Rust Belt Philosophy

So, as the title of this post indicates, I'll be going to Israel imminently. As a result, the blog will go quiet for about two weeks - I should be back on February 8. In the meantime, I've written three other posts to help dull the loneliness of not having me around:

Part two, in which many pictures of an abandoned building reside
Part three, in which I present some old Rust Belt Philosophy favorites for your perusal during my vacation
Part four, in which are listed enough bad arguments to keep your skepticism honed until my return

Before you visit any of those, however, I would like for you to read this article at Harper's. As reported all over the internet but apparently nowhere else, the story details an investigation into three so-called suicides at Guantanamo Bay (which is, of course, the site of the most infamous prison used in our war on terror). Without going into too much detail - it must really be read in full to do it any justice - the author suggests that the extreme result of a torture regime, murder, has already come to pass.

The reason I waited to post this is simple: I don't want it to get lost in the shuffle. This story and the reality it underscores deserve your full attention, and mine. It's tempting, especially in the wake of the all-too-recent electoral fiasco in this country and our continuing senatorial sloth, to write off all politics as a world too far removed or insulated from reality to waste one's time on - but this could hardly be further from the truth. Yes, the health care thing has been a case study in game-playing bullshit. Yes, it seems like every politician in history has been a swindler and a fake. But look: if this country, my country, murdered prisoners, we citizens should be in the streets with pitchforks and torches.

If you live in the U.S., please consider pointing your friends and acquaintances towards this story as a start. If you live elsewhere, perhaps you might ask your leaders to pressure us into taking it more seriously. At the absolute least, this must be a permanent wake-up call to everyone who thinks politics don't matter. Illegal rendition, imprisonment without trial, torture, murder: our collective apathy has enabled at least the first three of these to pass unchallenged. How much further do we have to be pushed before we start to push back?

I had hoped to get one more of these in before my trip, and luckily the weather cooperated today. These are images of what I'm guessing is a long-defunct clubhouse- or bar-type place. Emphasis on "defunct."

Look! Sunlight! We do have some of that in Pittsburgh, after all!


Apparently this tagger has a sense of irony? Although that doesn't necessarily make up for the obvious lack of moral sense...


Presumably at one time this place was pretty swanky - check out the columns. I think that rust-red thing in the middle of the shot was at one time a fountain, but it's pretty hard to tell: the whole place is a shambles.


Not the kind of place you'd want to explore at night by yourself.


Check out all the metal hanging down from the ceiling - couldn't help but feel from time to time like I was setting myself up to be impaled by something.


This is why I think it was a club of some sort: the (ex-)piano in front of the (ex-)stage. If not for that, it could've been anything at all: it has no identifying labeling anywhere, no particularly unique architecture, and practically nothing of any value in one piece.

It's a pretty sizable piece of property, falling down though it is.



The detailing is actually still a pretty nice touch, and that's with the stains and crumpling and general overall dumpy look. It's really too bad this place has been a wreck for probably my whole life - I would've liked to see it in its prime.

But the best part?

If you're new here, or if you'd like to have such lists for any other reason, here are ten analytical and ten non-analytical posts that I think represent the blog well. They should keep you busy while I'm away - and they're good to use as advertisements, should you feel generous enough to recommend me to some of your acquaintances in my absence:

Analytical
All the world's a stage - just hope you're not a red shirt (about religion and art)
You can't put anything past Andrew Sullivan (about religion and politics)
Adventures in scope confusion (about economics)
Against "Americanness" as a value metric (about politics and ethics)
A brief history lesson (about the history of philosophy as it pertains to religion)
Be this premise soon forgotten (about abortion)
How to argue badly: two contrasting case studies (about economics and, separately, gay marriage)
On soul-building (about religion)
I can't believe it's not better! (about ethics)
If you need help from rats, things are not going well (about evolution and intelligent design)

Non-analytical ("off-topic")
Movies I can't believe I saw: "G.I. Joe"
On the deceptive ease of wisdom
How to make computers think like humans: stop trying?
Breaking news: the rich idealize poverty...again
A touching story, ruined by baseball
What it looks like: Schenley park ice rink
Afghani fairy tales must be super-depressing
July fools!
But...but...I want my weapons!
Ouch for every designer since 1968

Just in case there are any of you out there who rely on this blog to help keep your mind sharp, here's ten days' worth of bad arguments that you can investigate at your leisure while I'm overseas:

Straw man, equivocation, oversimplification (about politics and ethics)
Ad populum (big time), red herring, genetic fallacy, missing the point (about religion)
Conflation (harder to catch, though: honorable/respectable), or else red herring (about politics and gender)
Incoherency (about religion)
Contradiction
No true Scotsman, ad hominem (about politics)
Red herring (impossible hypotheticals are not useful), conflation (goodness/praiseworthiness), false analogy (about the problem of evil, roughly)
Tin man (about the separation of church and state)
False dilemma (like three of them), several massive oversimplifications (about economics and politics; nominally also about religion)
Either conflation or oversimplification, with props to Benson (about politics, gender issues, and religion)

It's hard to pick Questionable Content for this weekly honor cause of its ongoing soap-operatic plot structure, but this one should be easily understood even without any context. Just take the robot for what it is and you're good to go:

Because of - or maybe despite - the market success of video games in general, there has never been much of a movement towards taking advantage of the medium's unique artistic capabilities (which is to say, the capabilities that currently it alone provides). You could make the argument, perhaps, that they've pushed the envelope in terms of computer renderings, but that's nothing specific to video games themselves: we've also seen similar (and in some cases superior) advances in movies, TV shows, music videos, and even commercials. Indeed, since they've arrived so late in the art game, video games are at a severe disadvantage - storytelling, visual representation, and music are all key artistic elements of many video games that are nonetheless not unique to gaming. In order to achieve a gaming-specific piece of art, it seems, there must be some meaningful focus on interactivity.

Some games have toyed with this idea to varying degrees of ingenuity, which on tvTropes goes by the name "interface screw" - you can read all about it there. For the most part, it looks like these efforts were engineered as challenge-increasing measures and not artistic components per se. That's not to say that those two are necessarily mutually exclusive, but it does mean that developers are missing out on the kind of artistic excellence that comes from a work's various attributes all operating in synthesis. Or, I should say, most developers are.

Thanks in large part to a sorta underground/indie gaming population, we now have such 10-minute gems as Every Day The Same Dream and Platform - play them both to see how the experience of playing the game has been accounted for and given a central role in the overall artistic scheme. Now, neither of these is the video game equivalent of Ulysses or Pride and Prejudice - they're more along the lines of, let's say, Where The Sidewalk Ends - but they do incorporate gaming in a way that very few other games have ever done.

It's not immediately clear how to translate this artistic success into a slicker, feature-length (so to speak) game, but it should be possible some way or other. The only truly significant obstacle I can think of is replay value, which games really ought to have if you're gonna buy them for fifty bucks apiece. While non-game artworks certainly often have value even past the first time one experiences them - see, for instance, my theory about Tarantino - gamers have come to expect a second play-through that's just as invigorating and new-feeling as the first, which seems to me to be a difficult order to fill. Add in the ever-present market pressures exerted by giants like EA and SquareEnix and it looks as though the indie/art gaming movement may forever stay underground. I hope it doesn't, of course, but only time will tell.

For my fellow gamers out there, I encourage you to seek out and support game developers who put more on the line than all the clowns out there who are currently making yet another generic World War II shooter. I'm not going to demand that the video game industry become a utopian artist's colony where everything is always cutting-edge, but just think about this: even Hollywood has a bigger indie contingency than the gaming market. There's no good reason for that to be the case.

Today on Rust Belt Philosophy, something we've never seen before: a false dilemma that's invalid not because it has too few options but because it has too many. Asked about the existence of so-called psychics, Sue Bohlin replies with disturbing keenness that "clairvoyant[s] are either fraudulent, making things up as they read the body-language responses of their customers, or they are being fed information from demons." Yeah, uh...technically I guess that's a true statement,* but really only one of those applies to the real world.

More problematically for Bohlin - I mean, logically, not necessarily in terms of her sanity - is her test for detecting a true clairvoyant, which of course she calls a prophet. "The biblical standard of a prophet of God," she says, "is 100% accuracy." Not only does this not jive with the actual prophet-characters in the Bible, who have something less than a stellar track record, her reasoning doesn't support this conclusion.

Though it would be the case on her view that a prophet's "information about future events is coming from God Himself," it's still the person that does the speaking. Even if we arbitrarily assume that prophets never screw up the information that God actually does give them - which, to repeat, we have no reason to assume - we still wouldn't be able to say that they don't just make stuff up in addition: prophet status does not, after all, turn one into a mute at all non-prophesying times.

It's easy to appreciate Bohlin's distress over the phony seers who make their livelihood fleecing innocent (if gullible) people - which is to say, her distress over all seers. But please, there's no reason to replace one set of liars with another unless you're in a voting booth. It's obviously comforting to her to think that legitimate prophecy is not only possible but indeed a reality, but her comfort is identical in form and function to that of the credulous psychic-seeker. Nobody gets information about the future from any magical source, period.


*Logically speaking, if you have any statement (call it "S") you can then say "S or X," where X is anything at all you like. For example, since we know that 1+1=2, we can say that 1+1=2 or the moon is a giant ball of cheese put in orbit around earth by the mouse-gods in preparation for the eventual catpocalypse. That the second of those isn't remotely true doesn't affect the truth value of the overall "or" statement.

Now that we've elected a black president, I don't see why this should be a problem at all:

"The All-American Basketball Alliance announced in a news release Sunday evening that it intends to start its inaugural season in June and hopes Augusta will be one of 12 cities with a team.

'Only players that are natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league,' the statement said."

No no, but see, it's not a race thing in any way, shape, or form! The founder just "wants to emphasize fundamental basketball instead of 'street-ball' played by 'people of color.'" If those damned minorities would just play the "white game of basketball" and stop "grabbing their crotch[es]" he wouldn't have to do this!

Sadly, Augusta's mayor - who is obviously a reverse-racist against white people - doesn't want to help advance race relations in this country. Luckily, there's still the invisible (and obviously also non-racist!) hand of the free market, which is just about due for an upswing: "The Augusta Drive lasted less than a month before folding in 1995, citing financial reasons. The Augusta Groove made it through a full, 20-game schedule in 2009, but [then] shut down in the offseason."

So here's hoping for better things for the Augusta Jim Crows - if they don't fix race in America, nothing will.

They say that truth is beauty and beauty truth, and life as a mathematician or logician (probably among other fields) will seem to confirm this: theoretical constructs of crystalline clarity and complexity often support the finer points of discourse in these fields, and when that's not the case one is told to seek the "elegant" solution. More generally, as David Klinghoffer says, "[t]here's an eerie satisfaction in detecting an apparently meaningful coincidence, but I get nothing out of detecting what seems a meaningless coincidence, however unlikely the genuine chance event might be." Just think of LOST: everything on that show seems like synchronicity, so watching it makes you feel like you're at one with the universe!* It might not be the real universe, but that's besides the point - coincidences matter, gosh darn it. And, since they matter, we need to know why.

Klinghoffer "fail[s] to see how my capacity for taking delight in such things reflects any evolutionary advantage that might have accrued to [our] ancient ancestors. Surely there's much more to it." Not quite, David, but don't call me Shirley! The last time I checked, the ignorance of one theologian was not good enough argumentative evidence to make any particular biological claim, but that doesn't stop Klinghoffer from using his own ignorance to tell us what is and isn't possible for evolution: he doesn't know how his feelings fit into the story, so there is more to it. It's also not too smart to say that evolution implies that every phenotypic trait into an advantage, because if that were true we wouldn't expect any species to ever go extinct; the alternatives, in other words, are not just "it's an evolutionary advantage" and "it's God's work."

After this short-lived piece of reasoning, Klinghoffer goes on to tell us a heartwarming tale about aquatic museums that I'll skip for the sake of brevity. Its gist, in his words, is that "when it comes to synchronicity, [the ocean is] exactly what we're talking about." Like the waters with their concomittant "image of what goes on beneath the surface," he thinks that  coincidences reveal "orders of existence that elude our normal senses and ordinary intellect, yet seem to make themselves fleetingly apparent now and then." Great - except with the ocean we can actually study those things and categorize them in a larger coherent worldview. If Klinghoffer wants us to follow him in this analogy he should at least suggest that it's possible for us to eventually find a way to turn our inchoate feelings into concrete evidence. In fact, though, he does the exact opposite, as the entire idea here is that we can't do that. This might seem like an unfair point to make, but again, the only reason that we can trust our knowledge of the ocean is that we've moved past the sitting-around-staring phase and begun more thorough investigations. Without that same ability, Klinghoffer's analogy is better used against his stance than for it.

The clever reader will note, however, that I have yet to answer the initial question: why are coincidences important? Simple: because they're important to people. An event or object needn't have some sort of key role in a Cosmic Grand Scheme Of Everything in order to matter - just being valued by a person is sufficient. Klinghoffer clearly values the feeling of awe he experiences when he encounters certain coincidences, which is perfectly fine and he's entitled to that. We can debate whether it's healthy or rational or appropriate for him to react that way, but none of those answers would change the basic facts of the situation and he should, ultimately, feel free to ignore such debates. His paranoid belief that Darwinists stormtroopers want to enforce a more stoic worldview is therefore really sad in a way: in addition to making several unjustified metaphysical claims, he's also committing himself to a warped view of humanity on which it's only okay to have (certain?) feelings if God endorses them. Believers in any particular system of thought - especially believers who blog about their belief - need to have a little more steel in their spine, because there's enough self-pitying tripe in the world as it is.

*Aaaaaaaand you're welcome, The Onion.

At the risk of my head exploding, let me talk about this senate race in Massachusetts for just a second. According to our Democratic president, the Democratic party "shouldn't try to jam anything through until [newly-elected Republican] Scott Brown is seated," even if that means abandoning a health reform bill supported by the Democratic majority that got them all elected to office. This, so says Charles Mudede, "is the left (not right) thing to do—be fair, play fair. As much as we want Dems to be aggressive and even stubborn, the party can only go so far in that hard direction." He thinks that passing a contentious bill without all the minority party voices would be a betrayal of the principles of the left, which he lumps together under the label of "humanism." While I normally love Mudede's thinking, he's way out of line on this.

Humanism - which for Mudede seems to mean a strict adherence to honor, respect, and other similar ideals - doesn't permit the kind of privilege that he's trying to apply in this case. On the individual level, Brown is replacing a Democrat and a staunch supporter of the bill in question who died while still in office not long ago: what kind of person honors the dead by capitulating? On the proceduarl level, there's nothing written or unwritten about the need to wait for a senator to be seated. Nor should there be: if Congress had to pause its operations every time it had a lame duck member, literally nothing would ever get done. On the representative level, Brown ostensibly will act in the interests of his constituents in Massachusetts - but Massachusetts is one of the most Democratic states in the country and already (happily) has the kind of health care under discussion. At any rate, all but the most naive should be ready to acknowledge at this point that the Democrats aren't acting out of any high-minded ideals: a mature ethical understanding of the situation would conclude that the minor (and, to my mind, nonexistent) underhandedness of voting now is dwarfed by the major benefits we'd see from starting in on any kind of real reform of the health care industry.

With all of that in mind, I want to announce my support for the You Are Dumb Dot Net four-step plan for the Democrats to make everything better:

"STEP ONE: SHUT THE FUCK UP. [See? He's off to a good start already.  This should be step one of every plan.]
Seriously, would it kill you people to spend 24 hours with your yaps shut while you get your story straight? Or at least spin meaninglessly in the same general direction? The message is the medium, people. The Republicans were ready out of the gate to declare the Scott Brown victory to be a 'revolution', a Teabagger's wet dream, and the death knell for Democrats. Unfortunately, at least a dozen Democrats were also ready out of the gate to declare the same damn things.
STEP TWO: START WRITING LAWS.
But not the way you've been writing them. Instead, start writing simple laws that stupid people will understand. Laws that sound like they'll provide free cake to the masses if they pass. No 2,000 page bills. No corporate lobbyist input. Simple, red-meat populist stuff. Do this without the slightest expectation that they will pass, because they won't. And they won't pass, because they won't get 60. But that's OK, because their NOT passing is vital for Step Three.
STEP THREE: BLAME THE FILIBUSTER.
Repeat after me. 'We had the votes to pass the Free Cake Act of 2010, but Senate Republicans wouldn't let it come to an up or down vote, because Senate Republicans don't want you to have free cake. Senate Republicans are in the pocket of Big Crocker, and they're using procedural tricks to protect their corporate friends.' Do this over and over again. As often as you can manage. Bring up a bill that sounds great - anti-bank measures, anti-Wall-Street measures, pro-homeowner stuff, middle class stuff, job stuff. It doesn't even need to be sound policy. It just needs to sound simple, populist, and seem like middle-class people will get something out of it.
Then you blame the living shit out of the filibuster for why they didn't get it. You turn the filibuster into Satan, and the Republicans who use it to keep everyone from getting free cake as Satan's faithful servants. This stuff needs to start, essentially, immediately. Because it needs to happen as often as possible before we can start Step Four.
STEP FOUR: RUN ON IT.
The Democrats' platform for 2010 should be simple. We tried to give you cake. The Republicans used the filibuster to keep you from getting cake. Therefore, if elected, we will end the filibuster."

I support this plan not only because it's cathartic to do so but also because it's a hell of a lot more sound than anything the Democrats have actually tried.

To conclude this little venting session, I do want to point out that I finally have a theory about Obama's overall plan. Everybody always says that he's the chessmaster of politics, that his strategic vision is impeccable and flawless and godlike. And indeed, judging by his leadership style to this point he must either be the genius everyone says he is or else he must be the real-life version of Chauncey Gardiner. Though the latter conclusion seemed really impossible, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what brilliant-genius-chessmaster kind of plan he could have been acting on. Until now.

I think Obama might be intentionally trying to rile us up. He's obviously not stupid or oblivious enough to think that the right wing in this country can be reasoned with, which means that his calls for earnest and constructive bipartisanship can't be legitimate. Yet try to reason with them is exactly what he's done, which has been (predictably) legislative suicide in terms of his agenda. He's also not stupid or oblivious enough not to be aware of the effect this would have on his and his party's popularity, although perhaps even he was surprised by this thing in MA. Finally, he's surely not stupid or oblivious enough to keep sticking to a plan that's failing so spectacularly as his current one seems to be: if he meant even a fraction of what he said on the campaign trail he must be devastated right now by the near-complete lack of progress, and indeed the regress, that his administration has seen. His behavior, though, isn't changing at all - if anything it's getting more conciliatory, as the quotes above demonstrate. At first it seemed like he might have been trying to let the Republicans dig themselves into a hole with their own rabid lunacy, but it's gone way past that point by now. So, I conclude, he must have some reason or other for intentionally doing all the things that would be most likely to make the Democrats (himself included) the focus of our ire.

What might that reason be? Oh, I have some guesses - that he thinks the left needs to obtain the kind of base that the right has, for example - but they're all pretty speculative at this stage of the game. And yes, clearly some of his unsavory behavior can also be chalked up to politics plain and simple. If my guess is right, though, one thing is abundantly clear: we're well and truly screwed until at least 2012, and probably for much longer than that. There is good news, though, in that his plan (if I've correctly identified it) appears to be working really very well: I, for one, am pissed. Heck, with another three years of this same kind of behavior it'd be amazing to see anybody at all who's happy with our government.

Hopefully this has the beneficial effects that I think Obama expects it to have and not the negative ones pop culture tells us it will ("anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side," blah blah), but at this point I'm beyond caring: sometimes, to paraphrase the movie "9," anger is the appropriate response. As such, I hereby embrace my anger regardless of its effects on Obama's reelection chances, and I cordially invite you to do the same. Let Mudede and his ilk coccoon themselves in saccharine compassion and good-heartedness - they'll come along kicking and screaming if they have to, just like everyone else.

Goodness gracious, how has it taken us this long to make that pun? I know it doesn't have anything to do with, well, anything, but c'mon, people. We have a responsibility not to let 80s Canadian television be forgotten.

No, but seriously: Ross Douthat is a complete tool. Having named himself Doctor Politics, he's taking a look into the country's various orifices and trying to diagnose what in particular is getting us down about the way things are going. Besides the terrible economy, he thinks there are "two ways in which Obama’s aggressive agenda may be causing him political problems." Before we go any further, you may well be asking yourself, "What aggressive agenda?" Patience - all will be revealed in time.

Reason numero uno "is the growing enthusiasm gap — and its implications for candidate recruitment, fundraising, turnout, and all the rest. In just a year’s time, conservatives and right-leaning independents have gone from being demoralized, disorganized and despairing to being, well, fired up and ready to go." It might be relevant to note that he didn't say where they're ready to go - remember that whole thing in New York with Palin's third-party candidate? For those who don't, the conventional wisdom is that the burgeoning enthusiasm of teabagger nation scuttled the Republican party's chances of winning a House election that they might otherwise have pulled out. That doesn't have much to do with Douthat's stated argument, but it is a little curious that he chooses only to see one aspect of the right's current agitation.

At any rate, he blames that same agitation for Obama's drop in popularity. Douthat "find[s] it hard to believe that you’d be seeing this level of right-of-center enthusiasm if Obama had postponed cap-and-trade, avoided taking over GM, compromised more significantly on the stimulus, and taken the incremental route to health insurance expansion." Without violently derailing this post to talk about how willfully blind that statement is - the right gets mad about everything, especially everything that involves black people - this is, yet again, a fallacious use of hypothetical evidence. For those who haven't already seen me say this eighteen thousand times, hypothetical evidence always begs the question. In this case, the hypothetical looks like this:

• If Obama weren't so liberal, the right would like him.

As a premise of Douthat's overall argument that Obama is too liberal for his own good, this statement must either have empirical support (what most of us would just call "evidence") or theoretical support that doesn't presuppose the conclusion. He doesn't have empirical support, obviously, because that would require us to either live in an alternate universe or else have direct observational access to one. And, since any theoretical evidence he can muster (not that he provides any) will be enough to prove his conclusion on its own, that pretty much means that this premise is just a rephrasing of his initial gut feeling about the situation, which is a motif that continues in Douthat's second argument.

"Independent voters haven’t just turned on Obama as unemployment has climbed higher," Douthat continues, they’ve turned on progressive ideas in general." Having just walked into a brick wall, he backs up and tries again: "This rightward turn could all just be a response to bad economic times. ...But I think it would behoove liberals to give serious consideration to the more direct[?] explanation — namely, that some of the anti-Obama backlash has to do with Americans discovering, after an enormous Democratic sweep, that they preferred liberalism much more in theory than in practice." Besides the fact that we haven't seen liberalism in practice under Obama (or anyone else in recent memory), saying "I think" doesn't suffice to turn the post-hoc fallacy into a valid argument.

I fully grant that Obama's poll numbers have fallen in part because of the way he has actually conducted himself (as opposed, I mean, to the way that other Democrats have conducted themselves, or the way that certain news organizations have characterized Obama as having behaved, or whatever). But a person's behavior covers such a wide spectrum that picking one and only one specific part of that spectrum will always be at least a little risky - especially, as in this case, when that one specific part hasn't actually been on display. Douthat clearly feels like the country is reacting badly to Obama's leftmost urges, but unless we're living in "Minority Report" and Douthat spends all of his time in a protein bath there's no reason for anybody to take his mumblings seriously: it's not even clear at this point that Obama has an agenda; suggesting that he has an aggressive one is just laughable.

As somebody committed to both honor and reason it pains me to say this, but...I think it's about damn time that our elected officials tried to ram some liberalism down people's throats. They might well piss people off and lose their seats - they might even screw up pretty badly. But at least we'd get to see what liberalism actually looks like in practice - and hey, as a side benefit we could also promote Douthat from "delusional jerk" to just "jerk."

Good news, friends! Ben Shapiro, author of an argument with the charmingly racist claim that "rap isn't music" and all-around despicable little shit, is back. This time he wants to tell us which ten "directors [most often] get credit even when [their] movies go wrong." You can go and read the whole list on your own if you like - if you do, I also recommend taking a look at this takedown thereof - but I'm going to focus on only one of the members of Shapiro's list: Quentin Tarantino.

According to Shapiro, Tarantino "is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema.  Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story." Oh, but there's more: "Tarantino’s films are like an army moving over a landscape in search of an idea." In short, he's "Wagnerian: long periods of boredom and 'artistic' violence punctuated by moments of utter brilliance." Not having listened to much Wagner I can't really comment on the accuracy of the comparison, but if it is accurate then that only says good things about Wagner.

While Shapiro is, of course, wrong about Tarantino's ability to tell a story - "Reservoir Dogs" should attest to that quite adequately - I actually find his comparison with classical music to be pretty much dead-on. Like any given piece of classical music of any real length (not, in other words, the hallelujah chorus), you will never understand a Tarantino movie that you drift in and out of. Also like most classical music, you have to stick with it when it comes to Tarantino and really withhold your judgment until the end. For me, this was made most clear by "Death Proof," his half of the "Grindhouse" double-header that came out a few years back: the first 90-100 minutes seemed awfully slow and tedious but the last 15-20 were great. Moreover, having watched the whole thing all the way through has made it easier (for me, anyway) to enjoy watching those first 90-100 minutes - once you have the overall shape in mind, you can watch the themes develop in a way that makes things much more clear and natural. Something similar happens with all of his movies, I believe, once you understand the theme at their various centers: realizing that "Kill Bill," for example, is about violence and motherhood makes watching it a very different viewing experience than just watching it for the sword fights and witty monologues. He might not use these other themes in the most realistic, praiseworthy, or sane ways, but that's when you just suspend your disbelief and get over it.

I suspect that this connection to classical music is the main reason why "Inglourious Basterds" had much more immediate success than any of his other movies: everybody knew going in what the theme was, so nobody had to sit there and try to work it out for themselves. If my guess is right, this ease of access helped drive the movie's success at the same time that it made it a marker for criticism: David Denby, for instance, called it "ridiculous, and stunningly insensitive," which is exactly the kind of complaint you'd expect to hear from somebody who goes to a Tarantino flick expecting to see some kind of cinematic Aesop fable. Just like you don't go to a performance of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" with sunscreen for the first half and a fur coat for the second, you can't reasonably show up to one of Tarantino's movies expecting to learn something valuable and wholesome about the real world. Grasping the secondary theme(s) of his movies, then, can come at a cost - but a savvy enough viewer will be able to overcome this. "Savvy," unfortunately, is the last word you would use to describe Ben Shapiro.

Despite the huffy anti-intellectualism that pervades his piece, Shapiro does hit on one valid criticism on Tarantino. To the extent that he (Tarantino) wants to be understood and appreciated for the subtler themes in his movies, he makes things harder on himself by giving all of his movies such a high-gloss surface. Most artsy directors specifically refuse to indulge themselves with the kinds of popcorn-movie tricks that Tarantino revels in, all the spurting blood and badass dialogue and general hipness, and this brings a lot of undeserved ire their way - just read Shapiro's piece in full if you doubt that. But at least you know where they stand, the Bergmans and the Herzogs of the film world, whereas there are surely many fans of Tarantino's who honestly believe that he's just a hack-and-slash director with nothing behind the viscera.

I'm not saying that Shapiro has to like any one of Tarantino's movies or the general aesthetic therein. I'm not even saying that there's anything wrong with him because he doesn't like Tarantino - there is something wrong with him, of course, but it has more to do with his worldview than his taste. All I'm saying is, which Tarantino movie went wrong? Anybody? He might not be everybody's cup of tea, but at least he didn't go from "American Graffiti" to "Revenge of the Sith" or "The Evil Dead" to "Spider-Man 3," right?

It always strikes me as just a little narcissistic when a person plays off their own name. Unless you're doing it ironically ("Colbert Report" with silent Ts, e.g.), really you should think about just using plain English words. I refer in this case to Pete "Odds and" Enns, one of whose articles on Biblical inerrancy appears on the BioLogos blog. Inerrancy is a favorite topic of mine because the Bible is ultimately the only even partway legitimate source of information about the specific gods of Judaism and Christianity. If the Bible isn't found to be trustworthy, then, it will be very difficult for any Jewish or Christian theologian to make a case for their god: even if they somehow prove that some god exists, there will be essentially no reason to conclude anything about that god's identity or team membership.

For Enns, then, the task is to defend the Bible without sacrificing either the possibility of it being metaphysically useful or the possibility of it being scientifically accurate (he is, remember, writing for BioLogos, an organization dedicated to reconciling Christianity with evolution). Addressing specifically the term "firmament" as it appears in some translations of Genesis 1, Enns takes a stab at such a defense by claiming that "Genesis and modern science are neither enemies nor friends, but two different ways of describing the world according to the means available to the people living at these different times." That the sky is not actually a Truman-Show-esque solid dome does not, in other words, mean that the Bible is wrong - it just means it's written for a different audience. "It is important to remember," Enns continues, "that God always speaks in ways that people can actually understand. In the ancient world, people held certain views about the world around them. Those views are also reflected in Genesis." This is all well and good, except it doesn't come close to solving the problem.

For one thing, the Bible itself is full of cases of a person not understanding God - or so apologists would have us believe. We often hear, for example, "that God did not mean physical death at all [in Genesis 2:17], but spiritual. When Adam ate the fruit, he sinned, which caused separation between him and God, or spiritual death." (See also here, here, here...) But clearly neither Adam nor Eve understands this threat, which means that Enns's inerrancy project has to somehow account for God-the-author to tell a truthful, comprehensible story with God as a character where God-the-character isn't both truthful and comprehensible. Enns, of course, does not even attempt this.

Further, any claim that the Bible speaks specifically to one ancient tribe of farmers automatically includes the claim that it doesn't speak to anybody else. Taking Enns seriously, in other words, means believing that God doesn't really care if or how we modern people interact with the text: it's not for us, so why should we even bother? Of course, Enns doesn't actually believe this - in fact, he believes exactly the opposite. Despite the multitude of scientific, philosophical, and sociological differences that the Bible presents, Enns still holds "that the central message of the Bible is clear without either knowledge of the historical and cultural background of the biblical books." This would be hilarious enough a claim in isolation - we humans haven't exactly been real good about confidently identifying one "central message of the Bible" and sticking to it - but when combined with his earlier insistence on context it's just absurd: the central message of the Bible, which requires a seemingly never-ending string of textual contortions and post-facto prophesying just to come partway into focus, nonetheless is clear just on its own? I don't bloody well think so.

If the Bible were just a few short stories Enns might not have had this problem - then again, if the Bible were just a few short stories it wouldn't be the Bible. The ability to make small portions of a text comprehensible at the expense of the rest - or, for that matter, to square small portions of a text with reality at the expense of the rest - is not exactly an impressive feat of interpretive prowess, so while Enns may have taken the Bible from "extraordinarily errant" to "only somewhat errant" he has a long way yet to go in order to reach his goal.

You might think, what with the ever-present snark regarding predictions of life in the year 2000, that we as a species would be over this silly compulsion to make meaningless and totally irrelevant guesses about what the future might be like. But, as it turns out, no. We are not.

"Forget the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker: in 20 years some of the most popular jobs could include vertical farmer, space pilot and body part maker, according to a government commissioned report."

This report, compiled by "a network of 'futurists[?!] and future thinkers,'" focuses in particular on "medicine, where the study predicts the creation of new limbs and organs will become a reality, meaning body part makers will be in demand. ...Rohit Talwar, chief executive of Fast Future, predicted the generation of extra limbs would be invaluable to the military, but could see more use in sport. 'If you're spending £80m on a footballer and for £2m you can have a couple of spare legs, then you're going to do it,' he said." It requires almost all of my restraint, incidentally, not to viciously mock this so-called futurist for using an old currency in this little fantasy of his - but that's not the point. The point is that we need to prevent this from happening in order to maintain the sanctity of "The Princess Bride."



I don't know about you, but I refuse to raise my kids in a world where six-fingered men are nothing unusual. As it is I'm already going to have to explain phone booths, people waiting at airport gates for their loved ones to disembark, cathode ray tube televisions, and the automatic presumption of American moral superiority - I shouldn't have to add "having only five fingers" to that list because some jerk scientists decided it'd be smart to give people some kind of Gattaca-style many-fingered hands.

So please, future generations, don't mess around with people's limbs. Give them new organs if you must - that would, I admit, at least eliminate the possibility of (the real) Larry Niven's organlegging idea - but leave our hands alone; the purity of a film classic depends on it!

You know, it's funny - all this time I never would have guessed that American society had been holding secret meetings behind my back in order to discuss certain aspects of our culture. And yet it must, because Dennis Prager says that "[e]very society has to answer a few basic questions in order to succeed and even in order to survive," and unless we're counting the Nielsen surveys nobody's asked me what I think about squat. I just thank my lucky stars that Prager's around to let me know, cause otherwise I would really be in the dark about this stuff.

Tragically for me, he only discusses one of these questions: "How do we make good men?" Though he doesn't really provide an answer, he hints at one by saying that we had it figured out back when he "was a boy in the 1950s." Ah, yes - the good old 50s, where all the real men were white, clean-shaven borderline alcoholics. What I wouldn't give to have the opportunity to live in those halcyon days. But - thanks to feminism and probably also the gays - I can't! I mean, just look at some of his reasons why I'll never get to be a real man:

"The distinction between men and boys has been largely obliterated...Even when a boy (or girl) addresses an adult male as 'Mr.,' many men will correct the young boy or girl -- 'Call me' and then give the young person his first name. This is often true even with regard to teachers, physicians and members of the clergy...

The ideals of masculinity and femininity have been largely rendered extinct...

America has become a rights-centered rather than a responsibility-centered society...

Instead of the traditional American model of masculinity, which was a rare combination of masculine toughness and stoicism with doing good (e.g., Superman), boys are now taught to be preoccupied with their feelings."

Dammit, he's right! I know I definitely respected all my teachers who made me address them with the honorific "mister," whereas I never take anybody seriously after learning their first name. And the reason? Because how am I supposed to know if they're a man or a boy without relying on their preferred mode of address - judge their characters or something? Stuff and nonsense!

And look - don't even get me started on how confusing it is to be a man nowadays what with the confusion between the masculine and the feminine. I went out the other day and bought eight miniskirts because I felt so sure that that was the manly thing to do. And do you even know how hard it is to find miniskirts in my size? (Very hard, is the answer.) This terrible man/woman mixup is to the point now where a guy can't even go outside in heels - heels! - without getting funny looks. Somebody has to put a stop to this confusion and really delineate once and for all what counts as manly.

Things are even worse when you take into consideration all the rights we're giving away - like they're candy on Halloween or undeserved bonuses on Wall Street or something! You don't get to have rights just for showing up and living in my country, you have to earn them by fulfilling your responsibilities. I mean, how am I supposed to know how to behave unless somebody makes my basic human rights contingent on my adherence to a set of (usually unspoken and informal) social standards? It'd be pure anarchy, I'm telling you! Anarchy!!

And do you know what the worst part is? The worst part? Is that I can't get away with bottling up all of my frustration in a masculine display of "toughness and stoicism"! People actually want me to talk about my problems - can you imagine?? Admitting my weaknesses and problems is tantamount to cutting off my balls and just flinging them in the ocean: goodbye forever, manhood! Everybody knows that the manly way to deal with feelings is to deny their existence, and then if that doesn't work to drown them in scotch, and then if that doesn't work to hit something.

All I can say about this whole thing is, thank God that there are still people like Dennis Prager hanging around. Life as a man is hard enough without all these people meandering around telling me to take other people into consideration and think about my actions before I perform them - everybody knows that stuff is for girls and homos.

Just because I can't find anything even remotely intelligent to write about today, is all - hopefully the rest of the week will improve, or else this is going to be a very long week.

Apparently under the impression that the '08 presidential campaign is still happening - not a totally unreasonable impression, given the length of that campaign - Jeff Pope wants to know, "why should we stop only with the taking of income from some to give to others? There are so many other things of value that could and should be redistributed as well." The argument, I guess, being that if we shouldn't redistribute everything then we should do away with moral abominations like the progressive tax code. Right - and since it's not a good idea to eat rocks or styrofoam, I guess we shouldn't eat food either!

Speaking of not eating, that's almost certainly what most of the residents of Port-au-Prince are currently doing. The earthquake there, which has generated nearly as much controversy as it has obscene suffering, "seems to have strengthened" the Haitians' religiosity; reports have yet to explicitly say whether this increase in faith has made up for the sudden and marked decrease in food, potable water, shelter, and medical care, but I think we can probably figure that one out on our own. Except, that is, for people like Rod Dreher: he calls their response "heroic.  It's what you would expect from a people whose religion centers on a God who was humiliated, tortured, and nailed to a cross until he died in agony." Given the very real need for work to be done - as opposed to, you know, standing around and singing songs to your imaginary friend - maybe "heroic" is not quite the right word, but Dreher doesn't stop there.

"Besides," he asks, "what else is there but to turn your overwhelming fear and sadness over to God? ...Do atheists have a better idea? What good are the philosophies of Dawkins and Dennett now to the poor of Port-au-Prince?" Before you go and bang your head against a wall to try and remove the sheer stupidity of that remark, he has one last thing to add: "Shame on any person or group, religious or secular, who uses the earthquake to score cheap culture-war points." Yes...shame indeed. You may now commence with the banging of the head.

When you're done, maybe you can tell me what this statement is supposed to mean:

"Surprises are, in their effect and regardless of content, instruments of wonder and spirit. A surprise lifts aliveness toward consciousness, where it does not (and cannot) permanently reside."

Anybody got any idea? Because so far as I can tell that is a word salad. I'd start to object to it, maybe, except for I can't tell what, if anything, it's supposed to mean.

Like I said: if things don't improve on the intelligent-writing front, this is going to be a long week...

Ladies and gentlemen, Wesly Buckwalter (bold mine):

"Philosophers routinely invite us to reflect on vignettes through the use of thought experiments. The practice involves the depiction of an imaginary scenario designed to focus our intuitive judgments toward various philosophically relevant theses. Upon reflection, philosophers typically take the answers we give in response to such cases and import them into a theory as evidence in support of their particular philosophical programs.  These kinds of appeals to intuition in epistemology have played a considerable role in characterizing epistemic concepts, normative theory building, and shaping professional philosophical discourse.  However the significant evidentiary status many epistemologists have placed on intuition makes two questions salient: are our epistemic intuitions unanimous, and if not, then whose intuitions count?"

I've expressed my disdain for the thought experiment before - so far as I'm concerned, any argument that relies heavily on the presumed response to a contrived situation is fallacious, especially (as is traditionally the case) if that presumed response is never borne out in a controlled experimental environment. Buckwalter, while being a little more credulous, seems to be on his way to coming around, although perhaps not for the best of reasons.

In a recent x-phi (experimental philosophy) study of two such thought experiments, Buckwalter found "a divergence of folk intuition...in terms of a significant gender effect, revealing that [in some way or other] women intuit about the relevant cases in a surprisingly different way than men." This difference may have been caused by some inherent difference - although it more likely traces back to some combination of sociological factors. Truthfully, while it may seem like an inborn intuitional difference would matter more - and while this has certainly been the prevailing attitude in the comments regarding Buckwalter's article - I myself can't see why this would be the case. Whereas most concerned philosophers are apparently more interested in trying to disprove a "real" gender difference, then, I want people to think about what these findings might mean regardless of their ultimate cause.

As the bolded text above indicates, the thought experiment measures only intuitions. Intuitions, however, are not static: they change based on a person's life history (including both personal and cultural factors), the context of the question, the person's mood, and so on. To answer Buckwalter's first question, then, no: our epistemic intuitions are not unanimous. One person's intuitions aren't even unanimous, so it's ridiculous to ask about consistency with any larger populations. It's his second question where the real trouble enters.

We humans are so enamored of ourselves that we naturally assume some kind of nebulous reliability when it comes to our beliefs; as this blog (among many, many other sources) shows, the capacity for self-criticism in humans is distressingly low. When it comes to certain areas and certain modes of thinking - math comes to mind as a case in point - we're almost certainly right to have such faith in ourselves. Further, as Jennifer Nagel says in the comments to Buckwalter's article, "a large body of work in the psychology of reasoning has" indeed verified that calm reasoning is more reliable than any other kind of reasoning. But what about intuitions? Feeling as though, say, retribution is always ethically justified is not at all the same as reasoning the same thing.

I say all of this in large part because of Dan Gilbert's phenomenal Stumbling On Happiness, in which the author discusses the fact that people pay overly much attention to their current state of being. When we're hungry, he says by way of example, we often say things like, "I feel like I'll never eat again" - but that's clearly not the case. Of course, we also make the same mistake in the other direction, leading to one's eyes being bigger than one's stomach. Or, in the words of a previous post on the same problem, while waiting until one achieves a calm state of mind guarantees that one is never "in the moment" when one intuits, one is always in a moment: the feeling of calm objectivity is also just another feeling, which means we must treat it with just as much skepticism as we treat feelings of rage, depression, hunger, or fullness.

If that seems too negative, take heart: it also means that we must trust a feeling of objectivity as much as we trust other feelings. In other words, rather than throwing up my hands and declaring the whole process a waste, I want to open up every field of human emotion to at least the initial possibility of validity. To bring it back to Buckwalter's gender difference, the presumed danger (and therefore presumably the reason that people are trying to poke holes in his paper) is that we'll go from inadvertently ignoring women to specifically excluding them on the basis of their being wrong. But why should men automatically be right? For that matter, why should westerners be right, or people from developed countries, or adults? Human brains aren't magical metaphysical-truth-detectors, so it's silly for us to assume that the same conditions that optimize natural brain function also optimize the accuracy of its philosophical intuitions. For all we know, there is no single brain state that reliably identifies all the various "epistemic concepts" that we're looking for, let alone a single brain state that we've already discovered and actually belongs to a certain group of people - let alone a single brains tate that we've already discovered and actually only belongs to white males of sufficient education who live in developed countries and are relatively level-headed at that moment. Not that these questions should be new or unfamiliar or surprising to philosophers: they're just reconfigurations of Hume's is/ought distinction.

So really, I guess what I'm saying is that Buckwalter is not a friend so much as he's the enemy of my enemy. His conclusions may not follow from the evidence he has and his overall goals may differ from mine, but at least in the short term we share a certain leeriness about thought experiments. We may not yet know whether there are "real" intuitional differences between men and women, but from a strictly logical standpoint it just doesn't matter: so long as we know that there are any differences we have to take those differences seriously, and that means withholding both our faith in and our disbelief of specific intuitions. Until somebody makes a good case for why one mind state is preferable to all others, that is to say, we have to quit it already with the thought experiments. And, look, it's not like I'm just a hater: I eagerly await the day when humanity discovers an incontrovertible link between brain states and metaphysical truths. But I ain't holding my breath.

Have you ever had one of those days where your brain just doesn't seem like it's working? Doesn't it feel kind of like all your ideas reach the tip of your tongue and then sublimate into the atmosphere? Isn't that really annoying? Y'know what's more annoying? When somebody ignores the signs of their cognitive exhaustion and tries to be smart anyway.

"If we are so abysmally wrong about purpose and finality, which we see everywhere, how reliable are our cognitive apparati? Are our brains really so poorly adapted to reality that we consistently and automatically ascribe purposive behavior to observed phenomena? If so, how much confidence can we have in the idea that NS [natural selection; i.e., evolution] has molded our brains to perceive the truth about the world?

...Presumably, mind evolved to 'pick out' purposeful behavior among evolving fellow anthropoids… but in that case, where did all that purposive mindedness come from in the first place? If there is no mindedness and finality 'there' in nature, how can sentient organisms evolve to 'pick it out'? (Very Zen-esque: what is the selective advantage of one mind thinking?) What selective pressure was subcognitive perception responding to in order that it evolved to teleologized cognition?

...Is there, then, a pre-supportive niche for mind and teleological cognition in nature? If not, how could such cognition adapt into a nonexistent niche in the natural order? If there is intrinsically no 'design space' for teleological cognition, how could it evolve? If, by contrast, there is a pre-established niche (or potential) for rational cognition inherent in nature, then just how 'natural' is nature?"

Before I get on with analyzing this, let me just take a brief moment to give some friendly advice to Elliot Bougis, the author of the text above. Elliot, if you have something to say, then fucking come right out and say it, you cretinous jackass. Quit trying to wear out the fucking question mark key on your keyboard and fucking say something. For crying out loud, it's just the internet: nobody's gonna show up at your house in a black mask with an assault rifle and do unspeakable things to you if you make a false statement.

Okay! Now that that's out of my system, it's pretty trivial to see that Bougis is trying his hardest to comprehend (and, at the same time, make incomprehensible) Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, which at this point I will give its own tag for easy searching. Readers unfamiliar with the EAAN are advised to start here. For the rest, you should already know that the EAAN tries to demonstrate that belief in naturalism is inherently irrational because naturalism implies the truth of unguided evolution, which in turn implies that our belief-forming mechanisms are untrustworthy. In his absurdly lengthy series of argument-like questions, Bougis echoes many of the themes of the EAAN - and therefore also many of its flaws.

To answer his first set of questions, no, our cognitive apparati are not very reliable (see: all of human history). Yes, our brains are really so inaccurate in their perceptions that we wrongly attribute conscious, intentional behavior to inanimate objects. No, we don't really have any particular reason to believe that truth-seeking was the decisive benefit that made our physiology the superior one at the time when our species faced off against whatever competitors existed at the time. But (to borrow Bougis's rhetorical style) does that mean our brains aren't good at finding truths, or at least some truths? Remember, duct tape wasn't designed to fill half the functions that it's actually capable of filling: the contingent historical origins of an object or process don't forever delimit the potential uses for that object or process. Furthermore, there are many more kinds of truth in the world than whether or not an event had an intentional component in its immediate causal history. Just pointing out one area where our brains perform badly and suggesting that they weren't designed to perform well, then, is not at all sufficient to prove that they don't in fact perform well - or, at least, well enough to get us safe knowledge of evolution.

Moving now to his second paragraph: "purposive mindedness," which is to say intent, came from - can you guess? - purposive minds, which do exist in nature. (Humans, it apparently always bears repeating, are and always were a part of nature and not somehow ascended or fundamentally divorced from it. And anyway, other animals have this kind of mind, as well.) As for seeking the one true evolutionary history of a psychological trait, good luck. I could spin all kinds of stories about why "teleologized cognition" (the generalized tendency to attribute intent and/or purpose to events) might have helped our ancestors - but none of them would be any more worth believing than the others and anyway there's no need. Our ignorance about certain details of natural evolutionary history doesn't mean that we must reject that history, just like our ignorance about linguistic history means we have to posit divine intervention as the reason for the great vowel shift. We barely know enough about the current environment to model basic evolutionary outcomes with any accuracy, so demanding a detailed explanation of long-past evolutionary conditions is grossly unfair.

His third paragraph, though, is where things get really interesting. This is his first real departure from the EAAN as traditionally stated, and it's a disastrous one for Bougis: when you're just ripping off someone else's work you can always blame them when things turn sour, but striking out on your own means taking the hits. And there are a lot of hits coming.

Once again, replying to his questions: broadly speaking, yes, there is a niche in nature for thinking creatures like us; it couldn't; it couldn't; nature is entirely natural and wouldn't benefit from any magical add-ons. When Bougis talks about a "pre-supportive niche" for a trait, he's really referring (albeit very obliquely and probably without realizing this) to the solution space for the specific set mathematical equations (or, if you prefer, physical laws) that describe evolution. If that space includes a setup in which one finds a given attribute then on his terminology we say that that attribute has a pre-supportive niche (in nature). Anything that has evolved, then, must have a pre-supportive niche: by definition, a trait without a pre-supportive niche is impossible to observe in the real world. On the theory that consciousness and its attending oddities are the results of evolution, then, consciousness and all of those oddities do indeed have pre-supportive niches. Thus the answer to his first niche question is "yes" and the middle two don't apply. As for the last one, well...that requires a bit of explaining.

To begin with, we really have to state the question in a less obviously stupid way. We don't know how to measure naturalness, so asking how natural something is will not produce anything helpful. Dropping that language altogether, it looks like Bougis is trying to say that something supernatural is a prerequisite for the potential for rationality. Even that, though, doesn't make a whole lot of sense under close scrutiny. Remember, we're talking at root about math when we talk about potential physical states; as such, Bougis's claim amounts to saying that the mathematical representation of rational consciousness doesn't fit in with any mathematical representation of nature - that, in short, consciousness is inherently miraculous. Such a premise belongs nowhere near this argument: if we knew that our existence required a miracle we wouldn't need to worry about any of this at all because the answer would already be obvious! Introducing this kind of claim begs the question in a major way, which is only compounded by the fact that Bougis provides literally no evidence for it. Furthermore, there's no particular reason for him to have selected rationality as the suspicious trait - we could just as convincingly ask why God isn't a requirement specially for the existence of wings or ink sacs or bark. Combined with his total lack of support for this selection, the fact that Bougis just so happened to select the most contentious of all observed attributes suggests quite strongly that he did so not for any logical or rational reason but rather because he knew it would score some points with his readership. That tactic, it should go without saying, would be passed over as a meaningless waste of time by an honorable philosopher - which, at this point, it appears that Bougis is not.

Interestingly, this blog - which by the way also features our good buddy Apolonio "worst living philosopher" Latar as one of its authors - hasn't updated in almost half a year. Bougis's personal blog is still going strong (and dumb: "to accept Proof of The Love rather than The Love itself is not to accept The Love at all," etc.), but somehow this other one has sputtered to a stop. I can't help but wonder if that isn't at all related to their founding ideal that "our response to divine revelation and grace, as manifest in how we are thereby transformed as persons, is far more important than philosophy as an academic discipline." You cannot, Christians are fond of reminding us, serve two masters - a deceptively easy piece of folk wisdom that nonetheless rings very true in this case. Bougis and his compatriots chose to devote themselves to Christianity; the rest of the philosophical world should (and, ultimately, will) happily leave them to their delusions while it moves on to bigger and better things.

In either a very strange coincidence or in a veiled response to my contention earlier this week that all propositions are physically encoded, Alex Pruss asserted yesterday that "[l]inguistic tokens [such as propositions] do not...need physical realization." Since that's pretty much a direct contradiction of my claim, it looks like only one of us can be right. Which is it? Well, you've read my reasoning already (or you'd damn well better have; if you haven't, go do that now) - here's his:

"Suppose I want to communicate with you. There exist a million non-physical angels, numbered in some natural way (maybe from least to most wise). Both you and I are empaths of a special sort: we can both feel the angels' emotions and impress emotions on the angels. So now I communicate with you as follows. I take what I want to say to you, and translate it into a binary bit sequence (say, using ASCII). It had better have no more than a million bits. I then take this binary bit string and encode it in the angels' emotions: if the nth bit is one, I make the nth angel happy, and if the nth bit is zero, I sadden the nth angel. You then read off the angels' emotions using your emphathic skills, and so you know what bit string I was communicating to you, and you can decode it."

 Yeah...I'll just let that go without comment.

There's something a little more interesting towards the end of the post where he suggests that communication "need not even be...positive" (in the sense of "active") but that just makes me wonder whether all communication is linguistic. An answer to that, however, would require at least a theory about what counts as a language, and I just don't have one of those. It also makes me wonder whether he's mistaking absolute passivity with the mere absence of a certain kind of activity, which is what I think I'd retreat to if pressed on this: they do say, after all, that most communication is nonverbal. At any rate, the silent-communication objection is way more plausible than the million-magic-angels-and-psychics objection.

She posted all of these as one image, so that's how you're getting them - the specific one to find is the second from the top:

And also, for the record, I do remember Thundercats.

Every year in the NBA, billionnaire franchise owner Mark Cuban spends a little more of his money shuffling around upper-mid-level talent in order (he thinks) to give his team a better chance at winning the title. While his franchise player has been a constant presence since the '98/'99 season, Cuban has switched in and out a number of other big names, including Steve Nash, Michael Finley, Juwan Howard, Tim Hardaway, Avery Johnson (as player and coach), Nick Van Exel, Josh Howard, Antawn Jamison, Antoine Walker, Devin Harris, Jason Terry, Jerry Stackhouse, Jason Kidd, and Shawn Marion. To put that in perspective, that's more talent than the Toronto Raptors, Memphis Grizzlies, and Charlotte Bobcats have ever had...combined. Despite Cuban's revolving-door policy when it comes to his roster, his Mavericks have never won a league championship. Still, this year could be the year, right?

I asked that same question way back in August, guessing that last night's Lakers/Mavericks game would serve as some indication of Cuban's chances this year. The short answer? It's not looking good. Despite Kobe Bryant scoring all of 10 points while suffering from a broken finger and back spasms,* despite LA coming off a 20-point loss to San Antonio the night before (and therefore playing on the second night of a back-to-back), despite the successful return of Josh Howard to their lineup, despite playing at home, and despite committing a very low seven turnovers for the whole game, Dallas lost to the Lakers. I hate that this says anything good about LA - by any reasonable guess this is a game they should've lost - but for Cuban this is old news: his mad scientist routine has apparently produced yet another team that's better on paper than it is on the court, probably due to chemistry issues and/or defensive woes.

Expect Dallas to make the playoffs amid mixed opinions of their potential and then flame out in the second round.

*An aside for those who've never had lower back problems: it hurts.

In case you missed it - and, to be perfectly frank, you probably should've missed it - the Unviersity of Tennessee's football team just recently experienced a bit of a shock when its head coach abruptly packed up and left the program after only one year. Before your eyes start to unfocus out of sheer boredom and apathy, let me quickly add that this post has nothing, really, to do with college football - that's just the context. Really, this post is about soul-building.

When asked about this whole coach-leaving ordeal, some guy at the university said that he was "very disappointed for our student-athletes," and then went on to add that "they will find out that this is a time they will be able to look back on and gain valuable life lessons from it." Yes, that's right: he's disappointed that they will benefit in the long-term from what they're going through. He, this spokesman for the university, is disappointed that they, the approximately twelve thousand people it takes to form a football team, will gain valuable life lessons. None of the bright-eyed journalists in the room at the time, I have to point out, asked the obvious follow-up question.


Since I try to be fair and even-handed, I have to admit that in this particular case I'm mostly willing to let Mr. Administrator Guy off the hook. What he probably wanted to do was to let loose with a vile stream of invective directed at the departing coach, but since his job includes PR appearances he had to quash that particular desire. For the same reason, though, he couldn't sound happy about it, so he had to find some way of expressing remorse without indicting the outgoing coach. That he chose to do so by casting the players as victims was, I think, just an unlucky coincidence for him.


None of that, however, makes up for the real strangeness of his overall message. Pity the players, he says, because their future lives will be better. He's disappointed for them - he thinks they've missed out on something - because they'll have an easier time with things later on. Their developing maturity, that is to say, brings him down. If only the coach had stayed and they had missed out on this chance to form a more morally robust character and a deeper personality! Sadly, now their souls will never be as un-built as they could have been.


I would be very interested to know whether this same gentleman holds to Christianity and, if so, whether he believes that the evils in this world exist in order to test or strengthen us.

Feeling particularly full of yourself today? Well, are you of the mind that you "can make significant parametric changes to the Earth"? If not, good news! That, according to Walter Williams, "has to be the height of arrogance," so you're off the hook. Let him break it down for you:

"If all 6.5 billion of us, all at once, started jumping up and down for a little while, do you think we'd change the Earth's orbit or rotation? Do you think mankind could change the direction and timing of the ocean's tides? Is there anything that mankind can do to stop or start a tsunami or hurricane? You say, 'Williams, it's stupid to suggest that mankind could change the Earth's orbit or rotation, ocean tides or cause or stop a tsunami or hurricane!' You're right and it's also stupid to think that mankind's activities can make globalized changes in the Earth's temperature."

Well, that's that! Our planet is the windshield to our collective fly, the baseball bat to our collective mailbox: try as we might, our invincible super-planet is immune to the actions of puny mortals like ourselves.

Don't believe him? Okay - just prove him wrong by creating a hurricane and then reversing all the tides. We don't have weather machines like in a James Bond movie, dummy, so global warming isn't real. Never mind all the other crazy stuff we can do to the world (coughnukescough) and forget about how stupid that whole jumping-up-and-down thing is, just ask yourself this one simple question: do you have a weather machine?

No? Then I guess you have to shut up about global warming, don't you!

Leery though I am of judging anything by its title - you run out of good titles real quick when you post 2-3 times a day - something as fake-smart as "knowing truth" always seems to me like an inauspicious way to start things off. The fact that it's Rod Dreher doesn't help any, of course, but that's a title I wouldn't even trust coming from a smart person.

Dreher's point, at any rate, centers around one question: "is it not possible that people who live according to foundational beliefs that are not in fact true are able to see, or at least to embody, truths that elude those who hold objectively true beliefs"? Or, in plain English, what if a person's belief in something backwards and silly enables that person to know something else, or to behave better for some definition or other of "better"? It's not immediately obvious why we should even bother with this kind of question, but Dreher provides two reasons: that you can't "argue propositionally for the truth of a father's love for his son" and that "it can be more noble to live what you believe to be a lie if it serves the greater good of one's community."

If we are to make any sense of this at all, the first of these reasons has to pertain to "seeing truths that elude" people and the second to "embodying truths that elude" people. Taking them in that order, then, let's try to figure out why a father's love might be invisible to outsiders. Dreher certainly thinks that it is - it "can only be known experientially," he says - but unfortunately he doesn't deign to provide any evidence or support for this idea, so I'm sort of left to make some up on my own. Trying my absolute hardest, I can only think of two kinds of reasons for us to treat fatherly love as epistemologically special: privileged access and emotion.

To elaborate, Dreher might be trying to say that only the loved person can truly know (as opposed to believe or conjecture or whatever) that they are loved; or, perhaps, he could mean that the knowledge of love isn't really a proposition but rather the feeling of being loved. In neither case, however, does this argument wash. The first interpretation is just hyperventilating about nothing: one person loving another isn't any more observationally impenetrable than any other interpersonal reaction, and in fact the object of love quite frequently is in the worse position to ascertain the truth of the situation. The second, meanwhile, straightforwardly confuses feelings with knowledge. Given the unavoidable fact that feelings are often inaccurate, it's ludicrous for Dreher to say that one knows that one is loved when and only when one has a certain pleasant feeling.

With love out of the way, how about the prospect of beliefs reshaping one's lived truths? Well, before we go anywhere with that question we'd have to have some idea of what it means to live a truth. As above, Dreher proves singularly unhelpful - to the extent that he talks about this at all, he just reorders the words without adding any more detail or content. Once more, then, I'll try to fill in the blanks. Typically we say that somebody is "living a lie" when their day-to-day activities are either (1) inconsistent with their political, moral, religious, or other normative beliefs, (2) crushingly depressing for that person (typically this involves that person having some mistaken belief about themselves that leads them to conclude that those actually crushingly depressing activities will somehow magically become more pleasant over time), or (3) both. To live a truth, then, would seem just to be the opposite: a person lives a truth when their day-to-day activities are consistent with their normative beliefs and make that person at least somewhat happy. I do want, though, to throw in another alternative, because it seem to me to match Dreher's vaguely suggestive ideas more closely. On this second proposed interpretation, a member of group G lives a truth when their actions are driven by (all or part of) G's characteristic ("foundational") system of beliefs and when their actions uniquely suggest or reveal that truth (more details on this in just a bit - be patient). All that remains now is to see whether either of these notions of "true living" will do what Dreher says they will.

Certainly it's true that people with false normative beliefs (e.g. "rape is good, clean fun for the whole family") will be able to "live truly" in the first sense when others will not - but why should we care? If this notion of true living is at all a valuable one we would want it to exclude this sort of thing, not specifically allow for it. Well, unless Dreher really would mourn the loss of rape-loving families - which, in all likelihood, he would not. Despite the linguistic symmetry, then, I have to reject my first proposed reading of Dreher and move on to the second. To help flesh it out a little bit, allow me to tell a brief (fictional, but plausible) story:

On a sightseeing trip to the African savannah a good while back, a certain Englishman notices the natives going through great lengths to obtain food - stalking animals with handmade weapons, that sort of thing. Feeling a twinge of pity, he shows the natives how to use the hunting rifles he brought with him and how to drive his jeep, thus making their hunting vastly easier and providing them with a surfeit of meat. Of course, then he returns to England without feeling like he has any further obligation to help anybody for the entire rest of his life, and quite possibly his introduction of new technology had drastic effects on the local biosphere - but that's another story.

Though the English hunter had, we are apt to say, a better grasp of reality than the Africans, we might also lean towards saying that the latter might have been living a truth not available to the former: that physical exercise is beneficial for humans, say, or that working for one's food gives one a deeper appreciation of nature, or some such noble-savage-style wisdom. (For the record, Dreher makes a move in this same direction, comparing a "shaman" and an "atheist scientist" - but I don't know which truths a shaman could possibly access that aren't available to scientists, so I reconfigured his example to help me fill in the details without, hopefully, changing the timbre of the original. So if you're out there grinding your teeth about how racist this is or whatever, go take it up with him.) While this sort of scenario hits all kinds of intuitive notes, its overall tune is significantly less interesting than Dreher thinks it is.

While a sufficiently thorough medical examination of both sides in my story would indeed reveal the health benefits of exercise, no medical examination could come to that same conclusion by examining either side by itself. Somebody whose only experience consisted of investigating people on identical exercise routines, in other words, would never be able to determine what effect exercise has on us: there's no control and no variable to measure. Indeed, we really need to fill in yet more of the story: a sufficiently thorough and sufficiently well-informed medical examination is really what's required to make a valid conclusion, because that knowledge helps to identify which factors should be controlled or allowed to vary. Given all of the context we need in order to reason in this way, this latter sort of "living truths" is only meaningful and special to people with severe tunnel vision.

It's true that we could learn about the benefits of exercise from someone who exercises and thus experiences those benefits - but we could just as rationally learn that same thing from someone who doesn't exercise and thus doesn't experience those benefits, like learning that a coin flip landed tails by learning that it didn't land heads. Dreher seems to have the idea that only the positive side counts - that, in other words, the truth in question belongs somehow to the group(s) whose experience we're using - but that's a patently illogical way of thinking about the situation. We might not want to embody the truth that exercise makes humans healthier by failing to exercise and therefore becoming less healthy, but the fact of an indolent person suffering for their indolence is just as revealing as an active person benefiting from their activity. By this definition, then, Dreher would have to arbitrarily tack value onto "living" or "embodying" a truth, because it sure isn't inherent in the situation to begin with.

To this point, it seems like we've done a lot of the heavy lifting that Dreher really should've provided on his own - because we have. If this is really so important to him, one can't help but think, maybe he should've put just the slightest bit of effort into making his point instead of simply bouncing words around like numbered balls in a lottery machine. As it turns out, though, I don't think he is all that interested in coming up with a coherent, persuasive, and useful way of interpreting that whole special-access-to-truth thing; I think he had an ulterior motive.

In the middle of all of his puzzled hypothesizing, Dreher offhandedly mentions his belief that "the world would be a poorer and more benighted place if people stopped telling stories and spoke only in non-fictional phrases." Apparently he thinks that this scenario accurately reflects the kind of world that atheists (or other skeptics) would prefer to live in: he compares it to what might happen "if everyone in the world who professed religious faith became an atheist." So far as I can tell, his fond affection for falsehoods traces back to this single idea, that accepting atheism means adopting some sort of Vulcan-esque existence wherein only facts matter and you're not allowed to have fun. Needless to say, this accusation of his is astoundingly off-base: by and large, we couldn't care less which fairy tales you read, Rod, and most of us will even grant you the right to believe what you want to in the privacy of your own head. We just think you're an idiot for thinking, and would strongly prefer for you not to act on, crazy obviously false ideas on the order of "[a]ll political problems...are ultimately religious problems" or "adultery is the only grounds for ending a marriage" or "liberalism has abandoned any authoritative metaphysical grounding in which to root its views of good and evil." Reality is our authority, and until Dreher realizes that he's going to have a very hard time understanding why we're able to tell stories we like without automatically believing that they're the literal truth.