Bad as they can be sometimes, you have to give serious Catholics credit: their religious leaders really seem to do their best to be totally incomprehensible. When Jeff Mirus says "that, devoid of tradition, human reason is essentially useless," I get that part. It's a dumb thing to say, but at least I get it. Reading the argument, on the other hand, nearly caused my brain to melt inside my skull.
(Seriously, brace yourself.)
Tradition, Mirus says while quoting the pope, enables "the ability to recognize my now as significant also for the tomorrow of those who come after me, and therefore, to transmit to them for tomorrow what has been discovered today." (Take a deep breath - ready?) Along the same lines, he continues, "a capacity for tradition means preserving today what was discovered yesterday, in that way forming the context of a way through time, shaping history. This means that tradition properly understood is, in effect, the transcendence of today in both directions." Now go get a root beer float or something - you deserve a reward for making it through all of that.
Back? (So soon?) Then we can proceed. Given the last line of the section above, it looks like the pope is essentially defining "tradition" to mean "anything that stays in the collective human consciousness for any length of time, or (in a different sense) anything that contributes to a thing's staying in the collective human consciousness for any length of time." That sounds complicated - hopefully less complicated than the original - but coming up with examples is really easy. If you ever made a time capsule (for school, say), you were engaging in tradition. Anything you've ever published is tradition. Likewise, finding someone else's time capsule or reading anybody else's published material is also tradition. Religious practices fall into this category, too, but - contrary to the usual intuition about the matter - "traditions" in this sense don't have to belong to any religion or even any organized thing at all. Elsewhere in his article, just in case you don't yet believe me, Mirus explains in a rare moment of comforting clarity that "tradition" in this context is just "the capacity to project our present backwards and forwards in time."
The trouble is, having now excised all specificity from his concept of tradition, Mirus wants to reinsert it. He claims that "the Western world has generally attempted to" escape tradition in the recent past and that "human tradition is uniquely confirmed and reinforced by the Catholic understanding of Sacred Tradition," but neither of those works if we use his earlier definition of the word. In particular, he's just insane if he really thinks that people have been trying to eliminate their own "capacity to project" themselves in time - some modern theories have many counterintuitive tenets, true, but I don't recall that being one of them. Strangely, though this pretty clearly goes down as a case of equivocation, I can't figure out what "tradition" is supposed to mean in these later remarks. Earlier its meaning is pretty straightforward, if almost completely unrelated to its meaning in normal use, but on what definition of the word is it true that "our post-modern condition" compels us to reject tradition? Look at deconstruction, for example, as a canonically postmodern activity: it relies heavily on past artifacts and experiences, so how can it be said to reject or deny them? I really just don't know what strange, new definition would provide the leverage that Mirus thinks he's working with.
A less charitable person would look at this whole thing and conclude that the church just wants to blur the lines around the word "tradition." After all, if people start thinking of traditions as being non-denominational then in some sense there's less motivation to reject them - not rationally, of course, because the traditions themselves would remain exactly the same (circumcision entails forced cosmetic surgery on an infant no matter which holy books command it, e.g.), but, then again, people have this annoying tendency not to behave rationally. Politically, then, this move would make sense for the Vatican: dissociate "tradition" from "backwards religious lunacy" and then maybe you can use "tradition" as a Trojan horse. But I'm not a less charitable person, so I'll say only that somebody here is extremely confused - and I'm not just talking about the poor fools who try to take Mirus at his badly-written word.
It's been a while since we had a good Biblical-genocide post here at Rust Belt Philosophy, but thankfully that long sad streak is now over. Among the laundry list of problems facing religious believers is the problem of having holy documents. Even when these documents don't contend to contain the word of any gods, they still express ideas that skeptics can easily shoot down; when they do contend to be the word of a god, things get much worse. Christianity and Judaism, for example, need to be able to explain why their respective gods might command genocide, as appears to happen at least a few times. Luckily, Andrew Moon thinks he can help.
"Suppose," he says, that "there is a pastor in a mainline Protestant denomination whom you consider to be wise, spiritual, and very close to God." (Just go along with it.) If this pastor then "reports to his mega-church that God spoke to him and commanded him to tell the church that they must go kill all the Mormons in Salt Lake City," Moon says that nonetheless "we ought to think that God did not tell the pastor that his church should kill all the Mormons in Salt Lake City." And why is that? He doesn't quite say, but he does make sure to complete his analogy: "Just as we ought not to believe the pastor when he makes his claim about what God told him, we ought not believe the Bible when it makes a claim about what God told the Israelites." Surely not any claim, though, because then the whole thing falls apart; but then, which sort of claim does Moon mean?
Again, he doesn't say this himself, but the answer's actually pretty easy to come up with. If the Bible identifies an obviously morally wrong action as being morally right, Moon means, we should disregard the Bible in that case. And, well, yeah - if the Bible identifies an obviously morally wrong action as being morally right, we should disregard it in that case. But that's not exactly a stroke of genius, that realization. The Bible is just a book, translated who knows how many times and written by a culture that didn't know which heavenly bodies revolved around which. It'd make about as much sense to trust the Bible unquestioningly as it would to trust a magic 8 ball. Moon, however, seems really proud of this, like he discovered a pretty serious and novel approach to reading the Bible. So maybe he did learn about this possibility at a recent conference, at which time he found it "to be...very powerful" - so what? People have been reading the Bible this way for a very, very long time, and I'd even go so far as to say that his amazing revelation is actually basic to pretty much every skeptic on the planet: just because your book says x doesn't mean x is true.
So while I don't want to give him a gold star or anything, I do want to officially welcome Moon to 21st-century ethical thought. Come on in, Andrew: the water's fine and, notably, totally free of half-baked justifications for things like genocide.
It was a close call, but:
Seriously, though, this was a very good week for webcomics. Dinosaur Comics gets an honorable mention for its mouseover text yesterday: "do a google image search for 'major snorefest' and prepare to be EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED to find not a single image of a rip-van-winkle type with an army hat on." I think Halloween brings out the creativity in people, is what it is.
Spending too much time by yourself? Been crying yourself to sleep lately? Don't worry - there's a quick and easy solution to both problems! Just adopt a hive of tear-drinking bees! Yes, that's right: some species of bee consume "lachrymation (tears) from human eyes," but they do it gently, "mostly landing on the lower eyelashes" and presumably never stinging people hardly ever at all!
Okay, but seriously, this kind of thing has such a rich potential for artistic interpretation. Why do people go out of their way to make up goofy monsters with conveniently literary powers when there are things like tear-drinking bees in the world? If I were a poet, I would write like a whole book of poems about this; if I wrote high fantasy novels, you'd better bet that these adorable things would make an appearance; if I sculpted, I would sculpt bees drinking the tears from someone's eyes. Uh, but unfortunately I'm not any of those things: I'm a blogger, so here I am blogging about it instead.
Nonetheless: awesome.
Check this out:
Yeah, the rollerblades are neat. But I feel like they wouldn't really count without the eerie glowing clothes and the fingerless gloves. These (I think French) police officers would clearly feel at home in a Blade Runner or a Snow Crash, but in the real world? Yesterday I would never have believed it.
Part of me yearns to visit this magical land of cyberpunk cops, but I know I would just be disappointed when I learn that they don't actually have laser pistols or force-field handcuffs or even normal-looking sunglasses that actually project an intricate heads-up display directly onto their retinas. And do they have their own moody noir soundtrack? It seems exceedingly unlikely that they do. Still, this picture is amazing, and I can always dream.
The one-time subject of a really depressing Built To Spill song, Twin Falls now draws the ever-watchful eye of the American Family Association, and not in a good way. Evidently, the town hosts a girl scout troop that recently "discovered that 50 sex offenders live within one mile of their current location." That's not so much the bad news - more on why not momentarily - as their response to this discovery is: they plan on moving, but in their opinion "there's no place for them to move. Their new location, it turns out, is smack dab in the middle of 23 registered sex offenders," which the AFA's Bryan Fischer finds unacceptable. "If either sex offenders or the Girl Scouts have to be inconvenienced," Fischer says, "I vote for sex offenders." Without making any general value judgment about sex offenders (or, for that matter, about girl scouts), everybody should be able to see why this is a false dilemma.
Ed Brayton goes the long way around, but he sees it. Despite the words in the phrase, he says, "sex offenders" rarely are. "In 13 states, that includes someone arrested for urinating in public. In 29 states, it includes teenagers who had sex with other teenagers. In 32 states, it includes someone arrested for streaking or flashing, something every frat boy has done from time to time during rush week." Acts like these may be illegal and may include, however tangentially, sex organs, but they clearly operate on another level than Fischer's concerns - streaking is kind of juvenile and stupid, but it sure as hell isn't "the rape of a child." Following Brayton's discourse means conceiving of Fischer's argument as an odd sort of equivocation wherein Fischer uses "sex offender" once in the strictly legal sense and then again in a less well-defined but more colloquial way. There is, however, another way to look at his argument.
For all of their alacrity in trying to escape their apparently sex-offender-laden neighborhood, these girl scouts presumably never actually encountered any sex-offendery behavior. (You'd think that, if they had, Fischer would've jumped all over the chance to report it.) "Discovery," in this case, is likely of the most passive, removed sort - something like looking up data or reading a report, for example. Thus, when Fischer says that either the girl scouts or the sex offenders must be inconvenienced, he's pretty obviously full of it. If this troop was able to do their girl scout thing alongside these 50 sex offenders for who knows how many years, and if this discovery didn't involve the committing of any actual sex offense, then apparently neither group has to be inconvenienced (with the possible exception of people who really can't stand cookie-selling solicitors). I've noticed that people do this to a disturbing extent, what these girl scouts and their leaders did in this situation: live with something for a long time without it causing any problems and then freak the hell out when they discover that they were living with it. Psychology-wise that's not very surprising, but that doesn't mean it's not disappointing; if you've experienced the harmlessness of a given phenomenon firsthand, it would be nice if you then acknowledged its harmlessness instead of deferring to whatever erroneous preconceptions you might've had.
Not a lot of time for a long, in-depth post, but I have duties to uphold, so here goes. The death penalty has a lot of detractors, and not just because it entails what would in different circumstances qualify as first-degree murder. Some say, for example, that it doesn't work to actually reduce crime. To these people, Kerby Anderson replies, quoting some other guy, that it works "just like a lighthouse throwing its beams out to sea. We hear about shipwrecks, but we do not hear about the ships the lighthouse guides safely on their way. We do not have proof of the number of ships it saves, but we do not tear the lighthouse down." This is a data collection phenomenon known as survivorship bias - or, perhaps better in this case, non-survivorship bias. Anderson's mistake is in thinking we don't already know about it.
The classical case of survivorship bias deals with measuring the performance of participants in market-type situations. It arises because market-type situations allow for free entry and exit, meaning that any group statistics taken at one time need to be considered in a larger context in order to gain reliable meaning. Looking at the average revenue of only 20-year-old companies, for example, necessarily neglects to include the revenues of all the companies that were born during the same time period but died before they could reach 20. In this case, Anderson thinks that our statistical measurements on the effectiveness of lighthouses are being skewed by our lack of ability to account for saved ships - the analog of failed companies in this case. But he's just wrong: it's actually quite easy to account for this, and at least in the case of lighthouses I'm sure these comparisons have already been made. As such, if this is his analogy then he severely underestimates the analytical capabilities of his opponents. I welcome skepticism when it's appropriate, but Anderson wants to just point out one potential issue and then declare the whole enterpreise a failure, and that's not how it works.
Fantasy football teams went 1-1, but both are still looking good for the playoffs. The basketball team suffered another loss, despite my decent line: 5 points, several rebounds, 4-5 blocks, 1-2 steals, maybe a few assists, and a few turnovers. I had an oxygen-deprivation kind of game, though, I think cause my quadriceps started to cramp up almost immediately. So better conditioning on my part would've eliminated many of my personal mistakes, but it wouldn't have saved the day - we got cherry-picked to death because our guards didn't run back after shots. This is the problem with being a taller guy, that everyone wants me to crash the boards but then nobody wants to cover for me if my defensive assignment runs back the other way. If we had a coach we might be able to fix that, but...
Anyway, in my continuing quest for credibility, I now return to my prognostications for the current NBA season. As each marked game gets played, I'll re-post my comments and make any appropriate continuations thereof. Then, at the end of the regular season (and, hopefully, again at the end of the postseason) I'll sum up to see how I did. To start with, last night's Rockets/Trailblazers game:
"This is supposed to be the year that Portland matures. It's tempting to say that this is a meaningless game for them, what with the Rockets looking more like a hospital wing than a pro ball team, but this'll be essentially the same Rocket team that beat LA twice during the playoffs. If the 'blazers get themselves up for this game, I say that bodes well for the rest of their season; if they fall into the trap here, they may need a roster move or some other serious intervention to catalyze the improvement they're looking for."The result of this game was an unimpressive 96-87 win by Portland. I say unimpressive because they allowed 10 offensive rebounds, committed 26 turnovers, and nearly allowed Houston to take a lead in the final minutes. Oh, and did I mention that their three big men ended up with 6, 5, and 5 personal fouls? Those nine points, in other words, weren't the end result of a huge lead that dipped a little in garbage time: that's a real representation of how well the Trailblazers dealt with a Houston team without any legitimate stars or even a starter over 6'6".
An inexperienced fan will complain that my criticism is unfair: Houston played well and it was the first game of the year, so what can I expect? But this is precisely the problem. Championship teams don't struggle just because the other guys showed up to play. And, like I said, Portland couldn't possibly have been surprised by Houston's effort - it was "essentially the same team that beat LA twice during the playoffs" last year. To be honest, I'm worried about the 'blazers. Their mental lapses would've made sense with a revamped roster or a new head coach, but this is a team that returned all of its starters, three of its main four bench players, and its coaching staff. Hopefully they prove me wrong, but unless the rest of the western conference goes down in flames I can't see this Portland team getting out of (at best) the second round of the playoffs this year.
My ego notwithstanding, however, I will revisit this prediction periodically as the season progresses. Evidence, as usual, is the great trump card.
Unlike many other professions, no handy metrics exist with which to judge the skill or talent of philosophers. We have no all-star games, no "employee of the month" honors, no stock numbers for which to claim credit, and even publishing records are of relatively little use. If I may be so bold, though, I think I know of at least one: the ability to discern the interesting attributes of any situation. There's some famous philosopher's quote about this - Bertrand Russell, maybe, something about taking boring premises and following them to a surprising conclusion? - but I can't find it; at any rate, this ability is the reason I like to read Charles Mudede and Lindy West. If I may be even bolder, I think this is something I do okay at, so that's what today's post will aim to demonstrate.
Among the least obviously interesting domestic news items of the past couple weeks is this hissy fit that Obama and his people have been throwing about Fox News. Administration members called the company "not really a news organization" and said that it "operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party." This argument verges pretty closely on no-true-Scotsman territory, what with all of the weakly-phrased criticisms. In and of itself, that's not terribly interesting: politicians do this all the time. So, though Fox certainly deserves some censure, this isn't the right or the intellectually stimulating way to do it.
Rather, the interesting part begins when you start to read the defenses of Fox. Almost* all of them follow Brian Darling's model (linked above), which responds to the initial fallacy with an equally stupid error. According to Darling, the real problem is that "Fox dares to report news critical of the administration," a consequence of which is that these attacks threaten journalistic free speech. None of this could proceed without the assumption that politicians - or just presidents in particular - have no right to act in their official roles in such a way as to criticize a news organization. But look again at that last part: "a news organization." This whole debate centers around the question of whether Fox News is one of these, doesn't it? This argument, then, begs the question:
1. It's improper for politicians to attack news organizations.
2. Obama's administration is attacking Fox News.
3. Therefore, what the Obama administration is doing is improper.
We've now arrived at the interesting part: how could you fix this argument? I'm having trouble thinking of a way, but it seems like there should be one. This is the most tempting change:
1'. It's improper for politicians to attack potential news organizations (i.e., organizations of uncertain status).
Or, along similar lines:
1''. It's improper for politicians to attack news-ish organizations (i.e., organizations that in part perform news services or that perform services similar to journalism).
Unfortunately, that seems false: tabloids fall into these categories but I doubt that it's improper for politicians to attack tabloids. Further, 1' leads to an even bigger problem - namely, that it gives harmful groups a far too obvious place to hide. Even the dumbest hate group, for example, would pretty easily be able to approximate a news-like facade. As for 1'', so long as we consider editorializing to be news-ish this will be equally problematic. After these kinds of solutions, the next most obvious step would be an appeal to popularity ("But Fox has so many viewers!") or even subject range, but those clearly won't do. So where can we go?
Personally, I would very much like to see:
4. It's improper for politicians to criticize potential news organizations without the appropriate evidence. (Which, let me just repeat, the Obama administration does not seem at all to have provided.)
But it seems like this is a non-starter for the ed/op crowd. It's hard to see why, unless maybe they fear their own inability to correctly identify the appropriate evidence, but for whatever reason this particular accusation - lack of grounding - just has not been made or sustained. At any rate, this would represent a huge shift from the argument currently being made, as 4 deals with epistemic justification and 1 through 1'' all depend on some sort of irritatingly nebulous practical intuition. Though my version would almost certainly be more successful, then, it wouldn't really help to repair the original argument.
Really, this sort of problem requires a philosophical treatment. Dissent, for instance, does not automatically identify the dissenter as a journalist. The same goes for the reporting of facts (occasional or consistent), the usage of news anchors, and having one of those little scrolling info-bars on the bottom of the screen. We all agree, in other words, that Fox News bears all the superficial indicators of being a news organization, just like tabloids and The Onion look an awful lot like regular newspapers, but that evidently isn't enough. Tragically, this debate will almost certainly never receive such a treatment - or, at least, not in a public enough way that it'll help anything. Still, the questions deserve to be raised: what, exactly, does a news organization require? Are there any actions that always disqualify a group from being a news organization? Does it make sense to identify distinct modules of a group as individual news organizations (or, as the case may be, non-news organizations)? And when, if ever, is it appropriate for a politician to refute claims that are nominally journalistic in nature?
*Actually, all of them in my experience, but that can't possibly be accurate, can it? I mean, see also David Limbaugh ("Obama's war against the network is about much more than Fox News. It is about his and his fellow liberals' intolerance for political dissent and their war on political criticism from any corner"), the Browns ("[The administration] abhors Fox News because they refuse to be lapdogs like the rest of the media"), David Harsanyi ("In the sinister years of the former administration, this would have been referred to as chilling free speech"), Bill Murchison ("There's nothing in the world like freedom of speech, so long as the speaker booms out your praises")...it's quite the trend.
Or, "Rust Belt Philosophy: where we must learn the same things over and over again because some people just don't seem to be getting the hint."
One class of right-wing theories dictates that society - at least U.S. society, and possibly others - finds itself in the grip of a sinister* but informal secular conspiracy. Thus religious people come in for more abuse than non-religious people, religious messages generate more rancor than non-religious ones, and so on. But remember, this is only a class of theories, and theories without evidence are not reliable even when they seem very compelling. (This is a lesson regularly taught to viewers of LOST, who nonetheless don't seem to learn any quicker than fans of any other TV show.) Sean Hannity would be wise to figure this out.
"Sensing an opportunity to exploit [a series of pro-atheist] ads for political benefit, Hannity told his audience that a Christian group could never get away with airing ads like that:
'Can you imagine the outrage if a Christian group put pro-God ads in the New York City subways?'"Hannity's argument, which is almost entirely unspoken, runs like so:
1. If a Christian group put pro-God ads in the New York City subways, there would be lots of outrage.
2. If (1), then [something about radical liberal secularists taking over America, I guess].
3. Therefore, [something about radical liberal secularists taking over America].
From a logician's standpoint, this argument sucks. Premise 1, being as it is hypothetical evidence, begs the question. Before we even take a look at the real world, this argument is trash.
From a normal person's standpoint, there's another slight error: "Christians have been putting up pro-Christianity ads in the subway for years and nobody cares." It's tempting to pounce on this as the bigger of the two problems, and certainly shoving factual inaccuracies in someone's face has a bit more flash than the abstracted, esoteric point I'm trying to make. But dammit, enough is enough. Hypothetical evidence isn't evidence at all: it's just whining. Putting whining into your argument makes it more annoying, yes, but not more convincing and for sure not more apt to identify facts.
I like solid disproofs a lot, believe me, but there are times when none is (should be) required. It's past time to end all of this ridiculous counterfactual bantering and just argue from the evidence we actually have.
*I guess the grip must be left-handed? An alien who interprets things literally would have a hard time with this post, apparently. Sorry, overly literal aliens.
Vanity, thy name is social networking:
Now, it's only reasonable to put the official Twitter and facebook links on this page. (Well, at least to the extent that it's reasonable that those exist in the first place.) But shouldn't those be the secondary resources? Even people who love the brevity of Twitter or the...whatever's good about facebook must still want things like showtimes, mustn't they?
The day that tweets and facebook newsfeeds become the first places people go for helpful knowledge is the day I pack up all my books and move to the Himalayas. At least, assuming there's still no wireless internet there.
On the face of it, the free marketeer's resistance to regulation looks pretty hard to explain. Markets, after all, necessarily include regulations, even when those markets are free. If they didn't, concepts like competition wouldn't make any sense: how do you compete against somebody in a game with no rules whatsoever? But there is a real and important distinction in that regulations (in this context) come from sources with markedly different priorities. Human rights, for example, simply can't be parsed by a strictly market-based ideology, so a regulation in the appropriate sense could be one that commands companies not to profit from, say, torture. Not all regulations are so obviously worthwhile, of course, but the point remains the same: any one organization can only have so many priorities, so multiple organizations are needed in order to achieve a more balanced set of priorities. Self-policing, in other words, tends not to work.
It's quite strange, then, for Robert Pyne to hypothesize that the concept "of human sinfulness is central to the United States Constitution." His idea, I think, ultimately goes back to this skepticism about self-policing, but this is a pretty clear misapplication of that skepticism. A government in which "each person's decisions must ultimately be approved by others" will only be "safer than a government in which unlimited power is entrusted to one individual" if people advocate for variety of values. For someone who believes that "our natural tendency as sinful people is to seek power and control for ourselves or to lie, cheat, and steal," adding more opinions doesn't translate at all into more reliable results - you might as well ask one mafia family to act as ethics consultants to another. Pyne could say, perhaps, that democracy will likely yield different results than some kind of monarchy, but it would be really shocking on his view if all of our sinfulness somehow canceled itself out.
Nor does Pyne even deny this: in fact, he comes right out and says it. According to Pyne, his view stands in contrast to "the second Humanist Manifesto:
I myself don't like the manifesto's focus on technology, but Pyne takes it much farther than that. "The Bible," he says, "presents a very different view of humankind and our future." This shouldn't be all that surprising - "technology" at the time of the Bible meant something almost entirely different than it does today - but as it turns out Pyne only really provides evidence for the first half of his sentence. Quoting some part of the Bible or other, he says, "There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God." (It goes on, but you get the point.) But this sort of thing only covers the "view of humankind" part and predicts nothing about our future. Actually, it's very good for Pyne that this is the case. Despite his negativity, we've already reduced disease, modified our behavior, and so on. Forget the future, then: Pyne's predictions aren't even reliable enough to describe the parts of the past that we already know in great detail.Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life."
His argument, in summary, seems to be this: humans are so sinful that it's impossible for any number of us to achieve the sort of meaningful progress we've already achieved, so in order to overcome this we should rely on large groups of humans. This blog has featured plenty of incoherent arguments before, but this one is plainly insane. Maybe - and I'm just throwing this out there - maybe instead of denying history and talking nonsense, it'd be better to do anything else. Like, at all.
I have been remiss, it appears, in my praise of Sloggers: Charles Mudede has come in for his fair share of accolades, but never once have I mentioned the amazing Lindy West! For shame.
Well, that is no longer so. And indeed, I need only quote two lines of West's piquant writing to demonstrate her value as a blogger. In reaction to the news that experts will investigate the mauling of two Russian circus employees at the paws of their ice-skating bear, she "wonder[s] what those 'experts' will discover upon examining the bear. Hopefully something illuminating like, oh, SOMEONE STRAPPED BLADES TO THIS BEAR'S FEET AND WENT ICE SKATING WITH IT."
You know, there's nothing quite like witnessing the speaking of truth to power, especially when the "speaking" happens in all capital letters and the "power" is in fact a Russian circus.
Luckily, I always make sure to wear my glasses of +5 seeing stuff, as well as my pants of +18 charisma. In my experience, though, most pants are about +18 to charisma - it's just really hard to be charismatic when you're naked from the waist down.
Probable cause:
"What I have is a brain that does some interesting tricks, like the aforementioned standardized tests and some classes... I understand mathematics and logical systems fairly intuitively."Aside from the self-righteous back-patting going on, it turns out that this author - kaninchenzero of the increasingly absurd Feminists With Disabilities blog - also acts a little on the hasty side in making this declaration. Her braggadocio notwithstanding, kaninchenzero (hereafter KZ) actually doesn't have all that good an understanding of logic, at least not if the rest of her post serves as any indication.
The latest in FWD's fallacy-rific Ableist Word Profile series, KZ's post about "intelligence" runs through the now-familiar history of the IQ test and asks in light of this history, "Does intelligence exist? At all?" She concludes that, after taking a fair look at the evidence, "we would have to jettison the hierarchy of intelligence" altogether. And then there's stuff about how the word "intelligence" does bad things to society, and so on and so forth - I'm going to ignore that part and just focus on on KZ's claim that intelligence per se is not actually something in the real world.
In between her lengthy sociological analysis, KZ manages to offer two arguments for this claim. First, "IQ testing doesn’t measure intelligence"; second, "[s]tupid[ity] is a perception, usually based on the perceived ability to communicate." (As an aside: "perceived ability to communicate" is a pretty amazing phrase. Communication by definition works only insofar as one party conveys a specific meaning to at least one other party - if you feel like somebody isn't communicating well, then by definition they aren't. They might not be blameworthy for their failure, such as if the two people don't speak any of the same languages and are trying to hold a conversation about metaphysics, but it's really taking things too far to draw a line between "perceived" bad communication and "real" bad communication.) For coming from someone who touts her own logical prowess, these are both shockingly illogical arguments.
The IQ test, I apparently have to point out, is only one test of many: its uselessness could not possibly, therefore, disprove the very concept of intelligence. More generally, even if no known test accurately measure intelligence we could still not conclude that intelligence is a non-entity. If ignorance could be used in this way, ontology would be super-easy. "Can you see it? If not, it must not exist." Again more generally, even if there's no way at all to measure something we still would have to have more evidence in order to declare its non-existence. It may be, for example, that the maximum computing potential of the human species is insufficient to calculate the nth digit of pi for some n - would KZ, in that case, have us conclude that pi in fact has no nth digit? Such a conclusion would be not only unwarranted but clearly false.
As for her argument from perception, ultimately it reduces to nothing more than a distraction. So people wrongly assess the intelligence of others - so what? People wrongly assess all sorts of things, from the value of art to the meaningfulness of academic papers to the resiliency of financial markets. Some of these things may indeed lack objective reality (aesthetic value, perhaps), but others clearly do exist (the resiliency, or lack thereof, of financial markets). Nor does it matter that people use the wrong metric in their estimations of intelligence - we wrongly stereotype all kinds of really-existing features.
The punchline, as it so often is in my mind, is the great game of basketball. If we replace "intelligence" with "skill at basketball," we could run KZ's arguments basically as written and conclude that, in point of fact and contrary to everything that makes any sense, nobody is any better at basketball than anybody else. Like intelligence, basketball skill has no one reliable test; it can even be broken down into parts in order to give the impression that it's impossible to consider as a whole (social intelligence, quantitative reasoning, and so on vs. handles, athleticism, and so on). And, like intelligence, most people look in the wrong places for indications of basketball talent: if the top 10 list of most popular NBA jerseys includes Allen Iverson and Nate Robinson(?!) but not Shaq, Duncan, Nash, Kidd, Howard, or Billups, clearly something is wrong. (My guess? Too much emphasis on individual scoring ability.) But let's not be crazy: there are absolutely differences in basketball-playing ability, and in almost every case it's actually pretty easy for knowledgable fans to make the correct distinction even if no explicit algorithm could produce that same determination.
All of the formal analysis aside, they say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So go ahead, KZ: you quit discriminating based on perceived intelligence and then let me know how that goes. Do you have a car? Don't bother avoiding the cheaper mechanics because they seem less smart - perceived intelligence is just an illusion! How about pets? I'm sure they don't need to be treated by a smart-seeming vet! Go to whichever doctors you like, rely on any random coworker to get the job done, and listen to whichever TV pundit strums on your heartstrings the loudest - it'll be a jolly good time! Just stay far enough away from me that, when your life implodes, I'm not caught in the resulting vacuum.
How long before the SUP05 bacteria becomes part of the war on drugs? It'd probably take a huge amount to do anything significant, but it "exhales nitrous oxide" - laughing gas, for the non-anesthesiologists in the room. Turns out this thing, which by the way clearly needs a PR consultant, is growing, and is growing because of the increase in "oxygen minimum zones" caused by - wait for it! - "climate change." Which, let's remember, is actually a fictitious liberal talking point and not a real phenomenon. Clearly the whole thing - that is, the whole nonexistent thing - has been a massive plot by marijuana smokers to generate a new, less police-able high. Well played, potheads, well played indeed.
Anyway - this story, being as it is reported by humans, skips straight to the anthropocentric part. University of British Columbia researcher Steven "Hallam describes [SUP05] as a 'paradoxical' organism, which appears to have both positive and negative impacts on the ecosystem, at least from a human point of view." Gee, how about that: natural events aren't all conspiring to make things peachy-keen for us humans. Who could ever have guessed that? Maybe, oh I dunno, a university microbiology researcher? I know he's not a linguist, but this definition of "paradoxical" leaves much to be desired.
Closing thought: maybe this explains why dolphins always seem so giddy?
This is just a disaster waiting to happen - when someone named Rusty Wright types an article called "Cool Stuff About Love and Sex," it's hard to imagine anything good coming of it. Wright - who, really, I'm sorely tempted to call Rusty instead - really means "cool stuff about love and sex and Jesus," with actually a surprisingly light emphasis on the Jesus part. He even goes so far as to admit that "[o]ne of the main purposes of sex is pleasure," which for a Master of Theology is a pretty daring statement to make. Unfortunately, it looks like his advanced degree left him somewhat short in the mathematics department.
"Marriage with Jesus involved," he says, "can be like triangle with God at the apex and the two spouses at the bottom corners." Why do the humans have to be on the bottom? Has Wright really not thought about the double entendre going on here? Isn't it usually a good idea to avoid the whole love-triangle image? It's not really clear, but what is clear is that he doesn't really understand how triangles work. Intuitive though this may seem, it's just not true that when "each partner grows closer to God, they also grow closer to each other": two vertices of a triangle can most certainly both move closer to the third without decreasing the distance between them even a bit. It would look something like this (apologies in advance, ASCII art is not my forte):
TRIANGLE ONE..... TRIANGLE TWO
...A..................................... ,A,
../ \ ...................................B---C
B---C
(Just pretend all those periods don't exist - it's the best I can do.)
Where A, B, and C represent the points of the respective triangles - you can pretty easily notice that both B and C are the same distance apart in both triangles yet each is closer to A in triangle two than in triangle one. I'd provide the formal math to back this up, but probably you're already confused enough, so I'll just move on.
Geometry - as demonstrated above - can be pretty hard, so it's tempting to just give Wright a pass on that one. Even then, however, he has trouble with his numbers. Despite his relatively sex-positive stance, premarital relations are still verboten for Wright - and not just for religious reasons. Because "premarital sex lacks total, permanent commitment," he argues, it "can create insecurity." His lack of controlled evidence - like a study or something - isn't even really what bothers me about this. What bothers me is, married sex also tends to lack total, permanent commitment. I mean, what's the divorce rate these days? Something like fifty percent? Add to that whatever (nontrivial) percentage of people cheat and stay married and you have a pretty solid majority of marriages that (according to Wright's standards) are not suitable for sex. Total, permanent commitment, as it turns out, just isn't all that common no matter where you look - marriage gets top billing as Commitment HQ, but apparently the only way to enforce it is to invest in a lot of really good locks.
All nitpicking aside, one positive thing really stands out from Wright's piece: he actually cares about real-world consequences. Sure, he spends some time telling people what God wants, but lack of commitment is a distinctly this-worldly complaint. If he'd just been able to perform basic mathematical operations, then, Wright may have been able to salvage a decent argument from the otherwise bizarro-world mindset that his religion encourages.
Maybe.
"[I dunno, some interviewer:]If there was one guy on the planet you could dunk on, who would it be? That teacher?
[LeBron James:] If it doesn’t have to be a basketball player, George W. Bush. I would dunk on his ass, break the rim, and shatter the glass."
(source)
LeBron...you know I love you, and I get what you were going for with this, but please be smarter than this. Seriously, please find a more appropriate way to communicate your political anger than to take half-jokey potshots at ex-politicians. Or, at the very least, explain your displeasure. Are you, perhaps, incensed about Bush's disregard for privacy? Do you disagree with his position on torture? Maybe you just think, a la Kanye West, that Bush doesn't care about black people?
Look, nobody's saying you're wrong to dislike the guy. Heck, I'd dunk on him, too, if I could. (Then again, if I could dunk at all I'd dunk on anybody and everybody, at least in the hypothetical, so maybe that's not such a great example.) But politics isn't about politicians - it's about policies. Couldn't you dunk on, I dunno, our health care system? Or the Iraq war? Or all of those state amendments banning same-sex marriage? Cause Bush is almost certainly just as much of a jerk now as he was during his stint as president, but he's gone and we still have problems.
Just sayin'.
Some days it just isn't worth it to paraphrase:
"Do Hybrids and Cybrids Have Souls?This sort of thing always confuses me - if you're going to ask yourself a question in order to punch up your rhetoric, at least try to address it. Heather Zeiger, the author of this lamentable article, apparently is so committed to disingenuousness that she can't even give herself a straight answer. Are these things unethical because they have souls (and they thereby usurp God) or because they don't (and soullessness is bad)? And what does the number of genes have to do with anything? As they say in the candy commercial, the world may never know.I believe, from a biblical perspective, the creation of hybrids, cybrids, and chimeras is unethical. However, some instances of transgenic technology, namely xenotransplantation, may be ethical, especially since there are built-in biological limitations regarding how many genes can be inserted into another species."
We philosophers call this an "A, B; therefore, C" argument. Zeiger's premises, those things with verse citations after them, have no connection whatsoever with her conclusion. She may as well have said, "Humans are created in God's image, we were created separately, and we were given dominion over animals; therefore, I like cheese sandwiches." Without at least a basic account of "human dignity," this whole thing is more than a little silly."Do these procedures violate the sanctity of human life? Several thoughts:
• Humans are created in God’s image (Gen 1:26);
• We were created separately (Gen 1:25, 26). We were created differently than the animals ('Let the earth bring forth living creatures…' Gen 1:24; 'then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature' Gen 2:7);
• We humans were given dominion over the animals (Gen 1:29, 30). Therefore, these procedures do seem to violate the sanctity of human life as revealed in Scripture."
My absolute favorite of Zeiger's arguments, however, has to be the one about bestiality:
"Do these procedures have something in common with bestiality? One could argue that the creation of human/animal hybrids may constitute an instance of bestiality. Biblically, bestiality is a type of fornication with animals; it is a type of intimacy that perverts the real intimacy that God designed between a husband and wife. ...It is only through modern technology that procreation can occur in the laboratory apart from consummation."Okay, yeah - modern technology is required for laboratory-based procreation, but only because modern technology is required for laboratories. For anybody with any creativity, though, "consummation" (a delicate euphemism if ever I've heard one) has never been the only way to achieve procreation. The easiest way? Usually. The most fun way? Again, usually. But the only way? Not by a long shot. Also, unless my health teachers fed me some pretty serious lies, genetic tampering is not "a type of fornication" and is definitely not something "that perverts the real intimacy...between a husband and a wife." Seriously: if your typical sexual interaction is one that could even possibly be perverted by microscopic-scale events taking place miles away, you should probably seek help.
All things told, I can't shake the feeling that Zeiger wrote this just for the sake of having written it. Her effort seems minimal and her attitude towards the evidence is ambivalent at best - I mean, "people believe animals are better than man because they seem to be stronger, faster, or heartier"? "Seem to be"?? But I can't get too mad at her, really, because she was basically given an impossible task. To write about bioethics from a biblical perspective makes about as much sense as writing about electrical engineering from a Marxist perspective: surely a round-peg/square-hole kind of situation. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that Zeiger would sooner reject the legitimacy of geometry than admit that her peg might possibly not be the right one for every hole.
(No basketball this time - my team has the week off.)
Just about halfway through the regular (fantasy) season, things are looking good - my two teams are second and third in their respective leagues and both are coming off of a win. Next week will be a good test, as one of them is going to play one of the league's real powerhouses, almost none of whose players are on their bye week. To be honest, I expect to lose - too many of his players are on a tear as of late and not enough of them are playing good defenses - but that's why they play the game, right?
Either way, it's about time to start looking for late-season pickups. Since playoff seeding really doesn't matter at all in fantasy football, I should be able to take a few avoidable losses now if it means better output in the last few weeks. It'd require a fair amount of analysis, though, and I'm fairly certain I have better things to do with my time - we'll see.
Continuing from this Saturday's post about the word "idiot," it turns out that there's a much bigger problem lurking. For those too indolent to click that link and go learn about the backstory, the short version is this: some people think that "idiot" oppresses disabled folks because of its (infrequent) use as a medical term for "someone with an IQ under 30." I think this is a pretty stupid argument, and one that fixates to an unreasonable degree on one aspect of the situation. As it turns out, a similar meta-level argument has already taken place, even including some of the authors of the original blog (that is, the anti-"idiot" one). The place to join the conversation is this comment:
"It’s… kind of funny how 'it’s supposed to be offensive, so it’s OK' comes out when it isn’t really affecting oneself personally…Ad hominem? Absolutely! But, as it turns out, that's surprisingly common - and surprisingly commonly accepted - in conversations about oppression. When that same commenter complains (childishly, in my opinion) that "some people are too happy in their privilege to listen," not one person calls her on it. In fact, they react in exactly the opposite way, stumbling over themselves to demonstrate that, no no, they really aren't "too happy in their privilege to listen." What should have been a one-time incident then becomes a veritable motif - anyone who asks a question must be "trying to sound rude or offensive," and that's not what people "expect to find...on a feminist site." By backing down from this one painfully obvious fallacy, the questioners found themselves being painted as intentionally offensive anti-feminists who weren't qualified even to partake in the discussion. So far as problems go, that's a big one: discussions go downhill pretty damn quick when there's no limit on fair play. The bigger problem, though, is the infuriating glorification of secrecy exemplified by this and other comments.
Also, [my] snippiness might just be because, again, these words and the structure they come from and reinforce happens to be a structure which results in Seriously Bad Things which I’m not going to go list *again* because I’ve done it enough times recently."
amandaw, the commenter in question, doesn't want to say what's going on. She's "done it enough times," apparently, which to my mind qualifies as a very strange usage of the word "enough" - it certainly isn't enough in this context, is it? At this point, a site administrator steps in and actually reinforces amandaw's behavior, saying that she and her fellow bloggers shouldn't have "to defend their opinions." For this admin, "it’s [not] fair to continue in this fashion": amandaw, among others, should be allowed to say (and not say) whatever she likes. Not surprisingly, she proceeds to do exactly this.
According to amandaw, "[a] marginalized person CAN educate a privileged person if they feel up to it. However, a privileged person cannot DEMAND that the marginalized person educate them, on any matter. They are the privileged one, and they bear the burden of educating themselves." In other words, if you ask about "the structure" or the "Seriously Bad Things" from her initial comment - or if you point out a seeming incongruity in her argument, or if you want to present an alternative interpretation of events, or if you fail to conform in pretty much any way - the conversation ends with you being an asshole. No matter how brilliant amandaw's arguments may be, no matter how well-constructed or subtle or elegant, you will never see them unless you already agree with her. One of her co-bloggers reinforces this point, advising the readers "above all to listen to the voices that the site centres" because "[l]earning is typically achieved more by listening than by talking." Agreement, then, is welcome, as well as silence; dissent, on the other hand, automatically means that you don't get it.
All of this clamor reaches its predictable result when the standard-issue Well-Meaning Internet Bystander steps in to clear things up, a role played here by Pilgrim Soul. Everything else aside, Pilgrim says, "dismissing the features of their oppression as logically or philosophically invalid doesn’t take the conv[ersation] to good places" - and that's that.
Let me repeat that: even if a "feature of oppression" is logically or philosophically invalid, it is fundamentally unacceptable to say so. And why? Because, and I am not making any of this up, doing so is "hurtful" and makes people "uncomfortable." Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached intellectual black hole territory.
As if to confirm this, amandaw further explains that following logic means "having to justify ourselves on terms that are based in oppression in the first place" and she'd much rather "get on with a conversation set in better terms." Although she almost certainly doesn't realize it, this is a move straight out of the sophist's playbook. Replace amandaw's liberal anti-oppression stance with a fundamentalist religious one and you will end up with a sizable portion of all the apologetics ever written: you deny God's existence because you don't want God to exist ("you have an ulterior motive"); you deny God's existence because you'd rather be able to live however you want without having to worry about being punished for your sins ("you're too comfortable in your privilege"); I know I'm right, so your denial of God doesn't require a response on my part ("I don't have you educate you, you have to educate yourself"); you deny God's existence because you haven't read the many brilliant proofs of His existence ("I've said this already, I won't do it again"; a.k.a. the courtier's reply); faith is a private matter, you should let me believe what I want ("this conversation makes me uncomfortable"); the God you deny isn't my God at all ("you're using the wrong terms"). Throw in an ontological argument and a teleological argument and you've basically exhausted the set.
Without saying anything about feminism or anti-ableism as a whole, and without saying anything about the legitimacy of anybody's feelings, these tactics are unmitigated bullshit. It is of the utmost importance whether your theory can stand up to philosophical scrutiny, even if you refuse to acknowledge that fact. And, at least in this country, it's almost as important to understand that no theory is sacred: if your idea of politeness consists of a bunch of nodding heads, get ready for a lot of brazen rudeness.
Unless I'm mistaken, the phrase for what these people are looking for is a "safe space." Before I read this conversation, that was just one more piece of jargon I didn't really understand - but I think I do now. A "safe space" is the equivalent of a church. Everyone who shows up assumes that everyone else who shows up "gets it," and if it turns out that somebody doesn't - if they ask the wrong question, say, or even if they aren't enthusiastic enough in their hymn-singing - there are authority figures whose job it is to remove that not-it-getting person. A safe space, in other words, provides a community of people who all agree, at least around one another, not to hold any higher priorities than the thing they're trying to hold safe. Whether that thing is the love of God or just their socio-anthropological theory, everything else comes second, including truth itself. Personally, I prefer movie theaters for that kind of thing, but do you know what? I won't even begrudge others these safe spaces, much though I'd prefer every space to be a dangerous one for ideas. If that's what you want, go ahead and have it. Just do me one favor: don't get too impressed with yourself just because your idea flies in a safe space. You'll find that the skies in the real world are far less friendly.
Today, a look into the mind of a (probably non-representative) Christian:
"'Faith is the great cop-out the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. Faith is not allowed to justify itself by argument.'Fair points, all - although, having not read this particular book, I can't say that Dawkins actually doesn't provide this kind of evidence. On the other hand, surely Christianity could at least in theory "justify itself by argument," if only as a specific example of the more general rule that there's a gray area between a total guess and an absolute certainty. Right?
Richard Dawkins, 'A Devil’s Chaplain,' 117
Maybe we should ask Dawkins what evidence he has for this definition of faith. What defence can he mount for such an ignorant statement? Does he know of anyone but other atheists who would say something so stupid? Does he have any evidence at all? Does he cite any authorities on faith?"
"Now, God may NOT exist, but His existence is not, will not and indeed cannot be proven based on the twists and turns of life’s journey."Uh...
(The second in a series, apparently.)
Over at Alex Pruss's blog, there's a list of "Deep Thoughts" - scare-quotes intended. Phrased in cryptic ways and italicized for emphasis, these one-liners mostly express tautologies in ways that seem, well, deep. The irony, and the reason for the list, is precisely this seeming: tautologies, we'd like to think, never really reach the level of profundity that other statements might. It occurred to me yesterday that a long-time joke of mine yields another way of generating fake wisdom, and this is what I share with you today.
The process goes like this: find a saying you think is wise on its own and add a halfway-clever qualifier to it without adding any actual information. So, for instance, you learn something new every day, whether you want to or not. Easy, right? Here are some more:
You can never go home again, no matter how good your GPS is.
Old habits die hard, but they can indeed die.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step even if that step is in the wrong direction.
Rome wasn't built in a day, but part of it was.
The early bird catches the worm - or, at least, the early worm.
Time heals all wounds, for some definition of "heal."
There's no such thing as a free lunch, but there are lots and lots of forms of payment.
It gets a little tiresome to make vast lists of these, especially once you realize that the original saying wasn't really all that insightful to begin with, but it's nice to have a few of these in your back pocket just in case.
Now that I've started paying attention to the Vatican, it seems they're always telling me that I'm using words wrong. Given that they specialize in Latin and my mother tongue is English I find this a bit odd, but they seem quite comfortable with it. But do they really expect anybody to listen? Okay, so "a Holy See diplomat has offered strong criticism of the secularist misuse of the word 'tolerance'" - why should anybody take that seriously, especially when the criticism itself is barely coherent?
This official, Anthony Frontiero, says that tolerance in fact precludes "neutrality toward world views" and "an absence of convictions" - but then also attacks skeptics for "deny[ing] in principle that religious images of the world have the potential to express truth," which seems pretty much like a conviction to me. Maybe these are just two separate groups of people, the neutral tolerant ones and the attacking tolerant ones (which, really, still doesn't seem that tolerant), but it sure seems like he wants to lump them together. And, as Ophelia Benson observes, part of his mistake is likely that he speaks of the need to "be truly tolerant and respectful" as though those two things are particularly similar. Aside from that one bad move, though, it's hard to see anything obviously wrong with Frontiero's thinking. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't any other problems - they're just a little harder to find.
Since Frontiero's writing has clouded this topic somewhat, it's wise to look for another area where tolerance is under investigation. Race and gender suggest themselves immediately, especially since they've been the subject of so much academic study. A major tenet of modern studies of oppression is that epistemic lines can't easily be crossed, so that experiences that are specific to one gender or one race (or, better still, one race-gender combination, etc.) are either totally impossible to fully understand outside of that situation or else extraordinarily difficult to fully understand. As such, people in different epistemic positions only have one fair choice: take other people at their word. Convictions, then, aren't even the right area of concern - any conviction about the general experiences of another group is illegitimate, even if it happens to be true. In these non-religious contexts, then, tolerance really does mean a studied and persistent neutrality.
Can the same lesson be applied to religions? If you listen to religious people, yes. One of the most common arguments across all world religions says in essence that religion can only be experienced from the inside. Thus we hear about "being open to God" or "seeking God" - I'm sure there are equivalent slogans for atheistic religions as well. Put plainly, then, it looks as though Frontiero is just wrong. Unless he wants to open up his faith to a whole new line of philosophical attacks and fundamentally differentiate it from other protected classes - neither of which believers are usually too eager to do - he simply has to admit that tolerance in the case of religion does mean neutrality and so on.
As for the rest of it - allowing for the influence of religion on politics and the potential truthfulness of religious imagery - I'm just not sure what he thinks he's talking about. Maybe he's unclear on the terminology, but I don't think very many people in principle reject religious imagery as truthful, just like even the most hardcore skeptic would never say that no art whatsoever expresses truths about the world. We just think that religious imagery, along with artistic imagery and various other kinds of interpretive constructs, happens to be wrong most or almost all of the time. And anyway, it's not like there's any shortage of this behavior on the other side of the table: how many times have you heard the claim that there's no morality (or, more generally, "meaning") without God? Tolerance, if it requires agnosticism about potential truth-sources, is sorely lacking among believers. The absence of areligious politicians - at least in this country - likewise points to a pretty strong tendency towards intolerance. At any rate, between this minor hypocrisy and Frontiero's more significantly problematic attempt to have his cake and eat it, too, it's pretty safe to dismiss his argument as nothing more than a weak political ploy.
"In my experience in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors [and as a Catholic], I have encountered people in all types of businesses and in all levels of authority that suffer for various reasons.
...This article doesn't seek to provide a solution to problems with persecution, but it seeks to provide some consolation. It isn't just you! You are connected to other Catholics throughout the world who are suffering. I'm with you; we're all with you! I'm praying for you daily; we're all praying for you daily!"
-Peter Mirus
Yeah, and how's that working out for you, Pete? All that prayer and connectedness must be really really effective if this is a problem you've encountered in basically every facet of your life on a consistent basis for several decades.
"This offense is better than six points, 100 percent."
-Jim Zorn
Good luck winning games with your super-scary 12-point-per-game offense, Jim...
Everyone ready for a history lesson? Good!
"'Idiot' is a very old word. It’s derived from Latin and Greek roots for 'ordinary person,' which came to be used to refer to unskilled labourers, and eventually to people who were ignorant or who lacked education.Wow! Fun times for the whole family, if your whole family really enjoys etymology. (They should, by the way - etymology is one of the two best fields with the letters e, t, y, m, o, l, and g in it.)
...This word appears to have entered the English language around 1300, in reference to people who lacked reasoning skills and were poorly, if at all, educated. In the 1800s, 'idiot' acquired a new nuance, as it started to be used as a diagnostic term in reference to people with severe developmental delays. An 'idiot' medically speaking was someone with a 'mental age level' of less than three years, or an IQ under 30. It was, quite literally, a diagnosis of mental inferiority, as decided by the medical community.
...the word 'idiot' was used in a diagnostic and medical context in...California as recently as 2007, when the penal code was finally amended to remove this word from the law books."
Uh, but let's not get carried away. The past usage of the word doesn't mean "that 'idiot' is ableist," not even if it also has a specialized use in some technical vocabulary.* The proof of this is that I do "pause and think about the meaning of what [I'm] trying to say" when I use the word "idiot," and I'm pretty sure it's neither "person no smarter than a three-year-old" nor "blue-collar worker." It's certainly closer to say that it means "someone who is uninformed about an issue or someone who is unaware of the complexities of a topic," but there's still more there and it still doesn't have anything to do with disorders of the sort that would warrant the word "ableist."
An idiot, a person who engages in idiot behavior, is someone who either has never bothered to learn certain basic facts or insists on acting with a certainty vastly disproportional to the knowledge they have. This is a complex notion to be sure, as the specific basic facts and the specific proportion both depend on any number of factors - the age of the person, their epistemic vantage point, their actual physiological capabilities, and so on. And yeah, "we all came into this world with no knowledge of anything" - at least, none that we could conceptualize - but is "uninformed" really the best word for Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or Carrie Prejean? Intelligent design, homeopathic medicine, the Law of Attraction, Scientology, and many other beliefs are not only "thoughtless, reckless, [and] irresponsible" but also obviously wrong, often to the point of self-contradiction. Forget the medical usage of the word: neither three-year-olds nor the severely mentally disabled can even really understand the claims involved in these theories, let alone assent to them. Idiocy, in the modern colloquial sense of the word, can only possibly be practiced by those who are epistemically well-situated.
"Idiot" - like "moron," "cretin," and "dolt," among others - is not only not a discriminatory word, it expresses a concept that's absolutely vital for our society. There's a reason it's called "knowing better": we rightly value efficient mental activity over intellectual laziness, capriciousness, or neglect, especially of a habitual nature. People (or people with loved ones) for whom mental efficiency doesn't mean mental effectiveness have the right, I guess, to feel upset about this whole situation, but disliking a situation doesn't make it not so and it sure as hell won't make the very real and very harmful effects of even garden-variety idiocy any less serious.
*As a side note for those who actually followed the link, it's also not "used to denigrate intelligence." I feel like it's maybe excessive to point out this kind of error given the point the author was trying to make, but oh well...
Those who appreciate the English language may wish to avert their eyes:
Okay, did somebody change the meaning of the word "first" to "fourth" without telling me first? ("...without telling me fourth"?) Because that's just rude.
Also, could somebody please teach proper grammar, syntax, and punctuation? Commas are followed by spaces, "commanded" requires an object, and clauses need to be indicated as such - God didn't "enjoy" the light because it was good and was separated from the darkness, God "enjoyed" the light because it was good...and then, after that, it was separated from the darkness. Not, you know, that the original makes a whole lot more sense, but at least with that one we can identify which goofy story it's trying to tell. I mean, how do you enjoy light, anyway?
It's tempting, after they're done with this, to ask for a conservative "translation" of Ulysses - maybe it'd come back as plain English!
It just doesn't pay these days to insult cephalopods. Whether or not HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu is really at the root of it, there's a distinct increase in pro-tentacle sentiment (except possibly among Japanese schoolgirls*). Just more proof, I suppose, that David Klinghoffer is way behind the times: in terms of what kinds of bodies represent God, he says, "an octopus would not fit the bill."
There's some context here about evolution and whatnot, but it's all pretty incidental to Klinghoffer's argument. According to his brand of Judaism, "a person is obligated 'to wash his face, hands, and feet daily because of the honor of his Maker'" - personally I think hygeine should be sufficient, but whatever. The question arises, however, of just how, exactly, clean feet would honor God. I mean, they say cleanliness is next to godliness, but why feet? Well, according to another one of his citations, this practice traces back to the whole "image of God" thing. Klinghoffer, then, evidently believes that "divine indifference to the form of our bodies" is an impossibility and therefore that evolution could never fail to produce something that looks sorta kinda like us. There's a nice, big hole here, and though it's hard to see at first Klinghoffer helpfully brings attention to it in his last rephrasing of his position.
Though none of this means that God has a face in the same sense that we do, he says, "something about Him can be reflected in our body." And...that's it. Something about God can be reflected in our bodies, and that's how he knows that God thinks we're sexier than octopi. (Which, okay, we are sexier than octopi, but still.) Without knowing which thing about God is being reflected or how that reflection works, this conclusion comes totally out of left field; there are, after all, lots and lots of things to say about human faces and hands, any one of which could be the reflected thing(s). In part, this ambiguity makes his claim hard to evaluate, since we can't really say whether our bodies actually reflect this unknown something - but we don't need to know that in order to reject the argument. Transitioning from general hand-waving to precise details with nothing at all in between is always fallacious: if it weren't, everyone would be able to win the lottery every time just by knowing that the winning ticket will contain some numbers in some order.
The really strange thing in all of this is that Klinghoffer could instead just use actual biological facts to try to prove his point. He wants to demonstrate that God would never love tentacled undersea creatures? Fine - start with the usual religious assumption that deities like human-level intelligence, combine that with the fact that brains require a massive percentage of the body's blood flow, and then work something in about the high cost of maintaining body temperature underwater. Would that really be so hard? I dunno if it'd work, ultimately - I'm not a biologist, after all, so this is a pretty loose hypothesis on my part - but it'd sure get a lot farther than "my book says that something about us is like something about God, so octopi suck."
*If you don't know, don't ask.
Seriously - if I had balloons that said this, I'm not sure I would be able to resist doing terrible things to people's cats, damn whining little mooches.
He's an it-getter:
"Social activists despise biblical morality (which heterosexuals could use a little more of, too), traditional values that have been proven to work when tried and numerous other cultural mores. This is not an opinion. It is also not a secret."When I first read this, part of me got a little upset. But do you know what? He's 100% right. I do despise biblical morality, traditional values, and numerous other cultural mores. (That last one really is a bit unfair, though - everybody despises some cultural mores, don't they? The faux-hawk, if nothing else?) There's a good reason for my hatred, though: biblical morality and traditional values are travesties. They recommend the death penalty for basically everything, have nothing to say about basic human rights, and in general lack any connection whatsoever to whatever morality actually exists.
Don't believe me? Not even a Christian university like Baylor includes the Bible on its intro to ethics reading list. Andrea Dworkin and Peter Singer make it on, but somehow that Jesus fellow just isn't important enough to warrant a direct citation, despite the claim that he got everything right the first time. Shouldn't that strike Christians as a little odd? I mean, physics professors don't include readings on the luminous aether just to spice things up; if you know the right answer, you tend to teach the right answer. And Singer and Jesus have not exactly boarded the same ethical bus, if you catch my drift.
So yes: I despise biblical morality, and no, I'm not trying to keep that a secret. If Cal Thomas ever extracts his head from his ass, I expect he'll feel exactly the same way.
A point to which I keep returning on this blog is that the lack of enforced philosophical training leads to subject area experts with no ability whatsoever to apply their expertise to real-world situations. We see this frequently with theologians, sometimes with scientists, and seemingly always in the case of statisticians. (The reverse is also true, of course: a philosopher with no subject-area knowledge tends to say some pretty stupid things.) Teaching someone to give their total allegiance to a theory, as it turns out, is a really good way to make sure that that person is incapable of operating in contexts where the theory turns out to be false (or, worse, irrelevant). When economists talk about ethics, for instance, there's bound to be trouble.
And so it is with Jagdish Bhagwati, market enthusiast. In a remarkably late reaction to last year's financial fuckup, Bhagwati declares his loyalties to be "with those who have found markets, on balance, to be on the side of the angels." Rather than seeing capitalistic greed as a spur towards bad behavior, he agree's with Voltaire's conjecture "that peace and social harmony, as opposed to the religious strife common until then, would flow from the secular religion of the marketplace." This is a pretty strong statement to make, especially in the total absence of sociological data to reinforce it. But it turns out that it might also not be what he actually means - though "markets will influence values," he says, the "far more important" factor will be "the values we develop" and the way that those values "will affect...how we behave in the marketplace." It's hard to imagine how both of these could be true at once, however: if the behavioral influence of capitalism is far and away outweighed by the preexisting moral attitudes of the capitalists, markets aren't really on anyone's side, angels or devils. Highlighting the moral consequences of capitalism in one case only makes sense if you don't proceed to dismiss them in another, and yet Bhagwati tries to do both.
(As a side note, he also seems to completely misunderstand the nature of this complaint. His main example of a capitalist villain is Bernie Madoff, who certainly qualifies as a villain but is at best only a minor player in the grand scheme of things. It would have been far more interesting, and probably vastly more harmful to his position, if Bhagwati had instead looked at amoral cost-cutting measures, such as the ones that paralyze innocent hamurger-eaters or the ones that promote sweatshop labor.)
Incredibly, that's the least painful error in his argument. His next claim aims to cast government non-intervention as a failure of free-market principles, as absurd as that may sound. While he acknowledges the "euphoria—shared by a large group of influential people who sport Brooks Brothers suits, belong to the same clubs, and travel on the same circuits—[that] led these gifted economists at Treasury and the IMF to drop their guard," he also calls attention to "the role that good old-fashioned lobbying played in the crisis." Though this did indeed play an important part, he says, it "had to do more with lobbying for profit than with ideology," and anyway, "congressmen of both parties bought into the argument that everyone, regardless of individual circumstance, must own a home." He's right about one thing: the government really did drop the ball on keeping these markets in check. But whining about government interference in markets - any government interference in markets - is completely laughable.
For starters, it should be obvious that a laissez-faire economy is only possible in the context of "the ideology of markets and deregulation" (or, at least, an ideology of markets and deregulation). Shifting the blame from free-market ideology to the government, then, amounts to little more than sweeping the proverbial dirt under the rug: when governments regulate, they do so because of a prevailing acceptance of regulation; when they don't regulate, they do so because of a prevailing acceptance of deregulation. More to the point, however, why can't Bhagwati's vaunted self-correcting market anticipate the consequences of government intervention? It's not like this intervention was secretive or hidden - it's public information and, as he himself points out, it was directly requested by the market itself (how else can we possibly interpret the act of lobbying?). Even in more ambiguous cases, government interference is information just like any other information. It may change the tangible results of market behaviors - reduce the maximum output of a fruit from 8 tons to 6 tons, say - but free market theory dicates that the market will always tend towards the most efficient outcome even when that outcome isn't very impressive. Government pressures, in other words, aren't somehow magically invisible to the market: even if government pressures cause an avoidable catastrophic market failure and are therefore blameworthy for that failure, that still disproves free market ideologies.
All of these contradictions, it seems, are the result of an understandable but really quite stupid false dilemma on Bhagwati's part. In the introductory portion of his article, he explains his disdain for a brand of "anti-market fundamentalism that was reflexively and irrationally hostile toward markets and reliant on knee-jerk interventionism." In short, he argues that economic development requires markets but that many theorists either deny this altogether or use it as an excuse to criticize economic development. As it happens, I think I agree with him on this point (though some specific examples would've helped). But there must be something in between anti-market fundamentalism and market fundamentalism, and in fact Bhagwati himself supports "an independent set of experts, who are familiar with Wall Street but are not part of it (or of the Wall Street-Treasury Complex), to evaluate the downside of new instruments, and to make that informed analysis available to regulators." It's just that none of his previous rhetoric fits with this vision - if markets are really that angelic, such regulation should be totally unnecessary.
His inability to consider multiple facts at once and thereby create a unified view is at its clearest in his conclusion, when he states his admiration for "those who do not succeed, and are buffeted by the vicissitudes of life, [but who] still believe in success...Capitalism," he says, "works well when those who lose feel that one day they might also win." This belief - which, recall, he likens to religious faith - simply cannot be both rational and limited to the terms of Bhagwati's fiscal catechism. Monetary success, the most visible advertisement for capitalism, is only part of the story - and Bhagwati knows this! That success depends not only on markets but also on realistic and powerful regulation motivated by a distinctly anti-market mindset. Such a mindset needn't go so far as to advocate for real socialism, but that's just the point: Bhagwati's capitalist refusal to call a spade "a spade" is just as stupid as the socialist (or whatever) impulse that forms the target of his critique.
I dunno where bloggers get off with this "required reading" or "required viewing" schtick - what am I gonna do if you don't read it, give you a demerit? Come to your house and slap you upside the head? Really, I don't get it.
But, if you trust my recommendations, you should take a few minutes and read Neal Gabler's editorial about international parity. To give you a taste, here's a paragraph:
"There is nothing wrong with self-satisfaction or national pride. But the incessant trumpeting of our national superiority to every other country in the world is more than just off-putting and insulting. It is infantile, like the vaunting of a schoolyard bully that his Dad is better than your Dad. It is wrong. And it might be dangerous both to ourselves and to the rest of the world."Gabler spends pretty much all of his time considering the nation-level consequences of this, and I'm with him more or less all the way, but it's also worth considering the effects of jingoism on a smaller scale. Having been raised in an environment of national superiority, I really have a hard time not labeling myself a victim of it. Not that it ruined my life or anything, but it's not easy to shake the (entirely erroneous) gut feeling that my home country just has a certain special something that's lacking in the entire rest of the world. That's crap, and I wish I didn't feel that way; travel, perhaps, is the best (the only?) remedy, but my overseas experience is nil.
At the risk of walking straight into a trap, I have to imagine that many of my fellow citizens feel the same way - certainly the lunatic right seems to, at any rate. Do these people realize the source of this feeling, or its invalidity? Do they even realize that they feel this way? I worry that they do not. Aside from the very desirable political consequences of true international attitudinal parity, then, I can't help but think that it would be healthier for individuals not to be burdened with this kind of patriotic fetishism. If nothing else, maybe that way I could plan a visit to other countries without first buying a Canadian flag pin for my backpack.
(Pictured: zombie Steve Nash, zombie Shawn Marion, and zombie Amare Stoudemire begin to devour non-zombie teammate Leandro Barbosa during the third quarter of a game in mid-2007. Asked about this momentary lapse of team chemistry in the press conference after the game, Nash explained, "Braaaaaaaaaains!")
What is it, exactly, that has brought the zombie movie to such prominence over the past few years? No, really - how did this happen? It's not like there haven't been other monster movies. Everyone I talk to about this has their own pet theory, ranging from the sociological (the presence of socially acceptable graphic violence) to the merely pragmatic (not having to wake up for work every morning), all of which seem like equally reasonable guesses. One aspect that typically goes unmentioned, though, is that zombies are so easy to understand. In normal everyday life, we constantly measure the desires of the people around us. Does that guy want to get on the elevator, or is he just walking by? Is she actually turning left or has she just forgotten to turn off her turn signal? (Just what is a "rundown," anyway?) Zombies, in almost blessed contrast, only want one thing: to eat you. No matter what color their skin is or what kind of clothes they wear or which area of town they come from, you can look at a zombie and instantaneously know each and every one of its priorities - and, therefore, you can instantaneously adjust your behavior accordingly.
Of course, this unthinking single-mindedness is a bit of a double-edged sword, as it's also the reason that zombie worlds typically contain way fewer non-zombie humans than the real world does. It's also usually the primary allegorical tool of these worlds, at least for those movies that operate on an allegorical level: Romero's first "...of the Dead" used it to criticize consumerism, "28 Days Later" allegedly does the same thing with respect to intolerance and aggression, and so on. Still, some people don't seem to get the message.
Evaluating health care reform fairly, for example, requires a multavariate approach. The dollar cost is one factor, the number of uninsured is another, sustainability is a third - I could keep going, but you get the point. For some people, though, everything (or almost everything) reduces to just one question: is it a free-market solution? Max Fisher is apparently one such person, at least judging by his brief argument in favor of the public option, which he says "would, crazy as it might sound, make health insurance a free market." ("Braaaaaains"...)
Now, I know what you're thinking, and so does Fisher: you're thinking, isn't the health insurance market already a free market? Well, first and foremost, no market is free in the definitional sense of the word - this is the main reason that free-market economics continually fails to describe the real world. But, according to Fisher, there's another key difference. "Something like televisions exist in a free market," he says, "because consumers, if they don't like any of the new TVs on the market, can simply keep their old one. If they really don't like the market, they can even forgo owning one altogether." When it comes to health insurance, on the other hand, those of us "with a sense of basic self-preservation [have] no choice but to buy health insurance every single month. You cannot opt out, there are few options to choose from, and it's difficult to know how to price your future risk of injury. So health insurance companies have distorted incentives to innovate or provide a more cost-effective product." The criticisms, such as they are, appear to be these: the insurance market doesn't allow for multiple ownership, doesn't allow for non-participation, isn't transparent in terms of pricing, and therefore induces people to buy an inferior product.
From the way that he writes about this topic, it'd be reasonable to guess that nobody in the history of insurance has ever made an economic calculation and decided not to buy it - after all, there's "no choice but to buy health insurance." Except, people do opt out of the insurance market, and free market proponents are among the loudest reporters of this fact. One statistic, just as an example, says that "17.6 million of the uninsured had annual incomes of more than $50,000 [in 2007] and 9.1 million earned more than $75,000" - I can't help but wonder if there are that many households without TVs. Fisher seems to say that the economic pressure to buy insurance is unique in the experience of U.S. consumers, but he's just wrong: the difference is a matter of degree, not of kind. As for the rest, Fisher would be well-advised to pick his head up and look around. If he doesn't think that every market suffers from a paucity of choice, undereducated consumers, and warped incentives, he isn't qualified to write about economics. I mean, really: how many people walk into an electronics store having actually worked out the value of a television? Even better, how many know the value of each extra inch of screen size, the relative value of HD versus SD, the value of each input and output port, or how much the various warranties are worth? And since all televisions basically do the same thing, there's a real question as to whether consumers have the kind of choice envisioned by free-market theorists - this is the same problem encountered with the eighteen thousand brands of soda that taste just like Coke. The extent of these phenomena may vary from market to market, but it's just absurd to say that markets in general are totally free of these problems.
As a rule, markets with really succesful companies are going to be markets with "distorted incentives" - Fisher could equally be complaining about the auto industry or the recording industry or the oil industry when he goes on and on about unfree markets. If I had to guess, his proposed solution to this problem would actually work: having an effective government-run health care system certainly would put pressure on private insurers. But would it make the market more free? I neither know nor care, especially if everyone uses the word "free" as haphazardly as Fisher does. Despite his unyielding pursuit of it, market freedom can only be an instrumental good at best; I would take (and Fisher should be thrilled to accept) an unfree, but fair and effective and sustainable, system over one that's just economically free. But try explaining that to a zombie.