Rust Belt Philosophy

So here's a fun fact about the NBA this year: the two teams who were probably the two most-favored to reach the finals in their respective conferences (Chicago in the east, LA in the west) both had a player call somebody a "faggot" during a game, and neither advanced to the finals. With that thought in mind, let's turn to the person least likely to ever play in that league, Phyllis Schlafly.

"Students in all grades at Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, Calif., were given two days of gender diversity lessons designed to teach them that gender is not confined to the 'binary concept' of two options...The major message was that 'gender identity' means people can choose to be different from the sex assigned at birth and can freely 'change their sex.' According to Gender Spectrum, 'Gender identity is a spectrum where people can be girls, feel like girls, they feel like boys, they feel like both, or they can feel like neither.'"

Nnnnno, I don't think that's what they meant. I don't think they said that the concept of gender identity is what allows people to change their sex. I also don't think they said that people can freely change their sex, like some kind of crazy bio-genital psychic power or something. Probably - and this is just a guess - they said something like this:

"Most people develop a gender identity that matches their biological sex. For some, however, their gender identity is different from their biological or assigned sex. Some of these individuals choose to socially, hormonally and/or surgically change their sex to more fully match their gender identity."

Some slight differences there.

That, however, utterly pales in comparison to what she says later in the article.

"Memorial Middle School in Fitchburg, Mass., featured another type of classroom atrocity: requiring pupils to answer nosy questions that are not only intrusive but designed to lead the kids into unacceptable behaviors. The survey, called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, was created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also provided the funding for it to be administered...

'During your life, how many times have you used methamphetamines (also called speed, crystal, crank, or ice)?' 'During the past 30 days, how many times did you sniff glue, breathe the contents of aerosol spray cans, or inhale any paints or sprays to get high?'"

I am somehow not convinced that an epidemic of paint-huffing is going to start now that kids are learning about it from government surveys in schools. Schlafly is pretty old, but even so it doesn't seem probable that school surveys were really cool when she was a kid. More than being upsetting, though, I feel like this is just disappointing. I've come to expect a really high level of skill from my fearmongers, but Schlafly totally phoned this one in. Hopefully we can install those death panels soon and withhold whatever dark magic is keeping her desiccated frame alive.

Ladies and gentlemen, a conservative answer to the current state of higher education!

"Peter Thiel is rocking the boat of higher education. The libertarian entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and co-founder of PayPal is sending liberal college administrators into a tizzy with his latest push to encourage young innovators to ditch college for two years and pursue entrepreneurship.

Last week, Thiel awarded 20 young people with '20 Under 20' Thiel Fellowships: $100,000 and two years of mentorship to develop entrepreneurial ventures in science and technology...

Parents, before you feel tempted to write out that six-figure tuition check, consider doing yourselves and your child a favor by honestly assessing the skills that your child demonstrates. If your child thrives within structure or if they want to pursue law or medicine, then college is likely the right path. However, if your child thrives in a creative environment, is self-driven and is constantly innovating, you should consider offering them your own version of Thiel’s 20 Under 20 fellowship as an alternative to subsidizing their college tuition."

Notice, first of all, that Katie Kieffer doesn't even mention trade work. Already that's a bit weird, because college and business aren't the only options. Maybe she doesn't bring them up because the trades won't keep someone in the middle class, but then wouldn't it be important for Kieffer to think some about why our society has devalued manual labor, a necessary part of all societies, to the point where a total gamble is more attractive?

And make no mistake: that's what the entrepreneurship route is, a gamble. Far from being any kind of insurance policy, investing money in the possibility of one's own success as a businessperson is a relatively large payout with a relatively small expected return. Running a business is no mean feat, and a little bit of creativity isn't gonna suffice. Kieffer, moreover, would know this if she had just done her research: most of the Thiel fellowship recipients already have some years of college education under their belts, and a few even have degrees. (For an extra bonus, look at the ages of those recipients who do have college experience. You think just anyone could graduate from MIT at fourteen?) Also falling under the category of "do your damn research," it's not at all clear that most college parents even have $100,000 to stuff in their kids' pockets. This, in fact, is part of the reason that "debt loads are mounting": debt, you see, only happens when someone borrows money from someone else, which college students would never, ever have to do if their parents always covered their tuition fees. Likewise, I can't help but feel skeptical that most parents can provide "two years of mentorship" from eminently qualified sources. If entrepreneurship is a serious gamble all on its own - which it is - it's an even riskier proposition when you start off with too little money and too few resources (or by taking on loans that you won't be able to pay back should your venture fail).

There is, of course, nothing wrong with entrepreneurship per se - it's a large part of why we still have an economy at all. But touting it as "an insurance policy" is not only stupid but is dishonest in a way that's liable to get people hurt. If we want to develop an insurance policy for the middle class, it needs to be something that can actually function as, y'know, an insurance policy: it needs to be widely available, it needs to have a relatively sure payout in the case that it's needed, it needs to distribute risk, and it needs to work for the entire duration during which the risk is present. (This last reason, incidentally, is why most product warranties fail to be real insurance.) Entrepreneurship, however, has none of those features. In the form that Kieffer mentions, which is the only form at all likely to succeed, it's available to very few people; its payout odds are limited at best; it focuses rather than distributes risk; and it won't be helpful years down the line if it doesn't succeed in the short term. While she's right to criticize four-year colleges for being poor insurance vehicles, Kieffer is dead wrong to think that entrepreneurship is even marginally better.

Maybe Bruce Ledewitz needs to take a moment of silence himself:

"It happens every year around this time: a public high school in a small town schedules a graduation prayer in plain violation of the 1992 Supreme Court case prohibiting such prayers, Lee v. Weisman; then a local student steps up to demand that the prayer be dropped and a moment of silence, or other invocation, be substituted. There is local outrage but the school board’s attorney recommends compliance to save litigation costs. In the end, the local community is fodder for sophisticated national ridicule. It’s the Scopes Monkey Trial all over again...

But there are...fundamental reasons to reconsider Lee. The substitution of moments of silence for prayer suggests that there’s no communal expression of meaning possible in American life, which is tantamount to the promotion of a kind of radical individualism. We are supposed to be a political community. Community requires some kind of creed—though not of course necessarily a religious creed. Silence is no substitute for communal expression, but some devotees of separation seem to feel that any communal expression of meaning is too close to religion to be permitted to the government."

Citation required for that last assertion, methinks. But anyway, Ledewitz must be living under a very special kind of rock to know oh-so-much about high school graduations but so little about, for instance, sporting events, at every single one of which the national anthem is sung as a "communal expression of meaning." (Not everyone participates in sporting events, it's true, but hey - not everyone participates in high school graduations, either.) And actually, last time I checked, high school students were required to say the pledge of allegiance every morning. So you really have to wonder why Ledewitz feels as though we're short on communal expressions of meaning. (Another interesting question: why must the relevant community be the national one? I know I'm part of the Pittsburgh community every time I hear that damn Steelers fight song, which is for damn sure an expression of meaning for at least some people.)

Whatever his reason, it may have something to do with this confused piece of reasoning:

"In Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Lee, this dearth of communal meaning in the public square was admitted. Justice Kennedy wrote that the government could not undertake the task of prayer even to express 'the shared conviction that there is an ethic and a morality which transcend human invention.'

But surely this goes too far. Even a New Atheist figure like Sam Harris, in his recent book, The Moral Landscape, insists that there is an objective morality that goes beyond human invention. But whatever the separation of church and state might mean, whatever government neutrality involves, it cannot forbid government from asserting that moral values are real."

You don't have to be terribly bright to notice that Kennedy did not, in fact, "forbid government from asserting that moral values are real." Partly this is irrelevant, because even such a prohibition would not necessarily mean that governments can't support expressions of meaning (meaning being, of course, something different than morals), but it seems to inform Ledewitz's moronic analysis of the whole situation. If, as he wrongly presumes, any expression of meaning is a de facto expression of morality, and if, as he incorrectly alleges, Lee forbade any expressions of morality, then no U.S. government is legally allowed to express meaning at all. That Ledewitz makes this mistake is especially bizarre given that, in just the last paragraph, he himself observed that communal meaning "requires some kind of creed—though not of course necessarily a religious creed." Kennedy clearly states that "the task of prayer" is what he wants to disallow, not the existence of creeds. If only Ledewitz had spent as much energy understanding the ruling as he has trying to vilify it, he might have been able to comprehend that.

Ledewitz ends his article by exhorting his readers to "ask yoursel[ves] what symbols of community you want our polity to invoke," because apparently we've "avoided the hard work of specifying what forms of communal expression of meaning are appropriate." But isn't this a bit, well, stupid? I can't decide on my own which forms of expression are appropriate for the community, any more than the community can decide for itself which forms of expression are appropriate for me. The way to find an appropriate form of communal expression is to go through - and I hope you're sitting down, because this will be shocking - the community, which is precisely what prayer-leading public-high-school-graduation speakers fail to do. Ledewitz calls community-building "hard work," but that doesn't mean that our only alternative is to take the easy way out and embrace a form of expression that is honored more by tradition than by actual living people. If this is the best he can do to move us towards a truly communal search for meaning, Ledewitz needs to step aside and let more qualified thinkers take over.

Same song, different verse...

"In a February 2010 New England of Journal of Medicine perspective, Harvard University health care policy professor Milton Weinstein and Dartmouth College health care economist Jonathan Skinner suggested how markets could resolve the cost-effectiveness conundrum. They note that other countries are also confronting the problem determining the cost-effectiveness of various treatments. In the United Kingdom’s centralized health care system, the cost-effectiveness of treatments is determined by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). That agency, in general, will authorize a treatment if it costs less than about $50,000 per added year of life.

So why not turn the new Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research into something like NICE? [Because m]arkets are brilliantly effective mechanisms for collecting and disseminating information about the costs and benefits of products and services through prices."

O rly? Cause last time I checked consumers were buying all sorts of silly shit, like a drug that was intended to make your eyelashes grow longer. I would love to provide the cost per added year of life number as a comparison but, well, you can't divide by zero, so...

I care so little at this moment about Ronald Bailey's mindless market cheerleading that I actually went and followed his link to the original article, in which Weinstein and Skinner produce this gem:

"Is it possible to contain health care costs without causing worse health outcomes?...[Y]es — we can save money without compromising outcomes — if we can induce providers to cut back on cost-ineffective services and replace them with more cost-effective but underutilized services."

For them the matter is an if, whereas for Bailey the matter has already been settled because the market is a fucking magic box that will give you whatever you want - no subtle difference, that. But Weinstein and Skinner are also exceedingly optimistic if they think (as Bailey says they think) that the inducement of which they speak can be achieved just through market pressures. There are plenty of doctors who will knowingly perform unnecessary tests and procedures just in order to protect themselves in the case of a malpractice lawsuit, and it would be no surprise to learn that hospitals encourage that sort of thing either officially or unofficially. What, exactly, can the market do about that? Or take the not-insignificant (and, thanks to the internet, growing) number of patients who decide for themselves that they want a certain procedure and are willing to pay for it. According to traditional economics, those decisions constitute a market demand of no small proportion, so we would be foolish not to expect a supply to arise to meet it. And, unsurprisingly, what you'll see if you actually look into medicine is that many doctors already refuse to perform cost-ineffective services, but at the same time many doctors do choose to perform those services just in order to fatten their own paychecks.

Because these are market problems, the only way to solve them is with a non-market solution. That doesn't necessarily mean regulation - we could prevent people from requesting unnecessary procedures by, say, developing a culture that's less afraid of death, aging, and handicap as well as more trusting of physicians - but regulation sure is the easiest, most direct, most transparent way of addressing the problem. So Bailey needn't endorse regulation as a solution, at least if he can be creative enough. If he wants to be taken seriously, though, he needs to at least start by admitting that the market can't solve many of these problems because market principles are creating the problems in the first place.

Ross Douthat seems to misunderstand the nature of synonyms:

"Most Americans, devout or secular, are inclined to distinguish lustful thoughts from lustful actions, and hew to the Merriam-Webster definition of adultery as 'voluntary sexual intercourse between a married man and someone other than his wife or between a married woman and someone other than her husband.'

On the face of things, this definition would seem to let porn users off the hook. Intercourse, after all, involves physicality, a flesh-and-blood encounter that Internet Explorer and the DVD player can’t provide, no matter what sort of adultery the user happens to be committing in his heart...

[But if] it’s cheating on your wife to watch while another woman performs sexually in front of you, then why isn’t it cheating to watch while the same sort of spectacle unfolds on your laptop or TV? Isn’t the man who uses hard-core pornography already betraying his wife, whether or not the habit leads to anything worse?"

Also in the list of things he seems to misunderstand: modern technology. Internet Explorer, Ross? Really? I'm surprised he knew enough to talk about DVDs instead of VHS tapes or cave paintings.

At any rate, though, it's clear that he wants to lump together the three notions of adultery, cheating-on, and betraying. It's not at all clear, however, that the three are the same - at least, given the definition of adultery he cites and appears to accept (if only for the sake of argument). Cheating-on presumes, as the name implies, a set of rules. (What is cheating if not a specific kind of rule-breaking?) On the face of it, however, there's no inherent link between adultery and rule-breaking. A married couple could, for instance, simply refrain from instituting a rule against extramarital intercourse - or, more radically, institute a rule mandating it - and then any adulterous behavior would fail to qualify as an instance of cheating-on. Presumably most couples will have an anti-adultery rule, at least implicitly, but the two concepts are in point of fact two concepts. Similarly, betrayal requires a certain kind of preexisting trust, loyalty, or fidelity. Again, though, adultery says nothing about trust, loyalty or fidelity. It is true that we typically expect marriages to possess at least one of those things, and to possess the specific variety of it that would be relevant to adultery (e.g. trusting someone not to commit adultery), but our expectations in this matter also often fail to track reality: not all marriages are about monogamy, and some marrieds even trust that their partners will seek sex elsewhere.

Douthat could avoid part of this trouble by retreating back to the by-now-comic position that marriage exists as a sort of Platonic ideal in which it's always a rule not to commit adultery - although, as it happens, most traditional wedding vows don't include anything about it even if that idea weren't laughable on its own terms. Even then, though, he could only succeed in collapsing cheating-on and adultery, and not in a way that actually helps his argument. Remember, he wants to say that porn is adultery. Assuming that adultery implies cheating-on, though, doesn't say anything about the reverse implication. As such, it's not valid to conclude that porn is adultery just because watching it counts as cheating-on. Betrayal, moreover, would still be entirely beyond his reach, because betrayal depends on situational facts that can only be determined by the people in the situation. And so much the worse for his played-out line of thought: if some people can marry so that adultery isn't (necessarily) a betrayal but is (sometimes) an expectation or a desire (and some people can do this), you'd have to think that many more people would be able to marry someone with whom they enjoy watching porn and with whom they therefore expect to watch porn on a fairly regular basis. At his absolute best, then, Douthat can only achieve one out of the three benchmarks he's set for himself, and not the one he really wants.

And really, why would he even go through all this trouble? His message, in its absolute barest form, is just this: quit watching porn so damn much if it makes your spouse unhappy. That seems pretty convincing to me even without bringing adultery or cheating-on into the story. Spouses aren't really supposed to make each other unhappy (which isn't even something unique to marriage: as a general rule, nobody is supposed to make other people unhappy), so marrieds ought to quit doing those things that distress their spouses. Pretty straightforward and clean, right? And it even gets Douthat to the exact same place that he appears to want to be. So why he feels the need to make a whole production out of it is really a mystery to me - though, of course, the same can be said for why I apparently expected him to make sense or write cogently.

Good heavens, people, really?

“'Is Anti-White Bias a Problem?' asks the 'Room for Debate' section of the New York Times. The key piece is 'Jockeying for Stigma,' by Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, which purports to be new research on the matter.

What Norton and Sommers say is new is that

many whites now believe that it’s anti-white bias that’s on an upswing, to the point where it’s even more prevalent than anti-black bias–a sentiment not shared by blacks. Why would the perception of anti-white bias have increased dramatically among whites, particularly in recent years?"

That's a bit convoluted (hooray academic writers!), so let me try to clarify what Norton and Sommers are asking: why do white people (ostensibly in the U.S.) feel more than ever before as though people are discriminating against them? The question, of course, presumes that white people do feel more than ever before as though people are discriminating against them, and that's a bit of a controversial presumption. So, as Jason Antrosio observes, it's a good idea to ask whether that presumption is actually, y'know, true. Well...

"To support this assertion, they display a graph titled 'White and black respondents’ perceptions of anti-white and anti-black bias in each decade.' Sure enough, it seems to show how 'Whites rating anti-white bias' has steadily risen, crossing above the line of 'Whites rating anti-black bias' in the 2000s.

But how did they get this historical data? Answer: they don’t have historical data–the chart is deceptive. What they have is a survey from today, asking people 'to indicate the extent to which they felt both Blacks and Whites were the target of discrimination in each decade from the 1950s to the 2000s' (Norton and Sommers 2011:216). And, of course, whites today say anti-black bias was a problem in the 1950s but drops steadily, whereas anti-white bias is steadily on the rise."

In short, the authors conclude that white people feel more oppressed today because white people say they feel more oppressed today. Antrosio goes into more detail about the original situation (racism, basically) over at his blog, but for me I just find it incredible that this nonsense found its way into a peer-reviewed psychological journal. A lot of the stuff I talk about on this blog is on the esoteric side, but I'm pretty sure that everyone is familiar (even if not in name) with the ad populum fallacy. Surely almost everyone know that "people say x, therefore x" is not a valid inference. Especially for psychologists, who receive years of training in the peculiarities of human thought, this fallacy ought to be a major red flag.

Regular readers may remember a post from some weeks ago in which philosophy was defended as a subject on the grounds that it helps "our citizens reason better." At the time I expressed skepticism that, counterfactual  claims about what philosophy could do notwithstanding, philosophy does in fact help Americans reason better. I thought we could tell that this was the case because, as a matter of empirical observation, Americans suck at reasoning. It turns out, though, that things are even worse: academia, the one area in which philosophy is concentrated and consistently practiced, also suffers from tremendous lapses in basic reasoning. Not all academics are like this (nor are all non-academics), of course, but it's incredibly depressing to think that Norton and Sommers are among the best that our university system have produced and yet they still can't recognize a common fallacy staring them in their collective face. They call it "higher learning," but if we can't even convince people that argumentum ad populum is a fallacy, I fail to see how much learning is taking place at all.

You are not the car you drive. You are not your kidneys.

"The living human bodies of the poor are increasingly looked upon by the rich and powerful as resources ripe for the mining...China tissue matches prisoners with buyers and kills the former to fill the organ orders of the latter. In India, the uteri of desperately poor women are rented for gestation, and the child taken or not retrieved by the biological parents depending on whether they like the product. And around the world, poor people sell their kidneys to the rich, sometimes with deadly consequences...

The poor have a tough enough time without being mined for their organs. Living human beings should never be reduced to the equivalent of a commodity."

This very common argument, presented in this instance by Wes Smith, has always confused me. I can sell my sperm or plasma without any real problem and I can donate my kidneys to family members, but as soon as I try to sell my kidneys I'm "reduc[ing myself] to the equivalent of a commodity"? Smith would certainly be right to argue that the risk/benefit ratio of selling one's kidney is rationally prohibitive for many citizens of developing nations even though it may seem otherwise, but that's not (the whole of) what he's saying. On top of that argument - about which more in just a moment - he adds this thing about turning the whole human being into the equivalent of a commodity. But on what grounds does he say that? It really is true: you aren't your kidneys. (And you're certainly not just one of your kidneys.) Just because kidney donation can kill you doesn't mean that it's an act of self-commodification. There are lots of things that can kill you but for which people frequently get paid, and Smith doesn't seem to care about any of those. Moreover, what kidney donation is can't just be what it is in some cases. Otherwise sky-diving would, in each and every case, literally be suicide (or, in Smith's bizarre euphemism, "the equivalent of" suicide). So why is he doing this?

If I had to guess, I'd say it's because kidney donation isn't actually that dangerous. When done properly (in a safe surgical environment, with the right follow-up care, etc.), kidney removal is actually quite safe. The horror-show properties of Smith's cautionary tales, then, aren't really anything to do with medicine at all but are, rather, related to economics and politics. Though this might seem like good news for a number of reasons (for one, that we might be able to reduce or eliminate the need for dialysis), for Smith it's disastrous: his position relies on the vague and amorphous idea of human dignity, which he feels is insulted by the sale of things like kidneys. Because this position isn't based on any kind of evidence or sound reasoning, he has to find a way to make sure that incompatible facts don't enter into the debate. As such, using the risk-benefit ratio wouldn't suffice for him: that asks directly about facts, and as we've seen the facts aren't really in his favor. Instead, he uses a scary-sounding concept like being "reduced to...a commodity," which requires no factual justification and so can't be disproven by silly statistics about how it's actually very unlikely that you'll die as a result of donating (or selling) your kidney.

In a very similar vein, Marcel LeJeune defers to God when he should be deferring to physiology and commits the same fallacy that Smith blunders into:

"[T]he progressive thinkers in psychology and gender-studies believe that being male or female is a societal construct that is forced upon us by antiquated ideas and societal norms. The truth about what gender we are is deep inside and must be brought out by experience and finding our 'true selves', whether that is transsexual, bisexual, male, female, etc.

The problem with all of these ideas is that they make a false separation between the body and the 'true self'. If you aren't your body, then what are you? If the real you isn't your body, what happens to the real you when it doesn't have a body to hold it any longer? What is the body, if it isn't a part of you?

...this way of thinking about humanity is a denial of the purpose in which God created us -- male and female. If we are able to be whatever we want, just by willing it, this boils down to a refutation of what God intends each of us to be."

LeJeune gives the game away himself when, in a single paragraph, he refers to the body both as "you" and "a part of you" - I, for one, know very few people who are proper parts of themselves. Add these, then, to the list of things you're not: your genitalia, your chromosomes, your secondary sex characteristics, your testosterone and/or estrogen levels. But, of course, LeJeune wouldn't necessarily be phased by that because he doesn't name any specific body parts upon which to partition humans into males and females. It is, instead, just what "God intends" that counts, and as we all know you just can't tell what that weirdo is going to think next. So never mind the fact that sex isn't a unitary variable, the ethically important thing for LeJeune is this intention, which nobody can gainsay because, well, that's the way he wants it.

Having taken a number of courses in philosophy and read lots of books, I know that personal identity is a tough subject. There are a lot of complications and paradoxes; I get it. But this stuff is just pathetic. Where people use the language of identity as a smokescreen for other, less hazy matters, as Smith and LeJeune very much appear to, they need to just say what they mean and let the chips fall where they may. Hiding the facts from view doesn't make them any less present, and no amount of hand-waving is going to make a safe procedure dangerous or rearrange a person's abnormal chromosomes.

What does the word "common" mean, again?

"Donald Trump may have left the presidential race, but his early, rapid rise in the polls should provide a lesson for the Republicans still vying to become the 2012 GOP standard-bearer. Americans have had enough and are looking for truth-tellers who aren’t afraid to rock the boat, even flip a few boats over to provide common-sense solutions to the challenges America faces!"

Yes, rock some boats - with common sense! Disrupt the usual manner of operations by suggesting actions that are already intuitively endorsed by all! Surprise and befuddle people with novel ideas that those same people already comfortably accept! Contradiction-in-terms 2012!

Okay, okay - I know I said that this wouldn't come up anymore, but this is just so pathetic that my already-meager powers of self-restraint can't hold up to the challenge:

"My 8-year-old son saw the news reports about Osama bin Laden’s death buzzing Monday on our TV.

He took particular note of scenes of cheering crowds: flag-wavers in Times Square and at Ground Zero in New York City, baseball fans in Philadelphia, patriots in Boston, enthusiastic students on college campuses. All were clapping, smiling and chanting in response to the news that U.S. Navy SEALs had cornered and killed the world’s most wanted terrorist...

Western civilization is heir to a rich 'just war' tradition of wrestling with the morality of war. This tradition can help us navigate these kinds of sentiments."

Oh boy, Ryan Messmore wants to play my favorite philosophical game - Navigate The Sentiments! Here, I'll start: your sentiments have nothing to do with morality as such. If you want to learn why you feel the way you do about major social events, you'd be better off studying sociology and psychology than ethics. In fact, your sentiments are almost morally irrelevant to situations that don't concern you personally, as Messmore himself seems to confirm:

"The idea of a just war recognizes the legitimacy of using military force to respond to injustice when ordinary political means aren’t available or effective. The Christian doctrine of just war brings moral principles to bear on decisions about when and how to wage armed conflict.

For example, military action must be waged by a proper authority. It must have a reasonable probability of success. And it must distinguish between combatants and civilians."

See anything in there about sentiments? I sure don't. But I wonder, do any of those points actually apply to the United States' part in the war on terror? Was it, in fact, waged by a proper authority? Did it have a reasonable chance of success (n.b.: that it succeeded [in killing bin Laden, which evidently we're pretending was the goal all along] says nothing much about its initial chance of success)? Did we distinguish between combatants and civilians?

"I didn’t go into detail about all these principles with my 8-year-old son. Nor did I have enough knowledge of the raid in Pakistan to apply them point by point. But knowing the tradition enabled me to help my son sort out his reactions to bin Laden’s death."

Huh?? How could you possibly have helped to Navigate The Sentiments if you knew nothing about any of the relevant information?

"A just war also is one undertaken with the right intention—not hatred or revenge, but justice."

...ah, I see. We're going to pretend that the war on terror was virtuous* and then wash our hands of the whole thing. Sorry, but I think that's cheating.

And speaking of washing one's hands, William Doino, Jr. accidentally makes an interesting point relevant to virtue ethics here.

"On August 6, 1945, the day the atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Robert Oppenheimer—the scientist who did so much to bring that day about—was jubilant. Pumping his arms over his head like a prize fighter, he told his team at Los Alamos how proud he was over what they had accomplished. Almost immediately, however, he experienced regret."

*I mean, really think about this one. Which intentions are relevant here? Bush and Cheney's? Congress's? American voters'? Those belonging to the soldier who shot bin Laden? If there's a group, what portion of that group must have the right intentions in order for this to be virtuous? How, moreover, could we ever tell? And what if hatred/revenge and justice coexist? This is a real problem for Messmore and other just-war theorists.

Haaaaa! No, I'm just kidding, there was no rapture. I mean, that's ridiculous idea in the first place, right?

"#Rapture is trending on Twitter, though, and I would encourage anyone so inclined to watch a few of the tweets going by. You’ll probably notice that many of them are mocking the idea of rapture, some are mocking the people who believe it, some actually read like people making real plans for the rapture, but many of those are probably sarcastic. However, a disturbing number of them (mirrored, by the way, on the Facebook page about the looting party), mock all religious belief and all religious believers.

I found myself in a couple of conversations today trying to walk the fine line between expressing my disdain over the idea that a Christian group would 'guarantee' that May 21 is Judgment Day and reminding my conversation partners that Christians do believe that a Judgment Day is coming."

Oooh - yeah, that must be pretty awkward, Dana Dillon. I know I wouldn't want to sign myself up for a belief system where I'd have to defend the idea of an apocalypse but also admit the ridiculousness of positing any details about said apocalypse. It would be really hard to convince my friends and loved ones that my belief in the eventual arrival of monsters that looked like "warhorses, with golden crowns, men's faces, women's hair, lions' teeth, iron breastplates, wings and scorpions' tails" is totally normal but that it would be ludicrous and silly to believe that said gold-crowned, lion-toothed (etc.) warhorse-things would arrive on a particular future date. I mean, I guess I could forgo an actual rational argument to that effect and merely rely on a sort of peer pressure by "reminding my conversation partners that Christians do believe that a Judgment Day is coming," but that would basically be a weak form of the same unthinking, morally problematic social control that's featured in so many dystopian novels. Surely, if I were the sort of person who believed in the rapture and had philosophical leanings, I wouldn't want to stoop to that level of shameless coercion.

But hey - maybe I could let someone else do it for me, like good ol' Andy Sullivan.

"There has been something a little smug about how eager so many are to humiliate the end-timers; and there is a poignancy in the evangelical nuttery. But...the Rapture nutters are not orthodox Christians - but rather Book of Revelations crackpots. They are not examples of religious faith but of marginal nutballism. Such nutballism begs to be made fun of."

See, if I were such a believer as Dillon is (or claims to be), I would be able to hide behind the faith/nutballism dichotomy that so many upstanding citizens are using these days. I would contrast my eminently reasonable and moderate views with the ones displayed by margin-dwelling groups like Family Radio, and in that contrast I would hope to find (although, along with Sullivan, not necessarily identify) the reason why my beliefs are totally cool even if they appear to differ only marginally from beliefs that we all agree would only be held by "crackpots." But um...what would I do, I wonder, about this?

"In a special broadcast Monday night on his radio program 'Open Forum' that the rapture he predicted was 'an invisible judgment day' that he has come to understand as a spiritual, rather than physical event.

'We had all of our dates correct,' Camping insisted, clarifying that he now understands that Christ’s May 21 arrival was 'a spiritual coming' ushering in the last five months before the final judgment and destruction."

Having already declared Camping a crackpot, it would be hard for me to take this sort of thing seriously. I would probably identify it as, well, what it is: a sad attempt to backpedal from an obviously failed prediction into a basically meaningless and therefore worthless defensive position. Except...

Except Camping's new line sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? It sounds, in fact, almost identical to the sort of thing put forward by supposedly non-crackpot groups like BioLogos.

"One interpretation [of the Bible] contends Adam and Eve experienced spiritual death as a result of their disobedience. The physical death of humans is thus not a result of the Fall and could therefore have occurred beforehand.

This view notes that God warned Adam and Eve that they would die 'in the day that [they] eat from [the tree]' (Genesis 2:17), and yet they did not experience immediate physical death. Therefore, the death cannot have been physical. Significantly, however, they did experience an immediate spiritual death — their perfect relationship with God was now broken. Spiritual rather than physical death seems to be the clearest meaning of the biblical text in this case."

How, then, would I go about differentiating myself and my fellow non-crackpots from "nutters" like Camping? It can't be anything about the basic content of our beliefs, because if our beliefs were essentially different there'd be no need to mount a defense in the first place. It would be nice if I could make a clean distinction between Camping's literalist interpretive methods and my own more flexible ones, but as it turns out Camping is just fine with metaphor. Maybe his learning curve is a little slower than mine would be, but, again, that in and of itself would be enough to draw us together: we would have followed more or less the same line of thought, just at different speeds.

So how, then, could someone like Dillon reconcile her faith with her own bemusement at Camping's antics in a way that clearly and rationally delineates the one from the other? Good question.

And now, to demonstrate the sharp divide between being in the right emotionally and being in the right substantively, here's Stanton Jones:

"Joshua Wolff raises an array of issues regarding the place of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons in Christian higher education in his provocative article, 'Where "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Remains.' He raises the stakes for this discussion by calling for the weight of professional opinion to be combined with the fiduciary oversight of accreditation agencies to challenge the way religious institutions of higher education handle matters of sexuality.

Wolff gets a number of things right. The special needs of sexual minority individuals present a particular challenge for religiously conservative institutions. Such individuals have the right to expect that their needs will be handled with care, dignity, professionalism, sensitivity, and compassion. Without question, there have been glaring failures in handling such needs at these institutions, and there is considerable unevenness in the competence with which such issues are handled."

Isn't it nice that we can worry about more nitpicky things now that the same-sex marriage debate is over? Just imagine how well things would be going if we had been making similar social progress about, say, our foreign policy over the past few decades.

Anyway, Jones clearly is not militantly heteronormative. Unlike some people I could name from yesterday, he acknowledges Wolff's experiences and accepts that they do actually happen and do bear on morality. Although he isn't willing to give full weight to the experiences of queer folks, then, he does at least give them enough credit to define for themselves what counts as serious maltreatment. So, speaking in a strictly psychological sense, he's absolutely right to say that his "moral concern about homosexual conduct and about all sexual intimacy outside of marriage" is not intended to be "a pretext to oppress or discriminate against GLBTQ persons." (Whether or not it acts as such a pretext is, of course, another question.) Better yet, everything from his language to the content of his article indicates that his primary goal is to help LGBT people find a practicable lifestyle that brings them satisfaction, not to moralize or grandstand. In terms of the feelings or attitudes that a person could bring to the debate, then, Jones is pretty much exactly where he should be. You'll note, however, that when it comes to the actual stance he takes on the issues his emotional rectitude doesn't seem to help him one bit.

"Many insist that the acceptance of GLBTQ persons entails the repudiation of moral censure of homosexual conduct and of many other sexual restrictions as well. This is of course an area of controversy and challenge today for all religious communities. Out of the ferment of these discussions over the last four decades, an interesting academic consensus has emerged. Contrary to popular understanding, the best scholars today — even many who don’t accept Scripture as authoritative for morality today — almost universally agree that the clear teaching of the Christian Scriptures is that intimate homosexual conduct is morally unacceptable...Based on this understanding of the morality of homosexual conduct, many religious traditionalists question the formulation of sexual identity implicit in Wolff's argument. On the one hand, we dissent from the presumption that one’s sexual attractions and identifications must be lived out in behavior to have meaning. Thus, an individual can both have a stable sense of same-sex attraction and a commitment to chastity based on choosing compliance to the moral teachings of Scripture."

For example, the concept at the beginning of this paragraph ("the acceptance of GLBTQ persons") is not actually related to the concept at the end (what "an individual" can do) in the way that Jones seems to think it is. Certainly there are some people who can be celibate and be okay with it no matter what their sexual orientation is, but Jones is talking about supporting an entire population. What a small group of outliers can or can't do is no reflection on the way things normally work, yet Jones argues as though the existence of a few happy celibate gays is enough to justify the conclusion that all queer people can be just as happy without sex as with it.

"On the other hand, traditionalists also dissent from the inclination so common today to accept the anchoring of one's entire identity around sexual orientation. The very depiction in Wolff's article of GLBTQ individuals as a discrete class, as if their sexual inclinations and orientations were the linchpin of their very being, is made problematic in the context of religious commitments that demand higher allegiance.

Contemporary scientific research lends further credence to that hesitancy on this point. Despite the common presumption that sexual orientation is directly analogous to skin color or race, an analogy invoked frequently in the cause of advancing GLBTQ advocacy, and despite the presumption that sexual orientation is genetically caused, the reality is that we still know little about the origins and causes of sexual orientation."

This "linchpin" thing, too, fails to hit the mark. For one thing, Jones himself just said that any given sexual orientation can coexist happily with the "higher allegiance" demanded by his religion - and not just for a few people, but for any given person you care to name. Why, then, is he now acting as though it's "problematic" to be, say, a lesbian first and a Christian second? There's nothing in that kind of situation that would prevent a person from embracing the compromise that Jones outlines above, so you'd think that he would maintain a little consistency.

Nor, of course, do "the origins and causes of sexual orientation" really have anything to do with it. The analogy to race is subtle and multi-faceted, but the one thing it is not is a direct scientific analogy. And, of course, we wouldn't even want it to be: thanks to the ever-applicable is/ought gap, a purely biological analogy wouldn't have any normative force behind it. Arguing the science, then, is a bit stupid from Jones's perspective - it's neither what his opponents are interested in nor what he himself needs. In order to make any headway, he would have to say something about the morally relevant similarities between race and sexual orientation. Trouble is, he doesn't really want to do that because all those facts work against him. To begin, race, like sexual orientation, is primarily a social construct and not something in nature - but if he were to admit that, he would have to stop pretending that it's legitimate to look for "a scientific perspective about how sexual orientation establishes the 'core' of a person." Another similarity, following on the first, is that one cannot reliably predict the extent to which a random person's race or sexual orientation will be a source of meaning in that person's life. Again, this is the sort of morally relevant fact that Jones would have to address in order to understand the analogy but that would sink him if he were to take it into account: his move from the person level to the population level assumes the exact opposite, i.e., that all sexual orientations provide meaning equally for all people.

Finally, although it doesn't really contain a fallacy of any sort, it's worth quoting this paragraph as a summary of what Jones is all about:

"The existence of moral boundaries, properly understood, challenges all of humanity and not just sexual minority individuals. Thus, far from projecting 'if you are gay, you do not belong here,' we can strive to properly understand and communicate about our communities as fellowships or communities of sojourners striving with the limitations and brokenness of our common humanity."

The reason that he wants LGBT people to stick around, it seems, is because they represent a special kind of limitation or brokenness, and limitations and brokenness are what Jones's idea of a Christian college is all about. Again, there's nothing mean-spirited or malicious here, but you sure do have to wonder how he can manage to feel supportive at the same time that he calls people broken like that - how, in other words, his heart can be right while his head goes so far wrong. I sympathize with his desire not to have his school shut down for its rather antiquated and morally confused honor code (which prohibits, among other things, porn and "obscene language"), but if Jones wants to make a compelling case that he's not a bigot (albeit a soft-spoken and accidental one) he needs to demonstrate at least a basic understanding of the subject under discussion. This article, unfortunately, demonstrates exactly the opposite.

This is like that, only completely backwards:

"Thankfully, we do not yet have a market for 'Christian' pornography (but just wait, someone will find a way). But we do have a market for 'Christian' romance novels...

This is not to equate morally 'romance novels' with the grave soul destruction of pornography. But it is worth asking, 'Is what I’m consuming leading me toward contentment with my spouse (or future spouse) or away from it? Is it pointing me to the other in one-flesh union or to an eroticized embodiment of my own desires? Is this the mystery or a mirage?'"

Russell Moore, it must first be noted, apparently does not know about (or else does not fully appreciate) rule 34.* But, sad though that one case of ignorance may be, it's really nothing compared to the presumptuousness that underlies his attempt to collapse all varieties of contentment into the (really quite) narrow concept of "one-flesh union." Contentment, it must be observed, is a subjective state of affairs: it exists only in people's heads and is dependent on facts about those people as well as facts about the world more broadly speaking. For Moore, however, contentment only happens one way, and that is (you will be unsurprised to learn) the way his religion tells him that it happens. Rather than going through my usual song and dance with this one, I'll try something different: would we find this at all plausible if he were talking about pain (or, better yet, anguish) instead of pleasure?

What we think of as physical pain is, of course, not easily reducible to some facts about the state of one's body. A shooting pain in my leg, for example, needn't correspond to any lesion in said leg; indeed, I need not even have a leg in which to feel the pain. Coming at it from the other direction, we know full well that being stabbed or cut or whatever is not sufficient for feeling pain - or, at least, those of us know it who have experienced effective anesthesia. Lest you think that this sort of phenomenon is limited to cases of obvious physiological or chemical intervention, allow me to assure you that it isn't. But Moore, of course, isn't even talking about something as relatively simple as a physical sensation. He wants to talk about contentment, which falls squarely into the realm of the mental.** But if physical pain, which is the less complicated and more direct of the two, can't be described or predicted without taking into account facts about the mental life of the person undergoing it, why on earth should we expect to be able to do those things in the case of contentment?

Believe it or not, this isn't actually a purely rhetorical question. I mean, it's partly a rhetorical question, but I think I have an answer, too. For some silly reason we've decided to use the definite article to describe moral ideals. What we're pursuing, according to many ethicists, is the good (or the good life). On the other hand, very few people (actually, none that I know of) describe evil as the evil or say that we should avoid living the bad life; for Anna Karenina, all happy families were alike but every unhappy family had its own special unhappiness. I rather suspect that there must be some species-level psychological facts that make this asymmetry possible (maybe something about empathy?) and I think it'd be really interesting to try to figure out what those are, but in the meantime it's sufficient to refute the notion that there's only one good way of living or that there's one idealized character that we all ought strive to attain. There is, I think history has amply demonstrated, nothing wrong with Moore's one-flesh picture - at least, for those who fit into its prescribed roles. But if contentment is what we're really after (and not, say, an arbitrary living arrangement that we've chosen to call "contentment"), we ought to reject this kind of a priori limitation on how that contentment can be reached. If he is at all serious about this tripe, Moore has committed himself to denying that any same-sex couple could be content. He would also have to say, contrary to the actual mental states they may possess, that asexuals can never find contentment. (From here you can add your own examples to the list - at this point, I doubt I have to spell them all out for you.) In short, Moore would have to let his philosophy delimit whatever empirical findings he would accept, which is precisely backwards and honestly pretty stupid.

What comes through loud and clear in this article is that Moore wants everyone to be like him (or, to be really cynical, to be like the person he wrongly imagines himself to be). As naively sweet a sentiment as that is, it's something we cannot let an adult get away with saying. The inability to recognize and accept as real/legitimate the emotional states of others is a hallmark of children, yet it also appears to be a keystone of Moore's worldview. Such an underdeveloped way of thinking cannot be permitted to define the debate, and so far as I'm concerned it shouldn't even be given a place at the table. Even in a comparably low-harm debate like the one over porn, there's too much at stake to defer to someone who won't even listen.

*Two things about this. One, here's the actual definition of rule 34. And two, check out this actual porn review from that linked website: "'Lazarus Rises' (2004) -- New Jersey's Mr. and Mrs. Ryan Brooks depict marriage during Biblical times. Wardrobe and locations are impressively authentic." Hi-larious!
**At least, as we use the word. I know there's something suspicious about dividing pain into mental and physical and all that jazz, but the finer points really don't have anything to do with this particular subject so I'm skipping them for the sake of brevity. As always, though, the comments are open for those who are interested.

For the love of all that is good - if this is the first paragraph of your article, just fucking stop writing it.

"The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What he thought about all the steps that follow has gone unrecorded. It is, nevertheless, those steps which test one’s resolve to go anywhere. Hence this article."

In fact, stop writing altogether. Then move to a place that's far, far away from any computers or internet access. And then, if at all possible, undergo elective surgery to remove the part of your brain that stores literacy, just to help ensure that nothing so astoundingly pompous and self-serving is ever written by any human ever again.

"Dad, what's a pen-pal?" they'll say. And I'll reply, "It was a sentient species of pen that went extinct because it was incompatible with the iPad." And then they'll just google it. (Oh, who am I kidding - they're just going to google it at the start...)

...(any Chicago fans in the house?) defensible!

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to respond, calling Israel's pre-1967 borders 'indefensible.' History proves he's right. In 1967, Israel was on the eve of an all-out assault by its Arab neighbors when it took out the Egyptian and Syrian air forces. Within six days, Israel had defeated Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon and gained significant territory, including the Arab-controlled parts of Jerusalem.

Nonetheless, Israel was attacked again a few years later. In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched an offensive on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. Again, Israel was successful in defeating both countries and gained more territory in the process."

Listing examples of how something was defended seems like quite an odd way of proving that that thing is indefensible, doesn't it? Whatever else you can say about Obama's proposals for the middle east, I don't think it's reasonable to act at this point like Israel could be destroyed or wiped off the map. Especially because we seem to be willing to throw ourselves at countries with essentially no provocation, it's a bit silly to say that we'd hold back from defending our most consistent and least abusive ally in the area. I can't say that I'm as optimistic as Obama himself appears to be, but that's only because I've resigned myself to the middle east being a bloodbath for the entire rest of history no matter what we do with it. At least I can say this much, though: I'm not so wildly pessimistic that I think borders that have actually been defended are, in direct defiance of that historical fact, indefensible.

So yesterday we saw Marvin Olasky cite a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that suggested, in part, that European nations "[lower] the cost of employing low-skilled youth in their first job" - i.e., that they instate a new, lower (but time-limited) minimum wage for teens. Another part of the report, which Olasky could easily have mentioned but did not, is its recommendation that companies provide "apprenticeship contracts for low-skilled young people." Interestingly enough, that echoes the recommendations of one Mike Rowe (with whom you may be familiar from his commercials, which air during episodes of Mythbusters*):

"I believe we need a national PR Campaign for Skilled Labor. A big one. Something that addresses the widening skills gap head on, and reconnects the country with the most important part of our workforce.

Right now, American manufacturing is struggling to fill 200,000 vacant positions. There are 450,000 openings in trades, transportation and utilities...

In general, we're surprised that high unemployment can exist at the same time as a skilled labor shortage. We shouldn't be. We've pretty much guaranteed it.

In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We've elevated the importance of 'higher education' to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled 'alternative.' Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as 'vocational consolation prizes,' best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree."

In some ways, Rowe is right to reject the idea of skilled labor as a consolation prize. There is, for example, no attribute of skilled labor that makes it inherently less worthwhile, less praiseworthy, or less rewarding than other professions. Knowing how to fix a car or weld things may not require a liberal arts education, granted, and in our current system that means that skilled laborers aren't as likely to receive one kind of education that we (rightly) value. But, as we've already seen, a liberal arts education shouldn't really be an option or a bonus anyway; if we value it so highly, it makes no sense for us to turn around and withhold it from entire segments of the population. This, however, points to the real issue with Rowe's premise (as well as the real flaw in Olasky's thinking): our society is not built to support skilled labor.

Part of this is, as Rowe observes, a PR problem. You'll note, however, that lots of fields have PR problems but don't face the same shortages that skilled labor does: politics, law, and retail, to name just a few, are all doing just fine. This leads me to believe that the shortage in skilled labor reflects more than just an image problem, important though the image problem may be. And, indeed, there are good independent reasons to believe that there are real differences between skilled labor and other professions that make the former less attractive than the latter. For one, there's the simple issue of salary. While many office jobs don't pay hugely more than skilled labor jobs, it's certainly easier to work one's way into middle management than it is to improve one's standing in, say, the construction field. Benefits - especially health insurance - are also more likely to be found in an office environment. Labor jobs (skilled or otherwise) are also much more dangerous. While my office does post one of those "N days since our last work-time accident" posters, we don't even bother to write in the number: nobody's ever going to injure themselves typing up SOPs and we know it. And working towards an office job, which for almost everyone means getting a bachelor's degree, means having something to fall back on - i.e., the bachelor's degree and the chance to get a different office job. To be sure, the PR situation is a contributing factor to these other problems and needs to be addressed, but in the meantime it's awfully hard to blame kids for weighing their options and deciding to go for the one that's physically safer, higher-paying, and, yes, more respected and honored by society.

This, then, is the real hole in Olasky's position. In part the liberal response to the idea of lowering the minimum wage for teens is that doing so presents a perverse incentive to managers to hire those teens in lieu of more expensive (and, yes, more competent) adults, but another part is the recognition that it's unjust (not to mention unworkable as a long-term solution) to try to plug holes in the workforce by pushing teens into extremely low-paying temp jobs that they already find undesirable. Without making those jobs seem and actually be suitable for someone who's looking to earn a decent living in a well-regarded profession, there are only two possibilities, neither good: if the kids accept the jobs, they'll just form an underclass of poorly-paid, badly educated workers, thus confirming the stereotype and continuing to exert pressure on the social safety net; if they don't accept the jobs, we're back to square one. Solving this social problem, in other words, requires more than just rectifying its economic side-effects. Looking at the situation as though it's fully describable in terms of statistics, as Olasky does (think unemployment percentages, wage levels, and so on), is not an acceptable or productive problem-solving methodology. It speaks well to Rowe's intelligence and character that he recognizes this, but it says nothing good about the state of our country that a random TV show host has more insight into policymaking than a paid pundit does.

*I kid, of course - Rowe hosts Dirty Jobs, another show on the Discovery channel.

Behold, puny mortals, and quake, as Marvin Olasky proves the wisdom of any given economic legislation you care to imagine!

"With teen unemployment nationally at 21 percent and likely to soar this summer, [Maine] Gov. Paul LePage and fellow GOP legislators want to allow employers to offer teens $5.25 rather than $7.25 per hour for their first three months of employment.

Good data support the LePage proposal. Last year even the Paris-headquartered Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, made up of 34 countries (70 percent from Europe) that rarely agree on anything, released a report contending that countries could reduce teen unemployment by 'lowering the cost of employing low-skilled youth' through a sub-minimum training wage.

The 'progressive' concern, of course, is that rapacious bosses will seize the opportunity to fire an adult—but no competent manager will replace a good worker with an untrained teen."

Setting aside the merits of the actual proposal in question and Olasky's awfully strange use of the word "data," check out what he's doing here. We don't need to worry about the potential downsides of this idea, he says, cause "no competent manager" will allow them. Isn't that neat? I mean, here I was worrying that not all managers were competent, and that in fact it is often the case that a business can save money by replacing good workers with cheaper, untrained labor. But it turns out I was just being silly - what a relief!

This is such great news for America that I can't even fully describe it. For one, we can stop worrying about the effect of the stimulus money on the economy: however that money got distributed initially, we can rest assured that it's doing good things now because it must have gone somewhere and "no competent manager" would let it go to waste. Indeed, I rather suspect that we can also safely get rid of the FDA and all other safety agencies, as "no competent manager" would allow their company to risk being taken to court and cleaned out. Just think of the savings we'll be able to pass on to the taxpayer! And here we were told that our problems were hard and would require sacrifice. How droll! All we had to do the whole time was conceive of them as happening to an abstract collection of perfectly-qualified economic agents. Who knew policymaking could be this easy?

Quoth John Gray,

"I'm very opposed to investing science with the needs and requirements of religion. I'm equally opposed to the tendency within religion, which exists in things like creationism and intelligent design, to turn religion into a kind of pseudo-science. If you go back to St. Augustine or before, to the Jewish scholars who talk about these issues, they never regard the Genesis story as a theory. Augustine says explicitly that it should not be interpreted explicitly, that it's a way of accessing truths which can't really be formulated by the human mind in any rational way. It's a way of accessing mysterious features which will remain mysterious. So it was always seen right up to the rise of modern science—as a myth, not a theory."

Part of this is certainly right: using religious tenets in place of scientific findings is a bad idea. It's not even a good idea to try to have them both exist alongside one another, as Robert Bishop does here.

"[J]ust like there are tensions in relationships between people who are constantly growing in how to live with each other, there will be tensions between fields of knowledge that are growing in how to live with each other on their areas of overlap. Complete agreement is usually not the goal in reconciliation nor is it necessarily a realistic or healthy goal in a relationship (this is another way in which the integration model is deficient: It presupposes complete agreement among the two parties else the integration fails–think of a partially integrated circuit)."

It's funny - scientific fields don't need to reconcile themselves with math in this way, nor with history, nor linguistics, nor sociology, nor indeed any other "field of knowledge" that I can think of. And really, if they're all fields of knowledge, why should they? The thing about knowledge is that you can't know something that's not true, so really we should expect there not to be any "tensions" (at least, in the long run). Complete agreement, in other words, is the goal.

Or, rather, it's the goal if religion is a field of knowledge that bears on science, which is sure what Gray seems to think.* At least, he says it's "a way of accessing truths," and presumably at least some of those truths relate to science somehow. Granted, he tries to deflect this by deferring to Augustine and this idea of a truth that "can't really be formulated by the human mind in any rational way," but neither of those strategies really works. Augustine, for one, thought that the Bible was reliable enough to determine the age of the universe (and, specifically, to determine the age of the universe to be less than 6000 years), and if that ain't "turn[ing] religion into a kind of pseudo-science" then I don't know what is. More importantly, though, I'm really disturbed by this idea that myths aren't rational.

The key to Gray's defense of declarative religion** seems to be his claim that myths (or at least religious myths) present "mysterious features which will remain mysterious" in a way that, somehow or other, doesn't count as rational. One immediate question about this is how it can possibly be the case that a myth provides access to one or more truths that nonetheless remain mysterious. That, to me, doesn't sound like access. Access is the thing that happens where you, for instance, unlock a door; pointing to the lock and going, "Oh hey, that there sure is one sturdy lock, don't think we'll be opening that door any time soon" is, I think, the opposite of access. A second question is how he knows that we're talking about truths. To continue with the previous image, there's no number of tests you can run on a lock that'll tell you what's inside the thing it's locking. Even a complete and perfect knowledge of the lock (which, incidentally, Gray can't provide, because then we'd know how to open it, thus eliminating the mystery) would be an insufficient basis on which to deduce that the building contains, well, any particular thing at all. I think the best option here is for Gray to just admit that we're not really getting access to mysteries per se but rather to truths that just seem mysterious. Just to have an example so that we can see how this sort of thing might work, let's take his example of Genesis and the existence of the universe: we know that the universe exists and we're fairly sure that it began to exist, but those facts are surrounded by so much ignorance that they seem deep and mysterious and meaningful. This isn't really accessing a true mystery, so Gray's language needs to be cleaned up a good deal, but it at least avoids the contradiction of accessing a mystery as well as the epistemologically foolish premise that any given mystery is true. There are, however, two really big problems with saying that this interpretation provides something that is not rational (or maybe not rationally expressible).

The one flamingly obvious problem is that I just did express it rationally: I said, quite rationally, that the universe exists but that we don't know much about why or how it exists. There's really nothing about this sort of situation that prevents us from talking about it (or even identifying the alluring bits) in plain, rational language. But okay - let's say for the sake of argument that there really is some myth or other that reveals a truth yet is so tremendously impenetrable by normal methods of analysis that we just cannot find a way to express that truth without using the language of (the) myth itself. I'm not sure what such a myth would look like and I'm not sure why we would want to suppose that such a myth exists unless we were trying very hard to make religion seem like more than it is, but whatever - for the sake of argument, let's do it. Why, then, would that myth be something other than a rational way of formulating the truth? Myths are not, I don't think, non-rational by nature - they use standard forms (even if those forms may vary by culture) and pretty normal ways of expression (analogy, metaphor, allegory), none of which seems anything other than rational. Granted, mythology isn't a direct, literal means of expression, but I see no reason for creativity or indirectness to be mutually exclusive with rationality. I mean, think of "string" theory: that's not literal, but I'm pretty sure we don't have to reject it or call it irrational as a result. In much the same way, whether or not the moral lessons of the Jesus story are true, I see absolutely no reason to say that the mythological formulation of those lessons is non-rational.

Now, if Gray were talking about music or abstract visual art, I think he would have more of a point. It would be much harder for me to see how a series of notes would express any truths in any kind of rational way at all, or how a square of a particular shade of blue would count as a rational communication of some fact about the world. Not impossible to see, mind you - language is just symbols as it is, so there's no difference in kind between words and melodies or colors - but much harder. But myths? Those seem perfectly orderly and non-arbitrary. They feature certain kinds of internal and/or structural logic, they construct ideas in a comprehensible and relatively determinate way, and they make perfectly good sense, at least when they're viewed in light of the proper background conditions. Gray, it therefore seems, is very confused about what's happening here. And, I think, for good reason: note that when he talks about "mysterious features," he doesn't say what those are features of. If they're features of the world, this whole idea is doomed: whatever we learn about the world we learn rationally and not mysteriously. They could, I suppose, be features of oneself, but then the idea is worthless - and doomed on top of it. Yes, myths are good for accessing certain hard-to-describe (which is not the same as mysterious) parts of oneself, but they're certainly not uniquely good at that. Even science can, for some people, provide the same kinds of opportunities for introspection and self-awareness. And, again, there's nothing to indicate that we're incapable of expressing things about ourselves rationally. So while, yes, religion shouldn't be used as a pseudo-science, it shouldn't be used as a pseudo-anything-else, either, whether it's the sort of thing that teaches us things about the world (like pseudo-philosophy might) or things about ourselves (like pseudo-psychology might). If it's supposed to be a science, treat it like a science; if it's supposed to be an experience generator like art, treat it like an art; but do not treat it like a science-only-different or an art-only-different. Whichever way he wants it, the one thing he can't have is a religion (or indeed any system at all) that provides non-rational access to mysterious features of who-knows-what. That is sheer gibberish, and not even the defenders of religion as a field of knowledge deserve to have their beliefs reduced to such tripe.

*Or to think that Augustine et al thought? I'm not 100% clear on this, but it doesn't much matter for the rest of this post.
**Roll with me a little on this term. Not all instances of religious practice, observance, or participation depend on statements about the way things are. Thus we can, I think, divide religion into a declarative component (where it tells you the way things are, or you say how you think things are) and something like a practical component (where you fast, say, or wear certain clothes). There are probably other ways of divvying it up and so on, but this is a way that helps make sense of what Gray is saying.

It's really too bad that Ben Stein is such a moronic asshole, cause Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a pretty good movie. Oh well.

"Now for a few humble thoughts about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his recent brush with law and journalism, bearing in mind that it's possible indeed, maybe even likely, that he is guilty as the prosecutors charge:

1.) If he is such a womanizer and violent guy with women, why didn't he ever get charged until now?"

This isn't even an argument. This is just a question. Actually, no - it's an irrelevant question, and one that attempts to establish a conclusion based on what we don't (or, rather, what Stein doesn't) know. And it's not like he couldn't have done the research to find out, so we're supposed to be impressed with this...why? (Also, dear readers, please do not use both a period and a parenthesis in your numbered lists. It makes me cry.)

"2.) In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes?"

Yes, people who commit crimes tend to be criminals. Fucking shocking. This reasoning is so deplorable I can't even bring myself to reprint the rest of Stein's eight items. Surely one of the sharper knives in the drawer, such as French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, will produce something better, right?

"[T]he Strauss-Kahn I know, who has been my friend for 20 years and who will remain my friend, bears no resemblance to this monster, this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast now being described nearly everywhere. Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally, but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it’s absurd."

Motherf- no, y'know what? I brought this on myself. Why I expected anybody to be able to write sanely about the accusation that a wealthy, white French businessman raped a poor, black immigrant American woman, I have no idea. Statistics, past personal history, and character references are worth precious little indeed relative to the facts of the case - especially when those other factors are biased or based on nothing more than supposition. Let's hope that the jurors here aren't easily duped, because apparently there's a lot of real stupidity hanging around this case.

Go Bulls.

David Limbaugh, I regret to say, is being just a smidge disingenuous here:

"Obama insisted that his plan would make sure everyone was covered. And what's the relevance of increasing insurance coverage if not to increase people's access to health care? So, it was just accepted as an essentially unchallenged premise that Obamacare, whatever else you wanted to say about it, would increase Americans' access to health care.

But as many of us knew all along and warned, Obamacare will not increase access to care. It will inevitably lead to rationing, and rationing, by definition, means reducing care."

Look how quickly he goes from "access to care," the proper subject of consideration, to "care." Insurance is a fundamentally statistical system: you take a sure loss up front (in the form of your buy-in) because you know that the expected value of having the insurance is greater than the expected value of not having it even if it never "pays off," so to speak. For the same reason, insurance distributes risk so that whole communities bear the brunt that would otherwise fall on individuals. It's not, in other words, like the lottery, where you only find out if you win much later and only a few people will ever win. With insurance, you've won just by purchasing your ticket* and the group wins just in virtue of having the system exist. Reducing access to care to just care, then, misses the very point of having an insurance system. Moreover, we don't necessarily even want a health care program that's structured to provide the most care, whether that happens through insurance or not. Preventative care, for example, is called that because it, well, prevents care from happening later down the line. (Sort of, anyway - it does this by preventing disease and obviating the need for care, but the point stands nonetheless.) We can even include traditionally non-medical areas such as urban planning under the umbrella of public health so as to reduce the need for care in the first place by making environments safer and healthier.** And, of course, less care (usually) means less spending, which is a major political focus these days. Crying about reduced absolute levels of care, then, is not convincing, especially when his preferred alternative also aims to reduce the total amount of care.

And, y'know, rationing doesn't mean reducing total intake (or output) by definition, nor does the bill have "no other way to bring medical costs down except to ration care" (see e.g. the provisions about pharmaceuticals), nor (and I'm not even sure how this would be possible) does it require treatment decisions to be made by "a bureaucratic, emotion-free board of 'experts.'" I mean, really: "emotion-free"? Is this really where we're at now in our political discourse? Making things up wholesale is old news these days, I guess, but Limbaugh makes it sound like Obama is going to staff his advisory boards with sociopathic robots or something. How he expects us to make good policy decisions based on contradictory premises (give me all the care I need - but do it within a limited budget!) and fevered nightmares, I have no idea. Then again, I have no idea whether he actually expects that, so...

*At least, assuming you haven't done something really stupid like purchasing gynecological insurance despite being male.
**And yes, Obama's insurance legislation did include provisions along these lines.

Can't you just figure out something to do on a Sunday afternoon?

"The most recent surveys [of most livable cities], from Monocle magazine, Forbes, Mercer and The Economist, concur: Vancouver, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Munich dominate the top. What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No LA or HK? None of the cities that people seem to actually want to emigrate to, to set up businesses in? To be in? None of the wealthiest, flashiest, fastest or most beautiful cities? Nope. Americans in particular seem to get wound up by the lack of US cities in the top tier. The one that does make it is Pittsburgh.

...there’s efficient public transport (that faint whoosh is the sound of London, NY and LA disappearing). There are also cultural institutions, global connectivity, green urban policies, well-designed housing within an easy commute, and so on. Each determinant on its own seems an indisputably good thing. But what do they mean together? Can Munich (Monocle’s Number 1) really be one of the best places in the world to live? On a Sunday afternoon?"

First of all, in your face, New York and LA. But isn't it a bit strange that Edwin Heathcote acknowledges the presence of culture, nature, shopping, and so on, and yet still wonders what there is to do? Just for kicks I went to our local indie paper's website to look up event listings for this Sunday afternoon and found over 100 options. Granted, 100 things may be a whole order of magnitude smaller than the number of things to do in LA or New York, but 100 things is way more things than any one person needs. So what the hell is going on here?

The really interesting thing about Heathcote's piece, I think, is that he ends on the centrally important observation that "tastes are individual" - and yet he spends the entire rest of the article declaiming about how the best cities are getting short shrift. Why can't we just be okay saying that tastes are individual and leaving it at that? Trying to squeeze an objective judgment out of something we know to be subjective leads to really stupid things, such as Heathcote's aforementioned implicit redefinition of "nothing" to mean "any number of things up to and including 100" or his unintentionally comedic description of Rio de Janeiro as having a "high murder rate [that] discounts it from traditional best cities lists. But what a cityscape." I think it's relatively obvious from his writing that Heathcote values an unstable living environment; other people value stable living environments. Assuming that both of them can be achieved without things like "[u]nfortunately...high murder rate[s]," I'm not sure that we need to go around bashing one or the other. At least, not while there's still Cleveland.

Over at Big Questions Online, which sort of appears to have become semi-defunct, professional mathematician Eric Priest takes a stab at doing philosophy. Unfortunately, he does it in a video form that I can't seem to embed here, so you'll just have to trust my summary of what he says, which is this: science and religion can team up to provide a common morality by being humble, trusting, and open, and having integrity. Or, to put it in terms he might better understand,* humility x trust x openness x integrity = morality. The problem with this, continuing with the shift in imagery, is that procedure x procedure never equals anything more than procedure.

Humility, trust, openness, and integrity, you'll note, are all ways of doing things or stops on the way to doing things and not the actual things themselves. If you wanted to learn about astrophysics, for example, you'd probably start by reading some books on the subject; reading books, in turn, requires trust in order to be an effective learning methodology, but trust is not going to get you there on its own. If you want to contribute to a learning community, you have to treat others as being at least close to your own level of learning and intelligence; that, in turn, requires humility, but humility itself won't suffice and isn't the goal. That sort of thing. But in order to reach a common morality (or any morality, really) you need more than process. You also need content, and that's something that procedure alone can't provide, at least not reliably. What it can produce - and what philosophers have been settling for a lot recently - is this thing called intersubjectivity, which is a long word that means "we finally get that you can't convince all the people all the time, so let's just set the bar low enough to feign progress." And, unsurprisingly, intersubjectivity is frequently achieved procedurally, that is, by asking (in varying degrees of complexity) lots of people what they think and looking for where the answers overlap. This, however, has at least three really huge problems.

First, intersubjective agreement is no guarantor of correctness. (That the effort here is aimed at the former and not the latter can be seen quite easily by the label "common morality.") Lots of people have agreed on lots of factually wrong things, and I see no reason to be suddenly optimistic that things will just so happen to work out now. Second, there's no guarantee that there will even be intersubjective agreement. Humble, trusting, x basketball for Ron Artest really does not resemble humble, trusting, x basketball for Shane Battier, even though the two have a remarkably similar skill set and play similar roles for their teams, so it's not immediately obvious that humble, trusting, open, integrity-having secular ethicists will agree very much (or at all) with humble, trusting, open, integrity-having religious ethicists. And third, as I've pointed out before, it's a mistake "[t]o conclude that [any person's] ideas are religious just because [that person] is religious...cloaks them in religious terminology." If, for instance, Priest's methods were to produce a consensus that God prohibits torture but only because torture produces more harm than good, that would be a secular conclusion with the concept of God tacked on at the end. A truly religious common morality, in other words, would not be much harder to achieve than Priest makes it seem.

So really I'm not sold on this whole thing. When asked about a common morality, it's just not helpful to talk only about common epistemological features that we might have when searching for a common morality; it's a bit like saying, when asked about the perfect vacation spot, that one arrives there in a plane. One can indeed get places on planes, so if there were a perfect vacation spot it's not absurd to think that a plane might be the way to get there. But it doesn't prove that it is the way to get there, either, and it certainly doesn't help narrow down the choices any, and when one group of people is set on interpreting the word "perfect" in a fundamentally different way than another group it's hard to imagine that the plane has anything to do with it at all. While morality has an advantage over the idea of a perfect vacation spot in that we're fairly certain that the one exists in an objective way that the other doesn't, the problems with Priest's approach remain the same in both cases. And, really, this is something he should have been able to figure out: any mathematician worth his or her salt knows that, unless the function one specifies is trivially simple, its output will depend on the input. To pretend that the same thing doesn't hold true in a(n arguably) more complex area of thought is just pathetic.

*Before anyone gets pissy with me for doing this, please note that I have a degree in math (as evidenced by my use of the cross-product sign instead of the cruder multiplication sign). This is not, then, anything against math as a field or mathematicians as people.