stenmark needs to connect the two somehow in order for this to have any real strength. Second, the few cases in which religion does directly address biology often seem like ones we would expect to change under different evolutionary paths. Take the very important Christian tenet of Mary's virginity, for example: if another evolutionary path had creatures that were "like us" in mind but that mated like e.g. frogs, nobody would care that the mother of God was a virgin. Thus, without having both defined metaphysical goals (something like, "these creatures must be capable of contemplating morality in the abstract") and some understanding of the physical attributes required to attain those goals (brain size, maybe, in that case?), Stenmark's "like us" argument fails to cohere into anything we can evaluate accurately.

As much as I appreciate his focus on science in this last objection - albeit science that we can't test technologically and that he didn't bother to define rigorously - I would rather have seen a fuller examination of this topic from a philosophical perspective. There are, after all, still unanswered questions about the intersection of evolution and religion. For example: why would God (or whoever) use such a messy process? Or: if evolution always produces the same classes of beings, why should we assume that our class is the special one? Given his performance here, though, I don't think I'd trust Stenmark to answer those even if he had been bright enough to ask them.

To paraphrase the (apocryphal?) Freud line, sometimes a whole bunch of gibberish is a whole bunch of gibberish. I would try to untangle this statement of Jeff Mirus's, but I'm pretty sure the statement is the tangle:

"God’s nature, as Christians understand it and philosophers ought to, is such that a relationship among three persons in God is absolutely required. Taking the Father as the first in logical priority (though not in time), we can see that if God’s knowledge of Himself is to be perfect, then that knowledge must in fact be another person, coeternal and coequal with the first, and aptly named (in priority) the Son. But the Son and the Father must also love each other infinitely and perfectly, so this love must itself be a person, also coeternal and coequal with the Father and the Son. We call this infinite perfect love the Holy Spirit."

Gibberish, all of it! Perfect knowledge doesn't have to be a person and neither does perfect love - moreover, it doesn't even make sense to say that knowledge or love is also a person. And if this were really correct, Mirus would have just spawned an infinite pantheon: God-Person 1 knows itself perfectly and thus spawns God-Person 2, but now God-Person 2 knows itself perfectly and thus spawns God-Person 3, and so on; meanwhile, God-People 1 and 2 also love each other perfectly and thus spawn God-Person (1,2), which also knows itself perfectly and loves all the other God-People perfectly. Ridiculous! And since he insists on jabbering on about "logical priority," he seals off his only escape route: if he'd tried to make two weird triangle dependencies,* he might've been able to limit the number of God-People. But since this crazy God-Person-generating process only happens in one direction, Mirus is stuck without the threesome he's looking for.

A bit later, his English breaks down again. I guess in an attempt to explain creation, Mirus says that this divine love-fest, "being infinitely intimate, always desires to include others within its magnificent scope." I don't know which definition of "intimate" he's using here, but it doesn't square with anything I've ever encountered. In fact, I was under the impression that a major point of his beloved "traditional" marriage was to encapsulate an intimate relationship so as to eliminate the inclusion of others. If Mirus were Mormon I guess this would be not quite as crazy (zing!), but he ain't, so it's not.

But the part where I think he really gets into trouble is where he tries to make this a feminist argument. Mirus says that God tailors the divine love to fit the recipient's needs, so "just as God loves in a manner wholly appropriate to a creature whom He has created body and soul, so too does He love in a manner equally appropriate to a creature whom he has created male and female [sic - and various other permutations]." Those of you who know Catholics already know where he's going with this: Mary.

Before we throw caution to the wind and investigate further, though, it's worth taking a look back to see what he means with that whole "body and soul" thing. In another predictable move, Mirus here cites "the astonishing Incarnation of the Son, the Word made flesh." (Can't you just see that on a circus poster?) I myself am not sure why this counts as "loving us" and not, say, "going off and doing something random," but okay. The precedent, then, is that when God sees multiple aspects of us that need loving, God partially becomes (or becomes partially incarnated as, or whatever) each of those things. So this carries over to the male/female thing, right?

Wrong! Instead, "God adopts a plan which incorporates the power of the masculine and the feminine to which human nature was expressly designed to respond." Don't bother looking for any explanation regarding the "power of the masculine and the feminine" he's talking about - he doesn't provide any. Mirus does, however, offer some more blather:

"He [God] creates for this purpose a woman whom He so fills with grace that she becomes, as Wordsworth so aptly wrote, 'our tainted nature’s solitary boast.' In the deepest sense, then, is Mary the daughter of the Father. Next, God brings about the conception of the Word made flesh through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, an intimate marital union which equally makes Mary the spouse of the Holy Spirit. Finally, God the Son grows in Mary’s womb, being born in the course of time as an infant, and being raised by Mary, who is finally and rightly called the mother of the Son."

Even the parts of this that make syntactic sense are bunk! If it's the grace that supposedly draws us to Mary, that must mean one of two things: either (a) both males and females (and everyone else) are drawn to grace or (b) this gender-specific thing, grace, is divine. In the first case, this is a non-example; in the second case, the affected gender doesn't respond to anything either masculine or feminine but rather something totally non-human. Grace, recall, belongs only to God on the Catholic view: when (if) we respond to Mary's grace, then, we respond to something not attached to either gender and therefore something other than the "power of the masculine and the feminine."

Finally, even if this had somehow been connected to femininity, Mirus would only have proven half his point! Recall that he wanted to investigate the male as well as the female; well, then, where's the part about masculinity? Perhaps in the same place Mirus left the dressing for this word salad. Either way, if anybody thinks they've learned something deep and true about humanity or God from reading this article, they ought to go see a psychiatrist immediately.

*Knowledge triangle: Father->Son; Son->Holy Ghost; Holy Ghost->Father
Love triangle: Father/Son->Holy Ghost; Father/Holy Ghost->Son; Son/Holy Ghost->Father

Tremble, ye puny mortals, at the comedic horrors of writing in a permanent, publicly available medium:

This afternoon, in an email to his staff, David Westin, the president of ABC News, announced that ABC News will be converting its existing research library on the second floor of its 47th street building into a smaller, more cyber-focused "Digital Research Facility." "Our extensive, hard copy library filled with periodicals and other materials is no longer necessary in the digital age," wrote Mr. Westin. "The time has come to re-shape that library to reflect today’s world."

Sucking up all my brain power, grr... I'm working on some more intellectually stimulating stuff, but it'll have to wait until I can concentrate on anything other than how much I hate the Lakers. For now, you'll have to be satisfied with gloating (I was totally right to tell Rafer to lay off the 3s) and only somewhat intellectually stimulating stuff. Today: Ben Shapiro.

Last time we heard from Shapiro, he played the part of a crotchety old man by complaining about the damn music that kids were listening to these days. Well, give the man points for consistency - now his premature oldness is manifesting itself again, this time in the context of sex. When it comes to sex and other risky behaviors, he says, "teenagers are morons." I would like to say that he's just kidding, but it's Ben Shapiro, so...

Actually, though, I don't have any real desire to defend the intelligence of teenagers, cause so far as I can tell most people of any age group are morons. The problem is Shapiro's application of this stupidity to politics. He reports that "adolescents are biologically driven toward risky behavior and sensation-seeking by their functionally mature limbic systems. And the part of the brain that generally controls such risky behavior -- the prefrontal cortex -- is not yet fully developed." As a result, "despite the fact that teenagers are smart enough to recognize the dangers of risky behavior, their brains ignore the risks when things get hot." This means, he says, that "teens are biologically incapable of inhibiting risky behavior" and as such we ought not trust them to be "fully capable of making informed choices on subjects." This has two problems that I can see.

First, the specific program that Shapiro references does not, in fact, trust teens to make the rational decision. On his description of it, "[t]eens as young as 12 [sic, idiot] will be subjected to full-scale sex ed, then handed 'condom credit cards' that allow them to pick up free condoms at soccer fields, barbers’ shops and 'scout huts.'" The program's creators explicitly refer to some non-rational motivating factors (social status, e.g.) as being an important part of this plan, and (if they're smart) they'll tweak it to work with others as well (like economic ones; people don't like to purchase something and then not use it, even if the "purchase" is fake). So, in reality, we don't trust adolescents to make calm, reasoned decisions. But even if we did, what alternative would there be?

The way that Shapiro describes it, teenagers follow their druthers without reference to any mediating factors. In that case, though, why would we abandon one set of wholly uselses mediating factors (comprehensive sex ed) for another (abstinence-only education)? Clearly Shapiro is holding out on us, here: as an advocate for abstinence-only education, he must believe that something can motivate the young'uns other than their hormones. Until he tells us this, it doesn't make any sense to accept this argument as written.

Given the, ah, difficulties some readers and I are currently having in our little chat about abortion, I won't go any further in Shapiro's article than this: you just can't say that no means whatsoever are capable of obtaining a certain end and then expect people to take you seriously when you propose some means with which to obtain that same end. And maybe Shapiro doesn't want to be taken seriously - that would certainly explain his stance on rap, at least - but in that case he should probably quit his writing gig and move into an industry with a higher concentration of red foam noses and oversized shoes.

It occurred to me the other day that The Shadow of the Wind used a literary technique that I don't recall learning about in high school (and I had a good 12th-grade English teacher): self-reference. Or, at least, self-reference of a sort - the plot of the book is catalyzed by a fictional book also called The Shadow of the Wind. The two aren't meant to be the same book by any stretch - the plot of the fictional book, summarized by the protagonist, differs significantly from the plot of the actual book - but it got me thinking. How does this sort of thing work, criticism- and interpretation-wise? And how common is it?

Well, start with the obvious example: Hamlet's play-within-a-play. And movies definitely have fictional movies as artifacts, like in Michel Gondry's segment of "Tokyo!" or that one part of "Paris, Je T'Aime"; similarly with some TV shows, like LOST and Exposé. (In case you can't tell, I'm not doing this in any kind of meaningful order whatsoever.) And lots of paintings have paintings in them - like these ones, I guess - and Escher of course does self-reference in interesting ways. I have a harder time identifying anything similar in music, sculpture, dance, and so on (admittedly, I don't know much about sculpture or dance).

But what I'm really interested in is when the artist invents a fictional work of art and then names it the same thing as the real work of art in which it resides. As I say, this happens in The Shadow of the Wind; it also happens in House of Leaves. So far as I know, though, that's it. There must be more examples of this out there, but are there any outside of literature? Does anybody know any songs in which people listen to a fictional song by the same name? Or plays where people watch or read a fictional play of the same name? Or anything like this? Cause if I had to guess I'd say that at least one must exist, citing the law of large numbers, but I just don't know. On the other hand, the literary community seems to have developed a much more heightened sense of irony regarding itself than exists with other art forms, so maybe others just don't have the chutzpah to do something that goofy.

For extra credit, help me figure out whether it would be in principle impossible to have a fictional painting actually (fully?) displayed in a real painting or whether fictional paintings can only be referred to in real paintings by name or some other stand-in.

Some time ago, I wrote of an argument by Walter Williams that "freedom is not a commodity that can be measured in dollars." As part of a spate of (what I took to be) conservative articles that blamed taxation for limiting freedom, I thought Williams's argument was complete trash. Now I find that I was only half-right: while liberty and solvency are indeed different, evidently this argument belongs to the left...at least, according to Jim Ryan.

In his effort to deny the wealth/freedom equivalence, Ryan comes across a rather useful test. Since we understand liberty to be a fundamental human right, he says, connecting it to property means saying that "wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor" in such a way as to level people's amounts of freedom. Since this precise idea is strenuously opposed by most people who want to connect money and liberty - and, I think, most people in general - something must have gone wrong somewhere along the line.

But I'm not at all so confident in Ryan's assessment of this argument's strength. While it certainly works as a reason to reject redistribution, I hardly see how it serves as "the basis for dismissing out of hand the leftist's argument for redistribution of wealth." Maybe he's just using the word "leftist" in a different sense than I'm used to seeing it, but I was under the impression that leftists - liberals; in this country, Democrats, usually - had other justifications for this. Health care, for instance, is thought of as a right unto itself, so the use of progressive taxes to pay for a public option (of any flavor) wouldn't qualify as redistribution of wealth for its own sake but rather an instrumental redistribution of wealth. Really, I'm not at all sure which leftists Ryan thinks he's talking about, excepting possibly some communists or something way on the fringe.

Moreover, I don't even think his premise is (today) a leftist one. Equating money to freedom, so far as I can tell, happens far more often and readily among rightists - conservatives; in this country, Republicans, usually. This would certainly explain why he's wrong in attributing his conclusion to us liberals, but it still leaves open the question of why he thinks this phenomenon belongs to the left at all. Sure, some libertarians notoriously say this kind of thing, but aren't most libertarians in the U.S. conservatives? I'm pretty sure they are. And, at any rate, do libertarians really make up a large enough constituency of either political wing to automatically consider their opinions representative? I'm pretty sure they don't.

So somebody here is confused; right now I don't think it's me, but I could be wrong.

Please stop shooting threes already. Seriously.

This is your line from game 1:

And from game 2:

I know your team missed 7 free throws in game 2 in addition to a last-second layup and that any of those would have sufficed to win the game; I know the refs bailed Kobe out a couple of times towards the end of regulation. And probably your team has bigger problems than a few missed shots, but let's be serious for a second: you're no Ray Allen. Hell, you're not even Derek Fisher.

So do me a favor and drive the ball every once in a while. You might not win anyway - LA only has to take one of the next three to basically seal it - but at least that'll save us all the headache of watching you miss wide-open jumpers.

It sounds easy, in the abstract, to differentiate good philosophy from bad philosophy: the stuff that feels good is good and the rest of it can, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, take a flying fuck at the moon. But this is just the problem - statements like this post's title feel right and seem to imply very strong positions very easily even though, as we saw on Friday (and continue to see in the comments), that road leads more readily to sophistry than to anything reliable. Today I revisit this premise in a slightly different context.

In a recent column, Ken Connor warns his readers of "what happens when we embrace the notion that there are those among us whose lives are not worth living" and urges them "not [to] repeat this mistake again." Connor approaches the subject - broached by Washington's assisted suicide laws - from the familiar Christian standing: life, he says, is "a sacred gift from God." Despite this, he (thankfully) operates from largely secular premises. The first of these is a sort of prudence, as Connor demands that we consider "critical moral and ethical questions which ought to be at the forefront of the debate." Sadly, all but one of these questions express ludicrous slippery-slope scenarios - for example, "Will the "right" to suicide be transmogrified into a "duty" to commit suicide?" It's more than slightly frustrating that Connors would rather begin with distractions than with content, but that's precisely what this is.

When he finishes proposing plotlines for the next M. Night Shyamalan movie, Connors makes a revealing claim. The problem, he says, comes when "we decide it's okay to encourage terminally-ill persons to choose self-destruction in the name of dignity." But what does this have to do with law? To make something legal is not at all to encourage it, let alone to encourage it across the board or in every case. Yet Connors stays on this point for some time, blathering on about "the notion that the terminally-ill are mere vessels of pain and decay—no longer worthy of our best efforts at care and comfort" and even asserting that the right-to-die position rests on "a false choice" between "pain or death." Besides the inane stupidity of this remark - the choice, if one existed, would be between pain and dignity; you'd die in either (and indeed every) case - this is precisely not a dilemma that euthenasia supporters endorse or that euthenasia legislation imposes.

Connor's overly optimistic talk about hospice notwithstanding, the whole point of euthenasia is that nobody gets to define any kind of life either as universally worth living or not worth living. While he certainly has a right to offer his own suggestions, Connors misses the mark by a wide margin when he characterizes euthenasia strictly as "reject[ing] the sanctity of life in favor of an expedient escape from pain and fear" in a way "that ignores the fact that people are part of a larger community"* and assesses life "only by material standards." To give this some context, this is as flatly unhelpful as someone on the other side saying that Connor's position "rejects the sanctity of human free will in a way that ignores the fact that people are part of a larger community and measures life only by abstruse standards" - it might feel exciting or empowering to abuse one's opponents like this, but it stresses the debate almost to the breaking point.

The one valid objection that Connor raises concerns the Hippocratic oath. Though he misrepresents his opponents' view yet again - "kill or cure" just ain't it - he's right to point out that euthenasia appears diametrically opposed to the promise to do no harm. While I don't think this would cripple the right-to-die movement altogether (remember, bioethics or medical ethics are not really subets of ethics, and neither fully determines law), the threat it poses does provide the impetus to reconsider the Hippocratic oath as a multidimensional statement that addresses the good of the whole person and not just of the person's various organ systems. This might sound like a risky endeavor on which to embark, but in fact we already have: medical ethics currently provides for the patient's autonomy on matters of religious importance, for instance, even when those matters directly conflict with the recommended advice of medical experts. For people who find this sort of thing compelling - and I cannot imagine that Connors is not one such person - the move to a broader view of the Hippocratic oath cannot be consistently contested to as a matter of general principle. Not that Connors would care, though: if this argument is any indication, he has just as little respect for logic as he claims his opponents have for life.

*Not that this matters: even if the entire rest of the world decided that Connor's life wasn't worth living he still wouldn't accept the conclusion that he should die. With this guy, it's deceptions and then more deceptions.

Last time I did this, I talked about the way that working with syllogisms - those artificially formalized but still normally written arguments that come in numbered lists - can be a way to take one structural step forward while taking two steps back in terms of content. I turn now to another case of that, courtesy of Robert Bowman, Jr.:

"Premise 1: Intentionally killing an innocent human being is always morally wrong.
Premise 2: Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being (except when the child’s death is not desired but results from saving the mother’s life).
Conclusion: Therefore, abortion is morally wrong (except as noted above)."

Before I get into his elaboration on this, I just want to ask one thing: what the heck is that parenthetical comment doing on the end of his premise 2? What exactly happens when the fetus's death is not desired but results from saving the mother's life? I can't see how that's any less intentional or how that makes the fetus any less innocent - maybe he meant to put it after premise 1 instead? I dunno.

Anyway, onward: Bowman's premise 1 is straight Bible interpretation (or so he says), and I'm really in no hurry to go back down that road. As such, I'll stick to his second premise, which he says uses the word "being" instead of "person" because "contemporary society does not have a consensus view of what personhood is." Usually we see the ad populum fallacy when there's mass agreement, but that doesn't make this any more legitimate: disagreement among people bears just as little ontological weight as agreement among people. Though this might seem now like a weird decision for Bowman to have made, his reasons will become clear as we move along.

Before he gets to the really interesting bit, Bowman hits on a bit of a stumbling block: "It is a scientifically certain fact," he says, "that the event of conception (or, perhaps more narrowly, fertilization) is the first event in the history of the human being." His error here (hint: it pertains, as it always is with this subject, to twins) isn't a major hindrance to his argument, but it does reinforce my point about the power that a carefully-worded syllogism has to mask its author's weaknesses.

Much more damaging for Bowman is his continuing traipse through scientific half-ignorance. The reason we must focus on "the moment of conception," he says, is not in fact that a new human comes into being. Rather, he specifically identifies the relevant thing as (with my emphasis) "a human being with potential for growth and full realization." His argument, then, is sunk already: without this clarifying phrase, his premises say far more than his supporting facts can buy him. It's difficult for Bowman not to make this move - if he doesn't, this kind of thing becomes very problematic very quickly - but that doesn't mean he can just pretend like he never made it.

Soon after, he matches this by admitting that abortions are really acceptable "in an attempt to save someone else’s life" (again, my emphasis) and not specifically the mother's life. Surely there are relatively few situations in which an abortion would save the life of someone other than the pregnant woman involved, but they're not impossible; indeed, I'd by mildly surprised if such a situation hadn't already come about (not medically, of course, but because people can be assholes sometimes). Again, this move seems inevitable for Bowman, but its inevitability (or apparent inevitability) doesn't excuse his sloppiness.

Conveniently, Bowman's most attention-worthy mistake is also his last of the article. This argument matters, he says, because "the major premise of the argument is simply that killing innocent human beings is wrong and should be prohibited by law." Let's look at that major premise again, shall we? Here it is again, in case you've forgotten:

"Premise 1: Intentionally killing an innocent human being is always morally wrong."

Notice anything missing? Like, oh I dunno, even one single, solitary word about legality? Unless Bowman used some kind of magical invisible internet ink when he wrote this, his major premise quite plainly doesn't say "that killing innocent human beings is wrong and should be prohibited by law." Absent at least one other premise about the relationship between morality and law, Bowman's argument couldn't possibly say this or even anything like it.

Though this clearly works as a pro-life argument, then, it is (to paraphrase ol' Ben Kenobi) not the pro-life argument Bowman is looking for. For one thing, he willfully blurs the relevant lines when crafting its premises, turning "some human beings" into "all human beings" and "any person" into "the pregnant woman." More importantly, he apparently believes that completing a valid syllogism acts as some kind of video-game-esque power-up, rendering him invulnerable to criticism for some limited time period thereafter. He could not be more wrong: even if he had successfully defended the syllogism he presents that wouldn't have given him the right or the ability to twist its conclusion to meet whatever ulterior motive he's working with.

I swear I could spend the rest of my life studying memetics. Do you know what Sean Hannity and Richard Fernandez have in common? No? Allow me to enlighten you, then: they have both caught the "Obama's Cairo speech has hurt us" meme.

Oh, to be sure Hannity's strain is more potent than Fernandez's - Hannity straightforwardly misinterprets Obama in a way that even a fifth grader should be able to avoid - but the connection is unmistakable. For Hannity, Obama himself "is now calling us a Muslim nation"; for Fernandez, Obama has merely abetted Middle Eastern Muslims in identifying the U.S. as a Muslim country. These Muslims, Fernandez asserts, "can [now] say right: just look at how advanced and rich America is, and it’s one of the largest Muslim countries on the planet. See nothing is broken in Islam. America is proof."

Hannity wants to prove I have no idea what - really, I don't care, cause that guy apparently has no connection to reality anymore. But Fernandez has a point, and it's that "[t]here comes a point when rebranding may become misleading packaging." Can we be serious for just a moment, though? It would always have been true that these Muslims "can say" wrong, stupid, potentially harmful stuff about a presidential speech. If Obama had hyped our way of living and deemphasized Islam as a legitimate social force, they could have said, "Well gee, I guess he wants us to stop being Muslims altogether and totally change everything about our society." If instead he'd favorably compared Islam to Christianity as a legitimate social force but an illegitimate political force, they could have said, "Now he's trying to convert us to Christianity - and make our lives as secular as possible!" Especially given the fact that some of these Muslims in Obama's Middle Eastern audience are total nutcase terrorists (who, incidentally, are not known for their tendency to give the other side a fair hearing), his audience could have said practically anything.

Without some kind of substance to give his argument traction, Fernandez provides nothing but very meticulously constructed innuendo. He whispers and muses where Hannity blusters and rages and this makes him seem saner or more believable, but really none of this deserves to be taken seriously.

I've tried to stay away from Sonia Sotomayor on this blog, for basically one reason: the dialogue surrounding her nomination has been almost entirely devoid of content. According to the media, everybody is now a racist: Sotomayor because of that one thing she said one time, her opponents because they're opposing a Latina, her supporters because they're supporting a Latina, and everybody else just because. It got to the point where I thought any article that didn't mention her race at all would be a blessed relief, an oasis in the desert.

And then Michael Medved showed up.

In what can only be a textbook case of the reason people are abandoning newspapers, Medved recently reprinted a month-old article about Obama's Supreme Court search. His argument in it spans all of three sentences:

"The core mistake of liberalism involves the confusion of charity and justice.

How do we know it’s a disastrous error to blur the distinction between these two timeless virtues?

Because the Bible specifically warns us against it."

(Note also the brilliant skill with which he writes: his first three paragraphs are also his first three sentences! A true artist, that Medved.)

Medved's brazen appeal to authority could hardly be more out of place. For one thing, he's not even trying to engage with his opponent's view, which offers a broader definition of "justice" than the one Medved references. For another, U.S. courts are (at least in theory) free of Biblical oversight. And, as always, one can only hope that Medved also heeds the Bible's "important warning[s]" about mixed-cloth fabrics, allowing the poor to scavenge leftover crops, and not trimming beards, because those are interspersed in the same chapter from which he pulls his "timeless and necessary Biblical separation between public justice and private compassion."

Though his self-righteous posturing only half-heartedly pretends to be anything but, Medved really has reached some sad, if not new, lows. Predicting that Obama would look for someone like Sotomayor after he said he'd look for someone like Sotomayor does not make one "prophetic," recycling old columns doesn't make them any more relevant, and spewing out Bible verses doesn't make for legitimate political discourse.