Rust Belt Philosophy

One of the things that I am not going to miss about cable television is the commercials. It's not that I can't bring myself to ignore them - some of my friends express that problem, but that's not it. It's also not that I find it offensive for companies to scream slogans and flash bright colors at me. No - it's just that commercials are so damn stupid. When they're not cartoonishly trying to pander to my manhood (either by contrasting it with an equally cartoonish ideal of womanhood or just directly) they're working on my view of my race, socioeconomic class, political views, and who even knows what all else. Why can't we just have commercials that just tell you what the fuck is being sold and then advertise its capacities as a whatever-the-fuck-it-is? You know, like the ads for crisis garden seed banks and the Vivos apocalypse bunker, both as initially seen by this reporter on Stephen Colbert's show.

Although I was initially prepared to approach the Vivos thing as lightly as I took the seed bank thing, Colbert's bit did give me pause: if a company takes the ancient Sumerians seriously, clearly that company has earned a somber look-over. But then I got to their website and saw that they didn't even have "zombie apocalypse" listed under their various doomsday scenarios! How, I ask you, can you include the ancient Sumerians but not zombies? Where is the quality control, for crying out loud?

Luckily, their section on anarchy more or less covers the various zombie scenarios. They say that "the government will not be capable of providing adequate police and social support," which is a hallmark of zombie uprisings; likewise for their assertions that "[y]our house is practically a sore thumb that anybody can find and break into" and that, "[t]o defend yourself, you would have to have an arsenal of guns and weapons, as well as anti-measures to hide and secure the few supplies you have stockpiled for your survival." (I'm assuming here that an "anti-measure" is sort of like a counter-measure, only for stupid people.) But I really don't find their solution to be very convincing, if only because they recommend staying hidden in "a remote shelter, one in which you would be almost completely secure from the outside world and could lock yourself in and be self-sustaining for an indefinite amount of time, hopefully up to a year." Everybody knows that you can't just turtle during a zombie invasion: when's the last time that ever happened in a zombie movie? Also, it's slightly worrying that their "indefinite" period of safety will only "hopefully" last "up to a year"; personally, I like my indefinite periods of time to last, y'know, indefinitely, especially when the alternative involves having my flesh torn from my bones by ravenous hordes of the undead.

I was also heartened to find "Orange Drink" on their list of food "BASICS" and to learn that they would have computers in their survival bunkers, because the last thing I want is to survive the end of the world without being able to sip Sunny D as I cry hunched over the keyboard of a computer that I have just then realized doesn't have the internet because the internet can't possibly survive the end of the world. It makes me even more excited to learn that these shelters, each of which "is worth $10 million dollars," will only be funded by 200 people paying fifty grand apiece. Think about it: 200 people times $50,000 per person only works out to ten million dollars - the good people at Vivos are operating their business not for profit! They may even be operating at a loss, assuming that "$10 million dollars" is more valuable than just "$10 million" or "10 million dollars."

Alas, I don't think they'll ever let me in, and not just because I have this nagging feeling that it'd be a better use of my $50k to build my own shelter out of five million pennies (and, let's say, duct tape). You see, everybody who gets accepted into one of these bunkers - which, by the way, won't even be built until mid- to late 2012 - will be "assigned an ongoing responsibility, based on their skills, expertise and ability, from medical, to security, operations, maintenance, meal preparation, education, exercise, communications, etc." Much as I enjoy philosophy and find it valuable, putting an annoying prick like me in a confined space with a small population is a really good way to make a somewhat uncomfortable situation extremely uncomfortable. Although I could plausibly learn to be a seamstress ("seamster"?) - which is on their list of approved specialties, together with aviation (very helpful in an enclosed underground space) and religion (insert your own scathing remark here) - my best bet would probably just be that thing about pennies and duct tape.

So, dear readers, it looks as though I'll be on my own when the shit hits the fan. As for you, well, I can only hope that your plans for Armageddon, like Vivos's, will be "truly an enormous undertaking, perhaps even epic!"

This post makes me think that the measure of good philosophy is the extent to which it permeates non-academic philosophical culture but in a warped, stunted way. It doesn't make me think that for very long, of course, because the definition of good philosophy is much more straightforward, but it does make me think that.

"Evolutionist Jerry Coyne thinks atheism is true. But if atheism (in addition to evolution) is true, then how could Coyne know it? For if atheism and materialism are true, then Coyne's brain is nothing more than a set of molecules in motion. Its various configurations are simply a consequence of its beginning, subsequent inputs, and some random motion here and there.

What Coyne thinks is knowledge would merely be certain molecular states, not necessarily having any correspondence with truth. How do evolutionists reconcile their atheism with their convictions of knowledge and truth?"

You may recognize this as a version of Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, sort of in the same sense that Sean Connery starred in a version of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Sia (whoever the fuck that is) recorded a version of The Church's "Under The Milky Way" for a car commercial. Even though Plantinga's argument sucks as philosophy it does have a certain quality to it, and that level of craft is totally absent from Cornelius Hunter's rendition (which, yes, is just those two paragraphs).

Plantinga isn't so stupid as to blame his paranoid skepticism on the material nature of brains, because brains are material. Even if theism is true, Hunter would still be left with the fact that his brain "is nothing more than a set of molecules in motion" that depends for its output on "its beginning [state], subsequent inputs, and [maybe] some random motion here and there." For Plantinga, the problem is that our brains haven't been designed a la metal detectors to beep happily in the presence of truth, which is a boring problem to resolve but not really as stupid a problem as the one that Hunter presents: Plantinga at least presents a problem that he can solve, even if that problem doesn't exist in reality.

Another reason this is a smart - or, at least, a canny - move on Plantinga's part is that it hides the problems of adopting a theistic view of minds and knowledge. Besides the standard questions about whether the concept of immaterial minds even makes sense and how those minds might interact with material bodies, Hunter's distaste for material solutions will also earn him some hard questions about the efficacy of his non-material solution. Even if human minds are somehow immaterial, you'd have to say that they still depend on their "beginning, subsequent inputs, and some random motion here and there" - I mean, that pretty much covers all the possible influences (initial state, causal influences, random influences). Further, whatever stuff he thinks minds are made of, it too has to come in configurations or patterns of some sort, because otherwise it wouldn't be capable of acquiring different states (e.g. hunger and satiation). So while we can't say of an immaterial mind that its "knowledge would merely be certain molecular states," we could easily replace "molecular" with whatever word Hunter thinks is appropriate (probably something like "spiritual"). At that point, his argument once again comes back to bite him, which Plantinga's (though it fails as an argument) does not do.

Probably the most interesting thing here is that Hunter has managed to utterly erase all of the evolutionary content of Plantinga's argument. Although he knows enough to include the word "evolution" a few times for strictly rhetorical purposes, you'll observe that Hunter doesn't once reference the content of evolutionary theory. The reason this is so strange is that Plantinga's argument is roughly 85% basic evolution and 15% obfuscatory hand-waving, so you'd think that leaving out the evolution part would just leave a skimpy, almost content-free lump of garbage...which, not surprisingly, is exactly what Hunter has produced.

I generally think that philosophy is something anybody can practice even if they don't have training, especially because philosophical training in the academy is so rarely the kind of training that actually makes you good at finding truth. But maybe there are also people who should just do themselves a favor and not try to play in the deep end of the pool, as it were.

We've seen twice in the past two weeks how easy it apparently is to get confused about medicine and the rights of children. While Alice Dreger, Ellen Feder, and Dan Savage (among others) have provided some relief, I find Maggie Koerth-Baker's take on the issue to be perhaps the most philosophically admirable. Although her post on the subject lacks some of Savage's punch, she also doesn't step out onto as many limbs as he does, which I consider to be a plus when it comes to truth-seeking. And while her writing doesn't display the field-area expertise that Dreger and Feder bring to the discussion, Koerth-Baker is also not constrained by the politics of the field and so is able to state her case without dithering quite as much. In my ideal world, this is how philosophy would always be performed (bold mine throughout).

"Poppas wasn't just pulling this idea out of his rear. And his patients weren't just little girls with slightly larger-than-average clitorises. In fact, the children were born intersexed—genetically female, but with ambiguous genitalia caused by a hormone imbalance. For these girls—and other children born with a variety of intersex conditions—genital surgery in infancy is standard practice. It happens all over the United States every day. The only thing that makes Poppas different was his follow-up procedures (a whole problematic can of worms that [Dreger, Feder, Savage, and others] cover very well.)


But just because Poppas was following standard practice doesn't mean there's nothing to question. Doctors recommend genital surgery for intersex babies on the assumption that it would be psychologically damaging to grow up with private parts that are so outside the norm—your parents wouldn't be able to handle it and would reject you, you'd be tormented by peers, etc. But the thing is, there's no evidence that this is true. We don't know that intersex people who've had the surgery lead happier lives than those who haven't. Nobody has ever systematically followed up with the patients to find out."

The medical default, she goes on to say, is to do nothing - in other words, we need a compelling reason to engage in medicine, not a compelling reason not to. But since Poppas and others are operating merely on an assumption and not on facts, they cannot plausibly claim to have found a need. The solution, she concludes, is to practice evidence-based medicine.

"I love modern medicine. The skeptic movement has turned me into an advocate of evidence-based medicine—the simple idea that tradition, anecdote and common sense aren't good enough reasons to ask a patient to spend money and risk side-effects on a treatment. If there's no solid, scientific evidence, what you're doing isn't medicine. It's woo-woo magic.

But I think people often forget that this doesn't just put the smack down on things like homeopathy and chiropractic. Mainstream medical treatments have to be held to the same standard. And they don't always measure up, either."

This, believe it or not, is a major challenge in bioethics, making sure that doctors and other health care professionals actually temper their behavior so as to accord with the evidence. English society, for example, has had some problems handling the idea that chiropracty isn't evidence-based, and the field of psychiatry is rife with practitioners who actively resist taking the approach suggested by the evidence. You'd think that this would have stopped being a big problem some time before the year two thousand and ten, but apparently not - in fact, apparently the only progress we've made is to make the problem so well-known that even webcomic artists know about it.



The situation is reversed (in that underground medicine would try to subvert evidence-based medicine whereas Poppas's brand of thought seeks to subordinate evidence) but the effect is the same: rather than conceiving of medicine as an ends-based practice whose effectiveness depends on its adherence to the scientific reality of the situation, non-evidence-based medicine tries to impose some preconceived ideological structure on the way that doctors interact with their patients. As Koerth-Baker says, this essentially means that doctors are practicing magic first and medicine only as a way to fulfill their particular magical goals. For Poppas, having genitalia of a certain size (or something) magically prevents girls from feeling anxious or uncomfortable (and may, as per Savage's guess, also magically ensure their heterosexuality) - and so he operates, evidence or no.

You may be wondering at this point if there's ever a case where the magic belief happens to coincide with reality. Again, Koerth-Baker:

"Research and follow-up studies could end up showing that intersex children do get psychological benefits from growing up with 'nomalized' genitals. I don't know. Nobody does. But you can't just assume a treatment is successful because you think it ought to be."

Before I wrap this up, please note that she doesn't try to over-correct the situation. Just as "you can't just assume a treatment is successful because you think it ought to be," Koerth-Baker recognizes that you can't just assume that a treatment isn't successful because you think it ought not be - her "I don't know" indicates as much. As much as it drives me nuts to see people make stupid philosophical mistakes, this sort of thing makes me smile ear-to-ear: she may suspect that Poppas is full of shit and she may recognize that his actions cannot be condoned in any case, but she also understands that she can only take her argument so far and so stops before she says too much. You may not see it, but for me there's a kind of beauty in this kind of epistemological humility.

The only thing I want to add to Koerth-Baker's analysis is one of the many reasons to do research. Even if we assume that Poppas's beliefs ultimately do reflect reality, we need to know the limits and details of that reflection. Or, to make the point more generally, magical beliefs like his need to be precisely delimited in every case where they aren't outright disproven. For example, just what size or shape would a clitoris have to have in order to cause psychological trauma? How likely is that trauma to occur, and what factors affect that likelihood? How serious is that trauma, especially as compared to the risk of harm that comes with the cosmetic surgery in question? All of these questions have specific answers that arise from specific scientific realities - or, at least, they do if Poppas has any idea what he's doing. It is, then, not just skeptics who have reason to support the evidence-based medicine movement: Poppas's supporters (assuming he has any) should be eager to shore up and fine-tune his position by producing evidence, because they should believe that the evidence is in his favor.

My formulation may differ from hers - I prefer "fact-based" because it alliterates with "philosophy" - but Koerth-Baker is my kind of philosopher. Evidence has never had a particularly privileged place in the world of philosophy and, as a result, it and other fields have been able to operate without much pressure at all to stay true to reality. It's long past time that this trend was reversed: an evidence-based approach should be automatic, not something we have to fight for.

Well, okay - rather than beating around the bush, let me get right to the point: I think PZ Myers might not know what he's talking about here.

"So here's the Woman Problem, and it's not a problem with women: it's a problem with atheist and skeptic groups looking awfully testosteroney. And you all know it's true, every time I post a photo of some sampling of the audience at an atheist meeting, it is guaranteed that someone will count the contribution of each sex and it will be consistently skewed Y-ward.


Why? And what are we going to do about it?

...I think the right answer is for us males to shut up now and then and listen. It's not for us men to tell women how to fix our (both men and women) problems, but if we're to have a lasting and equitable representation at the tables of atheism and skepticism, the guys who currently dominate need to step back and stop pushing.

I was thinking about this because I was reading Skeptifem's take on the absence of female skeptics, and my first reaction was that it was pretty good, but I had some little disagreements here and there where I thought I could put together a quick blog post with plusses and minuses listed…but then I realized that these are the problems she honestly sees. These are real obstacles in both perception and reality, not an academic exercise. Shut up and listen, I told myself."

But then, maybe I'm just confused. The problem, as I read him as saying, is that women are under-represented as speakers at and organizers of skeptical conferences/events/organizations/other things. The solution, he seems to say, is for men "to shut up...and listen" to (I assume) the suggestions that women have. Except...isn't that not a solution? Isn't that, like, a pre-solution? Unless by "listen" he means "listen and then follow the instructions you just heard," I'm fairly certain that listening isn't a problem-solving technique all by itself.

If that's correct, then we have to expand the meaning of "listen" so that it includes some active behavior - something that will, in other words, affect the world outside of our heads. Ideally, we would want this behavior to be based in reality: while non-reality-based behavior can have positive results (like when people give to charity because they think it'll get them into heaven), it's a safer practice in general to motivate people in a way that corresponds with the way things actually are. So far, so good - Myers ought maybe have been a little more clear about the need for men to act in some way at some point instead of just being good listeners, but hopefully people understand that without it being said. But, um, why isn't it okay to speak up?

Let me just restate a few of my background premises at this point. First, we're dealing in this case with skeptics, people who at least claim to value rational discourse and who freely choose to associate with like-minded folks. It should, then, not be a problem to have a rational discourse about any given topic; it's not, in other words, like we're dealing with the Catholic church, in which only certain members of the hierarchy are allowed to speak up. Also, I should think that we can all agree that there is a lot of space to work in between "shut up" and "tell women how to fix our...problems." That is, the alternative to saying nothing is not necessarily to bring one's iron fist down on any woman who opens her mouth; agreement, for example, sits nicely between silence and oppression. Third, and finally before I move on, there is in general a fact of the matter that will be true regardless of the gender of the person who identifies that fact quickest. Yes? All of those are reasonable and true things? Okay.

On, then, to skeptifem. I fully understand that her writing reflects "the problems she honestly sees." I might be cynical bastard, but unless I'm watching Fox News I tend to believe that everyone only mentions the problems that they honestly see. But - given the three points we just agreed on! - that's not really the same as saying that every one of her points is "a real obstacle...in reality." That's sort of the thing about us being humans and not omniscient: the problems that we honestly see are sometimes honestly not there. (How this contrasts with an academic exercise is something I'm not at all clear on: if Myers conducts his academic truth-seeking exercises differently than he conducts his real-life truth-seeking exercises, that seems like a problem for him and not the rest of us.) For example, skeptifem hypothesizes that (all emphasis hers) "[t]here are so few female skeptics because the potential ones are busy." That, near as I can tell, is a truth-apt statement about the objective world and so can be evaluated for its accuracy just like any other truth-apt statement about the objective world (even if it requires a bit more parsing, perhaps). I'm not saying that she's wrong - I haven't looked into the matter enough to dispute that particular contention, and in fact I find it plausible (at least as a partial explanation) - I'm just saying that there's no particular reason why only women should be allowed to discuss that idea; why, in other words, I should have to just "shut up and listen" instead of participating (rationally!) in the discourse.

So I'm confused, not least because this doesn't seem like a position that Myers would actually hold. It seems, if I am to be blunt, distinctly anti-intellectual and discriminatory. He takes a step back at the end of his post in saying that men are allowed to "make positive suggestions and ask for more information," but for me this only makes things more muddled. When, first of all, is the "now and then" that he mentions at the beginning, and what (if anything) does it have to do with these exceptions? What counts as a positive suggestion, and what are we contrasting "positive suggestion" with? (Negative suggestions? Neutral suggestions? Positive somethings-other-than-suggestions? What?) Why, if Myers wants to encourage a sort of protected discourse for women, does he not only fail to follow his own advice (his "one suggestion" is a detailed description of a convention that he thinks women should put together all on their own) but do so in a way that totally departs from skeptifem's ideas (which, if I am reading her correctly, center around establishing "a collective (community or government) payment system" from which to reward domestic labor)? Moreover, isn't it just a wee bit self-defeating for Myers to rail against people who "pontificate on the issues and tell the women what's wrong here and how they can fix it" only to, y'know, pontificate on the issues and tell women what's wrong here and how they can fix it? What, to be concise, the fuck is going on here?

This situation bears close monitoring, I wager, so on the perhaps optimistic assumption that Myers does something with the "suggestions or gripe[s]" that he asked women to send his way you can look forward to at least one more post on this topic. Until then, can anybody identify some areas where limited discourse really is proper to instantiate? I know there are some and I think it might be constructive to come at this situation from another angle, but I'm having trouble thinking up examples.

There's a meme going around these days (that may actually be much older) that says that liberals, such as myself, either reject all tradition/old stuff or reject tradition/old stuff by default just in virtue of it being old. Thus "conservative" is defined to mean anybody who has any respect at all for "tradition" - howsoever defined - and liberals are accused of rejecting every historically-held belief and cutting of all ties with the past. Presumably someone somewhere along the line actually staked out this kind of position and declared it to be liberal, but that's really not a good reason for the meme to have continued on to this day, as it's simply false. It's true that I prefer not to spend a great deal of time rehashing past discussions but that's not because I have an undue bias against the past: old artworks can of course be good, certain old ideas are very good, etc. and so forth. It's just that rehashing past discussions can get to be a little, well, limiting.

Take Emrys Westacott's article about surveillance. Westacott, who's a philosophy professor at Alfred University, spends basically the whole thing going over arguments that other people have already made. Read enough of it and it starts to sound like a roll call: Kant serves as the centerpiece, but he also name-checks Nietzsche, Plato, Hobbes, and Wordsworth seemingly just to flex his knowledge of opinions belonging to dead white guys. But, again, this in and of itself is not necessarily problematic. Certainly those dead white guys must have made at least some good arguments - at least, I dearly hope so - but it does become a little suspicious that they show up in every single philosophical conversation. In particular, the historical threads from which Westacott weaves his own beliefs are, in this case, very much in tatters.

Roughly, he thinks that surveillance should be limited due to what he calls Kantian concerns about moral development. "On this view," he says, "increased surveillance may carry certain utilitarian benefits" like reduced crime and more trust among citizens, "but the price we pay is a diminution of our moral character. Yes, we do the wrong thing less often; in that sense, surveillance might seem to make us better. But it also stunts our growth as moral individuals." I've expressed my skepticism of the concept of moral growth elsewhere and I'm still not really confident that it's a good metric of anything, but Westacott's arguments fail even if I adopt his (to me, overly intense) fondness for moral growth.

To contrast (perceived) oversight and (perceived) freedom, Westacott uses one of my least favorite philosophical tools: the thought experiment.

"At Scrutiny College, the guide proudly points out that each examination room is equipped with several cameras, all linked to a central monitoring station. Electronic jammers can be activated to prevent examinees from using cell phones or Blackberries. The IT department writes its own cutting-edge plagiarism-detection software. And there is zero tolerance for academic dishonesty: one strike and you’re out on your ear. As a result, says the guide, there is less cheating at Scrutiny than on any other campus in the country. Students quickly see that cheating is a mug’s game, and after a while no-one even considers it.

By contrast, Probity College operates on a straightforward honour system. Students sign an integrity pledge at the beginning of each academic year. At Probity, professors commonly assign take-home exams, and leave rooms full of test takers unproctored. Nor does anyone bother with plagiarism-detecting software such as Turnitin.com. The default assumption is that students can be trusted not to cheat.

Which college would you prefer to attend? Which would you recommend to your own kids?

Or compare two workplaces. At Scrutiny Inc., all computer activity is monitored, with regular random audits to detect and discourage any inappropriate use of company time and equipment, such as playing games, emailing friends, listening to music, or visiting internet sites that cause blood to flow rapidly from the brain to other parts of the body. At Probity Inc., on the other hand, employees are simply trusted to get their work done. Scrutiny Inc. claims to have the lowest rate of time-theft and the highest productivity of any company in its field. But where would you choose to work?"

These just-so scenarios prove, according to Westacott, that "the Kantian ideal still resonates with us. If we regarded the development of moral character as completely empty, misguided or irrelevant, we would be less troubled by the practices of Scrutiny College." As with all thought experiments, this argument suffers a fatal flaw: there's no possible way that Westacott can divine the reason for our reactions just based on the reactions themselves. While it's certainly consistent with the results of the experiment that we all gravitate towards moral growth, it's also consistent with those results that we simply would rather be able to get away with being morally stunted - or any number of other cases that don't support his intended conclusion. (Westacott admits as much himself, as he says that "there is always something we (or at least some part of us) would sooner be doing than being virtuous.") This is just sloppy argumentation on Westacott's part and really very unconvincing, especially since most people don't even understand the concept of Kantian moral growth (or, arguably, just plain moral growth) and therefore could not possibly "resonate" with it.

Another odd problem with Westacott's position is its short-sightedness. Parents, like companies and colleges, should limit their surveillance because "children need to experience the struggle between obligation and inclination" - but why do they need that experience? In a society with very strict surveillance, the idea is that obligation - a weak force in general - is replaced by fear (or just level-headed self-preservation). So Westacott's argument here seems to be this: we should not implement a surveillance state because surveillance states make it difficult for people to behave correctly outside of a surveillance state. That very clearly misses the point, though, because obviously once you've established a state of type x you don't have to worry about what your people will do outside of that kind of state.

Westacott does offer a few worthwhile objections, which he damn well ought to: it's just not that hard to come up with cogent arguments against a surveillance state. (Here's one: it doesn't work.) But these objections depart quite distinctly from the overall tone of his piece and in doing so reinforce my point that maybe it's okay to let go of (e.g.) Kant, at least a little. For example, Westacott rightly observes that "surveillance often signifies a lack of trust" and thus "its effect on any relationship is corrosive." (Okay, so there's a small error there: if surveillance only often signifies a lack of trust, it's hard to see why its effect on any relationship is corrosive. But you get the gist.) Since humans have a hard time being happy or fulfilled without strong relationships, that's a pretty serious strike against (at least certain kinds of) surveillance. But you'll note that it's not really related to moral development and so doesn't really belong in this ostensibly Kantian discourse. Westacott tries to rescue himself by deferring to the widespread practice of raising children in an environment "in which the default expectation is that everyone will fulfill their obligations to one another," but this is really a shot in the dark. Not only does he not have any data about the effects this has on moral character - his argument to that effect is merely the word "surely" - but he also makes the classic gaffe of presuming that the majority must know what it's doing. Given that he has (or, at least, cites) no actual information about how people grow morally, it's very hard to take this argument seriously.

Probably the best thing Westacott says in his whole article is his admission "that the relation between surveillance and moral edification is complicated." Since these complications cut across many fields of knowledge (ethics, obviously, but also psychology, sociology, and politics, among others), this is exactly the kind of relationship around which philosophers ought to tread carefully until they get their hands on some hard data. It certainly doesn't help matters any that Westacott's arguments are so poorly constructed, but even in the best case his conclusions would have to be rather limited in nature - but then, if he were willing to limit his conclusions to the available evidence he wouldn't have signed up as a disciple of someone who was writing centuries before it was even possible to obtain the right evidence. Ultimately, it's philosophers like Westacott who give the lie to the famous Santayana quote: it's precisely because Westacott has learned his history that he's doomed to repeat it.

This God character sure is shifty. I have been led to believe that, in times of hardship, God carries us - you know, the thing about footprints in the sand. But our dear commander in chief evidently believes in another, less hands-on sort of God.

"...what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny -– our determination to fight for the America we want for our children.  Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like.  Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there.  We know we’ll get there.
   
It’s a faith in the future that sustains us as a people.  It is that same faith that sustains our neighbors in the Gulf right now.       

Each year, at the beginning of shrimping season, the region’s fishermen take part in a tradition that was brought to America long ago by fishing immigrants from Europe.  It’s called 'The Blessing of the Fleet,' and today it’s a celebration where clergy from different religions gather to say a prayer for the safety and success of the men and women who will soon head out to sea -– some for weeks at a time. 

The ceremony goes on in good times and in bad.  It took place after Katrina, and it took place a few weeks ago –- at the beginning of the most difficult season these fishermen have ever faced.

And still, they came and they prayed.  For as a priest and former fisherman once said of the tradition, 'The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers.  The blessing is that He is with us always,' a blessing that’s granted 'even in the midst of the storm.'"

"Gee," this God might say, "I was thinking of carrying you through that rough patch, but there was all this gross oil all over the beach, see, and I didn't want to get my feet all oily and disgusting, so I figured you could probably handle it on your own."

What's even weirder is that Obama spends the earlier portion of his speech enumerating the various things that we, not God, are doing to make the situation better (or, at least, to try).

• "We now have nearly 30,000 personnel who are working across four states to contain and clean up the oil.  Thousands of ships and other vessels are responding in the Gulf."
• "I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness."
• "Ray Mabus, the Secretary of the Navy, who is also a former governor of Mississippi and a son of the Gulf Coast, [will] develop a long-term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan as soon as possible.  The plan will be designed by states, local communities, tribes, fishermen, businesses, conservationists and other Gulf residents." 
• "I’ve established a National Commission to understand the causes of this disaster and offer recommendations on what additional safety and environmental standards we need to put in place."

Whether or not these specific actions will improve things is open to question, but you will note that each of them is a specific, concrete action that some person or group of people can and will perform. God, by way of contrast, will apparently not do or even consider doing any of that stuff...or, in fact, anything at all. It's hard to make Obama look good by comparison these days, especially considering that the most apt comparison is with Obama himself back before he got elected, but I would take even the half-assed post-election paper tiger Obama over a God whose major accomplishment is its acute observational skill.

The tea people in the gulf, and their marginally less whacked-out fellow conservatives, would be wise to understand that help, when it comes, comes from human hands (and, probably, the hands of humans who work for and are paid by the government): the sand, in reality, has millions of sets of footprints, but none of them are divine in nature. Any being that comprehends human suffering and merely watches it happen deserves no praise, and our president ought not perpetuate the falsehood that there's anyone out there helping us (supporting us, "blessing" us) besides us. As a wise person once said, we are the ones we've been waiting for.

I really hate to say that, because I honestly think that soccer is a beautiful game, but there are two things about it that really ruin the experience: players and refs.

Not all players ruin it, if for no other reason that not every player gets the chance to ruin a game. But look at this and tell me that you don't feel at least a little sick.




As Dale says, this behavior is embarrassing and disgraceful. I'll add to that the claim that it's also malicious and mean-spirited - Abdul Kader Keita's dive in his game against Brazil, for instance, cost one of his opponents the chance to play in his next match. Moreover, when viewed in the context of the game, Keita unquestionably intended this result: his team was being soundly beaten and, in the manner common to professional athletes, decided that the appropriate response was to injure someone on the other team. When the refereeing crew tried to impose themselves on the proceedings so as to prevent an injury, Keita's Ivory Coast teammates then responded by playing the role of victim, which led directly to the scene below.



This has no place in sports; to be frank, it has no place anywhere.

The second problem, which is bound up with the first, is that the sport has too few and too few capable referees - and no safety net. Basketball refs do a fair job of getting calls right with a 10:3 player-to-ref ratio, but soccer officials are asked to make do with a 22:4 ratio. (For those in the audience who aren't mathematically inclined, that's way more players per ref.) Furthermore, there is not a single case in which the refs are allowed to look at any kind of instant replay. Not even when a player is blatantly offside immediately prior to scoring a goal...

...or when a goal is wrongly disallowed...


...can the officials receive a helping hand and rectify their mistakes. The smallness of their margin of error is only made more frustrating by the low-scoring nature of world-quality football. While the players could of course stand to be a little less mentally fragile - Mexico in particular really fell apart - it's entirely possible for a blown call to be the only reason why one team advances and another does not. Add in the consideration that instant replay would help to better police the sport's rampant fakery and it's very hard to see a reason not to implement some sort of change to make the refereeing more consistent and more accurate.

Hopefully the best team wins this World Cup - but even if that does happen we'll arguably never know it. If the cost of sports is the creation of grievances, let those at least be sporting grievances and not complaints about underhanded playing tactics or incompetent/insufficiently supported refereeing. The beauty of the game surely does not require ugliness of this sort; we can only benefit by eliminating it. Even though it won't help the USA win - we'd need some semblance of a defense for that, methinks - and even though it's just sports, every little bit counts.

You sort of have to wonder what inspired Paul Jacob to write this article when he did. It's not that he wrote it - columnists write stuff like this all the time - it's that he wrote it now.

"It is an anniversary one does not celebrate, but mourn. The pain is still fresh — piercing and overwhelming for the loved ones of the nine Washington, D.C.-area residents killed in the crash of two red-line Metro trains near the border of D.C. and Maryland on June 22, 2009.

...The Washington-area Metro system faces a myriad of troubles, but behind and beneath them all lies the specter of profit. A lack of profit."

Would it really be too much to ask for him to just wait a few months (optimistically) until the oil thing is over and done with? Do we really need someone to be telling us right now that profit is a panacea?

Quite obviously profits, even huge profits, do not reliably prevent businesses or other organizations from failing to maintain certain basic safety measures. This goes back to Vonnegut's observation "that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance": for whatever reasons, humans tend not to make the right conclusions about risk. Presumably humans make the wrong decisions more frequently in cases where resources are scarce - which includes but is not limited to low-profit/loss-taking scenarios - but that's a presumption that needs to be borne out with evidence and is at any rate very different from the argument that Jacob makes.

We know by now that market fetishists like Jacob aren't living in the real world; that's fairly well established. So it's not really surprising that he would produce an argument that fails in this specific way: in the fairy-tale land that he inhabits, the world revolves around money and he who profits can do no wrong. (Note, for example, that he blames the "federal regulatory regime" for its failure in the gulf but not BP: BP makes money, so it's exempt.) But we're being deluged - pardon the expression - with news about BP's horrendous safety record, devil-may-care attitude towards complaints and violations, and tendency to put its image ahead of the health and well-being of actual people. How, in the face of this news, can Jacob still pretend as though safety violations reduce in every case to a problem with one's profit margins? I feel bad saying that he's really stupid enough to have not thought this out, but what alternative is there? Intentional deception on his part? That's just depressing.


The sad thing here isn't even how wrong he is, it's that his line of thinking takes us directly away from the real problems. If we want to create, in his words, "an economic system and a political order that will render such tragedies as unlikely as possible," we will need a plan that address a much wider range of issues than simply the fiscal. By advocating for a one-variable solution to a multivariate problem, Jacob is essentially influencing our social decision-making process in a direction that's doomed to failure. This is of course his right in a free society, but if there were any justice in the world he would have been the one on that BP rig when it blew up.

When they sit down to write the history of the internet, they will be remiss if they leave out such irritatingly popular web classics as Hamster Dance and that one company with the online greeting cards that were actually just a bunch of anchors and a .wav file. Indeed, as Kate Beaton demonstrates(ish), technology has let's say always been used to bug the living shit out of people.

But with improvements in the capability and efficiency of our devices, we have also become more creative and effective when it comes to making people want to throttle us. Today's examples of technology that you cannot turn away from no matter how hard you try include a neat little piece of code called The Swinger that takes any piece of music and makes you hate yourself for listening to it. Observe:

Money for Nothing (swing version) by TeeJay

You have to give this Tristan Jehan fellow credit for his programing ability - I suppose; someone back me up on this one - but one can easily imagine this technology ending up in the wrong hands. While it would be a brilliant April fool's joke to replace all of the music on someone's mp3 player with swung versions of the same songs, for instance, that's also a really good way to make someone doubt their own sanity.

Speaking of cases of questionable sanity, someone may have wanted to interrupt this gentleman and take him back to a safe environment.


That's a demonstration of Microsoft's Kinect system, which ostensibly is an answer to the Wii's motion-based gaming suite (although I don't recall Nintendo ever asking whether or not pasty white guys can dance). Since the system is still being developed it's hard to say for sure how it'll turn out, but it's probably not a good sign that arms akimbo dancing guy up there doesn't once crack a smile. I mean, I wouldn't smile if I were doing that dance either, but presumably somebody paid him to be up there, which means he should at least have tried to look like he was enjoying himself. If I had to come up with a tagline for Kinect based just on that video, it'd be this: "All the incredible awkwardness of a bar mitzvah party without any of the tacky plastic crap that you get to take home at the end of the night." Enticing? In a disturbing way, yes. Enticing enough to spend hundreds of dollars on? Nooooooo.

But the absolutely canonical case of technology that's so bad it's good has to be YouTube's new gadget. Watch this video for a few seconds and then click on the little soccer ball icon towards the bottom right - you'll thank me later.

Those fucking assholes had it coming! (There are seals on the gulf, right?)

Well, now I have seen everything.

"The story has all the makings of a gynecological horror flick: 'Cornell Surgeon Used Vibrator To Stimulate 6-Year-Olds,' gasped the headline in Jezebel. Dan Savage declared himself so angry that 'I hardly know where to start.' (On our own XX Factor blog, my colleague Rachael Larimore called it 'appalling.') The villain in this medical horror story is one aptly[??] named Dr. Dix Poppas, a pediatric urologist at Cornell University who specializes in genital reconstruction. [For a more detailed version of the story, see this post - LN] Outrage was so universal that a new Facebook page called 'End Genital Mutilation at Cornell University' is racking up thousands of members a day, and Poppas has begun receiving death threats.

Is it true? Is there some rogue doctor surgically slicing the clitorises of little girls and then testing them with vibrators? Not exactly."

That is a very interesting contention, "not exactly." I'm not sure how you can inexactly perform unethical surgeries on infants - I mean, there's no such thing as unethical-ish, is there? - but Hanna Rosin seems pretty confident, so let's see where she goes with this.

"Dreger and Feder...raised many valid ethical questions about Poppas' research...[He employed a surgical procedure that] doctors call clitoroplasty, or cosmetic reduction of the size of the clitoris...Poppas used a machine called a biothesiometer [on the girls' clitorises], used to test vibrations in human subjects...Poppas did not go through the standard channels of approval for the experiment."

Uh...so there was a rogue doctor (one who "did not go through the standard channels of approval") surgically slicing the clitorises of little girls (performing "cosmetic reduction[s] of the size of the clitoris[es]") and then testing them with vibrators ("machine[s] called...biothesiometer[s]") - but that's "not exactly" the same as a rogue doctor surgically slicing the clitorises of little girls and then testing them with vibrators? Bullshit.

Rosin's concern seems to be Poppas's reputation - although why anybody should worry about that is beyond me. She makes the entirely fair point that his research "does not make him a child molester," but that certainly doesn't mean that he was also not a rogue doctor surgically slicing etc. The closest she comes to an actual defense of his actions is to say that "the world is not yet a place where most little girls can have a clitoris that looks like a penis and feel entirely at ease." Unfortunately, this argument - if she actually takes it seriously and wasn't just trying to play the role of "balanced" journalist - makes her about as much of a sociopath as Poppas is.

Little girls, Rosin evidently reasons, cannot consistently feel comfortable with clitorises over a certain size, therefore we must allow their parents to sign them up for unsafe cosmetic surgery and perhaps also invasive, psychologically harmful, and completely unproductive post-surgery checkups. (How she knows what little girls feel about their clitorises and what specific size is too big are questions that we can set aside for the moment.) But what happens for other physical traits that make people uncomfortable? If you're a black parent and you recall the hardships you underwent growing up black in the U.S., how much crazy shit will Rosin permit you to do to your newborn to spare them the discomfort of being targeted by racists? Or if a child is born with too many fingers, would she want the doctors to just lop some off? Men might see their male children and worry about the potential for future penis anxiety, but it would be really horrific if we okayed penis-enhancement surgery for infants, wouldn't it? Obesity might have a genetic component - should doctors be allowed to perform obesity-mitigating surgeries on infants? The bottom line is that people feel uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons, and the mere possibility of a child feeling uncomfortable in the future is not sufficient justification for screwing with that child's body. Especially when the cosmetic surgery in question is known to be one whose safety cannot be guaranteed, this practice is just plain wrong.

At this point we can pretty safely discard Rosin's support for Poppas. When she isn't contradicting herself she's proposing totally untenable (bio)ethical standards, and apparently all to no end: remember, Rosin does admit that there are "many valid ethical questions" in this case, that his "patients...could never benefit from the [vibrator] test," and that the test itself was scientifically useless. So why does she even bother?

I can't say for sure, but it's hard not to notice that she twice defends Poppas against the charge of being a pedophile. While this accusation is certainly unwarranted and quite possibly libelous - assuming, that is, that anybody has actually made it; Rosin never cites someone who does - Rosin should absolutely not over-correct "the blogosphere" by making Poppas out to be a fundamentally good person ("He was [just] trying to answer a legitimate scientific question," you guys!) who made a few mistakes. It's entirely possible to come down hard on Poppas without endorsing any claims about his sexual proclivities - here, I'll prove it: "I may have no idea about what gets Dix Poppas off, but I do know that he's a loathsome bastard." See? That wasn't very hard at all. Whatever it is that stopped Rosin from making that same statement she badly needs to take some time to introspect, cause right now she's on the wrong side of one of the least complex moral issues around.

Quick - what's missing from this analysis of Mitregate, the recent Episcopal scandal in which a female bishop from the U.S. was instructed to take off her silly hat while visiting a male bishop in the U.K.?

"...this is more than a petty church quarrel.  In the larger picture, Rowan Williams' actions demonstrate something much more troubling.

Christianity in the west is in a persistent state of decline (this includes England and the United States), losing spiritual market share in favor of other religions and atheism.  Why?  Some of the loss is due to the fact that most western people find Christianity boring and hypocritical--sentiments that the spiritual head of the Church of England underlined by Mitregate."

"The United States has always been challenged by the ethical implications of how we obtain energy, and energy acquisition has always been the seamiest side of this country.  During the American Revolution a great many of our greatest leaders were from the South, particularly Virginia.  Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were also vocal opponents of the slave system, though they could not figure out how to abolish it.  Because they did not, ultimately it abolished the values to which they dedicated their lives."

You know, if you name yourself "Assistant Village Idiot" on the internet you're basically asking for trouble. Of course, it really doesn't help matters any when you write crap.

"Contemplating the universe two posts ago – and yes, I used picture-thinking – I focused, as most of us do, on a small blue planet in an obscure corner of a smallish galaxy. For no obvious reason, something called 'life' developed there, something dynamic and reproducing itself. Just a curiosity, really...

Along the way, the creatures that worked well together reproduced better than those who worked poorly together. These habits of getting along they started to think of as imperatives, something that had to be taught within the group for survival...Like the Electric Monk in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, they believed things because they were programmed to.

We have gotten all the way to morality, even to Natural Law, and we have still not found a meaning for it. It’s just a subprogram among our survival mechanisms. Each group of human creatures has its variant, and believes it to be true. But true has no meaning, only survival."

Ah, the sweet pain of gibberish: "true has no meaning, only survival." That would be beautiful in a way if I had read it in the subtitles in an old kung-fu movie, but coming from a native English speaker and in the absence of martial arts awesomeness it's a little disturbing.

"Do you begin to see why the nonbeliever’s insistence that they can be just as moral as the next guy is true, but it is a truth with no value? It helps the group to survive, but really, why should we care? It helps us to survive individually, but why should we care about that, either? It’s an opposable thumb, the loss of a tail, a purple flower.

Existentialism provides no relief, and these are the dark paths that Nietzsche and others trod. If there is actual meaning, but we might become an Ubermensch by discovering and imposing a meaning on our own existence, why should we bother? It sounds all noble and intellectual fierce, but so what? Those words have no meaning.

We might adopt something else – anything else – which pleases us and be just as well off by any measure. This morality protects its young, but what would be the objection the morality which ate its young?"

Gah! I should've known that Nietzsche would show up here - that tricky bastard seems to appear everywhere these days. Assistant Village Idiot - hereafter Avi - naturally wants to supplant these atheistic moral systems with a theistic one, but his criticisms (and subsequent suggestion) are so poorly-constructed that you begin to wonder if maybe he was working in BP's oil rig construction division.

To begin with, Avi builds his objection on a classic fallacy of composition. Each of the components that goes into our lives ("an opposable thumb") has no meaning on its own, he says, and if we zoom out we'll see that the sum total of our lives won't have any meaning either, so therefore our lives and the moral decisions we make have no meaning. Besides being a fallacy, this is a pattern of reasoning that Avi can't actually support. For example, despite my rhetoric, we should all be able to admit that there's no moral difference between the Lakers winning a title and any other team winning one. Viewed on the large scale, then, the basketball season is morally meaningless. But does that mean that all of the events in the basketball season are likewise moot? Not hardly.



Coming at it from the other direction, we're all made up of atoms and individual atoms can't make morally weighty decisions, but it doesn't follow (and Avi certainly doesn't believe) that we ourselves are incapable of making morally weighty decisions.

Then there's his contention that we could arbitrarily change our behavior "and be just as well off by any measure." Hopefully he meant to say something else, because this is almost a contradiction in terms: if we choose the measure by which we don't eat our young, we'll very obviously do worse off if we change to "the morality which ate its young." I'm not sure what exactly he was trying to say with this section, but whatever it is it did not come across.

Really, though, neither of those arguments is the main draw. Avi, you should have guessed by now, is not particularly bright, one result of which is that he lacks the rhetorical skill to make those two arguments seem any less stupid than they are. But the one thing that even infants can do is a repeat a word over and over and over again, and that's where Avi finds his real strength. True has no meaning, we can be good existentialists and create our own meaning but only if there's absolute meaning, "noble" and "intellectual fierce" have no meaning - "there is," he aptly sums up, "simply no meaning."

This might come off as somewhat flippant, but I can't shake the feeling that Avi is basically this guy.


It's actually quite easy to parry Avi's appeal to meaning from a logical standpoint: as meaning is dependent on the presence of a mind capable of finding things meaningful, there's no reason to believe that meaning is what makes morality real. Anyway, if we're eliminated from the conversation because we were "programmed" to think a certain way, that would have to apply to God as well: Christians say repeatedly that God's nature is moral, but what is "nature" in this case except a veiled reference to programming?

But Avi doesn't want his concerns to be addressed logically. He wants to be satisfied, to be made to feel a certain way. It's no coincidence that he has this sense of dissatisfaction - asking incoherent questions like "what makes goodness valuable" is basically guaranteed to screw with one's sense of equanimity. In fact, this is one of the strongest pieces of evidence against Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism: he presumes that, since we're good at finding facts, our brains must be in some sense designed to find facts, when in fact our brains are apparently constructed so as to find explanations. Even in possession of all the facts, many of us are still irresistibly tempted to seek an explanation for those facts, as though tautologies like x*y = x*y or "we ought to behave rightly" somehow require some complicated proof. Adding God to the picture won't help to explain arithmetic and it won't help to explain morality - but it can very well act as an emotional salve for people who don't know when to stop scratching at a particular intellectual itch.

The distressing thing here is not that Avi buys into the argument from too many questions: he, sadly, just is not reflective enough to know any better. No, the distressing thing is that he almost certainly discovered that argument in the writings of a person who had the smarts to realize the mistake they were making - and that it's those people who are going to continue to perpetuate this idiocy.

As a philosopher, this puts me in two minds, one of which is cringing and the other one of which is desperately eager to help this Stephen Hall person not sound like such a doofus.

"Wisdom is not the same as knowledge, and so it seems odd it has attracted the attention of science. There is such a thing as 'wisdom studies' now, and in his book Hall talks to researchers and neuroscientists in a search for the latest information about wisdom. Scientists treat wisdom the way they treat anything else. They break it down into its smallest components to identify and test, and they attempt to figure out how it works, how to obtain it, and what it is. There are, according to Hall and the researchers he meets, eight attributes of wisdom: Emotional Regulation, Knowing What's Important, Moral Reasoning, Compassion, Humility, Altruism, Patience, and Dealing with Uncertainty. Tests are designed, studies are lined up, and college undergrads short of cash or in need of class credit are recruited as lab rats in our pursuit of wisdom."

First of all, whoever came up with the phrase "wisdom studies" deserves to be dragged out into the street and shot. More importantly, though, these Helpfully Capitalized Attributes seem to have a great deal of overlap: Knowing What's Important, for example, seems like a direct subset of Moral Reasoning. Still, I do have to express my pleasure with the difficulties that Hall ascribes to the process of finding wisdom.

"There is a danger in seeing this as a map of isolated points rather than a three-dimensional, pulsing, dynamic network of neural coordination, one that is constantly changing, and changeable, one that is weighted with different inputs depending on our previous experiences, our learning, our mood that day, the general uncertainty or anxiety we may be feeling, our life circumstances at any time, our age and stage of life — a network that is, in a word, idiosyncratic."

Quite so: wisdom, if it exists at all, is dependent on a whole host of idiosyncratic factors, many of which are likely in conflict with each other. It's odd, then, that Jessa Crispin - whose review of Hall is where I'm getting all of this from - would say that "[w]e know the value of wisdom." I mean, do we? Given that we're just now getting down to identifying what wisdom is - and given how slowly that process is coming along - it seems hard to justify saying that we know much about wisdom at all, let alone that we know its value. (Unless, of course, Crispin's italics indicate that she means "know" in the sense of "feel in our guts" instead of "know" in the sense of "know." In that case I have no objection.) She justifies her claim thusly:

"We know that narcissists should not be in charge of industries that can wipe out people's lives — our Enrons, our BPs, our Bear Stearns. But as long as it's possible to make money this way, we don't fuss about it too much. We know that we should be caring for the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, but we don't want to pay higher taxes to do so, nor do we really want to donate much of our time or money. When it comes down to it, we greatly prefer the life of the binary, of the scale of one to 10, the things broken down to their smallest components."

This is my problem with wisdom: the gap between narcissism and wisdom is huge, but people tend to look for wisdom as though it exists wherever vices aren't. For my part, I don't think we ought to hold out for wise leaders; I think competency is quite sufficient all on its own. It's also very hard to see how our social failure to care for the poor is due to a paucity of wisdom - again, if we refuse to take action until we reach the wise solution, we'll never even start. (In particular, the whole point of using mandatory taxes to help the poor is that the people supplying the money don't have to be wise. Taxes, in other words, circumvent wisdom.) Our current wisdom deficit may well be a problem, but I don't see how it helps any to cast it as the problem. Oh - and, for the record? "The life of the binary" can't be measured on "the scale of one to 10" - which, also for the record, should have been written "the scale of one to ten" - because the meaning of the word "binary" sorta kinda precludes going all the way up to ten. Just sayin'.

But by far the most disappointing part of Crispin's review is her closing. "I remember Hall's chapter on Patience," she says, "and maybe a chapter he should have included: Faith. Because wisdom isn't a bolt out of the blue. It's the low hum of the hive. And the hive? It's buzzing." Not to be dense, but what the fuck does that even mean? What is "the hive," and what does it mean that it's "buzzing"? Furthermore, what does a buzzing hive have to do with faith or patience? How does "the low hum" contrast with "a bolt out of the blue" - and, once more, what's the relationship between blue bolts and faith or patience? This imagery, frankly, is awful.

Furthermore, who does Crispin think she is to suggest that Hall add faith to his list of Helpfully Capitalized Attributes? Hall did presumably at least months' worth of research for the book that he wrote on this very topic, during which time he consulted (apparently) with the leading scientists in the field - and Crispin, a book reviewer with no real scientific chops, has the gall to suggest that he missed something? Obviously part of my irritation here is due to the specific suggestion that she chose to make - faith, as you all know by now, is not real high on my list of desirable character traits - but that's only the minor part: her cavalier, borderline anti-science attitude is much more problematic than the specific way in which she expresses that attitude. It's one thing to assess a work of nonfiction based on its factual accuracy or to dispute its logic, but it should be fairly clear that Crispin's suggestion doesn't match either of those descriptions. If anything, her closing words strike against the entire rest of her review: forget the science and the research, she's saying, wisdom is just whatever silly bullshit makes you smile. Do you like faith? Throw it in! Do bees really belong in this conversation? Probably not, but the idea of a "low hum" seems neat to me, so why not!

I still think that wisdom doesn't exist as a coherent idea, but even I am offended by the casual disrespect on display here. Cripsin's reaction is pretty much a paradigm case of now not to react to scientific research. Especially when you take into account our poor cultural understanding of science and the fragility of the particular scientific field in question, her fancifulness verges on the irresponsible. If you don't have the intellectual maturity to take empirical evidence seriously even when it runs counter to your fairy-tale worldview, fine - just stay the hell out of scientific conversations.

It's too bad that father's day just happened, because Ken Blackwell's kids would know exactly what to get him after reading this article.

"We already know something of the unusual ideas of human rights and commerce held by U.S. Solicitor General, Elena Kagan. Kagan has been nominated by President Obama to succeed the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. Kagan also served in the Clinton White House, where she left an extensive paper trail of documented opinions.

Most interesting, perhaps, is Kagan’s support for cloning human beings. Clinton Library documents show that she opposed any effort by Congress to prevent human beings from being cloned specifically to create embryos that would be experimented upon, then killed."

Okay, so there's no argument here yet, but give it a moment. Obviously Blackwell sees something suspicious in Kagan's stance - which, by the way, isn't he like months late with this Kagan stuff? - or else he wouldn't have used the euphemistic "interesting," but wait til you see what he actually thinks is going on.

Since Kagan also rejects the Supreme Court's "ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission," Blackwell continues,

"we can clearly see that the kind of disregard for human rights Kagan denied in her advocacy of cloning human beings extends to property rights and to suppression of free speech.  All our Bill of Rights guarantees--including freedom of speech and assembly--can only be safe in a constitutional order that respects human life. We must stand for free markets, but those free markets themselves are supported by respect for those inalienable rights with which we are endowed by our Creator. When those rights are denied by government, destructive forces are unleashed against free markets as well."

The connections between these various subjects - cloning, corporate speech (which is to say, corporate funding of speech), the always-nebulous respect for human life, free markets, and God - are so tenuous as to be basically nonexistent. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Kagan is wrong on both cloning and Citizens United. What, then, does that have to do with the free market? If anything, her position on cloning is more laissez-faire than Blackwell's, and it's rather difficult to see how limiting corporate influence on elections is an infringement on market principles. In fact, I can't name even one "destructive force" that could be "unleashed against free markets" as a result of Kagan's positions - nor, it seems, can Blackwell.

Furthermore, in what sense is the right to assembly threatened by the legality of cloning? Blackwell's thesis seems to be that all of our rights stand or fall together, but the very premise of his article disproves that: he would have to say that, prior to Citizens United, we were subject to "suppression of free speech" and had been for a long time. Yet we were hardly living in a fascist hellhole during that time, which must mean that "our Bill of Rights guarantees" can "be safe" without respect for "human life" (again, whatever that's supposed to mean).

If Blackwell had taken the time to express himself more thoroughly, we would likely have learned that his problems come from faulty definitions. For example, he seems to consider corporations to fall under the category of "human life," which is so mind-bogglingly wrong as to make you wonder how he has been allowed to keep his job. Given only what we can see in this article, though, it sure looks like he's an out-and-out paranoiac: Kagan can't just be wrong in two unrelated cases, she has to also devalue human life, distrust free markets, and hate God. Since we're not living in a Dan Brown novel - fortunately - not everything has to be connected through these nigh-mystic levels of decoding and faux-detective work. Wherever this delusion comes from, it's not a good sign that Blackwell and his cohort feel the need to always feel compelled to look for a grand explanation that ties everything together in a neat little package: for one, it means that they never come to examine the actual arguments being made by their opponents; for another, it's just not a sane belief. The sooner we can excise this conspiracy-theory garbage from our political discourse, the better.

Give Meghan Duke credit that she doesn't outright endorse the findings of the Pew Global Attitudes Project - but only as much credit as you take away because she also doesn't take the hint.

"The people have spoken, the results are in. Pluralities or majorities in eighteen of twenty-two countries surveyed for the Pew Global Attitudes Project think that Americans are not religious enough. According to the report 'this is especially true in all three Arab nations surveyed—Jordan (89%), Egypt (81%), and Lebanon (64%)—as well as in Indonesia (67%) and Pakistan (55%). Majorities also hold this view in India (57%), Brazil (55%), Mexico (56%), Kenya (53%) and Nigeria (57%).' For that matter, 64 percent of Americans surveyed think that Americans are not religious enough.

While there is general consensus that America should be more religious, I suspect that this reflects nothing more than the general consensus that religion is a good thing and you can’t have too much of it."

When you are on a list with Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, and Nigeria, you really need to think about how to get off that list. Duke wisely dissociates herself from the survey by intimating that she doesn't find the results persuasive, but when it comes to the notion "that religion is a good thing and you can't have too much of it" her silence is deafening. Why, just look at Jordan:

"A Jordanian man confessed to stabbing to death his pregnant sister and mutilating her body to protect the family honor, said Jordanian authorities on Sunday.

...The incident, the ninth such case this year and the second this month, took place in the village of Basira, in the conservative Bedouin heartland of southern Jordan.

Strict tribal and religious values are enforced in these villages, including the belief that women carry the family's honor."

Is it too much religion when a pregnant woman is "stabbed repeatedly in the face, neck, abdomen and back as well as being hacked up with a meat cleaver" because of "tribal and religious values"? Apparently Meghan Duke does not know. Perhaps more examples will help.

"Two years after the death of the Rev. Marcial Maciel, a Mexico native, scandals continue to unfold: Just the other day in Mexico City, two brothers came forward, claiming tearfully that not only was Maciel their father, he had also sexually abused them.

Buffeted by the string of revelations, Maciel's powerful Legion of Christ is fighting for its survival in Rome, the headquarters of the church. But here in Mexico, where the Legion has long-standing ties with the ruling class and an expansive network of elite schools, the organization remains strong.

...As the Catholic Church is rocked by scandals about abusive priests and the failure of its hierarchy to confront them, Maciel in many ways embodies the insidiousness of the problem."

Still not too much religion?

"Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities."

How about the rapidly-developing nation of India? Surely a country could not make such great strides if it, too, was plagued by religious extremism.

"Ms. Nirupama Pathak, a bright young business journalist based in Delhi, was brutally murdered recently by her family for carrying on an inter-caste relationship with a male colleague.

Last year, there were 100 honor killings recorded in the Indian state of Haryana alone, according to Washington Post."

And let's not forget about the ol' stars and stripes, which of course features not just religious violence of all sorts but also absurd amounts of pressure designed to essentially turn parts of the country into little mini-theocracies.

Now, maybe Duke knows all of this. In fact, I presume that almost every adult knows this, if only because information is so hard to avoid these days. But the trick is not just to know that there's such a thing as too much religion, it's to work that knowledge into one's understanding of the world and not try to ignore it in the way that Duke has done. Our presence on that list doesn't constitute a knock-down proof that we in the U.S. are (statistically) doing something wrong, but it sure does point strongly in that direction.

It's now day, what, twelve? of the World Cup, which means I can only credit myself for eleven days' worth of self-restraint. Humbled, I now to present the real star of this year's soccer tournament: the vuvuzela.

"The vuvuzela (English pronunciation: /vuːvuːˈzeɪlə/, also known as lepatata (its Tswana name) and stadium horn, is a typical 65 cm (2 ft) plastic blowing horn that produces a loud, distinctive monotone (B♭3) note...

As part of its marketing campaign for the World Cup, Korean automaker Hyundai and a local South African advertising agency called Jupiter Drawing Room created the largest working vuvuzela in the world—114 feet (35 m) long—on an unfinished flyover road in Cape Town. The giant vuvuzela is powered by several air horns attached at the mouthpiece end, and it was intended to be blown at the beginning of each of the World Cup matches; however Reuters reported that by 18 June 2010, a week into the World Cup, it had not yet sounded a note during the tournament because of a dispute between the operator and the city authorities over its noise levels.

During the opening ceremony the announcer had to ask fans using vuvuzelas to be quiet as he could not be heard."

Having annoyed the shit out of every living being to encounter it - and especially the French, who as we all know are extra-irritable by nature - the vuvuzela has apparently gone so far on the "Make It Stop" axis that it has come back out the other side and become almost an object of worship. It has caught the attention of cultural icons like The Onion and FML for starters, and (as any good meme does) it has generated its own easily sharable image alterations:




Too big a fan to appreciate the internet's characteristic sarcasm? No problem - just check out Vuvuzela Radio! Having an argument with your friends about who's the bigger vuvuzela lover? We can help you with that, too! Need to have the absolute latest, up-to-the-second updates about the vuvuzela? Follow it on twitter! Just be careful who you talk to about the anti-vuvuzela filter, as you may well be labeled a vuvuzelapostate.

But if you are a hardcore vuvuzela fan - a vuvuzelaficionado; dare I say vuvuzeladdict? - there is only one way to get your fix: vuvuzela time. You can thank me once they let you out of your padded room.