Rust Belt Philosophy

"Oblivious," I feel, does not truly capture the monumental feat of mental laxity that Larry Kudlow accomplishes when he talks about economics. Addressing this past year's events, Kudlow describes the changes in America's economy as "socialism lite": "Bailout Nation; takeovers of banks, car companies, insurance firms, Fannie, Freddie, AIG, GM, Chrysler, and GMAC; large-scale tax threats; overregulation; an attempted takeover of the health-care sector; ultra-easy money; a declining dollar; and unprecedented spending and debt creation." He even goes so far as to say that we should have "expected [this] to destroy the economy." But, of course, it hasn't destroyed the economy - at least, not yet. To the contrary, if we're going to take Kudlow at his word "we’re likely to witness a mini boom in economic growth." How odd, right?

Not too odd, says Kudlow. "If you have faith in free-market capitalism," he crows, "then somehow this faith is being rewarded by a more durable and resilient free-enterprise capitalism than many of us thought possible only one year ago." Hallelujah and praise the lord - capitalism has saved the day again! Even with the great, terrible weight of "socialism lite" pressing down on us, our "free-enterprise actions have led to great productivity in our mostly free economy." Hooray! It's just, I'm not so sure how Kudlow knows this.

From what I can tell, his argument is: some socialistic stuff happened in 2009 and some capitalistic stuff happened in 2009; the economy is still around, therefore capitalism is great. This is nothing short of absurd, though. We might as well conclude that the socialist stuff saved us and the capitalist stuff hurt us - or, if we're really in the mood to take risks, that both the socialist and capitalist parts of our behavior had both positive and negative benefits. Heck, Kudlow hasn't even done the very tiny amount of work necessary to show that it wasn't, say, astrology that saved us in 2009: yes there was some capitalism and some socialism, but there were also stars and planets!

I know I shouldn't be surprised at this point in my intellectual development - people, as a rule, are stupid and as a result they tend to do and say stupid things. But Kudlow knows that there's new input into the system: he's the one who brought up the addition of "socialism lite" in the first place. And he also knows (well, or thinks he knows) that the output of the system is positive. Yet despite all of this he concludes that the new input is bad and that the old input is good. It's really just astounding: not only did he commit the fallacy of reading a cause into a correlation, he did it backwards. Please get here soon, the death of print. I will happily trade having no more Sunday morning comic strips for having no more (or at least fewer) Larry Kudlows.

I'm calling it early this week cause too many people are running old work until after the new year.  Speaking of that, though:

It may have been a really good idea back when people first made it up, but at this point I really think the oath is overrated. Especially as a tool in a political argument, it just doesn't make sense anymore. For one thing, if wiki's modern version is accurate they don't even say "First, do no harm"; for another, they do say "I will treat without exception all who seek my ministrations, so long as the treatment of others is not compromised thereby," which lends itself quite well to wide-scale ethical interpretations. But fine - for the sake of argument, and in order to demonstrate a level of charity above and beyond that which anybody is required to demonstrate, let's pretend along with Heather Zeiger that the oath really is the popular, apocryphal version.

In that case, she says, government-sponsored healthcare plans change the focus of medicine. When governments are involved, medicine "no longer speaks on an individual level, but on a societal level." She doesn't object to that in general, "[b]ut when it comes to an individual making a decision for his personal health or for his dependents, what is best for society as a whole is not the appropriate ethic." Easily enough said - but why? Well, because "what is best for the greatest number of people, or society as an aggregate, may be at the expense of certain individuals" and "we cannot value some individuals more than others." Ergo, Hippocratic Oath something mumble health care is evil.

Problem one: even assuming the cartoon/soap opera version of the oath, "at the expense of" doesn't necessarily indicate harm. It isn't like flu shots are made out of old people's spines or anything: not helping somebody fits perfectly well within the boundaries of Zeiger's oath, because not helping and hurting are two different things. Problem two: utilitarianism, the ethical theory that Zeiger's referring to when she talks about "society as a whole" or "aggregate," specifically denies that some people are worth more than others. In fact, that's the entire point of utilitarianism, that nobody is worth more than anybody else. We may very often happen to act as though we've "define[d] 'everyone' to mean 'everyone important,' or 'everyone I care about,' or 'everyone who's a good person,' but utilitarianism demands that literally no person be left out." Zeiger cannot, therefore, blame utilitarianism for whatever might go wrong with a government-run health system. She can certainly say that people engage in utilitarianism wrongly or practice a warped version of utilitarianism, but what she can't say is that utilitarianism itself has problematic theoretical consequences.

Again, though, let's try to keep a level head about this: the Hippocratic Oath doesn't say "First, do no harm." It wouldn't matter if it did, either, if that was at odds with the best moral theory operating. What Zieger is arguing, in essence, is that a misrepresentation of an ethical theory says bad things about a caricature of a (potentially irrelevant) professional oath. Understanding all of this, it's amazing that she thinks anybody should take her seriously. Not that many people do, I don't think, but certainly she thinks they should. One can only hope that the talking heads in the major media outlets have smarter things to say.

Everybody knows what that means - time for top ten lists! Lists lists lists - lots of lists!! Uh, but I made all of these in approximately 15 total minutes, so try not to take them too seriously.


Best movies of THE DECADE!
10. Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai (<3 Jim Jarmusch)
9. Serenity
8. Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (each of these is ONE MOVIE, people, you don't get to pick the whole trilogy)
7. The Dark Knight
6. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (best scifi movie of the decade, possibly much longer, and I say that keeping in mind #9)
5. No Country For Old Men
4. Amelie
3. City Of God
2. The Fountain
1. A Serious Man

Best fiction books of THE DECADE!!! (...that I've read. Turns out I'm a bit behind on my fiction.)
10. House Of Leaves
9. The Raw Shark Texts
8. Kafka On The Shore (his most recent book might be better but it won't see an English release until 2011 or something, so I may have to retcon this list in a few years)
7. Haunted (by Palahniuk; presumably this is a relatively common title)
6. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
5. No Country For Old Men (probably The Road is better - haven't read it yet)
4. Everything Is Illuminated
3. In Persuasion Nation
2. The Yiddish Policeman's Union
1. Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Best albums of THE DECAAAAAAADE!!!
10. Fionn Regan - The End Of History
9. Johnny Cash - American IV: The Man Comes Around
8. The White Stripes - Elephant
7. Iron & Wine - The Shepherd's Dog
6. The Postal Service - Give Up
5. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
4. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
3. Ramona Falls - Intuit
2. The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
1. M.I.A. - Kala

BEST TV SHOWS OF THE DECAAAAAAAADE!!!!1!!11!!
10. Psych
9. Stargate Universe
8. The Office (UK)
7. Samurai Champloo (as always, watch the subbed version)
6. Paranoia Agent (same here)
5. Firefly
4. The Daily Show
3. LOST
2. Coupling
1. The Colbert Report

Hahhhh...okay, I think it's probably time for me to stop this now before I get really carried away. If you still need more lists, seek professional help. But in the meantime, try this.

In preparation for my upcoming trip to Israel, I'll be trying to do a little photo-blogging over the next few weeks. Displaying my enviable creativity and sparkling wit, I've decided to call this series "what it looks like." So, without further ado, here are some pics showing conditions that some meteorological organization or other identified as being advisory-worthy.

Part of what one might learn from this blog, it occurs to me now, is that the medium should not be blamed for the message. It's a well-known phenomenon that each new method of communication will invariably draw detractors, many of whom will say that it's making us more stupid. The generation raised on the "idiot box" is therefore now competing with the generation raised on computers to see which of us will turn out the dumber. Still, even a seemingly anti-content, anti-intelligence web service like Twitter would permit the famous William Carlos Williams poem "This Is Just To Say," which clocks in just under 140 characters:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

On the flip side, we've seen upwards of 500 posts now that are, at bottom, indicators of cognitive dimness in material published in newspapers, books, or academic journals. So while it might be tempting to blame the blog format for the sloppy writing in, say, this post by Scot McKnight, don't; locate the fault where it truly belongs, with McKnight himself.

The two questions that he says he considers in that post are "If biological evolution is true, does this mean that we are just animals?" and "Do natural explanations remove both the need for and the plausibility of belief in God?" - in point of fact, he actually only attempts to answer the former. Though he does this badly - he recommends that his readers distinguish "evolution as a biological process" from "evolution as a world-view," which should be easy once they realize that the latter is a contradiction in terms - I want to go back and look at the first question instead.

In asking whether non-theistic answers eliminate God from the picture, McKnight pretty clearly implies that God was in the picture in the first place. This, however, is not at all an acceptable assumption, taken either epistemologically or ontologically. If the lack of a natural explanation suffices for the plausibility of belief in God - the epistemological side of things - then belief in God has always been and will always be plausible. But when people use evolution to argue against theism this is precisely the question under investigation, so McKnight can't just go ahead and take his position as a premise. Likewise, if we need God in order to explain any given phenomenon - if, in other words, only a really-existing deity can make sense of the world - then obviously evolution doesn't disprove God: nothing could. Once again, though, theism's detractors want to test this idea, not just presume things about it.*

McKnight's fundamental error seems to be that he thinks the burden of proof lies on the dissenter or the party representing the minority view. I can't think of any other reason to ask such a stupid question - he couldn't possibly be thick enough to believe in a burden of disproof, could he? But if not, there's no good reason whatsoever to talk about removing God from the picture: considering the matter from a strictly logical perspective, God was never in the picture in the first place! A myth in an ancient Middle Eastern scroll isn't philosophical evidence, ignorance isn't philosophical evidence, and the combination of the two sure as hell isn't philosophical evidence either. He can certainly ask other questions - like whether evolution makes God irrelevant to the history of life, or whether it conflicts with the Bible - but he has just as little right to ask whether evolution removes God from the picture as I would to ask whether it works the other way around. The picture is the picture: all that we can do is label it correctly. I have confidence in my methods and conclusions because they pertain to things that we can actually see in the picture; McKnight has confidence
in his apparently because he's willing to cheat to make them work.

*Out of completeness, there is one other alternative interpretation. Rather than asking any philosophical - i.e., knowledge-centric - question, he could've been asking whether evolution could replace in some sense the common belief in divine creation. There are so many problems with this interpretation, though, that I don't even want to start in on it. Just for the sake of having said something, this is the sort of question it's irrelevant to argue about - either people will be happy with evolution or not, so let's not distract ourselves from fact-finding by stopping every five minutes to make sure we haven't hurt anyone's feelings.

Victory!

Just in case you can't tell from the "1st" by my team name or the score of the final game or the line through the other guy's team or the "League Champion" label in that weird gray box, that photo-realistic rendering of my smiling face in the middle of the page should inform you that my fantasy football team, the Tehran Riots, emerged on the top of its league. Hooray!

Before I get into the gratuitous, boring details of the game, a word about the team name. If you haven't already heard, Iran's most recent election (held in June of this year) had some...contentious results. In wiki's characteristically unhelpful (and inexplicably eurocentric) words, "The European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and several western countries expressed concern over alleged irregularities during the vote, and many analysts and journalists from the United States, Europe and other western based media voiced doubts about the authenticity of the results." Much more importantly, the actual people of Iran - you know, the ones who actually voted and who have to actually live with the results? - protested the results immediately and haven't much slowed down since.

Iran's government, being as it is a pretty much tyrannical bunch, has not reacted well to the protests. Like, really not well. Like, murdering protesters and refusing to properly review the election results and generally acting in a tyrannical fashion. There's always been an uncomfortable question about what we non-Iranians can and should do about this. Should we pressure our governments to interfere, we might cast ourselves as the villains and thereby inadvertently let Ahmadinejad off the hook. Any individual effort, on the other hand, seems like it would necessarily be either foolish and dangerous or useless. But it also feels wrong to do nothing, because these people are really suffering and we all know the aphorism about evil triumphing when good people sit idle. So I decided to name my team in support of the Iranians, knowing full well that it'd give me an excuse to talk about it in precisely the way that I am now. I still haven't thought of a better idea - but at least now you know about it, so maybe you can figure out some sort of helpful action to take. And anyway, it's a hell of a lot more meaningful than naming my team after a porn star or a TV pitchman. (For more on the situation in Iran, check out Tehran24 and The Daily Dish.)

Anyway, back to fake internet football.


There's a good reason why running backs go higher in the draft than any other players. Between our six featured WRs, we got almost twenty-two points fewer than we did with our four featured RBs (Peterson, Grant, Tomlinson, McFadden). A lot of people got all excited about quarterbacks this year for some reason, but the people who drafted QBs in the first two rounds finished in 2nd, 4th, 9th, and 10th places - not exactly a great risk to take, especially considering that the 2nd-place finisher had to play a second-string RB throughout the playoffs (McGahee, his lowest-scoring player of the finals). If I had to guess, I'd say that this is just due to plain statistics. Assuming that a great QB has a 75% chance of a good fantasy week but a good RB only has a 60% chance (and that all these probabilities are independent of one another), you're much better off with two good RBs than one great QB. Factor in the tiny chances of success for a mediocre or bad RB - like McGahee or McFadden - and it's pretty obvious that the on-balance solution is to draft RBs.

Another big thing in fantasy football - probably in fantasy sports in general, actually - is paying attention to streaks so that you select the best-performing players every week (or, phrased in the other direction, deselect the worst-performing players every week). Players and teams tend to repeat themselves, so if they're not performing well over the past few weeks (like Driver or the Washington offense) it's usually a warning sign. Exceptions usually fall into one of three categories: recent poor health (Nicks; changes a player's worth downward), preemptive caution about health (Manning; changes a player's worth downward), or a "change in focus" for the team (Peterson, surprisingly; changes a player's worth upward). This is the sort of thing that motivates sports journalists to spend seemingly inane amounts of time reporting on each and every quirk or oddity that comes up in the prelude to a game: evidently we fantasy players constitute a valuable market segment, though I myself have never done something so stupid as to pay a website to let me play fantasy football.

Of course, "well" and "poorly" cover a relatively wide range of values and are very different descriptors when applied to different players, which basically amounts to saying that the projections are useless week-to-week. Sadly, the far more effective option is to spend one's personal time keeping up on all the most recent happenings, right up until the real games begin. That's for suckers, though, so what I do instead is use psychological tricks to lull myself into a (typically false) sense of security. It works something like this:

• Always select  whichever extremely popular fantasy players happen to be on my team that year - Adrian Peterson or Andre Johnson, e.g.
• Spend a few minutes imagining how well those popular players will surely - surely! - perform.
• Conclude that it won't matter how the other guys do because the really popular ones are gonna be fantastic.
• Play whichever non-popular guys did best last week and hope for the best.

The key is the first step: without a (completely unwarranted) sense of confidence, I tend to second-guess my choices left and right. Then, no matter how well the team does, I do the same thing the next week, because if I did well then all the worrying must've worked, but if I did badly clearly that calls for more worrying. And then I have gray hairs by the end of the season no matter how well my team has performed, and where's the fun in that?

While winning is definitely nice, I have to say that the best part about this week's game is that it was the last one: now that the fantasy season has ended I can safely return to a state of blissful apathy about football. So somebody let me know if the Super Bowl commercials are any good, please, cause I'll be doing anything other than watching it.

As a warm-up, let's take a gander at the results of the AP's male athlete of 2009 vote:

Name...............# of votes

Jimmie Johnson	42
Roger Federer	30
Usain Bolt	29
Kobe Bryant	9
Albert Pujols	9
Tiger Woods	9
Michael Phelps	8
Peyton Manning	6
Joe Mauer	4
Manny Pacquiao	4
LeBron James	3
Tom Watson	2
Brett Favre	2
Drew Brees	1
Derek Jeter	1
Tim Tebow	1

For those of you who don't compulsively follow each and every professional sport, that's a car driver on the top, followed by tennis, track, basketball, baseball, golf, swimming, football, baseball, boxing, basketball, golf, football, football, baseball, and football. Car driving, let's start by saying, is not a sport. Likewise, golf: not a sport. I grant freely that both of those activities require a certain body type and also a certain set of motor and thinking skills, but so does, say, trick-shot pool. And I defy you to tell me that this 3-minute video of trick-shot pool isn't more exciting than a lifetime's worth of golf or car driving.



As for pure athleticism, Bolt and Phelps should be one and two with 100% of the vote between them, the end. Everything else is politics.

All warmed up? Make sure you are. Otherwise you might pull a brain muscle trying to comprehend the results of the AP's female athlete of the year vote:

Serena Williams	66
Zenyatta	18
Kim Clijsters	16
Lindsey Vonn	15
Diana Taurasi	14
Maya Moore	13
Rachel Alexandra	10
Bridget Sloan	3
Jiyai Shin	2
Erin Hamlin	1

Once again for the sports-disinclined: tennis, horse racing, tennis, skiing, basketball, basketball, horse racing, gymnastics, golf, luge. Note first of all that there are significantly fewer of these athletes than there were in the other list. Then puzzle over the increased presence of niche sports. Then, if you're really on top of things, you'll go check up on the two horse racing participants and learn that they're the goddamn horses. The horses. Not the riders - not the riders! Not the riders - we talkin' 'bout the horses.

I understand that, technically speaking, those horses were both females and athletes in the year of 2009. Female horses, yes, but females nonetheless. But what the hell kind of sportswriter knows so little about sports that they would pick a female of another species over a human female in this kind of voting? I could maybe understand if this were the Regular Jerk Off The Street poll or the Based Only On Headlines poll, but the voters in this case research and analyze sports for their job! At least eight hours out of every weekday, the twenty-eight imbeciles who voted for a horse lived sports. And they couldn't think of one human female who did something athletically impressive in 2009. The implications are, to put it lightly, stunning.

There are only two questions left to ask at this point. First, is there an AP dolt of the year award? And second, if so, do you get twenty-eight votes?

Almost exactly one month ago, we first encountered the term "soulish" as a descriptor of non-human animals. At the time its meaning didn't matter much and so wasn't really investigated, but today we'll see it play a more important role. Luckily, the author - the same one as last time, Hugh Ross - actually condescends to define his terms this time: according to Ross, "soulish life includes creatures, namely birds and mammals, that God has endowed with mind, will, and emotions so they can form relationships with members of their own species as well as with human beings." This concept is important, he says, because of "the severe challenges [that] the origins of soulishness and spirituality pose to naturalistic models for life."

These challenges come from two papers that evaluate one of Darwin's hypotheses about animal intelligence. Proposing a rough hierarchy of mental powers, Darwin evidently believed that there was some correlation between overall genetic similarity and intelligence: "there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes …and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and a man," Mirus quotes him as saying. But, if we take the results of these papers into account, that doesn't quite seem to be the case. One study compared crows to monkeys under the expectation that the latter would outperform the former only to find the opposite. Its authors concluded "that cognitive traits cannot be neatly arranged in an evolutionary scale of relatedness." Similarly, the second piece of research asserted that "there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system...[which] runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain" - in other words, that the physical differences between species must in fact exceed Darwin's prediction.

Ross's explanation for all of this, of course, is "that God, not natural processes, must be the causal agent behind all three origins of life: physical, soulish, and spiritual." The argument, if I read him correctly, goes something like this:

1. Darwin predicted situation S (a smooth hierarchy of animal intelligence, correlations with overall gene similarity, whatever).
2. S is in fact not the case (based on these two studies).
3. Therefore, God did it.

The missing premise is the usual one, and it comes with the usual problems - you just can't go around assuming things like, "If Darwin was wrong about any one of his specific predictions, then God did it." There are, however, other and more interesting problems at play here.

We can start with the simple fact of the Bible's apparent category error. Birds and mammals aren't the only kinds of animals that use tools proficiently (cf), so right off the bat we can safely reject Ross's preferred hypothesis. In order for God to be the explanation here, we must first reject what the Bible has to say about the topic - and if we do that we're left with no reason to even think of God. Whether he doesn't know about "soulish" non-bird, non-mammals or he simply neglected to include them in this post, Ross's omission makes his argument seem far stronger than it actually is.

But also, why should we think that Darwin was wrong in principle just because he was (apparently) wrong in the details? It is, granted, a little silly to think that there should be a nice, even gradient of increasing intelligence as species develop in any given direction: overall genetic similarity is, well, overall. To assume that general similarity necessarily implies similarity of one particular part - that, in other words, a fundamentally general measure can always be used to infer a more specific measure - is just bizarre. Insofar as that accurately describes Darwin's guess, then, we can indeed say that Darwin got it wrong. At the same time, though, that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to look for some sort of statistical connection between genes and minds; we should just only include the relevant genes in our account, is all. That one (admittedly childish and naive) version of a theory failed does not mean that we can reject the entire family of such theories.

A bigger problem than anything Ross brings up is that we still don't have the knowledge to run a good experiment on this particular notion. In order to obtain reliable results about any potential gene/brain/mind connections, we'd first and foremost have to know which genes or gene combinations to look at - right now we don't. We'd also have to have a pretty good working grasp of epigenetics - which we also don't currently have. Still another barrier to overcome is our irritating inability to find trustworthy tests for other animals' (or even human) intelligence; if we can still be surprised by something simple like an octopus using a coconut shell, it'd be pretty egotistical of us to say that we have anywhere close to a full account of animal mental capability. Without these things, tests would for the most part be shooting in the dark at an unknown target with a weapon we don't know how to operate: not hitting the target isn't exactly a convincing display of anything at all. Still, none of this even comes close to a disproof of evolution or a proof of design, which is what Ross thinks he has.

First, to all my readers:

(By "stuff" I mean "lots of blog posts," just so you know.)

About the only thing left to say today, now that we've done the holiday greeting thing, is the trite but always-needed Late December Appeal To Guilt. My life is going along okay and hopefully yours is, too; at the very least, you're able to read this, which means you live somewhere with internet access, have some kind of free time that you can use for entertainment, and so on. If all of that's the case, you (like I) have a moral obligation to help other people out.

I don't much care how you do this - what am I gonna do, check up on you? But there's not much of an excuse for doing nothing. If you'd rather give money and be done with it, great! Should you desire something more hands-on, also great! Want to do something that supports the arts? That reforms politics? That benefits local organizations? That bolsters education? That decreases pollution or contributes to human rights or spurs economic development? Then do it: I will happily give you the names of charitable groups that do precisely those things. Even better, do it and take a friend! Who knows, maybe you'll even enjoy yourself.

And hey - while you and your friend are busy making the world a better place, if you just so happen to slip in a nice word or two about this blog, what harm could it do?

And the bank, apparently, is open.

Apropos of nothing (other than the slow dissolution of my brain as a result of 9 consecutive hours of televised basketball), I will now proceed to list some of my favorite song lyric couplets. This is harder than it seems cause context makes up for a lot of vagueness - I'm curious to see which couplets you, the reader, like.


Make up something to believe in your heart of hearts
So you have something to wear on your sleeve of sleeves
(The National - "Mistaken For Strangers")

God may forgive me, but that's not enough
Cause I gotta live with myself 'til I'm dust
(Dan Auerbach - "Heartbroken, In Disrepair")

There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
(Leonard Cohen - "Hallelujah")

But I'd rather be working for a paycheck
Than waiting to win the lottery
(Bright Eyes - "First Day Of My Life")

But the rook's not to blame
For those who didn't have an endgame
(John Vanderslice - "Letter To The East Coast")

How many whips did you get to lock you down in iced-out chains?
Though the whips and chains have designer names they enslave us just the same.
(Tomasia - "Mean")

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Excepting Alice
(Arlo Guthrie - "Alice's Restaurant")

Lava flows over crooks and craggy cliffs to the ocean
And explodes in a steam-heat-fevered cyclical motion
(Andrew Bird - "Fitz And The Dizzyspells")

Whew - that's four of these down, only one more to go...

More interested in the first derivative of the score, actually, than the score itself. Nine points wouldn't be enough against LA in any case, but it'd be a lot more comforting if it was going away.

Speaking of going away, I wish Mary Grabar would. Despite supporting libertarian principles in general, Grabar wants marijuana to remain illegal. An extreme libertarian, of course, would support the decriminalization of marijuana as part of a broader campaign to remove actions from legal constraint. "Libertarians" with this kind of increased commitment to principle, she says, "are fond of pointing to the wreckage caused by the abuse of alcohol: deterioration of health, traffic deaths, and domestic violence. This is true, but it is an analogy that emerges from an abstraction." Before we get to the argument proper, let's take a moment to absorb this statement. Deterioration of health, traffic deaths, and domestic violence, Grabar is saying, are just abstractions. Just allow that to soak in to your consciousness for a moment - and then realize that somebody paid her to write that. Sort of incredible, isn't it?

Her actual argument for alcohol and against pot isn't much better. Since our culture's view of "alcohol use goes back to the Bible," which "tells us when and how we can use alcohol," it counts as "one brick in the foundation of our society." Similarly, laws against marijuana are other such bricks. "Every toke [thus] symbolizes a thumb in the eye of Western values" and so on and so forth. But appeals to tradition, to put it succinctly, suck. Grabar criticizes weed for temporarily reducing "work ethic, emotional engagement, sexual inhibition, and the ability to reason" - but alcohol does exactly the same things. And if she really thinks that "one cannot come to [a college] class drunk without drawing attention," she has obviously not been too observant herself.

After she's done laying out her excuses, Grabar descends into simple ranting. Maybe in her world it's true that pot threatens to make us "give up on our way of life" and make us take up "Gaia worship" instead but in the real world pot is our way of life.* Really, though, I think The Streets put it best when they said...



*So long as one understands the phrase "our way of life" properly, anyway.

That's completely unacceptable - Boston plays without Paul Pierce and Orlando digs themselves a double-digit hole in the first half? I'll be surprised if Van Gundy makes it out of this game without his head exploding.  "We're talking about a championship," Dwight Howard says in a pre-taped interview. Suuuuuure you are, Dwight.

So yeah - a few weeks ago Ophelia Benson posted an excerpt from her contribution to 50 Voices of Disbelief (which, for some reason, has a gratuitously depressing cover design; skepticism isn't bad or evil or a force against, so what's with the whole extinguished candle thing?). Benson's post drew some attention over at Faith In Honest Doubt, among other places, and her point caught my eye as well. Here's why:

"God shouldn’t be testing our faith."

That's it - that's all anybody should need to say on the subject. Insofar as any other points are made in theology or the philosophy of religion or even just in the private echo chamber of one's own head, those points are made superfluously. Benson continues - I suspect because people in fact continue to say things anyway, even things like "God should be testing our faith" - and the rest of what she has to say is of course just as sharp, but really the question of faith is what the philosophy of religion has always boiled down to. We see the unsettling truth of this when believers, from the amateur to the world-famous, try to level the playing field. "Science is a faith as well," they say; or, "evolution is just an atheist religion." I won't try to rehash all of the very many reasons why that line of argumentation is worthless, but really: why would a theist, pressed to the point of desperation, try to impugn science this way unless irrational faith really is impugnable?

Go...Knicks? The city of New York probably could use the pick-me-up.

So since there are five of these today, I figure I'll do all my blogging at the halftime of a game. First up, some of you may not yet have heard about the amendment proposed by Senator Al Franken that was recently signed into law. It "guarantees that rape victims who work for defense contractors can pursue charges against their employers," which seems like a pretty straightforwardly desirable thing to have. Assuming you want your government to represent and encourage moral progress - and we in the U.S. tend to - you'd want that government not to subsidize companies that go out of their way to flout basic ethical principles.

Ah, but not (apparently) "Jeff Sessions[, who] called the amendment a 'political attack directed at Haliburton'" and then voted against it. This just goes to show once again that neither dislike for a thing nor the ability to correctly use a bad name for a thing mean that that thing is bad. Political attacks, construed I guess to mean uses of political power specifically to injure a person or group, typically get a pretty bad rap. Ideally, politicians would maintain the same (fantastical) objectivity that we also expect from journalists, police officers, and other people in positions of power. But this sort of objectivity would preclude satisfying one's anger through the use of one's official power, which is precisely what Sessions accuses Franken of having done. And yes, in general we should keep an eye out for this sort of thing - but is that misdeed really more harmful than allowing rapists to go unpunished? I cannot find a way to believe that it is.

Even if this argument weren't basically a thinly veiled personal attack on Franken himself, then, it would be dangerously short-sighted. Though Sessions would like us to believe otherwise, the phrase "political attack" does not automatically denote an overall negative action. Just calling a piece of legislation a political attack is therefore insufficient to justify voting against that legislation - unless, of course, you're a huge flaming asshole like Jeff Sessions, because huge flaming assholery is sufficient to justify more or less anything.

It took me all of ten pages to fall for Marvin Minsky's The Emotion Machine. An even earlier sign of our compatibility came on page two, where he first suggested that "'consciousness' refers to more than twenty different [brain] processes." At the risk of inflating my own ego too far, I'd fumbled around with that kind of hypothesis about 8 months ago over at Paul Mealing's Journeyman Philosopher blog:

"A major part of our consciousness, it seems, is analogizing and approaching learning in a fundamentally multidisciplinary fashion. I wouldn't be at all surprised, then, if only something very advanced but weirdly consciousness-empty could be made from just one genetic algorithm (that is, just an algorithm or a group thereof designed to address one problem in one way): this would be like a hyperbolic case of autism, in a way. But chaining them together somehow might at least grant the appearance of consciousness, might it not?"

(You should stick around to read the original post, of course, and the rest of the comments; it's really quite educational.)

But what really got me was Minsky's pitiless deconstruction of infatuation. When somebody says something like this...

"I've just fallen in love with a wonderful person. I scarcely can think about anything else. My sweetheart is unbelievably perfect - of indescribable beauty, flawless character, and incredible intelligence. There is nothing I would not do for her."

...Minsky parses it like this:

"Wonderful. Indescribable.
     (I can't figure out what attracts me to her.)
I scarcely can think of anything else.
     (Most of my mind has stopped working.)
Unbelievably perfect. Incredible.
     (No sensible person believes such things.)
She has a flawless character.
    (I've abandoned my critical faculties.)
There is nothing I would not do for her.
     (I've forsaken most of my usual goals.)"

Once I stopped laughing, I returned to the book with a reenergized interest in the subject matter. Learning is all well and good, but geez is it nice to read somebody who can write.

The trouble is - so far, at least - Minsky doesn't seem to prefer writing. Despite the pretty noticeably complex and technical nature of the argument he's trying to make, so far he's settled for drawing lots of pictures. Pictures help the learning process, yeah, but how convincing are these supposed to be, exactly?

A constant source of annoyance in political debates is the extent to which people resort to sloganeering. Even more so than in philosophical spats, politicians and partisans love to reduce their arguments to pithy, canorous* sayings whose poetic strengths presumably are supposed to make up for their logical weaknesses. So, for example, when people insist on the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," it's almost a taboo to ask what they mean by a right to life. If someone looks to be in mortal peril and I can save them without risking my own life, would I violate their rights not to take any action? Food is necessary to life - do I have to provide food for people who don't have any? And so on.

For the most part, the closest anybody gets to really plumbing the depths of these concepts is what Jacob Sullum does in his article about health care reform. Sullum, an apparently libertarian conservative, dislikes the idea of reform, especially if it includes a government-run plan. But, more importantly for the sake of this post, he also dislikes the notion of health care as a right. According to Sullum, "it does not make much sense to say that [such a right] exists in a country too poor to afford such subsidies or at a time before modern medicine, let alone in the state of nature. Did Paleolithic hunter-gatherers have a right to the 'affordable, comprehensive and high-quality medical care' that the Congressional Progressive Caucus says is a right of 'every person'? If so, who was violating that right?" It's this last question that I want to focus on - but only after a brief aside.

Surely no matter which right to health care people actually propose they do not think that humans "in the state of nature" or across the globe have the right to the specific modern referent of "affordable, comprehensive, and high-quality medical care." There will always be medical technologies and practices that aren't available to the whole human population, at least as long as there's a cutting edge of medical practice: this is just what "cutting edge" means. Likewise, to specify a fixed level of care seems absurd. If for no other reason, such a position should be avoided because we have, at any give point in time, no real idea what medicine will look like in 100 (or, to make things more fun, 1,000) years. We would not, therefore, want to restrict medical rights to any specific era's abilities - that would be a mistake on the order of saying that surgical patients only have the right to an anesthetic as effective as strong alcohol. Having now in mind the fact that Sullum partially argues against a ludicrous straw man, let's move along to the more interesting argument.

By asking who violated an ancient human's right to health care, Sullum implicitly says something like this:

Rights exist in nature and therefore apply universally to all people at all times. Thus, when a person is not capable of obtaining the thing that a right protects, that right has been violated. And, since rights exist in nature, they apply automatically; in other words, in order for a right to be violated, a person must have violated it.

As paradigm cases of naturally-existing rights, he lists "liberty rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of contract." These rights, he says, exemplify "the traditional American understanding of rights" as laid out by "[t]he Framers." Part of this applies - but only part of it. Sullum is absolutely correct when he says that some rights "developed as a way of protecting people from wrongful interference by their neighbors" or the government and that such rights can be found in the constitution. Freedom of speech, for example, is probably the most famous such right enumerated in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment (we'll get to the most infamous of these momentarily). He's not correct, however, to say either that these rights are the only ones recognized by the framers or that natural rights can only be violated by people.

To start with, the Bill of Rights - the same one that Sullum references when he talks about freedom of speech - also provides for a right to trial by one's peers, defensive counsel, due process, and all kinds of other things that (in Sullum's words) "represent a legally enforceable claim on other people’s resources." If there's a "radical assault on" tradition, then, it doesn't happen just because the right to health care isn't a liberty right. How about the state-of-nature thing?

Apart from his very mistaken idea that the U.S. only used to uphold liberty rights, Sullum also seems to say that it's an American tradition to use just those rights that, if the are to be violated, must be violated by a person. But this concept is borderline incoherent: from the universe's perspective, the number of "rights" any given organism has are very few indeed. Sullum asks who violated a Paleolithic person's right to health care in order to underscore the absurdity of the question, but in fact it's the question itself that's the problem and not the specific right therein. Just look at the right to life: people routinely lose their lives without another person causing it, yet Sullum would never say that the right to life doesn't exist. Along slightly less obvious lines, the free practice of religion - another First Amendment protection - also falls prey to this sort of objection. There must be some folks somewhere in the U.S. who don't have access to crackers and wine: which dastardly villain is depriving these poor people of their right to practice Catholicism? And you hardly ever see Greek altars anymore - what about those of us who want to properly worship Aphrodite or Zeus? The answer, obviously, is not that any such people have been deprived of their rights in the sense that another person or group of people has actively conspired to make such religious expression impossible - it's just that these things happen and get over it.

None of this is to say that health care reform or a public option is morally or politically necessary. I do think they are, just for reasons not stated here. But Sullum thinks that the whole question is laughable, that recognizing health care as a right would somehow corrupt or destroy the pristine and intricate system of rights upon which this country operates (or, at least, upon which it's supposed to operate). He hasn't proved that by a long shot, and he won't until he comes to grips with the annoying subtleties that always haunt political thinking.

*Thanks, ReverseDictionary!

Evidently it wasn't a great idea for the Pittsburgh Sports League to schedule a game on December 22: our team fielded* all of four people and the other team didn't even show. So we played some two-on-two for an hour and a half and then went home - just as good. But seriously, what kind of punk team can't even show up for a game? Shame upon their houses.

Elsewhere, the Hawks fell to the Bulls last Saturday in one of my games to watch. That should really not have been the case, as Atlanta is in the middle of an overall very good season and Chicago is the sort of team that blows a 35-point, third-quarter lead. But the Hawks, very much like the Utah Jazz, play vastly better at home than they do on the road - a fatal characteristic, usually, for a team that hopes to make serious advances into the playoffs. Chicago, on the other hand, has apparently hit a wall. It took them a couple of years to do it, certainly, but the low-athleticism, low-talent, high-hustle model can only ever take you so far. They'll have their nights - like, for instance, when they play at home against teams that struggle on the road - but they're just stretched too thin to be a real threat. As for the Hawks, it all comes down to maturity and professionalism: if they can't beat the Bulls on the road, they'll have no shot against Cleveland or Boston or Orlando (or, if it comes to this, LA).

Finally, good news! My fantasy football team is still alive, thanks almost entirely to the Cowboys' performance against the Saints. This week is the league finals, so I should be able to have a nice in-depth multimedia analysis of the game by next Tuesday. As of right now, Yahoo projects me as the winner by about 28 points, or about 33% of my opponent's projected score - but, on the other hand, their projections are crap. Time, as usual, will tell the result.

*"Fielded"? It's not a basketball field. "Courted"...?

Part of the reason so few people are philosophers, I think, is that the job requires a good deal of emotional coldness. So many fields require a sense of interpersonal warmth (retail, real estate, basically anything artistic, others) and so rarely does empathy not turn out to be helpful in day-to-day life that it almost becomes a value unto itself. And certainly friendliness has its place - I'm not saying, for example, that we should all treat each other philosophically all the time. At the same time, though, people can have trouble turning off their social selves and really committing to a more rigorous mindset. The reason I say all of this is that today's objection, more so even than most day's, is a real case of pedantic nitpicking (pedantic nitpicking, of course, being the sort of thing one tends to let fall by the wayside in non-philosophical contexts).

Our argument comes from Hugh Ross's Reasons To Believe website. Always keeping abreast of interesting scientific discoveries, Ross and his coworkers try to assemble these new-found facts into a compelling argument for an intelligent designer of the universe. Needless to say, this typically involves at least a tiny bit of intellectual dishonesty - you can search for "Reasons To Believe" to find a pretty good number of posts relating to their arguments. Sometimes, though, they opt instead for simple incompetence, as in the case (I think) of this argument, which hinges on the idea that "Earth is not at all ordinary in its assortment of elements and compounds."

Citing two separate studies, Ross more or less firmly establishes his claim that our planet is irregular.* First, some women from MIT say that the Earth should have "very deep oceans and very thick atmospheres" - which would make life, or at least advanced life, rather unlikely. And, moving in a somewhat different direction, two (apparently) Italian scientists say that it's got wonky amounts of various different elements. All told, Ross summarizes the situation thusly:

"Earth’s Anomalous Abundances
carbon 500 times less
water 250 times less
sulfur 50 times less
phosphorus 4 times more
uranium 10,000 times more
thorium 1,000 times more"

And then comes the boilerplate: "Every one of our planet’s exceptional abundance characteristics discovered so far has proven to be essential for the support of life and of advanced life in particular. The evidence for the supernatural, super-intelligent design of Earth is mounting." Really, he might as well not have said this - we all knew it was coming.

Anyway, my major problem with this argument is that Ross leaves out a whole bunch of relevant details - which may or may not be his fault. Most importantly, he gives no indication whatsoever of what mathematical terms the original authors use to describe their findings. Especially in the case of the team from MIT, who used a computational model to generate their findings, Ross should have been able to find the technical details that he omits from his account. What, for instance, was the standard deviation of their model's predictions? How often, if at all, did simulated Earths fall near the values exhibited by the actual one? Did they researchers find any set of initial conditions for their model that would produce something like our Earth? And so on. Basically, Ross is just throwing some big numbers around without filling in any of the blanks: even if we concede that the differences he notes are indeed unlikely, that fact in and of itself (i.e., without further elaboration and specification) says nothing whatsoever about the odds that some planets somewhere would display characteristics like the ones he finds so incredible. If that event turns out to be not quite as unlikely then the whole thing falls apart: of course intelligent life would find itself on such a planet; Ross himself says that the changes are, without exception, helpful for the development of intelligence.

Last, it's worth noting as an aside that Ross seems to have misunderstood the way that science works. These models and predictions that he uses aren't somehow set in stone or guaranteed to be accurate. For scientists, a failed model means that some part of it doesn't accurately describe reality - not that reality itself is somehow the problem. Even in the absolute best-case scenario, then, Ross still has a ways to go before he can use the results of any seemingly incorrect or incomplete model, because the scientists who devised the model can always just respond that it's flawed and thus remove his evidence altogether.

*I am, of course, trusting the original studies themselves. It's easy enough to cherry-pick the research and find something you want, but since I have no evidence that Ross has done this I can't very well accuse him of it.

Or has he just been this obnoxious and amoral all along? I mean, what the fuck? As awesome as it sounds, I don't have any desire whatsoever to engage in "spiritual piracy"; only somebody with water for brains would really reject "cultural elitism"; and maybe if you wanna hear fewer "lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year" you should ask your fellow Christians to quit playing them already? I tried to read that article and just completely ignore all the really loony stuff: it didn't help.

Near as I can tell, here's what he's saying. "We as a society should really put our foot down on this whole 'life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness' garbage - non-Christians have clearly taken it too far." But while we're at it, why not do that same thing for race relations, too? Cause those black guys are always stealing our white traditions, what with the owning property and being president and junk (and even Christian ones, too!). Then, since the gays are approprating marriage, we can all sit down for a nice talk about how they can "buzz off" and go to some other country where that sort of thing is okay. And don't even get me started on women. Voting? Working a paying job? Wearing pants? A might reckoning is due, according to Garrison Keillor, and funnily enough it's only the minorities who find themselves in the debit column

I'll start taking this seriously when he apologizes to the pagans for stealing their holiday, the Mesopotamians for stealing their deity, the Jews for stealing their whole religion, the Native Americans for stealing their land, the Grand Ole Opry for stealing the premise of his show...

One of the most popular responses to the problem of evil is what we might name the Heel/Face Turn theodicy: that, without the various evils and trials we encounter in this world, our souls (personalities, characters, etc.) would be inferior. In the words of a recent commenter, "this comes from the belief that human beings were put on earth to perfect themselves. If we're already perfect, why did God create us in the first place? That's how we end up with the idea that saving someone from sin is better than helping them avoid it in the first place."* If this is indeed God's only (or even primary) excuse for allowing evil and suffering to permeate the world, that would of course have consequences in terms of the things we would reasonably expect to find. Flossing, for example, just doesn't fit: it contribues only marginally (if at all) to one's own character and not at all to one developing the big words that theologians like to toss around in this context ("love," "empathy," etc.). But does soul-building account for more significant evils?

Judging by the excerpts posted on Jerry Coyne's blog, Francis Collins believes that it does. Coyne quotes Collins as saying, "I can see, albeit dimly, that my daughter’s rape was a challenge for me to try to learn the real meaning of forgiveness in a terribly wrenching circumstance." Assuming for the sake of argument that one ought really forgive the person who raped one's daughter - which otherwise would really need proof - Collins still seems to make a few pretty obvious mistakes here. From the widest vantage point, we can pretty easily see that this world is not particularly well-constructed to serve as a soul-building environment. On an individual level, life appears to be composed for the most part of activities that have nothing to do with reshaping oneself into a more virtuous person - activities, moreover, that detract from our ability to have soul-challenging experiences. It's no coincidence that most compelling and engrossing stories of self-improvement conspicuously lack descriptions of characters clipping their nails, voiding their bowels, and so on: these maintenance activities have negligible soul-building effects in and of themselves and also take up valuable time, energy, and focus that could (on this theory) be better used on things like adventuring.

But let's forget about that for the moment and narrow our focus somewhat: the non-potentially-soul-building parts of our lives notwithstanding, how well does this world build souls? Again, we have to say not very. If God created this world and all of its trials, we must conclude that God has no real foresight; people fail their soul-building tests with alarming frequency, perhaps even more often than they pass. Alternatively, if God created the world but left the nature and extent of the trials up to some other force (free will is the usual culprit here), we can still say that God didn't limit the trials enough: even without having created the various evils themselves, God's creation of the universe effectively defined the maximum and minimum extent to which we humans can harm each other. That the maximum is way too high is therefore equally an indictment of God.

Constricting our tunnel vision still further, what if the overall design of the world and also the particular instantiation of evils are both somehow acceptable? Then, in Coyne's words, "I still find his reasoning shameful.  Does he really believe that God allowed his daughter to be raped so that, as part of the cosmic scheme, Collins could learn forgiveness? Is such an outcome at all commensurate with the suffering of his daughter?" Presumably not - but remember, in order for God to be perfect the tradeoffs involved in the creation of this universe must tend towards the positive. In other words, if some other universes lack the rape of Collins's daughter but also lack his (actually nonexistent)** better-developed character, those universes must be less valuable then this one (all other things being equal). Just pointing out that soul-building is good doesn't mean that the value of soul-building overwhelms the disvalue of the original challenge. Certainly in the case of Collins's daughter it is irresistably tempting to say that the "challenge" - i.e., her rape - is far and away more powerful than any given change of heart that Collins might undergo. And, of course, the rape of one person, though completely horrible and unequivocally despicable, pales in comparison to some of the more infamous historical cases of evil; quoting Coyne again, "Did millions of Jews, Poles, gays, and handicapped die so that we could grow spiritually and learn to forgive Hitler and his minions?"

In the interest of charity and good form, I must observe that there is one way for Collins (and other soul-building theorists) to escape these otherwise lethal errors. Seemingly just putting a different linguistic gloss on the same argument, he also calls his daughter's rape a case of God "work[ing] through adversity." However, this could be construed as a totally new argument. Rather than identifying evils as pre-planned components in God's Rube Goldberg universe, Collins could instead claim that they're inevitable and God displays moral excellence by giving us the chance to bring some good out of them anyway. This wouldn't fit so well with his claim that his "daughter's rape was a challenge" - identity claims like this typically imply something more Rube-Goldberg-esque - but it would make sense with some of the other things he says (e.g., that "the existence of free will and of order in the physical universe are inexorable facts"). Switching to a position along these lines would indeed save Collins from having to defend his theodicy - but only because he wouldn't have one anymore. The problem of evil doesn't ask what God might do for us to make up for the existence of evil, it asks why God would allow the evil in the first place. Positing soul-building as a compensatory measure, then, simply does not address the point.


Ultimately, one only needs to read one commenter in order to fully comprehend the failure of the soul-building theodicy. Quoth Bryan: "Does Collins hope that she will be raped again? If not, why not?"

*I'm curious to read your answers the rhetorical question herein. It sounds reasonable at first, I think, but becomes odder the more you think about it.
**"In complete honesty," he says, "I am still working on that." Like I said, we fail these tests far more often than any theologian should comfortably be able to acknowledge.

Ignoring for the moment the loose treatment of this technique in pop culture, sometimes it really is valuable to analyze a person based on what they leave unsaid. Besides the obvious examples - that poem you wrote sure is "interesting"! - a good deal of (important and enlightening) philosophical dirty work can be accomplished just by checking to see which premises an author believes go without saying. Sometimes a writer makes this easy by highlighting their unspoken beliefs with rhetorical questions or other gesticulative devices but, then again, sometimes people just skate right over a crucial idea without ever giving even a hint of its existence. Such is the case with this post by Jeff Mirus.

At that link, he argues that the stories behind three official disciplinary actions are "all good news." All three cases involve a Catholic officer breaking ranks only to be either reined in or cut loose by the church. It's this process of course correction that Mirus likes:

"When a bishop has ruined his ability to serve as a credible shepherd for this people, to resign—even if only at long last—is an honorable act. When a bishop, or in this case an archbishop, is disciplined by the Pope for the abuse of his position, that discipline is an honorable act. And when a bishop properly discharges his office by making it clear that pro-abortion Catholics damage their relationship with the Church, this profoundly pastoral exercise of his authority is an honorable act."

To the extent that he presents an argument for his position, that's it. Punishment, the act of distributing retribution for a (perceived) transgression, "is an honorable act" and therefore any news of punishment is overall good news. The flaw here should be obvious: morally justified punishment only takes place after a moral wrong occurs, so an evaluation of the whole process would have to include the initial wrongdoing as well as the punishment itself. By excluding half of this process, Mirus produces a fundamentally lopsided argument.

Yet there's something deeper to be said about this whole thing. Let's assume out of charity that Mirus simply neglected to bring up any considerations about balance - in other words, that he made a full evaluation in his own mind and simply neglected to transmit that evaluation to the text. On such an understanding of the situation, the goodness of the punishment must exceed the badness of the original misdeed. If not, the situation as a whole is either bad news (if the misdeed counts more than the punishment) or neutral news (if the two count equally). But how plausible is that, really? In essence, this says that the world has a greater potential for overall goodness the more that people act badly. Consider the following scenarios, keeping in mind the whole time our tentative assumption that punishments make for good news overall:

1. Two people live together for the duration of their lives, neither one producing any serious grievance against the other. However, neither one seriously improves the life of the other, either.
2. Two people live together for the duration of their lives without serious moral wrongs as in (1) but, unlike (1), constantly help one another in meaningful and valuable ways.
3. Two people live together for the duration of their lives, one constantly torturing the other. Eventually, the tormentor murders the other and is punished proportionately for the sum total of the harm inflicted on the murdered person.

For most of us, (1) sounds pretty blase, (2) sounds quite good, and (3) sounds abominable. In contrast, Mirus, at least if he is to be consistent, must  favor (3) over at least (1): after all, a correctly avenged sin is worth more to him than the simple continuance of the status quo; is it, in his words, "good news." If I can play psychologist for a moment, it seems as though this must be connected to the God that Mirus worships. As we saw yesterday, Christians with serious commitments to their tradition must reckon somehow with the atrocious doctrine of hell, and many of them do so by attaching a very high moral value to retribution. For, if hell is fundamentally a response to sin and a morally perfect God approves of hell, there must be some moral goodness about hell that dwarfs the moral badness produced by all that sin. As we've just seen, however, such a moral understanding is wrong to the point of being dangerous: we should absolutely not interrupt peace with violence just so that there's something to punish. Whatever moral system we subscribe to, punishment must always be viewed as essentially making things less bad and not making things better, or else we run the apparently very real risk of valuing punishment for punishment's sake.

As I type this, my facebook People Say Stuff Big Screen O' Updates has no fewer than three separate endorsements of "Avatar," a movie which currently scores 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. Something here must be wrong, because those same people also consistently say - and this reviewer gave the movie nine point five out of ten stars - that, for example, "[t]he story is basic and dare I say, clichéd and predictable." Wha? Can somebody explain this to me? If you're really desperate for scenery porn, go watch a Hayao Miyazaki movie. Those have stunning visuals and niceties like plot and character development. As soon as "Avatar" becomes available outside of theaters I'll watch it just to see what's what, but I refuse to contribute to the growing wave of excitement over what's apparently just a 160-minute-long screen saver.

Having that now out of the way, it looks like my learning curve worked like a charm for the last group of movies I recently saw.  As predicted, "A Serious Man" was pure gold. It's easily the best Coen brothers movie - but it's also the most challenging, so if you're looking for another "Fargo" (or, fortune help you, another "Intolerable Cruelty") your best bet is to stay far, far away from this one. Similarly, "The Road" is a thoroughly effective movie that requires a very specific kind of constitution to watch. I must say that I'm thoroughly impressed with John Hillcoat's directing, to the point that I may now have to go back and watch his prior work.

On a slightly lighter note, "Where The Wild Things Are" pretty much met my expectations. Visually it was quite impressive - and, unlike "Avatar," it managed to do this without sacrificing on plot or characterization. Being as it is based on a children's book the moral comes through pretty bluntly, but that doesn't detract from the quality of the filmmaking or the meaningfulness of the story. Likewise, "Whip It" was also not particularly subtle about its message. "Cute in spots but kind of kitschy overall" was a spot-on prediction, and it is fun enough to watch that you shouldn't mind the lamentable omission of the Devo song of the same name. Because really, if you're going to name a movie "Whip It," how can you not have the song? But, again, that was at worst a minor infraction in an otherwise enjoyable movie.

I never got around to seeing "Boondock Saints II" - but it wasn't my fault! The only theater showing it was way out in the boonies and I stand on the principle that no movie is worth driving a half hour to spend $10 bucks in a municipality I'll never ever visit again. Thankfully, however, my loss should not be too great; if you've seen it and you recommend it then do let me know, but otherwise there's no reason to rush out and find it before TNT starts playing it 15 times a day like they do with "The Italian Job." And, to wrap this up, "New York, I Love You" was an interesting experience - even if, as predicted, it fell short of its spiritual precursor "Paris, Je T'Aime." The biggest issue with the movie was its relative apathy towards the city: the whole premise of these movies supposedly focuses on showcasing a city by way of using it as a symbolically relevant setting for various kinds of love stories; Paris, accordingly, was featured prominently in its movie, but the city of New York was inexplicably understated in this one. Not to mention that Brett Ratner's vignette was awful - if there's an option on the DVD to permanently erase his part I would use it in a heartbeat. Still and all, the rest of the movie went along very well, including a very nicely-composed piece by Natalie Portman and a surprising and well-executed segment by Allen Hughes.

As for winter, well...I dunno. It honestly doesn't seem like the production companies slated too much original, compelling stuff to come out in the next few months, so maybe we'll just pick up this thread next summer.

Allow me to start by saying that I love books. I mean, books, apart from novels or plays or poems or histories: books, as physical objects, are great. Besides the fact that they work as insulation - yes, it's true! Line your exterior-facing walls with full bookshelves and see for yourself - there's just something romantic about the various tangible sensations that are unique to pages. But even I wouldn't say that "[t]he hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas." Then again, I'm not insane.

And speaking of insane, who better to illustrate the concept than our old buddy Apolonio Latar? Dusting off his old amateur psychologist hat, Latar explains that "we start dividing the people whom we can entrust parts of ourselves to" because we're "afraid to make mistakes." Ooookay - so far, nothing too egregious but also nothing too convincing. "With one person," he says by way of elaborating on his point, "I can entrust my problems. With the other, I can play a sport. With another, I can watch movies. With someone else, homework. We divide ourselves and become fragmented. We are afraid to allow another person to take hold of us in such a way that we become totally vulnerable." And where is all of this going you ask? Duh: "God, who has no need of man...makes us whole." Really, dude? God's your buddy? God hangs out with you when you watch movies and helps you with your homework? Cause it seems a lot likelier that you're hallucinating the whole thing, cause I've been to lots and lots of movies - and done lots and lots of homework - without God ever making an appearance.

Last, and (contrary to the normal way of the world) least, our good friend and known sophist Pilgrim Soul. Reviewing Peter Jackson's screen adaptation of The Lovely Bones - which I intend to see but have not yet seen - Pilgrim spends a lot of time establishing Jackson's failure to include the most "feminist," "nuance[d]" aspects of the book. Again, having not seen the movie (or, for that matter, read the book) I have no opinion on this matter; for all I know, that's precisely correct. But then she goes and attacks Jackson for preferring to "dwell on empty concepts like Honour and Country and Friendship." "Empty"?? Country, whatever - but honor and friendship? If you don't like the movie, say you don't like the movie. If you think the director watered down the controversial parts, say he watered down the controversial parts. But who the fuck are you to say that your personal displeasure with a fucking movie is sufficient to denigrate the very concept of friendship or honor?

Get over yourself.

Is it still blaming the victim if the victimization is fictional? I'm not sure, but either way Patrick Zukeran needs to get his head straight. Zukeran wants to defend the Christian notion of hell on ethical grounds, which he hopes will reverse the understanding of "the God of the Bible as a cruel and vindictive being." It shouldn't, of course, because this is still the same God that orders its followers to murder children, oppress women and various other groups, and so on - but let's forgive Zukeran his tunnel vision for the sake of argument and see what he's got.

First of all, he says, "Hell is basically a place of eternal separation from God." That, if true, would certainly help to improve the image of the place. Dante, for instance, definitely had some more malicious ideas, and the Bible itself tend to hype the place up just a little more - replacing the horrific anguishes typically described as hellish with just "sorrow and shame" and loneliness would make a big difference. But in fact Zukeran can't keep up the facade, eventually admitting that his vision of hell includes both "mental and physical anguish," including - yes - "flames." Now I don't know about you, but for me personally I've never been depressed or upset enough that I literally combusted. Indeed, "sorrow and shame" aren't even figuratively associated with fire imagery, which is really quite strange considering how poetic and beautiful the Bible supposedly is. So, one way or the other, Zukeran is just talking complete garbage here: either hell isn't "basically a place of eternal separation" or else there's no fire or anything. Worse, both explanations produce a further flaw in his argument. It doesn't matter what kind of place hell basically is, it matters what happens there. For all it matters, hell could basically be a carnival or a New Year's party or a grassy knoll on a warm May afternoon - so long as there's still incomprehensible and unjustified amounts of suffering going on, it's still incompatible with a morally perfect God.

This may be why Zukeran's next section specifically addresses justice (although, on the other hand, that also means that he basically concedes the point that his earlier argument is insufficient, which makes its inclusion a bit puzzling). "Justice," he says, "demands retribution, the distribution of rewards and punishments in a fair way. God's holiness demands that He separate himself entirely from sin and evil." Thus, since "Joseph Stalin was responsible for the death of millions in the Soviet Union," God has to rough the guy up a little. And by "a little," Zukeran means "infinitely" - so much for "in a fair way." Zukeran's argument from justice also raises questions about heaven: if God sends people to hell because there must be total separation between God and evil, does that mean that the people who get into heaven are morally perfect? Of course not! According to Zukeran, "all are guilty of sin and fall far short of God's perfect standard."

Putting all the ridiculous contradictions and distractions aside, Zukeran does offer one (and only one) halfway interesting argument. Twice he says that people remain in hell not because of justice or as a punitive measure but rather because they themselves choose to. On this argument, God simply respects the sinner's autonomy as a person and allows them, not condemns them, to remain in hell. Except that this, too, leads him into a contradiction: he adds "regret" to "sorrow and shame," which by definition means that the people in his theorized hell don't want to be there anymore. Respecting autonomy means following the autonomous individual if and when they change their mind, yet this is precisely what Zukeran says God will not do. Once you "decide" to enter hell his God mysteriously stops caring about what you think or feel, thus undermining autonomy altogether.

Really, I can't help but suspect that Zukeran's enthusiasm for the barbaric tradition of the Christian hell is due to CS Lewis. Towards the end of his article, Zukeran quotes Lewis as saying, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.'" It's hard not to hear Yakov Smirnoff in that kind of drivel - or, better yet, the Spinx from "Mystery Men." The difference, of course, is that those two cases are intentional comedy, whereas Zukeran is only funny once you realize how really sick his worldview is.

According to their website, BioLogos - a group we've seen before - "addresses the central themes of science and religion and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life." It exists in order to provide "a reliable source of scholarly thought on contemporary issues in science and faith [and highlight] the compatibility of modern science with traditional Christian beliefs." To this end, they've so far managed to produce a series of semi-answered questions* and a blog. Speaking as somebody who maintains a blog - and a much more productive one, if I do say so myself - theirs is a big ol' waste of money.

It's not that I think blogs are valueless or even that I subscribe to some kind of cutthroat free market theory wherein blogs should all be free just because that's the "competitive market cost" of producing one - no, not at all. It's just that this blog of theirs features stuff like this post by Darrel Falk, which appears to have nothing at all to do with scholarship, science, or even traditional Christian beliefs.

In what's basically a little mini-autobiography-cum-sermon, Falk goes on and on about religious stuff that makes him happy. Watching his grandkids perform in a church play "was one of the most fulfilling experiences of [his] life," he really enjoyed "the outings and fellowships" supplied by his childhood church, he and his "family were surprised by joy" that they found a church that wasn't full of bonehead fundamentalists, et cetera and so on. So, y'know, smiles all around on that: it's reflective of our society's (relative) goodness that somebody like Falk has the chance to find a group of superstitious tradition-worshipers who are nonetheless not so superstitious or tradition-fetishizing that they won't accept his scientific beliefs, and I wouldn't make any move to forcibly deprive him or his family of that opportunity. But, uh...where's the scholarship and all that other stuff?

Falk doesn't cite any studies, quote any literature, make any arguments, or even take a particular position - it's just him wistfully reminiscing away for seven paragraphs. Where's the part where he "emphasizes the compatability" between Christianity and reality? Which issue of science or faith is this addressing, exactly? I can't even find themes present here, and themes are always easier to find than issues because they're bigger and less specific. At best - and at worst, too; it's about the only thing to say - Falk could claim that he's addressing the weak sense of "compatibility" that just means "some person somewhere believes in Christianity and also evolution," but why should he get money from a Templeton grant to say that? This is about as far from scholarship as it's possible to get without the aid of a wormhole and neither science nor theology receives even a cursory glance from Falk's little tale: this sort of thing should be an embarassment to BioLogos, not a selling point.

I mean, look: personal outpourings like this have a valuable place in society and also in the lives of individuals, but this ain't it. We'd be lucky if Falk's piece just went ignored - that's the least harm it can do. Much more likely is the possibility that people will read his saccharine account as philosophical vindication of creationism. Even for a compromised intellect like Falk's, providing that sort of encouragement should be totally unacceptable. The first step in "the search for truth" is committing oneself to thinking with one's head and not one's heart. If BioLogos and its contributors can't jump that hurdle, they don't belong in the race.


*In more senses than one: those questions that have answers only have insufficient or irrelevant ones; also, not all questions are answered. In fact, they've been stalled on "How does evolution handle such difficulties as the Cambrian Explosion?" since their inception, which means they've made literally no progress in answering the questions.

1. A (human) community is obligated to supply those of the basic needs of its members that can be met, unless perhaps these members have freely consented to not having these needs met.
2. It is not permitted to require anybody to have sex, absent a free promise from the requiree.
3. If a community is obligated to provide A to x, then it is permitted for the community to require one or more of its members to provide A to x.
4. There is at least one community where there is at least one individual who (a) is capable of sex; (b) does not have sex with anyone; (c) has not consented to the state of affairs in (b); and (d) nobody has promised anything that entails having sex with this individual.*
5. Basic needs are the same for all members of all (human) communities.
6. Therefore, sex is not a basic need [for humans].

Interesting, no? Well...not too, actually. Though I think I agree with the conclusion - "basic" carries lots of connotations and until we expand them I'm just not comfortable applying the word to sex - this argument isn't the way to get there. Drawing again on The Road, I'm pretty sure we could do the following with Pruss's argument:

1. A (human) community is obligated to supply those of the basic needs of its members that can be met, unless perhaps these members have freely consented to not having these needs met.
2.  It is not permitted to require somebody to serve as food (i.e., be eaten), at least absent freely-given permission from the requiree/potential meal.
3. If a community is obligated to provide A to x, then it is permitted for the community to require one or more of its members to provide A to x.
4. There is (in the world of The Road, anyway, and at various times in human history; see e.g. the Donner party, I think) at least one community where there is at least one individual who (a) is capable of serving as food; and (b) does not serve as food. Further, (c) another person in that same community is, absent their consent, without food; and (d) nobody has promised anything that entails becoming food for this latter person.*
5. Basic needs are the same for all members of all (human) communities.
6. Therefore, food is not a basic need for humans.

In this case I'm perfectly okay with calling food a basic need, at least on the understanding that "food" includes things that might strike any given person as non-food (raw materials, certain rarely-eaten plants, that sort of thing).  But we certainly wouldn't want to say that any community has the right to compel one of its members to sacrifice life or limb in order to feed the others - morally speaking, you just can't get there from here. The same goes for sex, of course, so Pruss's (4) does indeed describe a morally acceptable situation - it's just that it's not so easy to say that humans don't need food.

As per the comments to the original post, the problem here seems to be located in Pruss's usage of "can" in premise (1). From all indications, he's using it only pragmatically: a community can do some task, in this sense, when it has the necessary materials, know-how, and actors with the will and power to complete that task. Since this is also a moral argument, however, it'd be better to also fold in an ethical sense of "can" so that at least a few simple checks are put into place.

*Maybe someone can back me up on this? I think he's also missing a clause in his premise 4 about how the community in question has not failed to meet any of its obligations with regard to sex; without such a clause, the conclusion doesn't technically follow from the premises. This is just a cross-your-Ts, dot-your-Is kind of thing, though, and wouldn't set him up for any serious problems if he included it.  I left the analogous clause out of my version just for symmetry.