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2008-02-29T18:49:00.001-05:00

“Billy Boy The Sunday Soldier of the 17th Maine” by Jean Mary Flahive* is a novel based on a real story, one I grew up with. Billy was William Laird, a “slow” boy from Berwick, Maine, near where I live. Though illiterate and most likely not able to understand what he was doing, he was enlisted in the Army during the Civil War along with a group of other boys from his town, deserted after he’d been separated from them by the Army, walked a long way home from Maryland, was arrested and was shot by a firing squad for desertion. That much of the story is pretty solid fact. The town lore is that he was badly harassed and likely abused in the Army and that Abraham Lincoln, when informed of his story, pardoned him but that the pardon arrived too late. Though it seems the last part is not able to be confirmed. The author points out that the Anti-Conscription riots might have had something to do with a pardon being lost at the time he was killed. It’s impossible to know.

I got the story from the same source the author did. She was given an account written by Richard Stillings, a history teacher, local politician, and career military officer, after his funeral. Richard Stillings was a friend of my parents, he told me the story, himself. His family lived in Berwick at the time Billy Laird lived, I think it is certain that his ancestors would have known the Laird family, so he probably got it from a line of transmission that began close to the facts.**

Dick was a history major and not a bad one. I once read one of his college papers and it was pretty good if quite conventional. He was smart and honest about history, though he was a liberal Republican of the sort which doesn’t exist anymore. You won’t be surprised to hear we fought about everything to do with politics if it came up. Since he knew I’d fight at the drop of an implication, he must have enjoyed it. He certainly provoked me often enough. Dick died twelve years ago and I wish I could ask for his comment. Jean Mary Flahive did a lot of additional research but said that she really only found the beginning and the end of the story so oral history a generation removed is probably as good as is available.

The book is a real novel so much of what it contains is either guessed at or invented, the author makes it pretty clear at the end of the book what is which. I think that her guesses were generally on the mark. The irresponsibility of allowing a mentally retarded boy to enlist in the army, the ill treatment he would have gotten, especially when he was separated from people he knew, the injustice of the military justice system that killed him with brutal indifference, though I’d guess it was with a generous measure of petty official enthusiasm. I have wondered if he wasn’t killed just as an example to others, a specimen of the institutionalized terror that all war machines practice as a means of forcing people to make war. I’d wondered if a mentally retarded boy might have been seen as expendable by military officers with too little to do stationed in Augusta, Maine where he was tried.

The completely invented material fills out the story into a narrative that tries to explain how he might have made it home. It’s suitable for its intended audience, though it goes farther than I’d have dared try.

I think the picture of his family and their reaction to the execution of a beloved son must be close to true. They recovered his body and buried him on their farm, where his grave still lies.** They must have loved him enough to overcome whatever shame would have accrued to them for having produced a deserter during the Civil War. I hope that is what that means. The story I heard was that they eventually left the town, having had their hearts broken by the injustice of it. The sadness of the story survived for the next hundred years as part of local history so I think there must have been more than a little affection for Billy Laird while he was alive.

“Billy Boy” is a good book for middle-school aged children and older to read, something to counter the constant pro-war propaganda that saturates the media in the United States today. Every decade or so there is a story about someone who was inducted into the military who shouldn’t have been due to their intellectual limits. Sometimes they are destroyed by the sadism or indifference of the military and its officers, sometimes it amounts to no more than cold blooded murder. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to change as the imperial wars the United States is brought into by corrupt presidents with real absolute war making powers continue. William Laird’s story is only a small story of a hapless soldier, one of those whose blood regularly runs down the palace walls of our pretend republic. It pulls back the curtain on “supporting the troops” in a way that wouldn’t ever remain buried in a real democracy.

* ISBN: 978-1-934031-13-1

** He told me on another occasion of having shaken the hand of someone who shook hands with Lincoln so he knew people who had been alive in the 1860s

*** Laird, William H., d. July 15, 1863, aged 30 yrs. 6 mos. 14 days. (53) (Executed as a deserter, but irresponsible.) BURIAL INSCRIPTIONS And other Data of Burials in Berwick, York County, Maine to the Year 1922 by Wilbur D. Spencer . I believe the age should actually read 20 yrs. I’ve never visited the grave, though I know people who have seen it.

2008-01-30T10:39:00.000-05:00

Dissing An Idol and Feeling Better For It
by Anthony McCarthy

The furor over the essay posted below produced some good points to consider and a lot of silly fun over at Echidne’s blog. I did get too much of the latter by citing Thomas Huxley and Richard Dawkins to refute the instantly arrived at piece of erudition from the Wiki Rangers and Knights of Sagan that “only creationists use the word ‘Darwinism”. Though even that obvious refutation didn’t matter. You wonder at the phenomenon of people who won’t read or think but who frequent blogs that deal with somewhat complicated ideas.

The most ridiculous, though, didn’t come from the post-adolescent Sciblog wannabees but one Word Search able scholar who went into paroxysms of indignation over the use of the word “cull” to describe what Darwin lamented mightn’t happen in ‘civilised’ countries due to the level of charity available to people in the work houses of Victorian England. I got the feeling that the guy didn’t know the word before reading it in the essay. Come to think of it, he probably doesn’t understand the New Poor Law or have the skills to find out what the reference to work houses means so this will probably set him off again.

Darwin used a metaphor to describe the unchecked breeding of the “weaker members” of the human species and the bad results it would have for future generations. He said:

Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

He introduced the idea that it was stupid to allow certain people to have children after lamenting that they would survive to child bearing age. By comparing people to farm animals in this context he was clearly lamenting that people wouldn’t be treated like animals in a commercial breeding operation.

Let me stop here to ask, isn’t that outrageous enough in itself? Not even animals in the wild, but comparing human beings to animals in a commercial breeding operation? Where else have we seen that idea not only posed by carried out?

Darwin’s Defender didn’t seem to realize that animals selected as not to be bred are not kept as pets on a farm but are marked for early slaughter. I’ll point out that this is entirely in keeping with the earlier part of the paragraph where Darwin laments that human beings will survive long enough to breed.

The mechanism to prevent this happening in the human population, the one he approves of, the one he heartily approves of among the ‘savages’ is through the deaths of the “weaker members”. That the gentleman's son, Charles Darwin, would leave the culling to the 'savages' signifies absolutely nothing.

By the time Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, where the passage comes from, he was a very experienced writer who was used to having his language dissected by both those hostile to science and by scientists. To think he didn’t mean what he wrote is the kind of double-talk you get from idol worshipers, ironically, it is tantamount to saying he was ga-ga when he wrote it. I think he knew what he was writing and that it is clear he knew what happens to animals on the farm, he cited exactly the practices of commercial animal breeding in his work and would have known about its enormous usefulness to his great idea, which isn’t evolution but natural selection. The subsequent and dishonest assertion of his humanity does nothing to dissuade me that he knew the horrible conclusions that had to come from believing what he had just written.

I won’t write down to the level of people who don’t read what they comment on or who won’t look up references they don’t understand. It’s a waste of the time of those readers who do read and do the bother of thinking about what is on the screen in front of them instead of automatically looking to their database of skimpy, pre-fabricated, cliches and prejudices in order to fit in ideas that don’t match any field they’ve got in their heads. Writing down is an insult to people who deserve respect and it’s my experience that the ones who choose to be idiots aren’t going to change no matter how hard you try to explain what you’ve already written.

I will also not hold back because “creationists” might find useful material in what I point out. If it’s there, they’ve got the resources to find it . If the proponents of Darwinism are so worried about ‘science’ that they think covering up the truth will protect it, they care more about their ideology than they do about science. I have no obligation to join in with their cover up efforts.

2008-01-22T11:35:00.000-05:00

EVOLUTION, evolution, ideology and the continuation of LIFE.

For my sister-in-law, Dr. M.L.D., the ecologist who has talked through some of my questions with me.

Part one
EVOLUTION is long. Really, really long. It encompasses the entire duration of life on the planet Earth. Most commonly that is thought today to be a period of more than three billion years. That’s a number we are all familiar with hearing but getting your mind around what even one billion - 1,000,000,000 - years really consists of is impossible. What could a billion years mean to a person? What would the first, the last and all of the varied unknown and unrecorded days, seasons, years and ages in between years one and one billion mean. They are incomprehensible in their vast duration and compass of possible experience in terms of even the longest human life span. We have no frame of reference.

And not only is EVOLUTION (upper case) long, it is also large in numbers, encompassing, literally, all of the lives of all of the organisms that have ever existed. All of the organisms which have reproduced or been produced. That number is of many magnitudes larger than even the incomprehensible billions of years already mentioned. Consider, just as a sample of the complications, the known time periods between generations of living species of rodents, and of one-celled organisms. Consider the number of fertile eggs some species of plants, insects and mollusks produce in one reproductive cycle. Each of the surviving, reproducing individuals was and is a variation, many have the possibility of having an effect on future generations. Leaving the entirely relevant question of individuals aside, imagining even the number of what we might classify as species, each comprising subspecies, varieties, and other sub groupings is incomprehensible.

Now it’s necessary to make a distinction between EVOLUTION, the actual fact of life in both its ancient and contemporary diversity and numbers, and the human science of evolution (lower case), which attempts to study the mechanisms and artifacts of all those lives and to understand many different aspects of them, including the attempts to make general assertions about them. Let’s allow the conventional beginning of the science of evolution as the publication date of The Origin of Species, 1859. In that case, evolution as a formal, scientific, study has been going on for about a hundred fifty years.

Immediately we have come on something remarkable, the difference between the billions of years that EVOLUTION has been operating and the mere one hundred fifty years that it has been studied to date. The fraction which would represent the part of EVOLUTION which is taken up by the human study of it looks something like 150 over 3,000,000,000+. A hundred-fifty years outstrips the conscious experience of most human beings by about twice, but it would appear to be like the briefest noticeable moment when opposed to the time that EVOLUTION has been continually in process*.

As a way of beginning the approximation of how complete a picture our science of evolution can give us today , other factors, of equal and even greater importance than the number of years, species, and individuals, have to be considered. While the numbers yielded by these aren’t known we can know that whatever it is would tax our imagination so as to be incomprehensible even before multiplication of factors to be considered begins. It is far from the end of it.

There is much more to consider such as the individual physical aspects of the bodies and lives of all individuals which could impinge on the processes of EVOLUTION, those which we know about, those which we will never know about due to the fact that their traces are lost for all time. The physical record available to us represents an infinitesimally small number of the physical variations that must have had some impact on the species and individuals alive today. Many of the examples available to us may or may not be representative of whatever species we might assign them to, if we were able to. Added into that the impacts of climate, pathology, nutrition, and those entirely unavailable variables, behavior and chance happening, which would properly enter into the study, the data available to study might be seen as nugatory. We can be certain that the information we have available or will ever have available is inadequate to present even a general picture of EVOLUTION, our study must, therefore, be limited to only a small part of it.

If, by some miracle, the reproduction by a single strand of life continued unbroken over more than three billion years it would produce astonishing physical variation if only as a matter of chance mutation over time. To say ‘by some miracle’ is not accurate, though, because that is literally the case of every single organism alive as you read this. It has been a single unbroken strand from the beginning of evolution that has produced each of us, no two alike. And that is entirely too simple, because we are at the ends of intertwining stands through innumerable exchanges of genetic material among different organisms, all of them subject to the possibility of mutation. Reproduction by the numbers we are considering clearly produces variety of results, in ways and almost certainly by means which we can not begin to imagine. It would be literally miraculous if it hadn’t. One thing that it is essential to keep in mind, at every moment in that three billion years there was a living being that was the offspring of living beings and which produced living beings all living in an environment that allowed them to survive.

This experiment could lead us to an important conclusion, while EVOLUTION is a fact supported by the relevant science, the belief that we know more than a tiny part of that phenomenon is absurd. EVOLUTION, in terms of human capacity, is effectively of infinite complexity**. It is almost certain that much many more facts will be known if the study continues, maybe many times more than what we have now. I would propose that it is certain we can’t even suspect enormous parts of even what will be knowable.

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But this daunting picture doesn’t mean that what we do know is unimportant. A mathematician once pointed out that given the infinity of topics that could possibly be taken up to study in mathematics, the question of interest becomes a matter of greatest importance. And as we have seen the possibilities surrounding EVOLUTION are equally taxing of the attention of the human species.

What do those who study evolution want from it? What uses can it be put to, what uses is it put to? To what extent do people who hope to make a profession out of the study of evolution allow their personal interests to effect their ideally objective science? Do they hope to get a certain job with people of a certain ideology? It could be the hope of professional acceptance that might shade what is concluded. It might even be that the science itself, what has been published to date and what is currently fashionable skews consideration. Does the professional study of evolution limit the science itself ? Do those engaged in it find what they are looking for and miss other things?***

And, by all means, we have to limit the consideration to those who accept that EVOLUTION is a fact and who do not try to impose an agenda which cannot be evaluated with the legitimate tools and methods of science. To do that removes someone from serious, scientific, consideration.

I have said that the science of evolution is important but it isn’t the most important thing in life. Life has gotten along for billions of years without our science, as shown in the fourth paragraph above. Somehow its having done so without the custodial care of human science almost leads to a feeling of anxiety. And yet it happened unobserved and unremarked by us.****

There is a consideration made much more interesting than evolution by necessity, today. We are in the midst of a mass extinction event caused by human activity. It endangers a huge part of the diversity of the biosphere, shutting off the lines of huge numbers of species, entire biotas are in danger of extinction. It is entirely possible that the products of science, technology, economics, politics and other human activities could kill us all.

EVOLUTION compared to the human study, evolution, is infinitely more important. Preservation of the thing studied is more important than the study of it. Our most important tool to preserve the biosphere, the only link between the entire past of life and the entirety of what life there is in the future, is politics. Politics is one of the greatest tools we have to correct human actions that endanger us all. The political success of environmental protection and species preservation is far more important than protecting any dearly cherished ideology of humans. Capitalism, communism, socialism, physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, Darwinism - which, many of you will be surprised to realize, isn’t the same thing as evolution -, creationism, etc. None of these are as important as saving the planet, none of them would have the possibility of existing without the life of the planet being saved.

Even these cherished ideologies and theories which our educations falsely lead us to believe are paramount, are entirely dependent for their existence on the future of EVOLUTION. Whatever they can lend to that effort is necessary, whatever preserves the life of the planet is necessary, whatever endangers it must be rejected. This includes whatever these ideologies, sciences, fads, etc. do which results in preventing political change that is necessary to save the environment. Environmental science, in so far as it is used to preserve the basis of life is the most important science we have ever devised. It is the science that deserves our greatest concern and effort. It is the key to our survival.

* We could also consider the number of researchers in evolution and its allied fields and wonder how that number could compare with the range of what is included with Evolution.

** The opponents of evolution and those who deny EVOLUTION aren’t stupid. They are quite able to read and figure out the weak spots in the man made theories about it. Not being honest about those weaknesses, pretending that the fact of EVOLUTION stands or falls on the basis of current ideologies within evolution plays into their hands.

*** Maybe it is right to look at the body of professionals who make their living in evolutionary science as being the product of selection pressures, or of adaptation to their profession’s environment. While EVOLUTION is a fact supported by an amazing amount of science it is large enough and unknown enough to produce different ideas. Perhaps a different species of evolutionist would dominate the field if the cultural environment and, especially, those with the ability to fund it hadn’t favored a particular point of view. Being a casual witness to just the death match over the rather modest idea of “spandrels”, in the 90s its clear there was a struggle for survival and reproduction. How could they object to these questions being raised about their profession?

**** It is undeniable that EVOLUTION would have fared better in species diversity and, most likely, in the possibility of its continuing at all, if humans and our culture, hadn’t evolved. Though they are not entirely to blame, science and technology are some of the primary causes of the destruction of the environment. They have accelerated the process of destroying the environment through magnifying the powers of human despoilers and they have provided chemicals and mechanisms not found by those without science and technology. They have done this at a rate many times faster than they have generated the knowledge needed to preserve the planet. To deny that is as irresponsible as it is ridiculous. To allow that fact to go unsaid precludes possibilities of reform and we need reform in the behavior that results from science. Science is almost as important as politics in the struggle to save the planet.

Applied Science: Interlude Scherzando

Living on the left you may eventually come across a very rare species, the principled, Hegelian cheap-skate. The few I’ve met have been Marxists, though I’ve read about other varieties, even anarchist skin flints. This scruple against giving alms or charity avoids corrupting the destitute into complaisance by making life too easy for them. You might ask what separates the leftist tight wad from those who make up a far larger percentage of the right? The ones who we justly think of as selfish swine? As usual, it’s different because it’s a matter of science. “Science” is supposed to settle all questions of motivation, isn’t it? You see, in addition to affording the poor the moral benefits of the strenuous life, whether or not they like it, depriving them the price of a sandwich is a means to force them to shake off their torpor and do their part in pushing the dialectic ever onward, back and forth, until the glorious day of its arrival at its scientifically determined destiny.

One example, who could be named but who may still be alive and, one imagines, might be litigious, was a fixture of the New York left of earlier decades. He was a noticeably comfortable psychotherapist who on at least one occasion said that he had held to the principle against charity since learning it as a red-diaper baby. And, being what he turned out to be, I’d guess he still holds to it. In less charitable moments one suspects that his subsequent drift from Marxism to neo-conservatism in the great migration of the late 60s and 70s was due to his realizing he wasn’t quite the figure in the left that he had believed himself to be. Though, thinking it over perhaps the former Marxist was doing his part to move history onward. No doubt, if this is true, he is just awaiting the word, printed in some small magazine with a plain cover and chaste type face, that the dialectic over Manhattan is on the move again. Propitiation sufficed. And, if he hasn’t since died, he will end his days as a neo-com.

None of the devotees of principled stinginess who I’ve observed, though, have undertaken self-improvement and applied their principle to themselves, voluntarily making their own lot more desperately miserable in order to rouse themselves from the coffee house table or book shop stall to the barricades and a more active part in the workings of history.

As we see, some principles of science are easier to put into practical effect than others.

Early Selections

Part Two

Due to habits formed in the defense of the wall of separation and public school science against creationism it can be difficult for a leftist to read Marilynne Robinson’s essay, “Darwinism”. It is also uncomfortable for someone on the left to talk about Darwin’s language as she does because many will immediately assume you are a creationist, or accuse you of some other form of apostasy by stealth. This is guaranteed to happen no matter how explicitly you endorse EVOLUTION or a belief neutral, democratic government.*

But you can’t have integrity unless you say what you mean. You also can’t be a decent person if you don’t believe and act as if people are not objects, abstractions, mere ideas or actors in your dearly loved fantasy scenarios playing out what you take to be the grand forces of the universe.

In her essay, Robinson is unsporting enough to read Darwin and others and to believe that they mean what they have written. Asserting that someone didn’t really mean what he continually and lucidly writes should mean that he isn’t to be trusted. But in polite society you are expected to pretend it doesn’t in cases such as this. You are also to concentrate on the demurral appended as an obligatory afterthought and ignore the bulk of what is clearly proposed

As an example, among the quotes she dares to take directly from Darwin and others, I’ll concentrate on this one.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The Descent of Man

Darwin regretted that the lower orders will be saved from necessary pruning by our sentimentality. That is as clear as the words he wrote. He was afraid that the level of charity current in mid 19th century, the time of Dickens’ England, was too much charity due to its impeding natural selection. Not that Darwin means to subject himself to natural selection. One assumes that the Darwins and the mostly well off families of his followers didn’t gave up the practice of vaccination or seeking medical care themselves. I’ve looked and can’t find evidence that early Darwinists refused medical care as a matter of principle, if you know of any I will revise. Thus these advocates of the benefits of universal human culling allowed sentiment to overtake their responsibility as members of the rational class, to husband their own stock to a higher state through the death of the underbred.** Perhaps this is something more noticeable for people who have reason to suspect they or, as in my case my great-great grandparents, were included in Darwin’s underclass. Perhaps your ancestors in the 1870s were also among those referred to above.

It is especially interesting to think about this passage due to Charles Darwin’s history of hypochondria - which seems to have begun before his marriage and his decisive reading of Malthus - his history of seeking treatments, cures and just about anything available to, how did he put it, have medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of Charles Darwin to the last moment. Was not such an unfit specimen as Darwin clearly judged himself to be, and he did apprentice as a doctor, marked as one for whom nature should be allowed to take its course?

Some sources say that he worried that his malady was heritable. Charles Darwin was the last person in the world to have missed that possibility. Wasn’t he an example of the worst kind who should be discouraged, at the very least, from breeding? Eventually he produced ten children, two of whom died in childhood, one a famously beloved daughter. You wonder if he thought about his own daughter’s death when he wrote this.

If you think it’s harsh of me to bring up his daughter’s death, do you think it was harsh of him and his admirers to meditate dispassionately on the benefits of untold other peoples’ children being weeded out of the breeding stock by small pox, other diseases, violence and starvation? Does it being called ‘science’ make that noble and good, or at least all right? Does it being “science” preclude further consideration of these matters?

How does this clear warning of dire consequences stemming from the vaccination of the lower orders differ in kind from the Imams in Nigeria advising people not to have their children vaccinated for polio several years ago? That is a real question and there is an answer. The difference is that the Nigerian Imams were afraid of the vaccine being tainted. There had been a drug test in Nigeria several years before which, they believed , had killed eleven children and disabled 200. ***They were also concerned that HIV might be spread through contamination during the immunization program. The clerics and government officials in Nigeria acted through ignorance and paranoia, perhaps, but their crime, for which they were roundly condemned, was an ill informed and ignorant attempt to protect children, not a tacit approval of their culling for racial hygiene. Does anyone reading this doubt that Darwin would have classed these children among the ‘savages’.

Saying that Darwin wasn’t actually advocating that many people die is dishonest. Does anyone really believe that with the thinnest of alibis for cover, he didn’t endorse the idea of allowing people to go unvaccinated, untreated, unfed and allowing a huge number of them to die of disease, starvation or in a horrific, violent struggle for food? He was informed enough about the governmental and economic practices of his time to know that his suggestions could easily have been put into effect with the slightest encouragement, almost by accident.

And he had seen the people he believed it was a folly to save on his travels and at home. Here is his list, “the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick .... [the alleged beneficiary of] poor-laws ... the weak members of civilised societies” all of these should be allowed to undergo what he approves of as the brutal culling found among “savages”. Does this list contain no actual people? Do you really believe that? With the benefit of reading this after witnessing the brutality of the self-professed, scientific regimes of the twentieth century the list should seem all too familiar to us. The word “selection”, also.

The effect of the Darwinists’ casual dismissal of the lives of people in marshaling opposition to the fact of EVOLUTION isn’t considered nearly often enough. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is a part of the opposition to the study of EVOLUTION is deluding themselves. The links between Darwin and those who overcame sentiment to put his ideas into practice are real and the opponents of evolutionary science know about them. Look at their websites if you think this isn’t true. Darwin shouldn’t remain the public face of evolutionary science.

Maybe less noticeable at first reading is that there is no supporting data given, at least in the edition I’ve got, to demonstrate his contention that vaccinating for small pox actually has the degrading effect he suspects. It’s a speculation based on his supreme theory, which isn’t evolution but the origin of species by natural selection. Darwin predicts dire consequences in vaccinated populations. I’ve not been able to find science from his time or up to today which supports his contention that it has this degrading effect. You wonder if the WHO shouldn’t suspend their efforts if such evidence existed. You also wonder what contemporary advocates of mass vaccination would make of this passage.

It is impossible to read Darwin and his circle and not be reminded of these things, once you have gotten over the habit of ignoring what’s right there in front of you. That was the greatest effect of reading Robinson’s essay, it is a slap to wake up and admit what is there to be seen. I’m sure she knew it would be misunderstood and misrepresented, yet she wrote it and her bravery deserves to be noticed.

Robinson points out ironies in her essay, none greater than the fact that the Darwinists and those who agitate for creationism effectively share the same economic morality. Looking at Republican social policy of the past thirty years, you see a practical attempt to remove any barriers to brutal selection forces. Only it’s called ‘competition’.

My question is how can the very basis of the left’s agenda survive the idea that our reason and morality don’t matter or that it is incompatible with what’s purported to be scientific truth. Equality, justice, democracy, a decent, peaceful life in a habitable environment. If the left really comes to believe that biology is destiny, that free will and good will are illusions or impotent, that the market of natural selection is the inevitable law that governs human lives, our agenda is wrong.

I don’t think it is. I think that the history of the past century proves it isn’t and that there is no realistic alternative to it. Too many of us have been duped through public relations into accepting fundamentally anti-democratic ideas that are based in the assumptions made by self-interested people with an agenda basically at odds with our ideals. I believe that the depressing, dispiriting effect of falling for various species of biological determinism leads to impotent cynicism. Those ideas have been given the test of time. They produce a nightmare.

That is the subject of the third part of this series.

* “Darwinism” is from the collection of essays, The Death of Adam ISBN 0-312-42532-5
Many, especially the throng of devout blog Darwinists who have never read him, might be surprised that Robinson concentrates first and foremost on the economic origins of Darwinism. They should go look at him and see that for him reading Malthus was his breakthrough event, literally everything springs from that moral atrocity. Malthus isn’t simply an implication or a starting point in the line of biological determinism stemming from Darwin he permeates it. Malthus is the seed, Darwin sewed it and it grew.

** You might want to contrast the content and tone with this passage, not much farther on into the book.

Man accumulates property and bequeaths it to his children, so that the children of the rich have an advantage over the poor in the race for success, independently of bodily or mental superiority. On the other hand, the children of parents who are short-lived, and are therefore on an average deficient in health and vigour, come into their property sooner than other children, and will be likely to marry earlier, and leave a larger number of offspring to inherit their inferior constitutions. But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races. Nor does the moderate accumulation of wealth interfere with the process of selection. When a poor man becomes moderately rich, his children enter trades or professions in which there is struggle enough, so that the able in body and mind succeed best. The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labour for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be over-estimated; as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work, material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages. No doubt wealth when very great tends to convert men into useless drones, but their number is never large ; and some degree of elimination here occurs, for we daily see rich men, who happen to be fools or profligate, squandering away their wealth. The Descent of Man.

“But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil.... Nor does the moderate accumulation of wealth interfere with the process of selection.” One suspects Darwin’s “moderate accumulation of wealth” which was not yet insalubrious included the wealth of the Darwin -Wedgewood families. Why, since he refuses to consider the possibility that humans’ capacity for reason, moral reflection and self-denial might exempt us from the brutal forces of natural selection, does he seem to think that membership in his notably brutal economic elite should render its members immune?

You also wonder why Darwin didn’t include the laws against stealing in the list of unfortunate curbs on the workings of natural selection. If you doubt that the laws protecting private property are one of the greatest inhibition of the weeding out of the unfit, imagine what would have happened in Darwin’s Britain if it was suddenly legal for the masses of the poor to take from those worthless drones bred to the aristocracy. The resultant struggle might have saved Darwin the embarrassment of explaining how he neglected to discourage their vaccination.

*** “The Pfizer drug test in 1996 is still on our minds. To a large extent, it shaped and strengthened my view on polio and other immunisation campaigns," said Mr bin Uthman. At the time, the US company had used an untested drug on children to fight an epidemic of bacterial meningitis in the Kano area. Lawsuits have since been lodged against Pfizer in the United States and in Nigeria, alleging that the drug trial was illegal and that it killed 11 children and left 200 others disabled.

N.B I’d thought of writing a post about the politics of Darwinism within science, having followed a few of the vicious fights over even minor attempts to introduce additional mechanisms of evolution for consideration (no, ‘intelligent design’ wasn't even considered) but it would have gotten way too long. One of the things found while researching that topic was this abstract by Susannah Varmuza of the University of Toronto. This says it better than I can.

Evolution is an idea that inspires huge emotional responses, in part because it speaks to our very identities. The religious overtones associated with debates about evolution are not restricted to those between evolutionary biologists and creationists (the inspiration for the quote above). Among evolutionary biologists, there is an aura of deification of Darwin that tends to stifle discourse on ideas that are construed by the mainstream to be anti-Darwinian, perhaps, as pointed out by Gould (1981), to counteract the political machinations of the creationist movement. Over the decades, attempts by non-traditionalists to introduce new thinking into the study of evolution have met with either stony silence or rancorous derision. Goldschmidt, Gould, and proponents of Lamarckian inheritance can still raise hackles, even posthumously (‘Goldschmidt is a bum!’ echoed around the lecture theatre at a recent scientific meeting, 44 years after his death.

You should read the entire thing if you’re interested in evolution and genetics. I’ve got the feeling the epigenetics might help open up a lot of new areas into the effectively infinite reality of EVOLUTION. But they will have to stop pretending that Darwin can't be questioned first.

The People Posted by Anthony McCarthy

formerly known as olvlzl

The People are the foundation and the ultimate authority of democracy. Democracy assumes that The People will rule themselves better than despots or elites or even “a government of wise men”. Democracy assumes that The People will act more wisely, more justly, more fairly than other authorities. Most of all, including all of these benefits, democracy assumes that the collective actions of The People will be more beneficially effective in the real world than any other form of government.

In order for democracy to be preferable to any other known form of government it has to pass a fairly low test, to produce a better life than undemocratic governments. The history of the world provides conclusive evidence that The People could hardly do worse.

There are four fundamental prerequisites for democracy to exist, The People must be assumed to have political equality, they must have a sufficient grasp of the truth to make the right decisions, and they have to have a sense of fairness, honesty and decency. It must be taken as given that The People possess the inherent rights to govern their lives and their polity. In order for democracy to really exist, these have to be more than assumed, they have to be made real. Without these prerequisites, democracy is a sham.

But the exercise of rights, though they might be said to be unalienable, cannot be exercised outside of a context which will permit it. Democracy is notably rare in the world, it is gained with enormous difficulty and it is difficult to keep. Would be rulers are always endangering it and elites actively despise it even as they appropriate its words as tools of deception. In the modern world one of the dangers to democracy is the propaganda power of mass media and in the United States that media is owned and controlled by the economic elite. We have the example of the media here perverting the concept of democracy to the point where it is to be held as unremarkable that George W. Bush - brought to office by Supreme Court ruling, approving a clearly corrupted election in a state ruled by his brother - claims the right to impose democracy, by unprovoked invasion, on a foreign country. When words become slogans without any coherent substance, the truth can’t be told. We are at a crisis which is destroying democracy and which endangers the entire biosphere.

An even greater danger to Western democracy is the loss of confidence by The People in our own ability to govern, when we doubt our actions can be beneficially effective. That is seen in low voter participation rates, the cynicism with which government and politics is regarded and the ever lower regard in which The People are led to hold ourselves. An apathetic, demoralized, jaded population is set up for subjugation.

----------

I began with a section about the immense dimensions of EVOLUTION. In the arguments that ensued no one disputed the contention that it was effectively infinite when compared with the capacity of the human population to deal with even those data which could be obtained. Less noticed, since it was unremarked, was the contention that the enormous duration and numbers of EVOLUTION would allow it being known through only as a minute part of the whole. I mentioned that this limit in what was knowable might apply to mechanisms governing the processes of EVOLUTION which the human study of it might devise or even discover. I am going to state that as probable, if not a given.

The “Interlude” mentions, very nontechnically, the Hegelian dialectic, a form of allegedly scientific determinism which has had at least a nominal effect in many countries. It has never been very influential in the United States. Those countries which followed Marx, more in the breach than in the observance, can be said to have followed that form of determinism. I’ll leave it to you to consider the largest of those countries, China, and the results for both The People of China and the Environment in which they will have to try to survive. I will also leave you to consider what it might have to teach about the probability of elites saving the planet.

This “Interlude” was originally meant to be published at the beginning of what became the discussion of Darwinism, but was broken off in a futile attempt at concision. The subject wasn’t specifically Darwinism or the dialectic but political theories which do not start with the assumptions necessary for democracy, but in various forms of determinism, biological, historical, and others. All of these theories begin by aspiring to the objective reliability and prestige of science. Some are more scientific, others take the prestige but make do without the objective reliability. The social sciences are replete with examples.

Darwin, resting on the reality of EVOLUTION, was certainly an important figure in science, no one can deny that just as no serious person can deny EVOLUTION. But from before the publication of The Origins of Species, as that book was incubating, Darwinism was more than just an attempted explanation of EVOLUTION.

We love our pet ideas and in the competitive struggle for attention and professional recognition the promotion of them can outstrip the fact that they are all contingent. The competitive pressures in university departments, the ruthless need for scholars to defend their goods, the need of the would be intellectual descendants of those holding a department or, in the worst cases, entire fields, often lead to the use of less than objective means to render competitors extinct. The desire of elite scholars and their intellectual heirs to promote their ideas to the point of invincibility is, perhaps, a result of scarce resources. I don’t know if it has ever been studied in those terms. It isn’t any surprise that such loudly touted ideas have the potential to leave a cultural legacy that can outlive the position they hold in intellectual life. Freudian psychology is a definite example of that. Such ideas have a life outside of science, They aren’t required to adhere to the requirements of science in the wider culture, though they never give up the pretense to have remained faithful to its exigencies.

It is mentioned in an earlier section that the position of natural selection, like all of the contingencies of science, is open and, in spite of enormous resistance, active. But that isn’t my fight. There is another aspect of natural selection that I believe is more important for democracy and, through it, the survival of the species.

Part Two, analyzed a specimen of thinking which became influential in the general culture. I think any honest observer of evolutionary science and the enormously varied cultural descendants of it would admit that is true. While quotes from other people could have been used, this one encompasses enormous political implications. Since the political implications of this kind of idea are the subject of this essay, that one is entirely fit for the purpose. An idea of science that steps into the mechanics of politics has made itself the proper subject of political analysis. I will finish the analysis begun in Part Two.

Whatever else this application of natural selection* to human populations asserts, it unmistakably holds that not even democratically chosen actions will reliably produce effective beneficial results overriding natural selection.

Darwin clearly didn’t think they would in this case. After Malthus, he warned of dire consequences that were practically certain to result if what he identifies as the “weak members” of the human species happened to leave descendants. He all but guarantees that if they live to reproduce, disaster for the entire population will result. Inequality is assumed as a given, it is assumed to be an intrinsic part of the operation of natural selection, even in its assumed govenance of the political lives of reasoning humans.

Darwin identifies the mechanism of the disaster, the failure of natural selection, and he identifies the cause of the failure, charitable aid and medical care which will allow survival to the point where children are born to these “weak members” . I am sorry if it is difficult to face that analysis but it is inescapable, that is what Darwin said would happen. Unsupported by corroborating data, he confidently expressed that the attempt to take effective beneficial action on behalf of these People would lead to tragic consequences. And notice, he assumes its intended effect, relief to the Wretched of the Earth, would be achieved. Its success was the problem.

After giving his dire forecast in steely, in what I must believe he felt to be, ‘manly’ language of dispassionate science, Darwin looked aside meekly and said that the aid must be given. This subsequent assertion, less vivid in language, that we must give that unwise aid though it lead to disaster, frankly, is irrational unless he pits the interests of the “weaker members” against the good of the rest and opts for the “weaker” ones. You might even say that he opts for them in spite of the good of themselves, since they will also experience the degenerating human population, front row seats, most probably. And in the paragraph, even as he is striking these moral postures, he is continually undermining them. **

That soft insistence on taking cross-starred moral responsibility is not one that all contenders for his mantle would feel it was necessary to observe, despite its having been made by Darwin himself. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the world would know that the demure assertion of moral responsibility would be forgotten while concentrating on the crisis it was clearly stated would result from it. Darwin witnessed the so-called reforms of the New Poor Law. That “reform” slashed aid to the poor, making the lives of the poor of under them even more miserable than before. Yet he condemned it as a too charitable hindrance to natural selection. Like the present “reforms” in the United States, forcing “competition” onto the weakest members of society, producing cohersive misery was its intended result. It is a bitter irony that the party embracing creationism and opposing EVOLUTION, has made this feature of Darwinian-Malthusian morality the dogma and law of the United States.

Though Darwin’s assumption of inequality is corrosive and the callousness infectious, the assumption of the uselessness of reason in the face of natural selection is fatal to democracy. The assumption of the futility of human intelligence to overcome an entirely theoretical “natural force” is the original sin against democracy that virtually every deterministic theory holds. It is in their application to human politics and society that the intended subjects of them have a fully justified skepticism of such theories.

It is one of the strangest features of the writings of many who assert the rational, scientific precision of their thinking, that they discount the effectiveness of human reason to change reality for the better or for humans to govern their lives by reasoning. You wonder how they could put their faith in reason or expect anyone else to care about it, if that is true. As I demonstrated, they tend to hold themselves outside and above the very laws they assert. You wonder how they account for their faith in science if reason is so impotent and it’s application has such notable exceptions.

I think it is because they are trying to force tools that can’t do the job. When Darwin and the rest try to apply science to the effectively infinite complexity of human thoughts and actions, both individual and, especially, collectively, to say they cut corners is one of the greatest understatements made in the history of language.

EVOLUTION is measured in billions of years, the universe of human thought and action is equally measured in the billions, no two People alike, everyone, now and in the past, more than just a variation, changing and dynamic over years of each individual life. The details and infinite variety of behavior, communal interactions, the infinite capacity of human beings to act well or badly, honestly or deceitfully, with hidden motives or little self-reflection, but most of all on the basis of reason and experience, precludes science from ever knowing more than a small fraction of an effectively infinite universe of human life. It is illogical and unreasonable to believe that science can make general laws about it.

Science cannot exist where there is no physical evidence which can be observed, quantified and analyzed. The temptation in scholarship is always to look for the grand unified theory of whatever. In the pursuit of a science of human behavior, of political and economic science, those grand theories have come and they’ve gone. In between, their pretenses of objective reliability are necessary for the professional prestige and funding of these efforts but that is seldom achieved except in studying a small part of the whole. Before they fade from science, they gain currency and have effects that often outlive their reputable lives in science.

Science absolutely depends on the observation of the physical universe, the physical universe is what it was made to study, it can’t study anything else. That is why assertions of intelligent design, even if it was true, have absolutely no place in a science classroom. You would think that religious believers would take it as an act of desecration to assert that science could perceive God who we are told you cannot see and live. If it is an act of blasphemy to put God to the test of statistical analysis, though, isn’t my subject here.

That those trying to subject human beings to the rule of science do not find free will or much in the way of the human rights which are the essential prerequisites for democracy to exist, is a confirmation of the nature of science. In their folly, due to their professional and personal arrogance, they assume and pretend that since they can’t find them they aren’t there. They aren’t alone in doing that, it is the habit of elites of all kinds to deny them, certainly to those less elite than they are. But anyone who seeks after these rights or, most often, the falsification of them, with science in order to make their name as the discoverer of a primary law of the universe is a fool. Unfortunately, their status can make fools of us all.

In The Trial of Socrates, I. F. Stone points out that despite the condescending derision with which the sandal maker is treated by those earliest scholarly enemies of democracy, Socrates and Plato, at least he could make a pair of shoes while Socrates and the entire subsequent 2,500 years of the history of philosophy couldn’t find even one Universal. Not so the world of scholarship has taken all that much notice of the fact.

* With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit*, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind*; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage*, though this is more to be hoped for than expected. The Descent of Man

** Please notice the final note of pessimism and the discouraging, conditional reservations throughout Darwin’s would-be humanitarian demurral.

In addition to my sister-in-law who discussed the scope included in EVOLUTION with me, I would like to thank Echidne who has allowed me to write at length on controversial topics, who has put up with my losing my temper a few times, and who writes one of the best blogs online.

I would also like to thank Marilynne Robinson whose essays provided the missing idea in a piece I’ve been thinking over for a long time. I would also like to thank those who have read and responded to what I’ve written for the past two years.

2007-08-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

from More Just So Stories

Gina Kolata of the New York Times New Service began a recent piece in the usual way, with an explanation steeped in the current fashion for explaining everything as being an expression of an ancient and adaptive genetic heritage:

Everyone knows men are promiscuous by nature. It's part of the genetic strategy that evolved to help men spread their genes far and wide. The strategy is different for a woman, who must go through so much just to have a baby and then nurture it. She is genetically programmed to want just one man who will stick with her and help raise their children.

Surveys bear this out. In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

Which is an odd way to start when you go on to read the rest of the article which is about the surveys which show that heterosexual men, on average have had about three to four more sexual partners than heterosexual women. You might have seen similar “scientifically conducted” polls bandied about on the blogs, on TV and perhaps even mentioned as yet another prop for biological determinism of gender roles.

However, there is a huge mystery about all this. Who are the extra women these men are having sex with and why are they apparently keeping silent about it. Otherwise, it just couldn’t figure.

- It's about time for mathematicians to set the record straight, said Dr. David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Surveys and studies to the contrary notwithstanding, the conclusion that men have substantially more sex partners than women is not and cannot be true, for purely logical reasons," Gale said.

Dr. Gale goes on to give a simple demonstration with equation anyone with fourth grade math could master. But not most of those in the media and even on some "Scienceblogs".

Despite all the confident assertions that the reported disparities are “proof” of a genetically programmed difference between mens’ and women’s brains apparently the original reporters of those illogical numbers know that what they’re reporting is bogus.

"I have heard this question before," said Cheryl D. Fryar, a health statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics and a lead author of the new federal report "Drug Use and Sexual Behaviors Reported by Adults: United States, 1999-2002," which found that men had a median of seven partners and women four.

But when it comes to an explanation, she added, "I have no idea."

"This is what is reported," Fryar said. "The reason why they report it I do not know."

While they’re noticing these seldom mentioned lacunae in today's common received wisdom perhaps they might want to notice something else.

Despite the reservations I’ve expressed here about polling and, even more so, the reporting of polls and surveys I do know one thing with absolute certainty. The methods of polling today are much, much more reliable than those of the Pleistocene period, the period about which the stories like the one at the top of this piece, are told with such confidence by biological determinists. We have no idea at all if our early ancestors were swingers, none. If men today, most of whom seem to be able to count, at least on their hands, are unsure about how many women they have had sex with, why would men at the dawn of humanity be more credible? Even with the techniques of modern polling? Maybe cavemen were liars and it is the propensity to lie about such things to people like pollsters (and other interviewers) which is the actual heritage we have from them. At least we know with some confidence that the lie is real.

In the end of Ms. Kolata’s article is this:

Ronald Graham, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, San Diego, agreed with Gale. After all, on average, men would have to have three more partners than women, raising the question of where all those extra partners might be.

"Some might be imaginary," Graham said. "Maybe two are in the man's mind and one really exists."

Maybe the stories of evolutionary psychology need to be subjected to similar levels of scrutiny.

P. S. For all anyone knows it could have been males with strong pair bonds who had a competitive advantage in the Paleolithic period. Maybe men who spent their time hankering after the, one assumes, sparse population of women instead of working were less likely to reproduce. Maybe women thought guys like that were creepy lounge lizards. It seems to me that the evolutionary psychologists, who, perhaps, have more leisure time to spend among college students less than half their age could just be projecting their longings back in time. Stranger things have been known to happen.

2007-08-04T10:07:00.001-04:00

Irresponsible Corporate Media Makes Responsible Government Impossible

Note: I was going to write a followup to this piece in light of this weeks bridge disaster and the soon to be laid aside interest in bridge inspection and repair. However, that wasn't possible. The reason the matter, clearly a matter of saving lives this week, will be laid aside is due to the collusion of conservative politicians and the media which supports them. It is the "tax and spend" chanters who have brought us to this. While it is profitable for their campaign supporters to build an enormous and complex infrastructure, it costs money to do do it right in the first place and to maintain and eventually replace a superannuated structure. That's when the howls of the right wing begin and responsible voices are silenced.

The Boston Globe had a column by David Luberoff last year which clearly explains the origins of the emerging Big Dig disaster. He points out that the project, originally funded through the federal highway system, lost a lot of its federal support half-way through. Instead of facing that reality, the politicians in Massachusetts didn't make up the difference with state and local taxes and tolls. One of the truest things in life is that while you often don't get what you pay for, you never get what you don't pay for. You know that's true when you are dealing with a large corporation like Bechtel with armies of bean counters making sure that they get maximum profits from their projects.

What went wrong in the face of warnings by people who knew what they were talking about - Massachusetts has probably the highest percentage of those on the continent- is just beginning to be studied. While they are looking at that I hope someone will look into the more general political atmosphere that led to the bad decisions. I don't only mean the steady stream of Republican governors during most of the Big Dig.

Given their refusal to monitor themselves for accuracy and responsibility, we won't get the media's role in promoting gross irresponsibility in politicians. At least not from them. But it really does largely fall on the media. Through call-in shows, wise-guy on-air personalities, connected owners and those who have created today's media sewer, anyone who steps up and tells the truth, "You want this done, you are going to have to pay for it," gets their head handed to them. They make lying and dereliction of duty requirements for retaining a political office or civil service job. Reporting with enough time or column space to really explain an issue costs more while the truths uncovered are insufficiently entertaining to maximize profits. And some of those truths might be most unwelcome at the club.

The Republican Party, who used to pride themselves on responsibility, now specialize in this kind of winning through lying. With the media fully in support they tell lies designed to win elections. Most people have a weakness for believing what they want to hear. The busy public, without the technical knowledge or time to look at the details buys the lies until reality strikes and they can't ignore it any longer. How else do you think Bush I lost to Bill Clinton despite the insane press adulation following Bush War I and the war they waged against Clinton as soon as it was clear he had a chance to win?

But if you want good government, safe and effective civil engineering projects, the rest of the benefits that only government can deliver, then we can't wait for the disaster to deliver the real news. The cost in lives, time and remedial action are multiplied many times by the lies and propaganda spread by the media.

The often repeated line, "Good, fast or cheap. Pick two." sums up the current political climate that this irresponsibility has produced. But as the Big Dig is beginning to prove, good is the only way to get faster and cheaper. Maybe the same applies to news media getting it right. But getting it right isn't what today's profit-driven and cynically self-interested media is all about.

The Globe had an article in which Michael Dukakis defends his administration's role in the Big Dig. Having read about the project from its beginning, he makes a good case. But Dukakis is just a boring detail guy the press rejected two decades ago

2007-08-02T10:51:00.000-04:00

Science Without Physical Evidence, Dawkins Brings Us Back To The Middle Ages.

"Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question." Richard Dawkins, quoted by H. Allen Orr in the New York Review of Books, Jan.11, 2007.

The first thing to notice about this odd passage is “Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide....”. Why “whether”? Its an absolute fact that there is no physical evidence available. None. No medical records, not even skeletal fragments. No physical remains of the woman or son or possible father in question are available nor is their possibly surviving lineage known. It's unlikely in the extreme that those will ever be identified. Why try to obscure the fact that there is none of the evidence necessary to examine the question with science when it is indisputable that there isn’t? So, Dawkins proposes examining the question scientifically without any physical evidence. He proposes determining the paternity of a child without anything to go on, whatsoever.*

Perhaps somewhat more understandable, since it’s Dawkins, he says that you can deal with the assertion of something that is claimed to have happened miraculously, outside the usual order of things and exactly once in the entire history of the world in the remote past, with science. With the claims made by those who believe in the Virgin Birth, even argument by analogy can’t address it. When an event is claimed to be unique, there is no possibility of making a comparison with another or even every other event proposed to be similar. Any scientific comparison with any other event would be irrelevant to the claims of a miracle unless you had physical evidence of it**

The total lack of evidence and the claim of uniqueness renders it clearly and most certainly NOT a question science can deal with. And this from the Oxford University Professor of The Public Understanding of Science. Certainly among the first things to understand about science are when there isn’t enough evidence to practice it and when there is. That is something that hasn’t stopped Dawkins in the past, however.

Much as it must frustrate those who would like to deal with some religious questions with science, much cannot be. They might not like that fact but that is just too bad. When the physical evidence necessary to study those is lost to history or non-existent, that is simply impossible. Pretending that you can proceed without the evidence it is dishonest and, beyond doubt, unscientific. You can believe or not believe the claims but using the prestige of the name science to back up your assertions can be done honestly only under specific conditions. It also carries a serious responsibility.

No one has to believe in the Virgin Birth, this short piece isn’t about that. This is about how one of the most famous and arrogant personalities of science can get away with saying something so stunningly absurd. With his status in contemporary culture, it’s just amazing that a person holding a position like Dawkins’ conveniently ignores something so basic to science.

If biologists are content with having Dawkins being the face of their science, they are exchanging short term glamor for long term problems. It is growing clearer that in the political climate in democracies that science can’t support the dead weight of extraneous ideologies unnecessary for it. I will make a prediction that you can check out later, if Dawkins truly becomes the face of evolution it will continue to face fierce opposition by many of those he insults gratuitously. Its research funding will not be secure. In the face of his arrogant condescension, a large percentage of the public will not understand the science or want to.

* While it might be fun to point out, going into the need to give God a paternity test only heightens the apparent absurdity of Dawkins claim that this is “a strictly scientific question. Science not only can't deal with these kinds of things, it makes a mockery of science to try it.

**. Your only hope to determine the accuracy of a claim of a miracle is to look at whatever evidence of the specific event is available and see if the claimed result happened. Modern claims of, for example, miraculous cures of physical diseases, could, very possibly, be investigated by science but only by examination of the physical evidence. Without that, science can’t be used to investigate the claim.

2007-06-23T06:58:00.000-04:00

This Comment Posted By olvlzl Was Not Submitted For Approval.

Finally got to a computer with a fast enough connection to watch digby’s address , which, if you haven’t heard it yet is, of course, excellent. I understand that one of those bloggers in the background was none other than our own Echidne. Echidne, you fully deserve to be on stage with digby and I can’t imagine a greater blog honor than that one.

Echidne of the Snakes is one of the distinctive voices of the internet. Its serious feminism and leftist political content, actual understanding of statistics and other necessary math, mixed with unusual point of view and style, produces a mix that couldn’t be replaced. The community that Echidne has established is, consistently, on of the most civil and intelligent anywhere. Anything else just wouldn’t be the same. The big problem isn’t that those are in danger of running out there isn’t any evidence of that happening.

The problem of blogging is that it is in almost all cases a volunteer activity undertaken by people who are not financially independent. The best bloggers have to find time in a real life to do the reading, thinking and writing necessary to produce good, original work. In full time blogging, producing three or four original pieces a day, it can become the equivalent of a second, full time job or more. I was reminded of just how hard that can be to sustain in the past month. In a life that is relatively free of overhead costs just producing three posts a day on a continuing basis was too much. I don’t think that it is likely that the best bloggers who produce the best work can continue to do so forever, even the most miraculous of them can’t just keep going forever. Burn out is an occupational hazard.

We, the users of blogs, need to take into account what is provided by the best bloggers who write original work. And we should be willing to financially support those who provide us with some of the best thinking available. A reliable support mechanism for the best bloggers is also the biggest obstacle keeping the blogs from providing us with the most necessary of all activities, original reporting of facts. Digby mentioned a support mechanism in her address, that is certainly worthy of looking into (which I will do as soon as I can get back to listen again and take notes) but there isn’t anything to keep us from giving direct support now. Bloggers need to be supported if they are to continue producing excellent work. It’s as clear as that.

2007-06-19T06:50:00.000-04:00

Who’d of Thunk It?
A paper reports the news and the people read it.
Spending so much of my time bemoaning the media it was good to read a Buzz Flash piece by Rory O'Connor about a small paper that did some reporting, The Post Register in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

The people at that paper did something like what the Boston Globe did in breaking and pursuing the clergy sex abuse scandal but it was the Boys Scouts and they went up against the Mormon establishment instead of the Catholics.

Here's what happened: after receiving a tip that a pedophile caught at a local scout camp in 1997 had not two victims (as the paper reported at the time) but actually dozens, Post Register reporters went to the courthouse to look for a civil suit filed by victims, only to be told that there was no such case. They later learned that the national Boy Scouts of America and its local Council had hired two of Idaho's best-connected law firms to seal the files -- thus covering up the entire affair.

Or so they thought... But the Post Register went to court and "dragged the case file into the light of day." What reporters found astonished them; scout leaders had been warned about the pedophile years earlier, but hired him (again!) anyway. Lawyers for the Boy Scouts knew about more victims, but never told those boys' parents. Top local and national leaders of the Mormon Church, which sponsors almost all area scout troops, had also been warned.

The Post Register ran a six-day series about the affair. The first story featured a 14-year-old camper -- "the son of a Mormon seminary teacher and a cinch to become an Eagle Scout" -- who forced adult leaders to call the police about the pedophile.

Then the backlash began. Mormon church members were among the first to complain, characterizing the paper's coverage as an attack on their faith. "The drums banged, and we were flooded with calls and e-mails and letters to the editor from readers who told us that holding the Grand Teton Council accountable was Mormon-bashing," Miller recounted.

The backlash came as well from advertisers, and the economic pressure built everyday the paper ran the series. "It's one thing to lose an account when you're an employee," Miller wrote. "It's quite another when you're also a stockholder; 140 employees hold close to 49 percent of the company's stock. For many families, this is their retirement." Nevertheless, he recalled, "Most of what I heard inside our building were words of support." Publisher Roger Plothow was also staunchly unapologetic throughout, "standing up with a stoic and clear-eyed defense... for the values of journalism."

The attacks weren't just financial, but personal as well -- including the outing of a gay staff reporter, Peter Zuckerman, by a local multimillionaire who bought full-page ads devoting several paragraphs to establishing that Zuckerman is gay. "Strangers started ringing Peter's doorbell at midnight,"

The local paper stood up for the right of their readers to be informed over what would seem likely to be a pretty severe punishment, financially and personally for its staff. Like what Bogart did in “The Front Page”.

But unlike in the movies and beyond what you, and the media itself, might expect, the paper that reported the news doesn’t seem to be suffering.

"One of the sweeter moments of our year occurred when we received figures from our circulation audit. While the sales numbers of other U.S. newspapers were in free fall, we were among the nation's faster growing daily papers."

Now that's a surprise ending. A story of a courageous newspaper staff and ownership that doesn't end in bitter-sweet cynicism. Maybe other papers should stop the presses and do a rewrite of their own story.

2007-06-11T10:13:00.000-04:00

Cutback In Writing Activity

A sudden change in my situation will apparently force me to cut back on my writing both here and at Echidne of the Snakes blog. I will be drastically cutting back on my comments on other blogs, probably the most positive development in this thing.

I hope to post one or two substantial pieces a week and to share them among the two blogs, maybe better quality will result.

Though the course this change in my situation will take isn't clear, for now it doesn't look as if it will lead to the complete end of my writing.

Thanks to everyone who has read what I've written and responded to it.

2007-06-08T09:03:00.000-04:00

What Is This Thing Called Blog?

My partner in blogging has done two quite fine posts off of Joe Klein’s whine about those mean bloggers.

Here is my raw comment on the second of them

Blog comments are revelatory in a lot of ways but, as you note, they aren't a revelation of some aggregated average viewpoint. The way that we’ve become so trained by things like polls and (badly analyzed or conceived) sociological surveys into thinking in terms of some kind of mythical average that we apply that habit in places where it becomes entirely unrealistic. Klein is part of the media system that has replaced the reporting of facts with junk like opinion polling, he has a financial interest in continuing this kind of fraud. Here it suits his purposes, of discounting his most biting and accurate critics. In the old media that isn’t something he has to worry about, they’re all in on the con.

At first blog comment threads were confusing and at times depressing. It took so much sifting of the chaff to find anything worthwhile. But if you look on it as a vital diversity instead of confusion it stops being depressing, though often no less confusing. Freedom, the real thing, not that thing that Bush and his kept media talk about, is good. Freedom both depends on and produces diversity of ideas and opinions, it doesn’t exist without diversity. The old media doesn’t do diversity, the really old media, inexpensive print media, did but electronic media is all about selling their audience to advertisers, not about its content. They latch onto something that has worked somewhere else and try to reproduce it, struggling to keep ahead of the attention wave. And in the largely unregulated cable markets the more violent and sensational the more likely they are to attract the few percentage points available. That crucial market would probably be endangered by real information or thought. The only requirement is that it not endanger profits or the interests of the owners.

Before a sociologist gets peeved at me, there are some good sociologists, just as there are some good cognitive scientists who don't make absurdly broad claims about their research findings. The media can be counted on to do that to their work. The best ones try to correct the distorions. You've heard me on the ones who do their own inflating and distorting so I'm not opening that can of worms today.
olvlzl, no ism, no ist | Homepage | 06.08.07 - 6:28 am

2007-06-06T13:12:00.000-04:00

Addendum
I’d used part of this article in one of the pieces critical of the behavioral sciences but should have read it through to the end. If I did it would have shown me that even someone who is favorably disposed towards Evolutionary Psychology (EP) doesn’t dismiss the possible political dangers of it out of hand.

Whether or not EP is correct, I hope this Handbook will convince you that it is not scientific window dressing for a political ideology, but rather a compelling scientific approach to human nature. This does not mean that EP is harmless. Critics, fearing EP to be a Trojan horse of the right, have raised countless objections to EP, objections that, as this chapter has shown, would border on the absurd were they raised against one of historys most successful scientific paradigms: the functional, mechanistic approach to organism anatomy. What the surprisingly myopic critics have failed to perceive is that the power of EP will be, not to prevent change, but to cause it.

Fully realized, EP would constitute a functional understanding of the neural circuits underlying our every thought, emotion, and action. With that understanding would come the power to mold our humanity to a disquieting degree. Perhaps it is naïve to believe that EP can keep up with the manipulative expertise of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, but serious critics of EP would do well to re-read their Huxley and Orwell. The dangers of EP lie as close to Brave New World and 1984 as they do to Mein Kampf.

More worrisome, EP challenges the foundations of crucial enlightenment values, values we undermine at our peril. Perhaps the mix of secular and religious values upon which the priceless institutions of democracy rest are like a tablecloth that can be quickly yanked out, leaving everything standing upon some solid, though as yet unknown base. But I wouldnt bet on it. We are at a cross-roads. A vibrant science of human thought and behavior must always be able to question its own premises, and is thus utterly unsuited to be that solid base. Yet if we discard the secular, quasi-scientific notion of the blank slate, or even subject it to genuine scientific scrutiny, we may threaten institutions far more valuable than a science of human nature.

The vital question is not, as most critics seem to think, whether EP is correct, but whether any real science of the brain is prudent.

Having no professional or ideological stake in protecting Evolutionary Psychology but as a student of the history of the past hundred and twenty years I go a lot farther than that.

Evolution happened over a period of 3+ billion years. The studies in behavior and cognition are just beginning to find facts, they haven't escaped their own history of what would charitably be called "speculation". In fact EP indulges in quite a bit of that itself. To believe that the relatively small number of scientists attempting to apply evolutionary knowledge various theories of their own (themselves even more recent) and claiming to have a relatively complete picture of these most unknowable aspects of human experience calls for deep skepticism. To assert that their ideas are applicable to politics or society now is absurd. It is professional wishful thinking of the type that has proven to be dangerous when earlier attempts at “real science of the brain” made outsized claims which damaged and destroyed all too real people. The damaged stemmed from loony theories of sexuality, phony intelligence testing and other methods of labeling people into categories up to and including those put into the line designated as worthy of death.

History has facts that are more tangible than the theories and fables of these sciences. History has run these experiments already and the results are in. Nothing that these infant sciences has produced negates those truths.

2007-06-05T13:03:00.000-04:00

Doing The Least I Can Do Because I Didn't Do What I Should Have Done

I'd planned to write about a piece posted at DAS Blog last month but events got out of hand. You can read the original piece here, it's as timely today as it was then.

You might want to also read this piece One for DAS at Adventus.

2007-06-04T10:21:00.000-04:00

A Classic Example of Why Counter-Bigotry Is A Bad Tactic

Peter Hitchens ruined what could have been a somewhat useful exploration of his brother’s foul personality, bigotry and blood thirsty advocacy of mass violence with a bit of bigotry about third-party atheists he has never met. Other than that it’s a somewhat interesting inside look at a case of imploding ego. In the greater scheme of things Peter Hitchens piece is about as important as anything said about Patricia Heaton’s inner life. If he had stuck to his real subject, his rotten brother, it could have made somewhat larger ripples. Now his own bigotry is the subject.

My rules about peoples' ideologies:

- Look at what they do, not what they say they believe. Their actions are the real belief, words are cheap.

- Forgive minor fudging in memberships, unless it's something like Opus Dei, The Republican Party 2007 or some other bigoted and or murderous bunch of fascists.

- If they accept "I'd rather not hear about that, thank you," they get, maybe, up to two minutes (unless their story is interesting). If they won't accept "I'd rather not hear...” proportional increases in rejection up to and including "Leave this house, now!" come into play.

- If they're rude and dismissive of other people on the basis of their harmless beliefs, religious, ethnic, gender, identities... then all bets are off, they have made themselves fair game for the hammer and tongs.

It's how the individual person acts that determines how they should be treated.

2007-05-27T12:16:00.000-04:00

First Posted Sunday, July 09, 2006; With Further Comment on May 28, 2007

Believers and Non-believers on the Left Must Unite For the Common Good Part One: in which I come clean

It would suit me if this blog didn't have to deal with the divisive, complex and extremely personal topic of religion but the fact is most Americans believe in a God and belief has a profound impact on our politics. Religion can't be ignored or dismissed. The participation of both non-believers and believers is essential for the left to succeed politically in the United States.

I don't think that the left would come out the loser in an honest religious fight. Make that an HONEST fight, not one assuming that the imperial religion the Republican right promotes is the alpha and omega of "faith". It's not even the alpha, they, themselves, don't believe most of it but that's for later. Before going on I'm going to let you know where I'm coming from on the issue.

About religion, nothing can be objectively known. Science deals with the physical world as observable and measurable phenomena. No measurements, no science. Science is plainly the most successful way of knowing about the universe. Religion doesn't deal with what is knowable in an objective way. Religion is belief of something beside what can be physically known. Real religious belief can't be objectively passed on by reason or repeatable observations, it has to be experienced personally. Remember, I'm talking about authentic religious beliefs, not about fundamentalism or organized, dogmatic religion. This isn't an encyclopedic survey of asserted beliefs.

I believe in God. I can't tell you what that means. Again, religious belief is an experience not a logical argument that can be transferred. The experience didn't really happen to me until I'd studied non-theistic Buddhism and saw that not surviving death held no terrors. If you are gone after death then there will be no suffering and all you need to worry about is what happened while you were alive. A single life contains as much of the universe and eternity as you can experience. What is outside that life effectively doesn't exist for you. I felt very comfortable with that idea, it gave me a profound sense of peace. The Buddhist doctrine of the end of pain put me at peace with the fate of all those I knew and loved and I expected that to be the end of the search.

But something unexpected happened on the way to where this would lead. I suddenly believed in God, not the God of my youth but an indefinable though deeply felt experience. I also believed in universal salvation, of continued conscious existence, eventually beyond pain, for every sentient being.

If you want to challenge me to account for this belief I fully admit that I can't prove any of it. Anyone who pretends that they can prove it is lying. You are entirely within your rights to reject it. You are within your rights to suspect that it's a psychological aberration, an odd ball quirk of personality or some weakness. Though I hope that you couldn't find anything in my actions to support those accusations.

I don't think the worse of you if you don't believe and don't think that disbelief is a sign of moral failing. Several of the people I have respected and loved most were complete and aggressive atheists who I refuse to believe are suffering in any way due to their honest disbelief. I don't believe that honest atheists enjoy less divine favor than I do, in fact, I seriously suspect that my belief might indicate that the deity doesn't trust me to be a decent person without it. I fully accept on the basis of observable actions that complete non-believers are sometimes fully as moral or even more moral than some religious believers.

I will, however, object if you are rude or rudely dismissive while you are being skeptical of someone's belief on the bases of discourteousness and impracticality.

The practical implications of religion and the left are the subjects of this uncharted and irregular series. The belief is personal and so prone to being entirely wrong, the actions resulting from the political agenda of the left are real. As the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki might say, they are real in every sense of the word. Their reality makes them morally imperative in a way that personal belief cannot be. Religion like political philosophy and economic theory should be judged on the actions and results that arise from it, not from the idealized descriptions and assertions of it.

There, that's about all of that and you shouldn't have to put up with much more first person in this series.

Update: May 28, 2007
How naive I was. It is impossible to talk about these things, even with rigorous attempts to avoid becoming the focus of the discussion, even with this kind of pre-emptive explanation and assurance and to avoid people looking for motives beneath what was said. In what was to become the second of this series, posted here to huge controversy before the fall elections, I tried again.

I am bringing this up because I suspect there is an effort to stir up these questions just now. Articles in MSNBC-Newsweek and elsewhere might indicate an attempt to kick up a religious fight before the fall election. My interest in this is entirely in its effect on practical politics, I want the left to win this election, winning is the most important thing for the next two months. We can live with a certain level of atheist-religionist animosity, we cannot win an election with leftists falling for the bait the Republican right puts out for it. Leftists can be counted on to come to the defense of atheists who are targeted for discrimination. If atheists are in danger of life and limb, we must do that. But this all too timely row has nothing to do with life and limb. It is not pressing.

That piece was attacked by a prominent, anti-religious blogger. Her distortion of it at times resonates within the atheist blogosphere today. It has affected my efforts. I still mean everything I wrote in that post and believe that subsequent events, involving some of those who attacked me before the last election, prove some of it to have been accurate.

These issues are important in politics, that is the reason I bring them up. The subsequently dealt with auxiliary issues in the behavioral sciences and scientism are also important because they have an effect “on practical politics”.

There is a mind set in some materialists that reflexively rejects all ideas that could conceivably imply the existence of a God or anything supernatural, leading, sometimes, to quite tortured effects*. The remarkable and at times uncharacteristically emotional content of many of those rejections leads me to believe that it is more a matter of personality than it is of following scientific evidence. There are some things I don’t care if they reject, organized religion among them. There are things they can reject personally in the most derisive and bigoted language which won’t have any negative impact on the world, those also aren’t worth bothering with.

But I have to confess that there are also ideas that, likewise, cause me to become quite emotional, perhaps for personal reasons. I’m not alone in that. On one occasion Barbara Jordan shocked people by saying that she would be willing to “shed blood” to preserve the right of The People to cast a vote. Barbara Jordan didn’t say so without good reason. She wasn’t prone to empty histrionics on important issues. I will do more than just defend the basic assumption of individual rights, inherently possessed by people simply because they are people. The exercise and extension of those rights were bought at too high a price by people throughout history.

I will not ignore an intellectual attack on personal rights, freedom of thought, freedom of belief and absolute equality before the laws. Not even attacks dressed up as science. If science is incompetent to find these freedoms, history and human experience demonstrate them to be there and fully worthy of cultivation and protection. If you doubt that those are valid mechanisms to find the truth you should consider that science is also based in human experience treated in a very specialized manner to establish a specific type of reliability. Science doesn’t answer all questions. Those freedoms, unless they impinge on the freedoms of others, are absolute. They extend from the most rigorous and brilliant thinker with the greatest of hearts to the most humble of us too caught up in the struggle for sustenance to enjoy an education or a life of the mind. Absent actions that harm other peoples’ exercise of their freedoms, those ideas and the expression of them are theirs.

I will not ignore attacks on those freedoms and allow them to go unanswered. I will not follow any fashion that would lead to their endangerment or that might lead to their necessary precursors being hollowed out or undermined. That kind of fashion will get as rigorous a critique as I have it in my abilities to make.

* This excerpt from “The Atheist Ethicist” might be illustrative:

What we are looking at reasons for action that exist for and against a prohibition on pornography. Yesterday, I ruled out reasons for action that do not exist. Intrinsic value and divine rights are reasons for action that some people bring into this debate. However, these reasons for action do not exist. Desires are the only reason for action that exist.

I also ruled out desires that cannot be fulfilled. A “desire that P” (for some proposition P) is a reason for action for bringing about a state of affairs in which P is true. If P can never be true, then the desire that P cannot be fulfilled in any state of affairs, and does not serve as a reason for any action. Even if P can be true in some states of affairs, but action A will not help bring about that state of affairs, the desire that P is not a reason for action A.

I used this to throw out desires to do God’s will and desires to realize something of intrinsic value (since these desires cannot be fulfilled under any real-world states of affairs).....

Also illustrative of the wider point.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being - Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever* - is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we - all of us, including the secular among us - are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said.

There are many people who would utterly reject what Krauss, quite reasonably, said if he had been a religious believer but who might not since it says he doesn’t believe. What he said would have not been different, his “personal preference” would be used as proof that the reasoning and honesty of what he said was tainted. They don’t subject the rantings of Dawkins et al to the same rule of evidence.

2007-05-21T09:17:00.000-04:00

A Shield Against The Power Rangers Of Occam
or Just a few random ideas as a late birthday present to the late Bertrand Russell

Occam is best known for a maxim which is not to be found in his works, but has acquired the name of “Occam’s razor.” This maxim says: “Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.” Although he did not say this, he said something which has much the same effect, “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.” That is to say, if everything in some science can be interpreted without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it. I have myself found this a more fruitful principle in logical analysis.

Bertrand Russell: A History of Philosophy

In order to apply the “razor” to a difference of belief between two people or to find the truth or untruth of a general idea you first have to have an agreement on the definition of the problem, without that you can’t exclude things from the solution. Exclusion is the purpose of this “razor”. And it can exclude only those aspects of a problem you know about. You wouldn’t be able to deal with any unknown aspects. If you doubt that one, please explain to me how you would exclude something you didn’t know about. While logical analysis is very useful and sometimes impressive it doesn’t encompass the entire universe of possibilities, it can’t include those unknown to it but which, nonetheless might be there, and it can’t include those which could contribute but which aren’t known and necessary to the immediate solution of the problem at hand. And unskilled use of the razor, rampant in some of its make believe masters, runs the risk of cutting out things that are relevant and even necessary.

A fun thing to think about, but which we don’t know to be of much practical use, are the extra dimensions of the universe which are being examined. How many of these dimensions exist? Are they really there? What qualities do they impose on existence? Do they impinge on our universe of sense? Could their effects permeate our lives unknown? Perhaps there are aspects of our lives too subtle for us to have discovered yet but which are understandable only through the added, as yet unknown, qualities of these extra dimensions. Just to throw one in for the entertainment of the atheists in the audience, maybe one of them has a quality that bridges the physical universe and the non-physical. Notice I said “maybe” before you fly off the handle.

For most of the problems we deal with those aren’t important considerations, we might cut out their consideration but that’s only a matter of the necessities imposed by contingency, not a definitive exclusion. As the math and perhaps someday the science done with these develops maybe that will change, though I doubt it will turn out to be a closed matter. The difficulties of dealing with just the equations might outstrip the efforts of the entire body of scientists and mathematicians to discover them before the species goes extinct. Maybe some of the less “knowable” aspects of human experience really are impinged on by these dimensions. Consciousness, for example. Maybe that’s why it escapes those would be-scientists who attempt to work around it. Who knows?

You’ll notice that Russell said, “if everything in some science can be interpreted.” That great master of logic used a conditional construction, he certainly would have known the implications of doing so and would have done that for a good reason. Science is a very specialized activity, many things in life can’t be discovered through science. My favorite example this week is to try to find “the separation of church and state” with science. To start with, there isn’t a discreet “thing” , defined and bounded, that is “the separation of church and state”. Just the lack of unanimity of the legal definitions of it clearly demonstrates that to be true. You would have to have a “discreet thing” there to do real science about it. “The separation of church and state” is there, or at least I hope it is, it has an impact on our lives and I hope it is preserved and strengthened but it is entirely outside of the reach of science.

I’m not sure if he meant to imply it, but Russell’s endorsement of this mainstay of modern materialist fundamentalists seems more of a conditional endorsement than a final requirement. You’ll notice Russell called it a maxim, not a foundation of logic. I’m guessing he meant it less as law and more as tool. The “razor” is really more of a convenience than an infallible tool, it doesn’t do everything necessary. And it might have been called a “razor” by people with painful experience that those tools are often not sufficiently sharp and prone to go farther than they should. He also endorsed it as a tool of logical analysis, formal logic reduces the complexity of real life to analyze the form of the problem. It can be useful but the possible solution of many real life problems are too complex to fit into its forms.

The kind of pop-materialists, cultists of scientism, etc. who are always ready to pull out the old chestnut “Occam’s razor” often mistake their wielding of pat assertions of prejudice and dismissive bigotry for this tool. That is an advertisement of their fundamentalism, not their mastery of logic. They often can’t get to step one of the use of the razor, finding out if it is useful in the question at hand.

A less than honest use of the form of the razor popular these days is to apply it to a question beyond its ability, the question of the existence of God. “The material world is most simply explained without a God so the idea of a God is false”, or some such construction. This begins by assuming that our knowledge of the physical universe and the methods we know to analyze it are effectively comprehensive, when they certainly aren’t. It also assumes that a God, by definition supernaturally outside of the physical universe, would be susceptible to the known limits of the physical universe and answerable to its laws. They do this even on those occasions when they assign qualities to “God” such as “all powerful” “all knowing”, etc. Just the first of these “all” qualities would include the ability to surpass the known laws of nature.

It compounds those follies with the assumption that only a yes-no answer is possible when neither are. The only honest answer to the question of God’s existence is “I don’t know”. You can go on from there to believe, not believe or abstain from voting on the existence of God. But belief isn’t considered to be the same thing as knowledge.

2007-05-19T14:58:00.000-04:00

Dear Austin Cline,
You distorted, not only the meaning of what I wrote, but also pretend that it was addressed to "atheists". This might have fit into the theme of your blog but it is clearly a lie. I assume, since you quote one of “Whispers” comments from the thread at Echidne's blog, that you would have seen the answer I gave to a lie “Whispers” wrote about what I had written, on that same thread. I don’t believe you could have missed my answer. I pointed out that the word "atheist" appeared nowhere in the piece*. I highlighted the same exact point in the follow up post at Echidne’s the next day where I corrected some of the incorrect comments the day after the first piece was posted. Yet you pretended it was a piece in which I targeted atheists well after that lie was corrected in a place you couldn’t have missed it if you had bothered to find out what I meant.

You might have been concerned since I used Richard Dawkins as an example of how Skeptics hold themselves to a different standard than they do the targets of their activities. I thought that might be your misunderstanding until I looked at your blog bio. You have connections with Paul Kurtz through at least two positions you've held. I must say that Kurtz seems to be cropping up a lot in different places in my researches of pseudo-“Skepticism”, I’ve never researched organized atheist-fundamentalism so I don’t know about what connection he might have to that. - I would think that what I’m about to point out might be interesting to anyone with the time and resources to do so.

You certainly know about CSICOP, in which Kurtz has a prominent position. It isn’t credible that you didn’t know about CISCOP. Dawkins is also involved with CSiCOP, last time I checked. Beyond doubt the most glamorous of its current stars, CSICOP is an organization that is star driven, ironically enough.

If you knew anything about the other people mentioned in the post, also hard for me to imagine though perhaps you don’t research your pieces, you would have seen that they were all involved with CSICOP and other 'Skeptics" organizations. Since I identified the piece as having been inspired by a flaming e-mail about a gentle jibe I made about the phony "Skeptic" Penn Jillette I don't see how you could possibly have missed that the target of the piece was organized “Skepticism”.

You pop-atheists are big on the charge of "cherry picking" this season, if I'm not mistaken its a charge you have leveled, yourself. Yet you distorted the clear intention of the piece by leaving out the entire first section containing the necessary argument to understand my conclusions. I think a reasonable person looking at this situation could conclude that your only reason for leaving that out was to distort the conclusions I reached in favor of the freedom of people to believe what they wanted to. I have always favored diversity of belief knowing it to be essential for freedom. CSICOP is an organization dedicated to frat-boy style coercion, and on one occasion a farcical coverup, to wipe out freedom of belief in order to enforce a quite narrow-minded materialism. Fortunately, they are bunglers and have been able to produce little but bigotry. Even their own magazine and their frequent come-ons have commented on the rise in belief in the things they hope to suppress during their three decades existence. Since I didn’t exclude atheists, or anyone else from the freedom of belief I support, my argument clearly applies to everyone. That inclusive freedom doesn’t suit your purpose so you ignore my support for it.

You claim to have understood my piece, yet you left out the part that was essential to my argument. Cherry picking? That would be too polite a way of describing what you did. You lied. You distorted my piece to turn into one of what your achieve proves to be an endless series of tedious whines. You not only lied, you didn't have the courage to inform me that you were doing it. If an agnostic I knew hadn't told me about your piece last week I probably wouldn't have ever found out about it.

I don't know what kind of ethics they pretend to follow at the Kurtz organizations, though my research into CSICOP and just a few of his holdings has been quite an eye opener. I’ve yet to brave Kurtz on “Exuberance” though the excerpts I’ve seen are sugary, philosophical frippery. I do know that what you did was dishonest and I will be writing a full account and posting it on line. I asked for you input, though your note seems to imply that you wouldn’t welcome me sending you an advance copy for your comments and possible corrections. I suppose a retraction is too much to expect, it certainly was for two other similar incidents of pop-atheists lying about what I wrote. If I am wrong, please tell me.

You have too thin a skin for a hatchet man. If you expect to continue in your line of bigotry, I’d advise you to grow a thicker one. I think I’ve got a rather good look into your character through researching my planned piece. I take someone lying about what I wrote quite personally. As to my comments, please be more specific in what your objections to those are. If I find I’ve lied about you I will, of course, issue a correction.

yours truly,
olvlzl

P.S. Since I don’t have any reason to trust you I am posting this on my own blog instead of taking the risk of sending it to you in case you tried to misuse it. It contains no lies and I’m not ashamed of anything I say here. I will defend myself.

* From the comment thread of the post you misrepresented:

Also, essentially calling all atheists liars is a good way for you to look like a hopeless jackass in our eyes.

If you want to clean up your philosophical meanderings a little bit, I suggest finding a way to differentiate between "belief" and "faith". Whispers | 01.28.07 - 1:05 pm | #

Also, essentially calling all atheists liars is a good way for you to look like a hopeless jackass in our eyes.

Ok, quote where I said this or its equivalent? I'm looking and don't even see the word "atheist" in this post. This is a lie and I do ask you to retract it as soon as you confirm that it is not true. The piece isn't even strictly about atheism, it's about skepticism. How do you know I wasn't slamming professional magicians and social scientists, if there's much of a difference in come cases.

As to "belief" and "faith", on the Online Thesaurus, it comes fourth in the list of synonyms. olvlzl Back and Blogwhoring | Homepage | 01.28.07 - 5:52 pm | #

From your piece:
“Whispers" posted comments to this post which explained the problems with Olvlzl's use of "faith" here.....

2007-05-17T06:54:00.000-04:00

It was brought to my attention earlier this week that Austin Cline of About Agnosticism and Atheism, as well as a prominent part of a number of atheist groups, presented some views as being mine which I do not hold a while back.

Wanting to discuss the matter with him I have repeatedly tried to make contact with him, he could hardly have failed to notice but seems to think that I am not worthy of his attention. If anyone reading this knows Cline please ask him why he refuses to discuss the correction of his misrepresentations, made in a rather prominent place. If someone told me I had misrepresented the views of someone, I’d be very interested in correcting myself out of respect for the other person’s rights and because not making the correction would turn a mistake into a lie.

2007-05-15T06:28:00.000-04:00

Looted From A Thread At Echidne's

Remember:
Republicans are about 9/11.
Democrats are about 7/4.
Mike

2007-05-15T06:22:00.000-04:00

Composing For Beginners

Forget theory, forget everything about paper. Paper and theory will just keep you from composing at this stage. Never forget that music is sounds, not a recipe for making a cake and not the symbols drawn on a page.

If you play piano, choose any five finger position, five notes. If I might suggest, don’t begin with c,d,e,f,g. Start with d,e,f,g,a or the five white keys up from e or f. Play with those trying to find melodies, harmonies, etc. that please YOU. You must please yourself first, if you try to please someone else you might as well let them write that music because it won't be your music. Make some of your pieces start and end on the same note some of them start and end on different notes. Use all of the notes of the five, for the last note in different pieces.

Watch out for repeating yourself, if you find a figure, rhythm, etc. that you keep coming back to, try to avoid it for a while. Write down those things you find that you really like, work on those. If you know what it means, watch out for 6/8 and 9/8 rhythms, getting into a lilt is alright on occasion but it’s a banality trap if you don’t watch out for it. Don’t be afraid to change meters either. Don’t be afraid to try anything because it’s too far out or too far in.

When you've had enough of those five notes, find another five notes with a different pattern of half and whole steps (different mode) or add another note to the five you had in the beginning. Proceed as above until you gradually add more notes.

Virgil Thomson advised composers with writers block to compose one piece of music a day. One whole piece a day. He said eventually you would find the music you wanted to keep.

And if your instrument isn't piano, use what you have. If you don't have anything, get a plastic recorder that plays in tune and use that. Use recordings of second parts if you want harmony.

2007-05-14T09:26:00.000-04:00

Écrasez l'Infâme

I can't find a quote but I agree with Gore Vidal, we have got to destroy the health insurance industry. They have a strangle hold on the American People, their stolen booty corrupts our government, their advertisements buy off the media.

2007-05-14T09:12:00.000-04:00

Retraction By Request

I mentioned last week that an agnostic had e-mailed me to request that I continue writing about things of a vaguely religious nature. I am reluctant because they are only important to me in so far as they have in impact on the politics necessary to move the government towards the left and to put items in the left’s agenda into law. Religion does interest me, its diversity and range, from folk lore to imposing systems of thinking are an important part of human culture. Atheism and the organized form of Skepticism were interesting the first time I read their ideas but it’s been a long time since they’ve provided the diversity of perception necessary to sustain interest over repeated repetitions. But then, I did, early on, read Thomas Huxley*. The current crop are at best forth generation echos of his brilliant sarcasm. It would seem that I’m not the only one who has found that to be true. Talking a while back with an atheist I know, he remarked that he didn’t find the topic of atheism at all interesting. He was more interested in more important things.

My new, agnostic friend apparently found what I wrote useful to her or his side of things. There is a growing intolerance for agnostics in the culture of non-belief. You are apparently required to give up free thought and honesty about what you don’t know in order to be sufficiently non-believing among the “Free thinkers”. If you dare to suggest that things other than rude intolerance for religious believers might make more sense, you will be accused of appeasing the Nazis, quite literally.

My decision to stop talking about the current culture of atheism was in the interest of talking about real life. I’d rather talk up single-payer health insurance and environmental protection than how to prevent the tiny minority of impractical, romantic Dawkinsites from losing us elections. My friend’s e-mails say that it’s brave to attack them, I’ve never suspected that I was in danger from them. Though sometimes prone to lapses of judgement through wishful thinking, I never expected to become popular with what I wrote and have resisted the temptation to write down to try to attract a larger audience. Though a lot of that was out of sheer laziness on my part.

I will point out that I am an agnostic only in that I agree that it is impossible to know with reliability anything about the existence of God or any other entity outside of the physical universe. It is impossible to objectively know anything about anything that isn’t physical. In that the subject matter of religion is like most of the physical universe, unknown. I think it’s entirely possible to be such an agnostic while holding beliefs in any range of things, physical and non-physical. The best proof of that isn’t in a tortured line of attempted reasoning, it’s in the fact that there are people who have told me that is THEIR personal experience.

This blog has never put up a sign saying that it will not take requests. It’s seldom someone asks for one. My new friend was so gracious in making theirs that fulfilling it will be attempted.

* While I thoroughly enjoyed Huxley on religious topics and some of what he had to say about biology he was also a particularly odious racist. The experience of reading some of the recent pop-atheists has, however, led me to wonder if their arrogance and dismissive rudeness is also copied form Huxley. It’s Huxley’s knowledge of his targets that make up for the fact that he could be a real jerk sometimes. Unfortunately that’s not something shared by his heirs. Apparently the idea that you should know what you are talking about is a failed “meme**” of the atheist fundamentalists.

UPDATE: I just got an e-mail that one of PZ Myer's devotees just accused me of listening to James Taylor. See, flapping their lips before doing research. I hate James Taylor's music, Just last month I nominated his and Carly Simon's cover of "Mocking Bird" as the worst cover of all times. This might have gone too far.

** I don't believe in "memes". Though the topic is too boring to explore my suspicions that Dawkins invented them in an attempt to cover up the defects in his theories.

2007-05-12T07:41:00.001-04:00

Remembering Arthur Berger The Week of His Birthday.
for Tristero
There is a certain slant of light, springtime afternoons, flooding through the large, open window with a fresh, cold wind that brings Arthur Berger’s Duo for Cello and Piano(1) to mind. Arthur Berger was sometimes described as an “intellectual composer”. Whatever that means. He was a composer, writer, analyst, critic, and a part of any intellectual scene wherever he happened to be. Perhaps closer to the point, Virgil Thomson, a fellow composer, critic and one of his friends, talked about his “sidewalks of New York charm”. So, here we already have a dichotomy, or at least two things usually considered as opposites. Maybe the strong sun light and cold spring wind should count as a third point of view. What’s the truth? Having played some of his pieces and studied more of them, I am happy to testify to the intellectual brilliance and the charm, he had both in abundance. Beauty of sound, the ability he shared with Luigi Dallapiccola(2) to find exactly the right note, tone color and expression, and to put it in exactly the right context, might stand in for the primary witness above.

Someone asked me why I don’t write more about music, since that’s clearly something I know more about than evolutionary psychology or cognitive science , about which I’ve spent enormous numbers of skeptical words. While music is what I got my formal training in, I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think anything more is known about music than the technical aspects of how to produce it. Music is an order of sounds (3), it is possible to learn how to produce musical orders intentionally to attempt an effect. On that level music is a skill instead of a collection of theories, observations, measurements and speculations. That I could talk about easily, though it makes for rough reading and it really doesn’t contain any information useful to non-musicians. It’s only in the sense that it is a skill to be practiced that someone can “know” something about music. In that sense, it is entirely like speculations about the mind, only with a practical component.

I could tell you that roughly measures 25 through 31 of the first movement of Berger’s Duo move me to an all encompassing state of ecstacy every single time I hear it or play through the piano part. Just remembering how that passage sounds can take me out of myself. I could try to think of further metaphors or write a formal technical description, to give a partial explanation of what happens at that time in the music and then guess why it produces that effect. All of that might be entirely true, in part, and entirely useless in total. Any elucidation that someone reading that description might think they’ve received would be deceptive. It would tell you nothing useful, it might endanger your own experience of the music. I would have to motivate you to experience the music, to listen to it, complete and in its entirety, to have any hope that you could know what I was talking about. No one who had not heard the music would know the first thing about it.

The culture of scholarship, text and reflection, is all well and good but it carries danger when it is placed in supremacy over actual life. Life, the whole stream of experience and action as lived, not arbitrarily cut into segments to be digested and published. Scholars dwell on their publishable and teachable work, the materials of their careers, jealously guarding its repute, hardly ever admitting to their intentional selection out of the entire body of possible information. Actual, direct experience is not susceptible to scholarship. It is by its most basic nature, personal, the experience of a single person, invisible and variable, in its deepest essence indescribable. That is something that the aforementioned behavioral scientists(4) should keep in mind, something that a composer could tell them, something such a musician should never forget.

The very selective, partial view of life, which makes up the work of a scholar, can be very useful, it can produce things and objects that enhance health and increase life-span, it can enrich experience. But when those things are ideas about real life, their entire effects, good and bad are often not able to be apprehended. Sometimes the added component of history proves that ideas thought good or innocuous in the abstract are deadly. Far from just being the plaything of a dreamer or a brick in a scholar’s career, an idea can’t be viewed as an end in itself, it has to be seen in as full a context as possible. Unconsidered in the full context, ideas can carry the danger of overtaking the whole of life.(5)

1. Also Hear: An Arthur Berger Retrospective New World Records NW 360-2
Joel Kroskick, cello Gilbert Kalish, piano and others.

Almost all of Berger’s works are or have recently been available on CDs. I have heard and would recommend all of them. If you can find it I would also recommend the old CRI recording of Berger’s music in the American Masters collection. The recording of his Chamber Music for 13 Players, conducted by Gunther Schuller, is particularly wonderful. I've seen three dates in different places of when his birthday was but they were all in this coming week. This week would have been his 95th birthday. I loved Arthur Berger and his music very much.

2. Talking about your neglected composers. John Harbison made this observation about Dallapiccola’s ability as a composer.

3. Susan K. Langer: An Introduction To Symbolic Logic. Langer’s several simple observations about music in this book stand as the most insightful general statements I’ve ever read by someone outside of the profession.

4. It is exactly this selective feature of these reductionist schools practice that makes me very suspicious of them and alarmed about the resulting conclusions they seem to demand. Those who insist that only one mechanism of evolution, the crudest part of natural selection, is the supreme guide for understanding practically everything , strikes me as too likely to produce a superficially appealing mannerism (6.) instead of a view of reality. It closes off too many possibilities of real life from consideration, even, at times, substituting fables with no known real life evidence as possible explanations.

5. If music was an area of life that could produce life and death consequences, a danger to freedom, it would be dangerous. Hearing, quite involuntarily, Les Preludes by Liszt the other day, the story of its association with the invasion of Poland and the suspected motivating force of Wagner’s work might be noted here. I do so without prejudice, as a suggested supplement to the observation.

6. I’m fully aware of the irony, I read Perspectives in Music Theory too.

2007-05-11T10:56:00.000-04:00

Comment Shill
just posted this response at Eschaton.

The only real journalists are reporters who dig for the news, get two independent confirmations, submit it to a competent editor who will check the facts and then send it to be published in some way. Real reporting, reporting the facts, not opinions, not the fact that anyone can find to people to give "opposing" opinions, is the only real journalism.

Columnists may have been reporters but once they stop doing what is mentioned above, they stop being journalists. Some of them are truly great and useful most of them a lying slags.

Bloggers can be any of the above and more or less. To talk about blogs is akin to talking about paper. It can contain great reporting or it can be worth less than used toilet paper. And a lot of what the corporate media picks up and waves around is exactly used toilet paper.

2007-05-10T06:23:00.000-04:00

Paperless Anniversary

My greatest and heartfelt thanks to you who do and have done me the honor of reading what has been posted here. Some of you have been pretty heroic as the word count reached a thousand and the reasoning or lack of it, got pretty tortured. I hope that the quality has gotten better as I've learned on the job. I hope you will find things worth reading here.

Here are the promises I made my first blog post. You'll notice the gap I gave myself was rather large. Anyone who goes back and looks at my archieve will notice that the date there is May 13. That's because I screwed it up so badly on May 10th I had to redo it three days later.

To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.

I have no intention of getting it right every time. I begin with no expectation of getting it entirely right a plurality of the time. No guarantee of such is given or offered. I will not allow considerations of the possibility of failure from keeping me from action. On occasion I'll plow straight ahead if conditions seem to warrant it. I, friends, am the thoroughly bad sort and claim as mine, as the sacred possession of every liberal and leftist, the absolute right enjoyed by the rest of humanity to get it wrong. And not only this but I claim as the birthright of leftists to present our side of things to the advantage of our side. I have absolutely no intention to be fair to fascists either, but that's for another day and I hope that Nat Hentoff doesn't die before I get to it.

The Code of Liberal Ethics is a standard operating setting required in every organ of the media. It is applied without consideration, without thought, as a matter of habit. It is a solid state component of the minds of far too many liberals. It is a weapon used exclusively against liberals and leftists and is applied to no other segment of the political spectrum. Everyone, from mushy moderate to rabid fascist is allowed their failings and their biases. But not liberals. Certainly not leftists.

No more. Here, today, I issue our own manumission, my fellow leftists. We have shaken off the chains of perfection, we are free of the lash of faultlessness. We claim our right to consider our own opinions superior and worthy of dominance. Never again will we present the arguments of conservatives as if they merit equal treatment. We will scorn their folly and expose their lies and their entertaining hypocrisies without apology. We will get off our knees and kick every fascist where it counts. In all seriousness, our lives, the lives of our loved ones, the life of the biosphere absolutely depend on it. We must crush out of ourselves and our kind the remains of these mind forged manacles and wipe their residue from every voice and their assumed existence from every ban. Friends, we have nothing to fear. We are free.

Disclaimer: I make no pretense of being a journalist. At best, if someone wanted to insult me, they might claim me as a columnist, an unskilled occupation of which I do not claim to be a part. I would never want anyone to assume that I pretend to be a real journalist, a reporter.

2007-05-09T11:57:00.000-04:00

An Agnostic Questions
my decision to not do posts about the religion wars. He requests that I continue, pointing out that between religious fundamentalists and Dawkinsites he’s feeling beleaguered. He says my posts are some of the few on the leftist blogs that support his position.

Any thoughts?

2007-05-08T08:52:00.000-04:00

Children Given A Death Sentence By Morality

There is really bad news for anyone who cares about the health of adolescents today, there is a jump in the number of new infections with Hepatitis C in injection drug uses as young as 13. The increase, even if it is due in part to better reporting is alarming.

BOSTON— The number of hepatitis C infections among teenagers and young adults in Massachusetts has risen dramatically in the past few years at a time when the abuse of intravenous drugs has also been on the rise, health officials say.

Confirmed and suspected cases of the blood-borne liver disease among people ages 15 to 25 climbed from 254 in 2001 to at least 784 in 2005, according to the state Department of Public Health.

The increase may be at least partially attributable to more diligent reporting of the disease by doctors.

"I suspect there is a direct correlation between the increase in hepatitis C among younger people and the increase in injection drug use and heroin use, in particular," said Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach. "It is terribly tragic, but it is very consistent with the pattern of risk that goes along with injection drug use."

I’ve got a personal interest in this one. About twenty years ago my father contracted liver cancer. A month before he died testing showed that he had a chronic case of Hepatitis C. In the short time there was to discover how he had contracted a disease then little known, it was concluded that he must have gotten it from a transfusion he was given at at a battle field hospital during the Second World War. The effects of the disease lay dormant for about forty years before manifesting itself in liver cancer. It wasn’t an easy, quick and painless way to go. No one who watched someone die that way could read about the rise in cases and not know that for some of those children, the price of their folly will be a death sentence and a means of execution as gruesome as any ever devised by the twisted mind of the medieval inquisitors. Some of those who contract the disease don't have to wait that long to die, very unpleasantly.

When will the moralists of the drug industry be over-ridden, their long, long history of unrealistic, ineffective crusade give way to reality? How many people will have to die before the simplest, effective means of preventing untold pain and death overtake the prissiness masking the highly lucrative money-making “morality” machine. Their cure for the disease of drug addiction has proven over decades of failure, billions of dollars of cost and countless lives to be snake oil and the effects are worse than the disease.

2007-05-07T11:27:00.001-04:00

The Weekend,

don't ask.

2007-05-04T18:48:00.000-04:00

pssst! I’m Going For The 48 Hr. Beauty Rest Treatment

and so won’t be at my usual weekend blog gig at Echidne of the Snakes. Echidne has some interesting things lined up, gardening magazines and, well, it’s always something different at Echidne’s.

I’ve been going through old posts to take stock and might post a couple of those here later tonight. Some of them seem so dated, some I’m having a hard time remembering having written them.

Note: The difference with a blogger I respect, which I had posted about below, is settled on friendly terms so I removed the post. I wish her the best in the future.

2007-05-02T09:17:00.000-04:00

Life Is Real
Early Anniversary Post
May 10th will be the year mark of my blogging effort. Looking back over a year of posts, both here and at Echidne of the Snakes, I notice some serious lapses in following my original intention. That intention was to focus on the practical, on those things that would win elections for the left. That means trying to figure out which are the candidates closest to the left who have a real chance to win the election and hold the office, nominating the one with the best chance, protecting them from lies and smears from the right and impractical, posing jerks allegedly on the left. It means once they are elected, working with them to try to find those positions of the left that they can support in a way to keep the office out of the hands of worse people. Only a position that has a hope of being adopted during the present term is worth that level of effort and risk. Other issues aren’t ripe for prime time yet, they need to build grass roots support first.

There was that big diversion that started last September with my pre-election post advising that the left couldn’t hope to win elections if it could be tarred with the charge that it was anti-religion. A string of elections had proven that to be an effective tactic of the Republicans and their kept media. The things said about that post by another blogger of much greater readership than myself were false but that didn’t keep them from both damaging my credibility and starting a stream of attacks that continue to this day. That has lead to many posts which, perhaps, held their own in the arguments they made, had rather pitiful practical results. I tied up a few threads on those subjects here the other day and am going to end detailed consideration of them for more important matters.

I will, however, fight like hell any futile or trivial trend or practice of the left that will damage our chances with the voting public and I don’t care how strongly I have to make that case. Winning elections, making laws that improve lives is more important than any hurt feelings of people who are being jerks. If they insist on their right to be jerks, they are asking for it. They are not the center of the universe, none of us are. The goal of improving lives is more important than anything, certainly more than whatever credibility or popularity is lent me. While I am grateful for that and find it gratifying, I am ready to sacrifice it to achieve political progress.

Politics is the art of making compromises. But it is an art only worth doing in an effort to move things in the right direction. Everything I’ve got is on that bargaining table except reality and justice. Those are non-negotiable for one simple reason. Life is real. Nothing is more real than the biosphere. Nothing is more important than real living beings. Nothing is more important than the real lives of people starting with the most common sense meaning of that phrase. Beginning with their physical well-being, their education and their spirits. Reputation is a bubble which is about to burst, life is real.

2007-05-01T21:12:00.000-04:00

In a book, The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said, Peggy is cited for the following pearl:

"I first saw [President Reagan] as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads."

From "Peggy, We Hardly Knew Ye" a memoir by Monica Finch and Gloria R. Lalumia of the young Peggy Noonan as they knew her in high school, college and beyond. But not nearly as far into the ether as she got.

2007-05-01T12:46:00.000-04:00

That’s Why I’m Leavin’ It All Up To You
My Final Word On This Subject
A lot of the talk about discrimination against atheists is kind of petty, the offense taken when they happen to be subjected to displays of religion not involving government and not directed at the atheist. To these all I can say is, well, ain’t life tough sometimes. You can try to avoid them. I try to avoid hearing rock and roll which, I can guarantee you, is a lot more ubiquitous and generally a lot more intrusive. With the advent of moron mobiles it’s portable too. Short of a violation of noise control or other legal provisions, you’re stuck with them.

As to those religious or other displays targeting atheists, those are a form of harassment and are a legitimate complaint. The displays involving government in some way are entirely appropriate things to which you can try to get legal relief. The only thing to add to that is the political and social outcomes of complaining or bringing actions in matters not involving actual harm, should be considered. If the results could be worse than the offense, is it wise to spend your political capital on them?

Anything which involves the denial of a public accommodation, even joining the Boy Scouts, is grounds for action. It is a stronger offense and requires being taken seriously.

Even stronger are physical threats and attacks. Those cannot be tolerated. With these things we are getting into discrimination of the real kind, the kind that can get people killed. When children are the victims swift and very strong action has to be taken to protect them. Even bullying of children should be considered the most serious kind of offense*. But, and never forget this, your relief will be through an appeal to the courts on the basis of violations of The Bill of Rights and the right to due process. That is sometimes essential and it is all well and good but it isn’t enough. It has been one of the most short-sighted mistakes of civil rights efforts that the courts have been relied on instead of building grass roots support.

The pseudo-discrimination most on peoples’ lips these days is the “ atheist electability” issue. That, I am sorry to tell you is not an issue of legal discrimination. An atheist doesn’t have “a right” to be president. No other member in any other minority group or in the majority has “a right to be president”. The only person who has what is constantly mislabeled “a right to be president” is the person who The People have elected to fill that office. In the United States it is the person who has won the majority of the electoral vote - which I would love to get into but I won’t here. To win an election you must win the most votes, it is as simple as that. No discrimination law exists which allows relief from any prejudice of The People in the election of the president**. Atheists who really care about correcting that prejudice instead of whining about it, won’t call the majority of the voting public superstitious, Spaghetti Monster worshiping, idiots. Anyone who does indulge their inner child in this manner and then whines about the entirely predictable results is the real idiot, an irresponsible jerk, a problem which any real civil rights movement will have to deal with if they ever hope to win an election or make progress.

Wasting time and good-will on lesser matters, pretending that occasions when you are subjected to nothing more than an affront to your aesthetic sensibilities and mislabeling those as “discrimination” will make your legitimate complaints in matters that require action less effective. They have the potential to lose you allies you will need for those serious fights. I can tell you this from going on forty years of being a witness to and participant in the struggles for gay rights. You have to be realistic and you have to be smart. You also have to be mature and ready for a lot of work. And you will fail unless you have strong alliances within the wider population. If, as atheists seem never to stop pointing out, you are that few in number and that hated, insulting potential friends is the stupidest thing you can do.

* Children’s first and most important right is their right to be protected by adults. Without that right none of the others will matter.

** The possibility of redistricting to enhance the chance of an open atheist being elected to lower office is a theoretical possibility but don’t count on it now. The ability to ensure minority representation by drawing district lines is being slashed to death in the courts as you read this.

Note: I have grown tired of the issues surrounding these issues. I will point out that this is the point I began, advising atheists that they should find out what will get them what they say they want instead of making enemies. I am quitting this field and going back to what I really am interested in, politics and music. Anyone who wants to read what I think can go to the top of this blog, put the word "atheist" into the search box and find what I've already written on the subject. Rational atheists of good will, I wish you luck in getting your civil rights. Idiots of all kinds, don't bother writing again. I'm not even going to bother reading it.

2007-05-01T09:48:00.000-04:00

Thinking About Solipsisms While Planting Onions

Dear E.
You flatter me with the charge of having constructed a philosophical position out of some pretty simple and clearly true assertions. But I haven’t. Every single thing which an individual knows is based in their experience, including those things which an individual learns which are based in other people’s experience. It is beyond doubt that things outside of an individual’s experience are things unknown to them. There are various facades of intellectual life which ignore this simple fact, enough to make a city of false fronts masking shaky foundations. That isn’t my fault, I didn’t build them, sell them or suggest you rent them. Don’t blame me for pointing out the termites or the rotten sills.

It is sometimes forgotten that math derives from human intelligence. So far as we know there are no other species that practice math. Math is founded in human’s experience of the physical universe. Even those simple matters Plato’s Socrates attributes to an inherent knowledge of the universe are impossible to observe in someone who has no clear experience of the physical universe. Math, which is based in the experience of the physical universe, is the absolute science.

As a comment on something I once put kind of awkwardly pointed out, math does have the methods to make solid proofs which, once solidly made and tested, can’t be refuted. This alert commenter noted that apparent contradictions between different proven points are assumed to be part of a larger unity as yet undiscovered. I think this is largely true because math limits its field of investigation to only the simplest of things and the most reliable extensions of those things. Even physics must deal with more complex matter and, perhaps for that reason, doesn’t achieve the finality of math.

Logic as well, through which the physical experiences are extended into more sophisticated math as well as science, is not observed outside of the experience of the physical universe. Though there is some evidence that it might not be species specific to humans, in at least its primitive forms. Logic can’t avoid dealing with even the most complex objects. While its methods are solid, it’s application is all over the charts.

Science uses math and logic to explain other experiences of the physical universe. Once it gave up the appeal to classical authority - largely based in story telling of a kind startlingly revived in some of the behavioral sciences today- and started dealing with the organized observation of nature, science came of age. Like all young adults, and way too many old ones, it forgot or denied the fact that its achievements are reliant on the most basic facts of its infancy. That denial often doesn’t impinge on the science or it’s place in the political world of human activity. But sometimes the facts of it’s intellectual basis do matter. When dealing with matters of human consciousness, behavior etc. the limits inherent in the acts of observation and logic force themselves into the scientific discourse. And I won’t go into the use of mathematics to cover up the deficiencies in observation and other sins of the behavioral sciences. There is no way they can be avoided since they are basic to the matters the “science” deals with. They are an inherent part of the debate.

Your charge of solipsism is only apparently close to the truth but it’s not much more than an appeal of the “Neville Chamberlain Atheist” kind made against some pretty reasonable and pleasant atheists. That is an attempt to change to an emotionally charged subject, the tactic most commonly seen in people who feel themselves in danger of losing an argument.

2007-05-01T08:22:00.001-04:00

Three Answers From The Blog Threads
Selected, revised and expanded upon.

1.
Unfortunately, I'm on a connection too slow for You Tube, but I'd expect it's pretty funny.

I'm not a scientist, though I did do more math than is normal for a music major. The "framing" issue is what brought me here since it astounds me how the side with all the arguments, the evolution side, is so incredibly stupid about the simple necessity of selling your message to the general public. It's very simple, evolution is science, the idea of a designer isn't. There isn't any reason for science to have to deal with it unless some try to foist the phony science onto 1. the schools, 2. the public funding system. 3. misc.

Mixing the message for evolution with other misc. such as the war against belief is too big a burden for science to carry. If you doubt that might be true, look at the mewling when you just suggest to scientists that scientists are the best people to make the case and that if they want to explain themselves to non-scientists they are going to have to speak the language that the voting public will understand. All the nonsense accusing people with a realistic view of what will be effective with the public "you want us to support creationism" is just nonsense UNLESS that has actually been proposed.

If the goal is actually to protect the teaching and funding of science then that should be the matter or most importance. Snark will not help, it has been and is counter-productive.

Let me suggest to you, friends, that you will find more useful material to plan your battles with from Ogilvy on Advertising than the pseudo-skeptical literature so much in vogue at present. I assure you that even if the present course wins you something, better and clearer explanations to the people you want to win over to science are not only a good idea, they are the only one that will work.

2.
This sounds like standard Solipsism to me. I reject it for the same reason I reject Solipsism.

You are free to reject anything. But you will notice that I am not the one who is trying to find either objectivity or proof. It is the fetish of these things that my comments com, from which you are trying to discern some larger philosophical position. There might be one, I don't know.

In so far as it's possible to absolutely know something with anything like certainty, math is about the only intellectual field that provides that. And a lot that is known in math isn't known in its full implications. In all else, all knowledge is contingent. In any area of science in which a direct observation can't be made, studied, measured, analyzed, the knowledge becomes strikingly contingent and fraught with the possibilities of being over-turned. Sociobiology morphed into evolutionary psychology and E.O. Wilson sensibly turned to protecting biological diversity. Evolutionary psychology is a choice of words I've got great reservations about since I think it appropriates the real science of evolution in an attempt to keep it's speculations alive a bit longer than it's forerunner schools. I suspect that it's version of "science" which relies rather stunningly on making up stories, quite often in the total absence of physical evidence, in order to come up with something like an explanation for very complex phenomena, which it assembles into "behaviors", is a prelude to extinction at a rate not much less rapid than it's ancestors. I suspect that the avocation of Richard Dawkins might be his golden parachute from the anticipated wreck.

No, I don't think that we should forget that very little of what we rely on has been proved and that much of it isn't able to be proved now, and much of it ever.

I hope you didn't find that too standardized.

3.
Listen, Sonny. I got into disputes defending evolution against Biblical literalists when Sam Harris was in training pants. One thing that you can still count on coming up is “well, they’ve never been able to find THE MISSING LI-INK”. That friggin’ missing link, or should that be missing friggin’ link? The problem wasn’t that the stupid idea couldn’t be refuted, it’s that it’s refutation, depending on the history of a science that the fundamentalist is even more ignorant of than the science itself and a long explanation of science they don’t have a clue about, is a practical impossibility within a real-time argument. That is except in miraculous instances of seeming instant enlightenment, rare and not replicable in controlled conditions.

Not helping is the fact that generation upon generation of scientists hadn’t found it a true, beautiful and worthy expenditure of their veddy, veddy, precious, time to eradicate the dumb idea from the vulgar public’s consciousness or even in the press. One could be forgiven for suspecting that some of them found it quite useful in their public careers. Piltdown? The really sensible thing would have been to stomp it to dust back in the early 20th century. Perhaps some of them, instead of finally forcing the punctuation to the end of the pseudo-evolutionary belief, thought that it would evolve into reality very gradually in accordance with the best classical tradition of their chosen heterodoxy. Maybe some of them feared that correcting anything about evolution risked adding force to the arguments of the enemies of science, their version of the most ingrained Vatican insider’s “giving scandal to the simple people”.

I suspect that clearly idiotic condescension is still a large part of the more impractical reaction to creationism today. No. Either you believe in honesty and telling the entire truth or you don’t. You don’t get to keep the whole truth about evolution within professional science. That is one of the biggest problems that science faces today, it has been believed that it could get by without effective missionary work among the backward rabble. Well, the rabble are at the gate to the compound and they’ve been told some stories they don’t like one bit. Telling them the truth on their own terms is the only thing that’s going to avoid ruin.

Now that I think of it, that’s a pretty good indication of why the great war to eradicate religion is such a stunningly stupid idea. They can’t even get rid of an massively erroneous myth about evolutionary science yet they want to take on the entire range of entirely non-scientific religious belief and grind it into dust? Um, hum. I see.

2007-04-30T06:42:00.000-04:00

Free Will? Democracy?

Here is the entire discussion of the proposition I posed at Echidne of the Snakes last Saturday. It makes for interesting reading. I would, however, point out that the assertions of some of the participants, that the question was boring, would seem to be contradicted by the evidence. Now, I’ll let the responses speak for themselves, mine included.

Proposed: Science has proven that "free will is a myth".

Please discuss, including an explanation of how democracy and personal rights can survive this belief.

This assumption seems to be a question that underlies a lot of present day thinking and we can’t avoid confronting it. It’s cropped up no less than three times in my surfing the web and it’s in today’s Boston Globe, it’s clearly a question that is ripe for investigation. You've heard me on this subject before, now it's your turn.

The Responses

See, there's the problem. I don't read the Boston Globe, I'm just a working scientist. Nobody told me that:

1. An assertion that very likely means as many different things as there are people reading it.

2. Has been falsified by a process that has no access to the kinds of experimental processes that could falsify it.

Mostly it's unlikely that people will take the time to look into what's meant by free will. I'm gonna take a wild-ass guess (WAG in scientistspeak) and guess that what the chatter is about is that increasingly scientists are finding physical correlates for mental events.

Ever heard of "post hoc ergo propter hoc? I ask 'em"

The ancients knew that the temporal and physical association of two events does not prove causality. It doesn't even prove, although it suggests, a true associative linkage.

In short, if you feel a rush of love and are observed to be gushing endorphins like Old Faithful it neither proves that the endorphins "caused" you to love nor does it prove that your love "caused" the endorphins.

Or as our Asiatic sistren put it, coins have both heads and tails. Neither causes the other.

For a really "scientific" investigation of the will I think you need to look at the buddhists, who have worked this particular vein for millenia.

They've reached some interesting conclusions, which neither assert the unbiologically determined ship captain idea of free will that is undermined by any biological correlate nor deny the possibility of democracy and community.

Unfortunately language doesn't capture their results very well. A typical reply would be:

No free will?
Who is asking?
Heraclitus | 04.28.07 - 9:48 am | #

"Proposed: Science has proven that 'free will is a myth'."

Proposed: we ignore this nonsense.
little green | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 10:09 am | #

Gravatar First I have never seen science "prove" anything, it simply figures out which results can be consistantly recreated. Lazy ass laymen with with agendas are the ones that scream PROOF!!!

As for free will, this is my take on it. Watched Make a Deal with a friend once. Annoying woman was winning. We wished she would lose the last two Large Money amounts, in a row. She did. (Odds were absolutely against her of course.) She didn't take the deal cause she was so sure God was on her side and she couldn't help but win. You could see it felt like a lock to her.

Well, in the end it comes down to her having a $1,000 in her hand and a parting choice of two oversized cases. One would double her money and the other would take it all away.

She didn't make the deal, having figured out God was not on her side, but was asked which case she would have picked. They opened it and it had the word NOTHING in it (or a $0 or something that symbolized bupkis.)

I turned to my friend and said, "See that? The choice of the cases? That was Fate. The choice not to go there, that's Free Will."

I have yet to see anything in science that says our influencers are non-negotiable. Some people may lose a portion of their free will to uncontrollable mental illness or overwhelming circumstances but if there are moments of clarity about the situation then you can freely choose a different answer than the one you are so influenced into.
Afm | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 10:23 am | #

Gravatar olvlzl, I was unable the article you mention in the Globe, do you have a url handy?

I won’t let that stop me from commenting. I have not read your previous posts on the topic, I hope we have some common ground.

Science has proven that "free will is a myth".

There is a lot going on in that statement. What is ‘science’? What is ‘free will’? Can its existence be proven (or disproved)?

What is ‘science’?

A guy with a white lab coat who commutes to a institution of higher learning in Cambridge? A bunch of similar people? A consensus that exists among them?

Most recent debate of late on this centers around beliefs held by people that are not based on objective and reproducible observation. Such beliefs may be described as ‘faith’ and are fundamental to many organized religions.

So discussion centers on whether e.g. creationism (a belief of faith) or evolution (a scientific observation) are at odds.

Such discussions become very passionate and polar. Arbitrary faith has the potential to undermine the value of objective science. And teaching religious beliefs *as* science corrupts the notion of science based on objective observation.

So let’s take the religious stuff off the table. Let’s say for the sake of this discussion we know or care nothing about the old or new testament or any other articles of faith.

Can we *prove* evolution to be a complete explanation of how humans came to be? There is, in my humble opinion, tons we still do not understand about how such a complex mechanism works. Yet many scientists, and those that are inspired in their beliefs by them, are galvanized in describing evolution as a complete ‘proven’ explanation because the specter of enabling the corruption of ‘science’ by unproven and un-provable religion is so scary.

If the religious nuts would just back off we scientists would be free to acknowledge that there is still a ton we have to learn about how we got here.

Bit of a ramble, but I suspect the same thing is true with regard to free will vs. determinism. Any ‘scientist’ who believes that such a complex phenomenon is presently understood as a result of objective observation is full of compost. Lots more to observe, lots more to learn, scientists will be gainfully employed for a long time to come.

What is ‘free will’? Can its existence be proven (or disproved)?

The myth may be that this *question* means anything.

The concept of free will is embedded in the concept of the human consciousness, a concept that in and of itself is not meaningfully understood in terms of neuroscience or objective observation. Scientists can show better and better magnetic resonance imaging, insisting that we are learning more about how patterns of activity in sections of the brain relate to observed behavior, but we have no idea *how* human consciousness exists or how it functions.

The classical belief (held by e.g. Einstein) that human consciences must be a result (only) of the physical functioning of the brain is an unproven hypothesis.

Our religious nut friends come knocking again. Dude, it’s your *SOUL* …

Ignore them. Can’t we just acknowledge that we still have much, much to learn about what human consciousness is and how it works?

[The non-religious nuts among us are intrigued about some things in physics that we have come to understand a little better since Einstein’s day. That at the sub-atomic particle level particles do *not* appear to behave deterministically, they do not observe physical laws as we understand them for larger objects. Cool.]

Please discuss, including an explanation of how democracy and personal rights can survive this belief.

Well, OK, so I am not in the Determinism camp. And until I am I am going to make the conservative assumption that what I ‘decide’ matters. Like who I love, who I hate, who I help, who I hurt. Who I vote for. I am going to assume that my personal morality matters and strive to be a better person.
Carty | 04.28.07 - 10:42 am | #

Gravatar I found Jeffrey M Schwartz' book "The Mind and the Brain" very revealing on this issue. Schwartz has developed a therapy to treat Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Patients essentially learn to reinterpret the pathological signals their damaged brain sends them and to respond in a different manner.This eventual begins to change the network of neurons in the brain. Schwartz uses his experiences to reflect on research in this field. He posits a level of 'mental force',as a real, measurable quantity, ('will' if you like,) that originates in our conscious decision and then can influence brain chemistry and neuronal networks.

The book discusses much recent research as well as the ideas of William James, one of the early critics of the reductionism that says everything is just neural impulses.

The other side of the coin is presented by Francis Crick's "The Astonishing Hypotheses" which is that all conscious phenomena--all our perceptions, feelings, thoughts, religious visions, and moral decisions, etc.--are "nothing but" the behaviour of nerve cells and can be completely explained in those terms.
Ron | 04.28.07 - 11:00 am | #

Gravatar we've never really defined "free will" adequately enough to ever say it can be rebutted.

whenever people say "free will proven a myth" usually what they're referring to is some data showing causal reasons for human behavior.

but our notion of "free will" requires elements of both causality and non-causality. if all our actions are nothing more than stimulus-response reactions, then we would probably say there is no "free will" (if everything is stimulus-response we would have as much free will as a thermostat)

if, on the other hand, our actions were completely uninfluenced by events around us, that is, completely random, we would also say there is no "free will" because that is completely irrationall. (if we acted randomly we would have as much free will as a pair of dice)

the problem isn't that science is rebutting the concept of free will. the problem is that the concept of free will has never been well defined and doesn't actually make all that much sense. it's both causal and non-causal at the same time. science didn't rebut it. free will rebuts itself
upyernoz | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 12:03 pm | #

Gravatar Hume solved the problem definitionally. As did most good enlightnement philosophers he imagined that the mind was a machine, much as it has proven to be by cognitive scientists such as Sapolsky. He defined free-will as lack of constraint. ( i.e. threat of force)

The lovely thing about such a definition is that it very clearly acknowledges the almost purely mechanistic aspects of mental activity while simultaneously prescribing a method to maintain liberty.

We might find the definition a little unsatisfying for telling us what will is, what its nature is, where it comes from, what it does, and why it supposedly distinguishes man from animals ( an impression that will disolve completely if one has spent fifteen minutes trying to get a mule to do something and failed, or ever tried to keep a billy goat from eating a precious shrubbery.)

I find the whole notion of will, willfulness, and so on to be a rather unfortunate set of ideas. It is an abstraction that I think lacks a solid conception or definition. Desire and motivation I think make sense in context with what we know about the brain.

As for democracy, it relies not on the notion of liberty but on the notion of justice, fairness. It requires that one person acknowledges the rights of the others. Guarantees of rights are not first person grants but second and third person grants. It is our selfish misconception that democracy is about me, and my group, not all of us thrown together that is chiefly responsible for the imminent demise of democracy.

Teach non-religious ethical analysis from third through twelfth grade. Make every person realize that school is not just vocational training but training to be cooperative members of an interdependent society. Only when we understand the importance of that intuitively is there any hope of maintaining liberty.
steve | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 12:13 pm | #

Gravatar Recent research into how parasites practice mind control over their hosts is pretty scary. Take, for example, the ants serving as hosts to Dicrocoelium. "The brainworm emits chemicals that alter the behavior of the ant causing the ant to spend inordinate amounts of time hanging out on the tips of grass where it is exceed ingly more likely to be eaten by a grazing sheep, cow, deer or rabbit.

Once the ant is eaten, the brainworm is digested and dies along with the ant. The remaining parasites are released into the host where they mature and lay eggs, beginning the cycle anew."

Would an infected ant think it was voluntarily spending time hanging out on the tips of grass stalks?

If ants (hosts and non-hosts) debated free will - would it be the ant asking the question - or the parasite?

The popularization screams "Science says no free will" - but the effect of the subconscious upon the conscious thought patterns of us "rationalizing animals" is interesting. How many people voted for Bush based upon nonsensical appeals to emotion that made no rational sense? Of those people, how many rationalized their emotion-driven decision based upon their subconscious fears and desires?
RepubAnon | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 12:27 pm | #

Gravatar Of course the real question here isn't 'is their free will' but rather 'who is it who has free will'? An interesting novel take on this is in the current New Scientist:

http://www.newscientist.com/chan.../ mg19225780.073
Ron | 04.28.07 - 12:45 pm | #

Gravatar The argument about determinism versus free will not end until the Sun goes supernova.
swampcracker | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 12:48 pm | #

Gravatar Some thoughts--
If a criminal mindset is a pathology then it should be possible to cure it. Prisons become more like hospitals at that point. Still, it would be an open question as to what counts as normal human behavior and what is designated as illness. A liberal society (the heirs of Hume, above) would likely still favor a society that accepts a broad range of human behaviors as being normal. Basic tenets of justice would not change only the nature of punishment.

Even if the self can be reduced to a collection of physical processes we still have to contend with contradictory impulses, for instance, between monogamy and lust. What is not understood is what the physical basis might be for choosing among them, i.e. consciousness.

Another troubling idea for the foundation of liberal society I infer from Frances Crick's hypothesis--that individuals themselves may not in fact exist, that our ideas of ourselves are merely that and have no more substantive basis than a superstition.
sporadic | 04.28.07 - 12:53 pm | #

Gravatar Ron: "Patients essentially learn to reinterpret the pathological signals their damaged brain sends them and to respond in a different manner."

And that is exactly what I've observed in recovering people. Why it doesn't get more attention is beyond me. All learning, all changing of behavior must be part of this willful rewiring of the brain.

So where does the "will" come from to do the rewiring?

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Carolyn Kay | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 1:00 pm | #

Gravatar Heraclitus' mini-dialog to suggest a Buddhist approach was very nice, very suggestive of what we can do when we think this problem. I'd like to come from the opposite side of the riddle.

In my experience, people who claim to disbelieve in their free will are actually disbelieving something else first - their own existence. As believers in mechanical causation, they are asserting that they have no free will because they silently assume taht there is no thing in the world that is "me". If they did believe they existed, they would have to believe that thing that is "me" can cause things to happen.

Why don't they believe that they exist? And why does it matter?

I think they're trying to abandon the fiction of the soul, or at least clearly fictional accounts of what is a soul (religious propaganda), and they're desperately challenging people around them to give them grounds for believing in themselves. So, yes, the problem is a democratic one, and a rights problem.

Personally, I account for my existence with the realization that all matter possesses the elements of mental energy, but people have to figure out existence for themselves before it will make convincing sense. Regardless of how each comes to it, I think we need to grasp that people really are not sure whether or not they exist, and this is a perfect state of mind to encourage authoritarianism.

They disbelieve in themselves because they feel powerless to live as they would like. That's the starting point.
citizen | 04.28.07 - 1:26 pm | #

Gravatar In my experience, people who claim to disbelieve in their free will are actually disbelieving something else first - their own existence. As believers in mechanical causation, they are asserting that they have no free will because they silently assume taht there is no thing in the world that is "me". If they did believe they existed, they would have to believe that thing that is "me" can cause things to happen.

Huh. I have to say, I don't believe in "free will" in any strong fashion. I believe that my actions are the result of my 28 years of life experiences and the bio-chemical nature of my body and the situation I'm in when I act. If you could somehow create an exact replica of me and put it in the exact same situations that I'm in, I believe that it would react in exactly the same ways that I do.

I don't think it has anything to do with denying my own existence- I know that I exist, and I'm quite pleased with how I've turned out. I don't think it's about feeling powerless- how I feel about things is as much a product of who I am as anything else is. Why should it bother me to believe that my actions aren't "free"? There are an infinite number of influences working on all of us, all the time. The reality is that I can't comprehend all of the things that are pushing and pulling on my choices every moment. Just by typing this up and hitting "publish" I could be shifting the experiences of someone else such that they react differently than they would have before.

It doesn't matter to me whether I have free will or not, because I'm going to continue living my life in the way that my experiences lead me to, anyway. Does it really matter if my choices are free or not?
*shrug*
Roy | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 3:04 pm | #

Gravatar Proposed. Science has proven that 2+2=5 what are the consequences of this?
Terra | 04.28.07 - 3:21 pm | #

Gravatar I second Ron's suggestion about "The Mind and the Brain", which also contains a bit about physical changes in the brains of Buddhist monks as suggested by Heraclitus.

The book suggests that events at a quantum level are the source of "mental force" and by extension "mind" and "free will". It is definitely worth the read.
goatherd | 04.28.07 - 3:27 pm | #

Gravatar Carolyn Kay wrote:
"So where does the "will" come from to do the rewiring?"

That is indeed the question. And many answers are possible.

I think that for starters you have to assume some kind of hierarchy, events form part of greater events and each level is capable of generating its own force of intention, individual or collective.

Ultimately, you nay feel that you have to posit some sort of 'ground of being' or 'God' or ultimate 'Self'. I prefer the Buddha's answer, no-self. If you peal away all the levels of relationships, there is nothing left, just pure potential. But now we are in the realm of philosophical preferences...
Ron | 04.28.07 - 3:37 pm | #

Gravatar I've always suspected that "no self" was more of a rejection of the Yoga idea of the "Self" than in what that might mean to westerners. I've always wondered why, considering his total unwillingness to speculate on other metaphysical matters, he would go into something as speculative as the self. This is one sutta I particularly like, it's more no comment than non-exitant.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ t...n.063.than.html
olvlzl, no ism, no ist | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 3:50 pm | #

Gravatar Here's a fun fact: With PET scans and MRIs and such, we can see the impulses from the brain to the to the finger happen BEFORE the "mind" "decides" to point at something. And what's more, there is experimental evidence that certain magnetic fields in proximity to the brain. can make us do things AND insist that we chose to do it, all evidence to the contrary. So the answer to this boring question is nobody knows.
JDC | 04.28.07 - 7:36 pm | #

Gravatar JDC, don't get me going on MRIs. And I wasn't the one who put the question in those terms, several people who believed it was true framed the issue that way. On liberal blogs. If it had happened on right-wing blogs it wouldn't have shocked me. What's the left if people get suckered into believing that freedom has been proven to be a myth? And, I'm not the only one who has noticed that is a belief that is gaining ground as more people, many without much sophistication in science or philosophy, are falling for the line.
olvlzl, no ism, no ist | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 8:01 pm | #

Gravatar I tend to be uneasy when I agree wholeheartedly, without any quibble, with Carty. So here I'll be uneasy.

Steve,what you are describing used to be called the comprehensive civics curriculum.

Heraclitus, excellent job of picking apart what is wrong with the whole idea of this question.
Helen H | 04.28.07 - 9:10 pm | #

Gravatar What's the left if people get suckered into believing that freedom has been proven to be a myth?

why are you assuming that belief that there is no freewil is "conservative"? freewill is not the same things a political freedom (i don't believe in the former, i do the latter). and i personally see determinism, not freewill, as more consistent with liberalism.

for example, when talking about crime who wants to look at the societal causes of crime, liberals or conservatives?

when dealing with terrorism, who wants to talk about what drives people to engage in terrorism, liberals or conservatives?
upyernoz | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 10:02 pm | #

Gravatar My initial impulse was to avoid commenting on this post because the subject is just too complex, and the body of literature too unwieldy to occupy the minimalist real estate of a blog thread. It would be something like putting the history of the universe into reverse by forcing all mass and energy back into a singularity. Nevertheless the subject is also irresistible, and I will keep my comments as brief as possible.

Determinism versus free will, gasp! Classical Greek literature is a good place to start. Fate, chance, and choice describe the plain of human interactions as understood by the ancient philosophers. These terms have specific definitions, and I refer readers to Wiki, a convenient reference for these baseline concepts.

Determinism did not always have its roots in science. Religious philosophers inferred determinism from the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient God, and the argument goes something like this: If God is omniscient and has foreknowledge of our actions even before we act, then how can mankind have free will. This concept of God leads to the religious concept of predestination.

Predestination troubled a great many thinkers, and their argument goes something like this: If mankind is predestined to act in certain ways, even before he/she acts, then how can a person be held morally accountable for his/her actions before the laws of God and man. An interesting dilemma.

Later philosophers argued that predestination and free will are not necessarily contradictory nor incompatible, and their argument goes something like this: Suppose you are a parent, and your two-old toddler is about to toddle off a stool and fall down and go “boom.” You have a choice: Prevent the fall, or let the toddler have an experience that will teach him/her something about the perils of gravity. Thus, it is possible to have foreknowledge and free will at the same time.

In a sense, God is like the parent who gives mankind a measure of freedom to act and suffer the consequences of those actions. In a nutshell, these are the historical arguments surrounding determinism versus free will.

At the risk of making a logical fallacy called the “error of mystification,” I would assert that science does not seek to prove or disprove the concept of free will. Science confines itself to measurable phenomenon in the natural world. It seeks to explain phenomena through hypothesis, experimentation, and observation. Although the psychosocial sciences use empirical research methods to observe human behaviors, conclusions are generally probabilistic, not hardcore deterministic. This is an important distinction and a source of confusion for many people. Behavior research reports statistical tendencies, not chalkboard physics with precise trajectories.

“Free Will” was, is, and will always be a moral and legal concept. Whereas the psychosocial sciences may attempt to explain why certain behaviors take place, and while there will always be clever lawyers, no doubt, who will try to convert an explanation into an excuse, the rule of law will always require a certain measure of accountability and responsibility.

I have always felt that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Act with responsibility -- there would be no reason restict personal freedoms. Act in an irresponsible manner, freedoms will limited or taken away. To a certain degree, society will always be struggling with these issues. Public debate will pivot, not on the definition of terms, but about where to place the fulcrum that balances freedom versus responsibility, i.e., free will.
swampcracker | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 10:58 pm | #

Gravatar swampcracker, while there have been religious and philosophical determinists I think that in the culture I'm concerned with, relatively educated people left of the political spectrum those viewpoints are either entirely unknown or are regarded as unworthy of serious consideration. The related matters you talk about are true for some religious or philosophical scholars and writers but equally untrue of others. Talking about something as varied as either field would be like taking one school in one branch of biology and using its theories to talk about "biology". But that's not really the crux of my concerns here.

I agree with those who hold that the question, as a scientific question, is meaningless just as addressing any question in which the main terms can't be defined and about which there isn't enough known is scientifically meaningless. Yet as it was put in the Boston Globe article this morning, quite close in phrasing to the other mentions on blog threads Q Some neuroscientists question the whole notion of free will and say it's a myth. www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/28/ evil_gets_a_closer_look_after_shootings/

People as relatively sophisticated as Rich Barlow, the journalist, ask the question in those terms. Politically it doesn't matter that the scientific meaning of the question or even the assertions (some of them more than implied by some pretty famous scientists) are bad science. The "science" used by the supporters of slavery and associated racism (Thomas Huxley, sad to say among them) was bad science, as has been the rest of this biological determinism. Most if not all of the official racism that goverments engage in is based in bad science, much of the racially and ethnically based killing in the second world war was "scientifically" justified or instigated. Bad science can have profoundly bad effects on people.

I would love it if scientists and science teachers did a better job of making their students a lot more skeptical about a whole range of things than they are. Many people with educations are astoundingly credulous about anything that gets labled as "science" and they assume that the science has to be "proven truth". I can assure you that if you took a sample of people with degrees and asked them about the nature of scientific knowledge most of them wouldn't suspect that contingency was assumed.

And this doesn't really get to scientists who make assertions about free will and the superstition that science can address all questions. Science as it really is, isn't particularly good about restraining career makers from public declarations out of all proportion to their actual findings. They don't even correct the media when they make absurd claims for it. And I'd guess outside of cancer research the area which has the worst reporting is in the behavioral and cognative sciences.

I'm very happy with this thread. Thanks to everyone who is participating.
olvlzl, no ism, no ist | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 11:27 pm | #

Gravatar Oops. That link didn't take. Here it is.
http://www.boston.com/news/local...fter_shootings/
olvlzl, no ism, no ist | Homepage | 04.28.07 - 11:28 pm | #

Gravatar Dear Uncle. Please accept my thanks for your reply.

Your comment -- “Science as it really is, isn't particularly good about restraining career makers from public declarations out of all proportion to their actual findings” -- is an interesting one. I can think of numerous examples to confirm your point, as indeed you have provided examples. Historically, totalitarian regimes bend science to suit nefarious purposes and enlist scientists willing to do their bidding.

Let me point out a logical fallacy about science, or any discipline for that matter. There is a tendency to blame a discipline for the sins of its disciples. By itself, science is neither good nor bad, but there are good and bad scientists. I think we can both agree.

I have the same problem with respect to answers provided by Reverend Coleman: “knowledge can have a potential for good and evil.” Again, the same logical fallacy: knowledge is not necessarily good or evil; but there will always be persons who turn it into something good or evil.

And the same can be made about the Internet: It is a wonderful technology that enables people to access information and form communities. The technology is neither good nor evil, but there are people who abuse it and use it as a medium for spam, harassment, stalking, and death threats.

So I think the question revolves around human nature, i.e., the capacity to use or abuse, to facilitate or to hurt. I have some thoughts on this subject but I need to take a break and return later.
swampcracker | Homepage | 04.29.07 - 2:04 am | #

Gravatar As someone who has spent a lifetime inside a biochemically defective brain, I'm coming more and more to believe that free will is, in fact, a myth. Or illusion. Or what have you. I come more and more to believe that what we think of as personality, as *me*, is just bundles of chemicals and electricity. Observing up close and personal the deep and real changes relatively minor chemical changes wreak is pretty darn startling. And enlightening.

including an explanation of how democracy and personal rights can survive this belief.

We have to make sure they do because I might be wrong.

MKK
Mary Kay | 04.29.07 - 3:20 am | #

Gravatar I tend to be uneasy when I agree wholeheartedly, without any quibble, with Carty. So here I'll be uneasy.

yay.
Carty | 04.29.07 - 9:19 am | #

Gravatar Usuaually I have a quibble, for everyone.

Have you not been posting much, Carty? I may have just been missing what you have been saying as my travel has been more sporadic, leading to my blog reading to be likewise.
Helen H | 04.29.07 - 9:50 am | #

Gravatar I know quite a few scientists. None of us say things like "free will is a myth". That's the kind of thing philosophers spend their time on. Scientists are still trying to figure what the heck the statement is supposed to mean.

It hardly seems like a well-formed statement about the material world, after all.
Whispers | Homepage | 04.29.07 - 10:09 am | #

Gravatar Heraclitus. Thanks for that post. You're right - this 'stand-along' (no real explanation) assertion doesn't mean very much.

But I still like your post - it was interesting and nice and easy to understand

Can you post some more for the fun of it please.
Jules | 04.29.07 - 10:30 am | #

Gravatar "Proposed: Science has proven that "free will is a myth".

Please discuss, including an explanation of how democracy and personal rights can survive this belief."

Personally, I reject eliminaitonist theories about 'free-will' for purely introspective reasons: e.g., whether I will continue typing this response - or not - appears (introspectively) like an action beyond causal determinism. Of course, that's not sufficient, nor is it very interesting.

Scientific (as well as philosphical) arguments reject free will with a compelling disjunction: any putatively free action was either caused, or it was not caused. If caused, then determinism, if not caused then random. In either case, no free-will.

Here, I go Kantian. The very concept of freedom defies analysis: IF it could be analyzed in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, the concept would necessarily not exist. This seems to beg the question, but this TYPE of answer has a very powerful analogue when it comes to accounting for the intractable nature of the mind-body problem (i.e., how can purely material stuff give rise to emotions, intentionality, etc.).

Expanding on the Kantian notion of antinomy, many contemporary philosophers find analogous explanations of how material stuff can have mental properties attractive. Eliminationist views of mental states, these philosophers argue (and I agree) are prima-facie absurd (Zombie-type thought experiments go a long way to shaping intuitions about this). Our lack of an adequate analysis of them, however, only implies that we are incapable (either thru limitations in brain power or an incapability of understanding the relevant concepts) of telling the story, but does not support the conclusion that such states don't exist. We know they do. (As Kripke says, if GOd were to of-a-day make the universe, the introduction of pain as an experience was something extra, beyond the creation of complex physical systems). Sounds question-begging, again, and also perhaps slightly paradoxical.

But the point is this: sceince's failure to account for mental states doesn't lead people to conclude that they don't have them.

It should also be noted that what constitutes scientific progress has come at the expense of 'reason' and 'rational' explanations, quantuum mechanics being the clearest example (its truth entails the falsity of the law of excluded middle, the cornerstone of all reason).

In short, I believe that the problem posed by science for free-will is a 'psuedo-problem', akin to the following: observational evidence from large objects reveals that the electron clouds which comprise those objects are probabalistically distributed to infininty, therefore, there are no large objects.

Democracy and personal rights, insofar as they require freedom, are therefore safe from the threat of science.
scudbucket | 04.29.07 - 11:04 am | #

Gravatar It doesn't matter to me whether I have free will or not, because I'm going to continue living my life in the way that my experiences lead me to, anyway. Does it really matter if my choices are free or not?
*shrug*
Roy

Suppose you are confronted with a difficult moral decision. Suppose, for example, that you are short of cash and the mortgage is way past due, and you are confronted with two options: stealing some easily liftable cash and risk going to jail, or not stealing it and risk losing your home. Imagine the scenario such that the temptation to steal is very appealing.

Now, after the fact, when you are reflecting on this situation in jail, are you at all inclined to say that your choice was simply the result of conditioning?
scudbucket | 04.29.07 - 11:22 am | #

Gravatar Whisper, and others. Please read today's post, you will understand that my interest in wording the proposition wasn't a "scientific" one.
olvlzl, no ism, no ist | Homepage | 04.29.07 - 12:07 pm | #

Gravatar Mary Kay: I, too, am an inheritor of a defective brain. I used to suffer from debilitating depressions, which included two hospitalizations.

I was lucky enough to come upon a book about cognitive therapy, which I threw across the room the first time I tried to read it, but later came to appreciate. I also found out about creative imagery, and was able to use both of those techniques to make some serious changes.

A few years ago, in one year I went through breast cancer treatment, moving, and changing jobs without suffering depression. For me, that's a huge improvement.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Carolyn Kay | Homepage | 04.29.07 - 1:37 pm | #

Gravatar Carolyn: I'm glad cognitive therapy works that well for you. I'm familiar with it and find some of its techniques useful. However, nothing budges my depressions except the application of drugs which increase the amount of serotonin and norepinephrine in my brain. I am really sure that none of the other techniques work because I tried them for 30 years before those drugs became available.

Watching this process from the inside is why I'm deeply dubious of the point I *think* scudbucket is making. (I might be wrong in what I think is one of his/her points. I really suck as a philosopher.) In fact something material does give rise to emotions: insufficient serotonin in the brain causes deep and powerful depressions. Correcting that not only sends the depression packing, but also stops compulsive thinking, certain types of anxiety, and pms dead in their tracks. I watched all those things happen in my own life, in my own brain. I've observed it from the outside in the cases of others.

Watching behaviors, thoughts, and emotions come and go, change and mutate as a result of a slight change in the chemical composition of one's brain is really arresting.

MKK
Mary Kay | 04.29.07 - 2:02 pm | #

Gravatar olvlzl: Again, I don't know what you are talking about. "Free will" is not a topic that is studied in science, so I don't see how anybody could seriously say that "Science has proven 'free will is a myth'".

Terra: Science has not "proven" 2+2=5. There are many things wrong with this false proposition. For starters, it's a mathematical statement, not a scientific one. Second, as a mathematical statement, the fact that "2+2=4" is nearly equivalent to the definition of "4". (Indeed, "4" is defined to be the number 4=3+1.) We needn't worry about "science" proving things that are mathematically false.

There is a certain kind of psychological reductionism that says that human brains are all just bunches of wires existing in reality and that "free will" is therefore an illusion, since the wires will simply behave according to the laws that govern biochemistry. I think this is a bit reductionist, but I'll get back to it in a second.

The extreme opposite approach to the problem invokes non-physical "souls" or "spirits" that have "free will", and casts human beings as being somehow more than physical, to avoid the inevitable conclusion that there is little inherent ontological difference between a human being and, say, a toaster, except for the complexity of the wiring.

I have problems with both extremes, but more with the second one, since it is obviously concocting terms that it refuses to define precisely, solely because it wants to avoid the negative implications of the first attitude.

So, what are the bugbears of the first theoretical framework that are so odious? Well, if you listen to the doomsayers (who are regularly badmouthing science, atheism, and any other system of belief that restricts itself to the natural world), a logical consequence of believing that humans exist entirely and solely in the physical world is the conclusion that humans are merely pawns in the physical system, and are somehow not responsible for the decisions they make.

To a great extent, people are slaves to our biology. We get hungry, we eat. We get tired, we sleep. We get horny, we breed. I don't quite see what that has to do with "free will" and "good and evil". Indeed, I find the practice of defining all decisions according to "right and wrong" to be much less trustworthy than defining decisions based on their consequences and the values of the people making the decisions.

It is fairly clear to me that, even though I do not belive in an essential "soul", and I have no idea what "free will" is supposed to mean, that I make choices about my life constantly. These choices are informed by my education, my emotional drives, my hungers, my ethics, and what have you, but they are all still choices, and I take responsibility for them.

Given all of that, I find the handwringing about the implications of a materialistic philosophy to be completely misplaced. It simply isn't necessary. And when you feel yourself well grounded in a materialistic philosphy that allows for the existence of human rights, concepts of good and evil, personal responsibility, etc., comments like
"Please discuss, including an explanation of how democracy and personal rights can survive this belief" just strike you are horribly misplaced.

Democracy is a concept that was invented in a material world. Why would it not be able to survive in a material world? The same goes for personal rights. Read up on Locke and the concept of a social contract. Personal rights exist in the collective imagination. What does that have to do with an ill-defined concept of "free will"?
Whispers | Homepage | 04.29.07 - 2:32 pm | #

Gravatar I would have to argue that while the biochemistry in our brain may effect how we feel, what we do can effect our brain chemistry (e.g. runner's high), some studies indicate how we "tell ourselves" we are going to feel can have some effect on our brain chemistry, so to can elements in the environment (the studies I've seen assumed "normal" brain chemistry, whatever that is defined by the study as being). This does not in any way lessen MKK's experiences from inside a brain with "defective chemistry"; it does indicate that our patterns are not simply what they are due to predetermined internal production, but are subject to change. I don't know that this has any bearing on the thological/philosophical concept of free will within a scientific examination for determination of existance.
Helen H | 04.29.07 - 3:10 pm | #

Gravatar Whispers said: "It is fairly clear to me that, even though I do not belive in an essential "soul", and I have no idea what "free will" is supposed to mean..."

One way to understand it, ala Aristotle, is that you are a 'first mover' with respect to your actions. The idea is that when you either raise or fail to raise your hand in five seconds (four, three, two, one...) the impetus for that action came from within you, an impetus which was in turn uncaused.

While its true that science is not interested in research on free will per se, science IS interested in theses such as a causally closed universe. If the universe is causally closed - that is, if every event is the result of a physical, causally sufficient condition - then there appears to be no room for free will (since every decision, judgment or choice is merely the result small particles bouncing off each other in determinate ways).

For my part, this is VERY counterintuitive. For example, if the universe is causally closed, then there is no such thing as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy actions. Morality, which many people think of as end in itself, is reduced to what is efficacious for promoting some other non-moral value scheme, utiles, stability, comfort, etc.

How this relates to democracy and human rights is pretty clear: a democracy is predicated an rational actors making (free) choices in determining governmental policy. Even on a reductionist view (which is realist about free-will!) which claims that freedom is merely actions unconstrained from outside forces, denying free-will entails the impossibility of democracy ('free choices' aren't determining anything because there are no free choices (the universe is causally closed)).

Realism about free will is necessary for anything but nominal democracy. More robust notions of free will are of course still consistent with democracy, and those I made earlier.
scudbucket | 04.29.07 - 3:51 pm | #

Gravatar Whisper, let me put it plainly.

In order for an idea to have a political impact, it doesn't have to be "good science". It just has to be a line bought by enough people to have a political impact.

The idea that "science - of some kind" has proven that "free will is a myth" is an idea that is out there and being discussed. It is a bad idea demonstrating a lack of the most basic knowlege of the philosophical basis of science but for it to have a political effect that doesn't matter one little big.

Creationism is also bad science but in areas where it is bought it has a political impact. It's really just as simple as that.
olvlzl, no ism, no ist | Homepage | 04.29.07 - 5:38 pm | #

Gravatar Imagine the scenario such that the temptation to steal is very appealing.

Now, after the fact, when you are reflecting on this situation in jail, are you at all inclined to say that your choice was simply the result of conditioning?

Why shouldn't I?
What reaction would you be inclined to have towards that choice?
Roy | Homepage | 04.29.07 - 10:37 pm | #

Gravatar I'll merely echo the point made by others--the proposition is not in a science framework. Sounds more like that of a journalist interested in getting his article printed.

Even if our finger points before our conscious mind concludes that it should, that doesn't mean that neurons are not going through a process which determines whether or not the finger points. Somewhere among those neuronal interactions is a cusp that leads to the pointing or non-pointing of the finger. The resolution of that cusp may take longer to reach the conscious portion of the mind than it does to the necessary motor neurons, but until scientists determine what takes place at that cusp concerns about the death of free will are premature.

I'll add a little more on the specific explanation you asked for. Just as the extreme lack of scientific support for many of the events of the Bible--Joshua's ability to stop the sun in the sky, for instance--has not stopped even some scientists from accepting the inerrancy of the Bible, neither would "proving" the absence of free will necessarily result in change of our society's practices relating to democracy or personal rights.

Nor, logically, should it. Even without an illusion of a scientifically-defined free will which has never been established, governments are needed, and agreements on what individuals can and cannot do. Since no individual has any inherent advantage of any other if no one has free will, how do we establish the necessary government and agreements? The concepts of a pre-determined atheist are no more and no less valid than those of a pre-determined buddist or pre-determined christian, unless there is a "proven" scientific superiority developed at some time in the future. Such a superiority has yet to be uncovered by science, and seems highly unlikely to be a part of science's future.

Remember, democracy is the worst form of government except for all other types that have been tried so far. What form of government would be best in the absence of free will? Well, probably the same one that is best when everyone is considered to be a free agent.

Of course, if we allow those who believe that their particular determinist viewpoint is more valid than those of others to take control, then there obviously will be problems. But that's true even in a world that believes in free will.

I also point out that the concepts of democracy and individual rights were not developed in societies that overwhelmingly believed in free will.

As can be seen by this response, I'm more than a little dismissive of the importance of the philosophical proposition olvizi presents. When I was a college student free will vs. determinism was interesting; the lifetime in between has often illustrated to me that the activities of individuals and societies are seldom seldom based on such concepts.
MedallionOfFerret | 04.30.07 - 4:39 am | #

2007-04-27T08:57:00.000-04:00

Note:
The response which was posted here is removed since the misunderstanding has been cleared up entirely and without prejudice.

2007-04-25T22:34:00.000-04:00

I said it before and I'll say it again

Bill Moyers is the greatest, English language, broadcast journalist of all times.

2007-04-25T11:11:00.000-04:00

Daniel Dennett Just Can’t Stay Out of That Lions Den
For all of their self-publicized objectivity and rigorous standards of reasoning, there are some rather breathtakingly naive ideas that have gained currency in the contemporary culture of atheism and among some of a vaguely scientific bent. Few of these are as astonishing as the assumption that the theorized genetic basis of religious belief necessarily leads to the conclusion that religion is just the undesirable artifact of evolutionary biology and QED: god is bunk. For a person who doesn’t believe in a god or who is making a career in the burgeoning pop culture field that champions these kinds of ideas, that assumption seems to be immediately grasped because they think it confirms their pre-existing preferences. But that is certainly not the most necessary conclusion, nor is their heart’s desire the only conclusion that can be drawn from it using their own level of rigor.

First, the proposition, most often associated with Daniel Dennett, is glaringly lacking in rigorous analysis. It assumes that a proposed creator god who created the entire universe, planets, solar systems, galaxies, clusters, dark matter, energy, the entire shebang, and who also keeps it in motion, wouldn’t have any say in what happens in the puny little molecules that make up our genetic inheritance. Perhaps they think that such a god would just have to grow forgetful under the burdens of considering the big picture.

Not only COULD such a creator god’s role be proposed in any such genetic basis of belief, but to leave out that possibility is entirely dishonest in a PHILOSOPHICAL* discussion of the matter. It is hard for me to believe that doing so could be just a rather astounding oversight for a philosopher to make. If you’re talking god, you don’t get to leave the possibility of god out of the picture just at a point when doing so best suits your conclusion. It certainly wouldn’t be by a careful philosopher who was thinking about the subject. When talking about “god”, god isn’t an unimportant detail in the argument.

Rather charmingly, Dennett and his cubs seem to not realize that even if they were to conclusively prove that faith was controlled by genetics that could lead someone so disposed to take that as the strongest physical evidence ever found that there was a god. Not only a god but a god who wished that people should know of his existence, or at least to have that option open to them as a recessive or latent possibility**. They could be handing the I.D. types, not their death sentence, but fulfilling their greatest desideratum***. I say charmingly only because Dennett, one of the proponents of that other PR disaster in the making, “The Brights” idea, seems to have a bad habit of handing ammo to the other side.

Note: From experience, you can be certain that one of the things that might come up in a discussion of this issue is the matter of “wish fulfillment” to impeach one side of the argument. That is, again, rather an astounding gap between the pretense of the self-identified “realist” side of things and life as it actually is. There are few, established, well accepted ideas found by scientific research which were not fervently desired by their discovers and promoters. And there are a lot of ideas that, found by mistake, lead to an equally fervent desire for confirmation and extension. Wish fulfillment in and of itself doesn’t prove sloppy thinking or dishonesty, though it can certainly be a motive in both. The falsity of an idea isn’t based in whether that it’s considered to be desirable by the person who holds or promotes it but that it has been disproved. If that wasn’t the case then even the idea that there is a genetic basis of religious belief would have to go, since it seems to be pushed most strongly by those who have a well known axe to grind on the subject. And, like many of the ideas of this school of speculation, it’s pretty much a construct made of words and assertions. And , as seen above, many of them are rather shaky in themselves.

* That is philosophical, not scientific, so don’t bother bringing that red herring up. Questions of a god have no place in any part of science. Philosophy can and does deal with many things that fall outside of science, whether or not anyone likes that.

** God help us, the strict Calvinists would have a field day with that one.

***I, personally, am doubtful that there is any such genetic mechanism but I’m not a biological determinist to begin with.

2007-03-14T09:59:00.000-04:00

C-Span Shows It’s Bias Again

Not being a buyer of cable TV I don’t watch C-Span’s Washington Journal much anymore. When I used to, I found it to be one of the programs most flagrantly biased in favor of the Republican establishment among the allegedly neutral and reputable media. It was the first place I heard of Matt Drudge, the fictitious “transition vandals scandal” and many other pieces of Republican spin. Hiding behind an equally fictitious screen of “impartially reporting what was being said” Republican lies were a major feature of the program.

By chance I heard Washington Journal today and saw a new face in the host’s chair, a woman who consistently used the phrase “the democrat line” to refer to the lines set aside for callers.

The word “democrat” is a noun, or at least that’s the part of speech it’s supposed to be. The adjective is “democratic”. As used by conservatives, Republicans and those duped by them the word “democrat” is used as an adjective of invective. It’s roughly the equivalent of the word “Hebrew” when used in exactly the same way as the word “kike”.

Members of the media who use the word “democrat” as an adjective reveal themselves to be one of two things, a Republican shill, someone who is ignorant of basic grammar or otherwise too stupid to have a job in the media. Or at least they are if they continue to use it after being told that it reveals this about them. Listeners to the media have every right to suspect the motives of people who use “democrat” as an adjective.

Democrats in the Congress should really consider if they want to allow the former member of the Nixon administration, Brian Lamb’s C-Span to be the broadcaster of its sessions or if a truly independent broadcaster with higher standards for its on-air personnel would better serve the interests of a democratic government.

2007-03-02T23:44:00.000-05:00

Elegy For A Liberal Historian
The Dangers of a Conservative-Cognitive Cohabitation
Unless Echidne does one of her great refutations of David Brook’s bilge, he is pretty near the bottom of my optional reading list. Other than as referenced by the writings of her and some others, I avoid the cherry picker. So I hadn’t read his recent citation of Steven Pinker before taking that modest poke at the guy here last week.

A comment asked what I didn’t like about Pinker. You could say that the reasons start with all of the misgivings posted here about behavioral science. But as Brooks has made the logical use of Pinker to back up the status-quo, the question goes way past those.

Discussing the great historian Arthur Schlesinger on another blog the other day, someone disagreed with me that history was a better way to learn about politics and society than the behavioral sciences. I hold that it’s clear that as systems become more complex that the difficulties of studying them grow and the certainty of the results of the study tend to diminish. Eventually the difficulties preclude those subjects from being science. Some of the methods of science can be useful in studying those very complex fields but the results are not science. While a clear demarcation is probably not possible, the science side of the line should include only aspects of behavior and cognition that are quite simple and well defined, at least that’s what I think. Some people aren’t as stringent about what they’ll place their scientific faith in*. I think that the best history is more stringent in its adherence to fact than a good deal of what is considered to be science. And its facts are no less facts than the product of the behavioral sciences. Quite often there is more evidence that they existed.

The unwise faith holding sway among our intelligentsia, that accords whatever a big name at a big university calls “science” a position of nearly unquestioned authority, is liable to break down most badly when “science” goes past where a reasonable and disinterested person should draw the line. A lot of those caught up in this kind of reverent awe are not given pause by their ignorance of science. It’s quite common among majors in the humanities or viewers of the Discovery Channel who haven’t mastered highschool algebra. It’s in them that the critique of science as a secular religion is particularly accurate.

Emblematic of the ubiquitous, uncritical acceptance of behavioral science is that the treatment of individuals as individuals, with their own abilities, thoughts and preferences, treatment unprejudiced by classification and assignment of abstract, statistical norms feels like it’s becoming ever rarer in today’s over indoctrinated world. People are not merely members of a category, you cannot tell anything about them by relying on classification. They can’t be pinned to a board like a dead insect and assigned a little, printed card.

II.
History, politics and society in general, with their enormous complexity cannot accommodate the precise specifications necessary for really good science. The vast academic subject, “history” is variable enough, flexible enough and sufficiently lacking in authoritative hierarchy to encompass the enormous and difficult mass of evidence in its ambiguity and contradictions. History, with no right to being called a science yet containing a larger part of the real complexity of actual life, can give a better idea of how to avoid the political mistakes that other people have made in the past than just about any science. It’s surely a better guide for our politics than the religion of near science. Not that science doesn’t also have an extremely important role. Careful and accurate science does have an enormous role to play in setting public policy when it’s useful. The suppression and distortion of science by the Bush regime is a crime against humanity and democracy.

There is bad history just as there is bad science. I believe both are a danger to freedom and the continued existence of life. But history isn’t contained in a single, larger, truth. It contains a large number of different viewpoints. You might find what is useful within one viewpoint or it might spread itself over several opinions. The strength of history comes partly from the number of viewpoints, when those viewpoints are honestly arrived at.

Democratic politics doesn’t depend on a single viewpoint for its authority, it can’t. It depends on the information that The People, as a whole, bring to it. It’s an attempt to average out bad ideas and to cast a wide net to find good ones. But in order for democracy to exist, The People need to hold values that can’t be found by science. Those values are as necessary to freedom and as essential to a decent society as accurate information. Equality, generosity and liberty are foremost among them. The rise in popularity of those values grew out of the knowledge of the history that preceded it and the desire to escape the horrors of the past, it continued with a faith that kind of change was possible.

It’s an uncertain life which we have to approach from our own limitations. Many leftists are too quick to accept the too confident and fashionable explanations of biological determinists on these subjects. The scientific trappings of their pronouncements cow too many people out of making a political and, let’s say it, moral critique of their edicts. There is no reason to believe that their work contains more legitimate ground for making good choices in politics than are found in life unfiltered by them. Brooks and others are beginning to use them like earlier plutocrats used other biological determinists to prop up the status quo. The history of that practice, resting on piles of entirely real bones, stolen lives and stunted spirits, makes suspicion of these neo-determinists entirely legitimate. Alleged science used to support the politics of David Brooks, which Pinker more than clearly implies in his contentions, needs a critical look in political terms. The history of their fields should require more skepticism than uncritical acceptance. The emergent political applications of their writings makes that kind of skepticism wise. **

Back when Sociobiology was young, a relative of mine was majoring in biology. They swallowed the fashionable line, then all the rage in biology departments around the country. During one of our frequent arguments on the subject they asked why I didn’t dispute physics but felt entirely free to dispute sociobiology . Other than the arguments made here about complexity, subjectivity and interpretation, the answer included that no physicist, on the authority of their research, had maintained that we didn’t have free will or had supported grossly sexist social norms.*** The real possibility of determinists impinging on other peoples’ lives confers the right to respond to them very skeptically.

III.
The danger in biological determinism for progressives is that its uncritical adoption will result in the left being hollowing out through an abandonment of our essential values. The view of people as “computers made of meat”, of our actions as the results of genetic fitness with little to be done in the way of mitigation, is a way of reducing people to fixed objects.**** That view of people is the core of conservative practice, no matter what line they might mouth. I don’t see any scientific bar to allowing those with more ability or resources to use such human objects in whatever way what will. Biological imperative is a well known excuse for human subjugation even today, there is every reason to believe it will continue to be. If this kind of biological determinism becomes the majority opinion all the evils of the past will reemerge. Other excuses have served exactly the same purpose, the results will be the same, perhaps worse because people will believe that it’s proven fact that subjugation is the best they can hope for. Steve Biko said "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." We will relive the past we have been encouraged to ignore.

The contentions of Pinker et al are suspiciously supportive of the status quo elite that they are a part of. Odd, isn’t it, that their work props up the current establishment instead of undermining it. In pointing that out I’m aware that Pinker’s camp has made the opposite charge against other, competing, scientists, that they claim have allowed their politics to influence their work. So, it’s a form of critique that they can hardly say is illegitimate when applied to them.

But I’m not going to get involved with that highbrow form of uh-huh, nah-uh. I’ll leave that to scientists. I’m interested in what history has shown us can happen in these kinds of situations. I think that the manifestation of such “science” in history, seeing how it played out in real societies, countries and lives, is infinitely more useful than taking the speculative and schematic findings of “science” and applying them the other way round. At least, they are if you aren’t interested in propping up an elite. Life is too complex to leave to the scientists, alone.

* Though this point was disputed on the other blog, behavioral science is clearly the most subjective branch of science. Given its field of study, it begins with interpretation of behaviors and then goes well past the point of simply describing what can be seen, drawing inferences about unseen aspects and assumptions. Its researchers very often lack an objectively observable, measurable, subject. The field can’t escape its origins, a behavioral scientist can’t escape the place they are observing from, their own mind, and the fact that they are putting their own interpretation on what they’ve observed. As I said in that long piece a few weeks back, cognitive science, even with all it’s measurements and imaging, sometimes pretends to have bridged that chasm when it hasn’t. We can’t know if it might achieve that someday. As of today, it hasn’t.

**I’ll avoid the temptation of making specific comparisons between them and others in history who have claimed a similar kind of authority based on the prevailing standards of reasoning. After all, those people also believe their standards were etched in stone for all time. Science isn’t the full measure of reality anymore than history is.

*** Sociobiology hadn’t accommodated itself to the objections of female sociobiologists yet. And just where did “sociobiology” go, anyway? You hardly ever hear the word pronounced these days.

**** I believe the quote was from the respected chemist turned Anglican Priest, John Polkinghorne, though I couldn’t find a link.

Is anyone else struck by the short shrift given by social and behavioral scientists to the ability of reasoning and logic to change lives? Haven’t you talked yourself out of something you really wanted to do by analyzing what you wanted with reason and common decency? I’d expect lots of people on the left have. Maybe even some on the right.

2007-02-28T10:28:00.000-05:00

A Buddhist Deals With The Same Subjects As Some Recent Posts Here

Thanks to the reader who tipped me off to Alan Wallace’s work. It’s kind of a non-political slant on a lot of what I’ve been writing about from a political viewpoint. I especially like this review of one of Sam Harris’ books. For comparison here’s my response to one of Harris' articles. I’d better point out, since so many people figure if you agree with someone generally that you’ve bought the whole package that while I don’t know if reincarnation is real I truly hope it isn’t. One life in this vail of tears is quite enough, thank you.

The Salon interview makes some of the points I’ve been making here. It’s almost spooky, as Dame Edna might say.

2007-02-27T11:01:00.000-05:00

Arguing About A Total Waste Of Time While People Defer Healthcare Because They Don’t Have Insurance Now.

Note: I was going to hold this till later but a piece of junk mail came today, from “Skeptical Inquirer” magazine published by what I consider to be the pseudo-skeptical group, CSICOP*. You can imagine the effect it had on me. I might post a piece on that group someday about why I am very skeptical of its skepticism. Maybe it was the praise of Stephen Pinker in the come on that really got me going. I assume that there are any number of feminists who will understand why that might be. This is also posted as motivation to skeptical evaluation of claims of the kind of science he and many others toute. Until then, hope you find this fun. I did.

Query: What did you mean when you said the “prayer studies both pro and con are bogus”?

Now, you will remember, before we begin, that no claims are made here as to the effectiveness of prayer. This is about why the studies are bogus, nothing else. It is also about why both the believers and skeptics are being dishonest about these widely reported “scientific studies”. The real point is, spend the money and effort on getting a universal health care system, that would really save lives and improve health.

In order to study something you have to be able to observe it, to define what you are observing within some limits and to be able to verify that it is present in your study. “Prayer” is not definable and it can’t be known to be one thing or to exist at any particular time. Any possible mechanism of its operation or the results of it are also undefinable or prone to ambiguity. The widely reported “prayer studies” don’t even get past the first hurdle of logic, never mind science.

“Prayer” is an undefined activity, it is also an activity that can’t be observed. It seems that the only verification of the presence of “prayer” in these studies were the reports of those doing the “praying”. Self-reporting, one assumes by people who “believe in the effectiveness of prayer”, is hardly objective verification. It isn’t even knowable if they had the same idea of what they were supposed to be doing. One person might have been trying to appeal to a god to effect healing, one may have been trying to send out healing “energy” from themself, someone might have been trying to do both at once or at different times. Another might have been doing something else. It could be that two people who used exactly the same words to describe what they were doing were actually doing different things. It is quite possible that the mental activities of two such people were quite distinctly different. How would the researchers have controlled for that? If imaging or other techniques were used to monitor brain activity during prayer, there isn’t any way to know if that would have an effect on the outcome.

It could be that any single person was actually doing different things on different occasions, even if they thought they were consistent. We have it on the authority of people who pray that they don’t always “get it right”. So, there is no defined activity that can even be tested for its presence. It gets worse.

It is possible that a subset of the group studied would have actually shown a result different than that of the whole group. It is possible that those were the only ones “doing it the right way”. There is no way of knowing which of the results, positive or negative, might have been right or if neither of them were valid.

Given the very nature of what was allegedly being studied, there is a possible participant in the study whose participation didn’t even seem to enter into consideration. What could be a rather important “other”. If every single person who was “praying” was praying in exactly the same way for the intercession of a god or other spiritual consciousness there is no way to know, 1. If they exist, 2. If they would cooperate with the sloppy study, 3. If they found the entire thing too insulting and so sabotaged it. Maybe the “agent of healing” had entirely different motives and chose to act in an entirely mysterious way without informing the participants. There are precedents reported in the literature of prayer that are consistent with that kind of thing.

And now for one of my pet peeves in this kind of “science”, the control group. It is entirely possible that such an agent of healing had motives entirely separate from those of the study and who chose to effect healing within the people in the “control” group. Maybe God took pity on people who were set aside by the protocols set up for the convenience of the researchers. You think a God who is willing to heal people on the basis of abject, desperate, requests wouldn’t have thought of that?

There isn’t any way to know that either a member of the control group or prayed over group was praying for themselves or if other people, unknown to those doing the study, were praying for them. There isn’t any way to know if such prayer would be more of less effective than that prayer sanctioned by those conducting an official “scientific” study. There is no way to know if the effects of prayer might not be cumulative. Maybe the number of people praying has no effect whatsoever, that is if there is any effect. Even if all of the participants in the “control group”, both non-pray-ers and prayed not-overs were self-declared atheists there isn’t any way to know if some of them might have cheated and snuck in some prayer just to cover all the bases. I suspect Balzac would have suspected that as a possibility*.

Why any scientist, skeptic or religious believer would give a “study” that begins so badly the time of day is probably the most interesting question that could come from this kind of thing. With a lack of validity being so clear, questions of motives must arise. Why the media would is clear, it takes up air time and pushes agendas.

These “studies” are a waste of resources that could be better spent in other ways. It’s quite shocking that religious believers, particularly Christians, would put God to a test like this. Even if its being literally against the word of Jesus didn’t bother them, the literature of religion tells us over and over that doing this kind of thing is just asking for trouble.

The motives of “scientific skeptics” who take their side of this thing seriously are even more suspect. If they are willing to accept such sloppy science their skepticism is of a very low order. As long as no one is being charged for services or delaying treatment, let people pray as much as they want to. While it might offend the tender sensibilities of the pseudo-skeptics, it’s really none of their business how people in despair try to alleviate their distress. They certainly haven’t come up with something any more guaranteed to do that. If skeptics want to go after charlatans who bilk the vulnerable and who endanger people by encouraging them to stop or delay treatment, that would be an entirely worthy use of their time. Otherwise, it’s not only none of their business, it’s cruel.

Spend the money and effort on getting a universal health care system, there is an enormous amount of evidence that a universal healthcare system would really save lives and improve health. So important, it needed repeating.

* Marcello Truzzi was a co-founder and was later somewhat a hertitic of CSICOP. He is often cited as the author of the slogan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof," so beloved of Carl Sagan. Apparently he broke with a number of avocational ‘skeptics’ over the fact that much of not most of the activity and writing surrounding many of the well publicized “skeptics” isn’t skeptical at all but is a promotion of their fixed opinion. The term “pseudo-skeptics” is a good word to describe the intellectual conceit that is currently fashionable among so many of the fans of the cult of materialism.

By the way, the slogan itself is scientifically problematic. Who gets to decide what claims are extraordinary to start with? Presumably the same people get to decide what evidence is extraordinary enough to fulfill their requirements.

And isn’t demanding anything above the normal level of verification be a bald faced violation of the foundation that scienctific inquiry has to be controlled, that no one gets to choose standards of rigor for one area of study that other areas aren't subjected to? The danger of that is clear, it would be an open door for allowing prejudice into what must be as objective as possible. Why would the designation of a claim as extraordinary require more than the, presumably, sufficiently rigorous level of evidence that makes ideas in science accepted? Is there something wrong with the normal level of scrutiny that science practices? I kind of think it works, when it’s actually practiced.

That is, that’s the level of verification necessary in science. What it takes to convince people in normal, everyday life is an entirely different matter. That’s too variable to get a handle on. People have a right to be skeptical for their own reasons that might have nothing to do with what can be demonstrated with the very limited and specialized tools of science. And they should be free to believe on that same basis. That's what we call freedom. And as long as they don't try to call it science or to force it on the unwilling it's their right. And, as I've tried to show in these posts, some "scientists" are just as guilty of passing off their unsupported opinions as science.

** See his short story, The Atheist’s Mass.

2007-02-27T07:48:00.000-05:00

Fudging or Meta-Fudging. What’s The Right Word For It?
The other day, discussing the local recycling program with a former town official we both cited the necessity of taking into account that a lot of people won’t sort or clean or limit things thrown into the recycling bin. I was trying to figure out a word for the act of taking that kind of sloppiness into account, “fudging” or even “meta-fudging” don’t seem to work just right. Using them would be an act of whatever it should be called.

Just about everything in life, even those things supposedly of great precision involve some kind of ignoring the less than pristine compliance with what should be. Most of the mewling I’ve been doing here about lapses in science would fall into that category. IQ, the fact that no one can define what it is or prove that it exists as something other than the product of reification doesn’t stop even relatively serious people from making believe that they can build science and, more dangerously, educational systems on the, perhaps, illusory stuff. As it is, there is a professional conspiracy to sweep the sullied pedigree of it under the rug.

We need a formal term for this kind of fudging and a science to identify and study it. Maybe one exists already and I’m just ignorant of it. Anyone know? If this kind of stuff, accepted only because it is either necessary or professionally desirable, could be studied, papers published and, most essential to any of the behavioral sciences, paying jobs produced at universities, tenure and endowed chairs, then maybe the possible negative effects could be controlled. As it is, that kind of junk is rampant.

Anyone know the Greek for "fudging"? An inexhaustable field of study awaits.

2007-02-26T09:04:00.000-05:00

OK, Shoot The Piano Player But There’s More To It Than That
Listening to Liane Hansen talking with Nathaniel Kahn the director of the movie “Two Hands” about the physical problems of the pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher, several things were striking. First, the number of times NPR alone has done stories about Fleisher would qualify as enough, already. He’s a great musician with an interesting story but there are many thousands of pianists, not to mention players of less glamourous instruments, who could be the subject of interesting stories. Why not do something that hasn’t already been done to death on NPR? And why not do stories about classical music that aren’t centered on the movies?

Second, the stories and pieces about Fleisher have all been the same and superficial. They aren’t about music. Our media has just about a blanket boycott on actually covering classical music as music. With the exception of a few pieces done by classical music critics they’ve all been about his disability. The really important thing about that wouldn’t make very interesting radio for non-musicians. If Fleisher really wanted to say the most useful thing he could about his disability, it would be to document the aspects of his technique that could have lead to his problems. Fingering, in short. How was he using his hands when he got into trouble and what could that tell us about how to avoid those problems? Maybe a comparison with fingerings of pianists who worked for many decades without problems would tell something interesting.

The piano being my instrument, I’ll tell you that it was when I used other peoples’ fingerings without thinking of what they did to my hand that I got into trouble. This first came to my notice when I tried practicing with my eyes closed, concentrating on how my hands position in relation to the keyboard changed as they moved up and down. The keyboard is a very large object and the hands position has to change as they move from the middle of it. Fingerings that work perfectly in the middle don’t work nearly as well as they move up and down octaves. The use of the weaker small and ring fingers are especially difficult in the right hand. Having been taught the standard fingerings and using them well past the positions they really worked in for years it was necessary to really think about how to use them in a way that worked. And I did find out that what was physically most comfortable tended to work better musically.

I also got into trouble when I studied classical guitar in college. The very unnatural right hand position insisted on by the teacher lead to really bad problems in the ring and pinky fingers. After two semesters I dumped it and switched my minor instrument to one with a teacher who cared more about their students hands than their own teacher’s orthodoxy. That was what got me started on looking at my piano problems.

If NPR wanted to do a useful story about this kind of thing, they might look at the work of Dorothy Taubman. Or they could actually do something about classical music that wasn’t related to the movies or the Pulitzers. They could actually do some reporting on music that hasn’t been done to death already.

2007-02-26T08:58:00.000-05:00

Bush Crossed The Rubicon A Long Time Ago.

Even the weak, first effort of Democrats in the Senate to advise against escalation of war in Iraq has been met with a stonewall of Republican resistance. Their effective majority of the Republican Royalists and phony “moderates”, with the help of the de facto Republican, Lieberman, will ensure that the United States will follow Bush and Cheney into an expanded folly.

When the Constitution was first taught to us the “balance of powers” was given as the proof that the “founders” were geniuses. We were taught that the powers of congress would eternally be enough to ensure that, among other monarchal catastrophes, one man couldn’t take the country into a disastrous war of conquest. By that time a line of presidents from Truman on hadcertainly shown that to be a lie*. We don’t live in a Republic in so far as our foreign policy goes, certainly not in matters of war. Any president can conduct a minor war at will. And with this war on top of the Vietnam war they can honestly claim absolute power to get us into wars longer than both of the World Wars.

War is different. It is the most serious thing that a country can do. It is a guarantee that large numbers of people will be killed by the state, both on the other side and on “our” side. War always brings with it every evil imaginable as order and morality give way to the war itself. Our constitution as it really is, not as the liars teach it, gives the power to start war to the executive branch with no real limit. Our media tried to use the war Clinton conducted against Serbia to hurt him politically but they didn’t really try to stop him. Other than that little has been done to discourage participation in a war since Republican isolationists, delayed the entry of the United States into the developing World War. I will point out, because I will never forget, that more than a few of the isolationists were great fans of Hitler and Mussolini.

The Bush war in Iraq, following on his father’s war on Iraq, is the most incompetent of the dishonest and illegal wars brought by American presidents. The inability of the congress, specifically the Senate, to pull us out of it is absolute proof that the Constitution as it really is endangers all of us. The consensus that there is no way to prevent the insane junta from getting us involved in what anyone with a brain would know will be an even greater disaster, war with Iran, should make us rise up as a body and yell at the top of our voices. But, now as it is beginning, an effective majority of seem to either be on the take or more interested in trivia.

The American People can do the right thing if they know what is really happening. The presidential horse-race, the Oscars, the rotting corpse of what passes these days as a sex goddess and a thousand other distractions are presented by the media to keep them from doing the right thing. By the time the People can’t avoid dealing with it, Bush’s attempted use of a larger disaster to save his crime family from the garbage heap of history, the world could be a much different place than it is today. Blair’s pre-Iran bugging out might indicate that even he knows what’s coming. He is a known rat, the ship is taking on water fast.

* As a comment at Echidne's blog said, the practice of presidents starting wars without the consent of Congress predates Truman. But the practice has been getting steadily worse since the Korean War. The ability to actually start a war is to the authority to declare war is a real power, the "authority" has evolved into a game of 'let's pretend'. Unfortunately the balance of powers has too. Let's stop pretending about that.

2007-02-16T12:45:00.000-05:00

Changing the Subject 101

When did the practice of assuming that everyone was going nuclear when they said they didn’t like something become the standard? Why is it that when someone says they don’t like pornography, find it degrading and possibly dangerous it is assumed that they are calling for the government to censor everything? Why is it that when someone disagrees with something someone has said, or the way they have said it, it’s assumed that you want to silence them by any available means?

I don’t know about you but I’ve come to suspect that the people who react as if the button has been pushed are really over reacting so they won’t have to deal with the argument. It immediately takes it from the particulars of the case and turns it into a federal case over abstractions.

Funny way to run a life of the mind. Really lousy way to run a political movement.

By the way, look at the first paragraphs of the first story in Dubliners if you want to find out what the last part of The Dead means. It's got the clues.

I'll be away until next Saturday.

2007-02-15T12:23:00.000-05:00

Rethinking Leftist Blogging In Light Of The Continuing And Unfortunately Spreading Controversy
The reaction to the Edwards blog incident has really made me rethink a lot of assumptions I’d had about the capacity of political blogs to change things for the better. I don’t really care about blogs, as such. I care about better people getting into office and changing laws and appointing judges to make life better. If writing bubble gum comics showed more promise, that’s what I’d be doing. The blogs might turn into a tool to make positive change happen. Given the fact that the mass media are in the hands of the enemies of positive change they might be the best tool available. They are important only in so far as they can make that change happen. They won’t make it happen unless their standards are higher than they are now.

This incident and what preceded it have exposed some of the limits of some of the most widely visited blogs. I’d say most widely read but in some of those the comment threads seem to have very little to do with what the blog owners write. Not reading what is written or caring about it where the trouble begins. Most blogging consists of written words. Those can be either carefully considered words, just tossed off irresponsibly, or they can be good, harmless, fun. Some of the best fun can be sharp and pointed but it had better be based in truth if it is.

There is a great difference in the effect of those words. While the writers of them have an equal right to say what they do unthreatened by fascist thugs, not all of what they say is of equal value. If readers of blogs don’t care that reasoned arguments based in facts are a better reflection of reality than invective based in emotion then their judgement isn’t likely to produce good choices. If they don’t care that the invective, which might reflect their feelings, is based on something other than the truth then it is just about guaranteed to produce bad results.

The trend in some of the blogs towards a standard, acceptable, point of view, enforced by derision and dishonesty is exactly what made highschool such an ineffective way for people to learn and develop into healthy, responsible adults. I went to highschool a long, long time ago and hated every second of it, give or take my Biology class, French class and a couple of good English teachers. I’m not willing to spend any more time going against the ruling cliques on those kinds of highschool blogs at this time of life. I’m shut of that. But I’ll never get enough of an adult level of disagreement. I’m too selfish for that. Having my ideas corrected and sharpened by people showing me the errors of my ways is too edifying to give up.

Just as important as getting the facts is that the very foundation of progressive politics is the belief that people, their welfare, their inner lives are important. Being a leftist is about believing that people have a higher value than their physical bodies and their utility in games of power and commerce. Leftists have to appeal to what is best in people, not what is worst. The left can’t use people on the basis of pack sensibility or as a hoard to be swayed on the basis of prejudice and resentment. Unlike conservatism, the left isn’t there to use people in any way, it is there to serve them. It’s been just those on the left who have skimped on this foundation who are the most likely to turn apostate and end up in the Hitchens camp. I don’t trust them.

If the price to post comments on some blogs is enforced conformity then I’m not of that blogosphere. That isn’t just due to a lack of personal sympathy but, all importantly, because commenting on them is a waste of time better spent on trying to change things in real life.

I won’t stop writing for and reading blogs over this, why should I? Why should anyone? If saying what you think means fewer readers and more antagonism, that price isn’t unknown to history. If trying to follow reason and facts instead of entertaining and irresponsible, childish invective is the norm of some blogs trending left that isn’t any reason to suspect that adult level blogging is impossible. There are a number of blogs out there which consistently appeal to an adult level of discourse. My experience in politics leads me to think that it’s the adults who are more likely to actually get the vote out and write letters. Talking to them is worth the derision of other people.

My entrance into this dispute was through that one piece I wrote about why insulting religious believers would lead to unwanted electoral results for the left. It continued through answers to people who didn’t like what I said then. Looking back through the posts I’ve made on those subjects they have all been based in answers to people who read either distorted versions of what I was supposed to have said or who mis-read what I’d written. Some of those have been insulting. If I wasn’t an anonymous blogger I imagine some of them could be threatening. At least one did threaten outing, though I’m confident that was very unlikely. At the time I first answered them I joked that I’d really rather be reviving the idea of progressive taxation. Only, that wasn’t just a joke, it was true.

Note: The big winter storm caused me to delay my plans, I am still intending to take some time off in the next week.

2007-02-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

In A Shameless Attempt To Become Mysterious and Chic

I will be away until the week after next Saturday, at the latest. If possible I'll post before then.
No, I know what you're thinking, it's not cosmetic surgery.

Hope you have a good two weeks.

2007-02-08T08:05:00.000-05:00

Got A Child With the Norovirus To Take Care Of Today, No New Writing

But before I go and deal with what that entails, I'd like to point out that of the three candidates at the top of the polls that John Edwards has the best position on the Iraq war. This isn't the position of a coward.

Calls on Congress to Block Funds for War Escalation

Senator John Edwards released the following statement today about President Bush's expected announcement tomorrow that he will seek to escalate the number of troops in Iraq.

"George Bush's expected decision to adopt the McCain Doctrine and escalate the war in Iraq is a grave mistake.

"The new Congress must intercede to stop Bush from stubbornly sticking to the same failed course in Iraq and refuse to authorize funding for an escalation of troops. They should make it clear to the President that he will not get any money to put more of our troops in harm's way until he provides a plan to turn responsibility of Iraq over to the Iraqi people and to ultimately leave Iraq. George Bush wants to dig a deeper hole, but we need to climb out.

"The situation in Iraq demands a political solution — the Iraqi people must take responsibility for their country. Escalating the war in Iraq, which our own generals agree won't help, sends the wrong message to the Iraqi people, to the region, and the world. In order to get the Iraqis to take responsibility for their country, we must show them that we are serious about leaving, and the best way to do that is to actually start leaving and immediately withdraw 40–50,000 troops. Once the U.S. starts leaving, the Iraqi people and other regional powers will be forced to step up and engage in the search for a political solution that can bring an end to sectarian violence and allow reconstruction to take hold, creating — as should have been done long ago — Iraqi jobs for Iraqis."

It would be playing into the hands of the Malkin-Donohue-Cabloidwhore-Republican McCarthyites to give him up over what is a minor glitch in a presidential campaign.

2007-02-07T18:21:00.000-05:00

It’s Time To Support Edwards, Not To Drop Him Like the Republican McCarthyites Planned

ZAHN: You should go work for Mel Gibson.

DONOHUE: I'd love to! Hey, Mel, I'm for sale!
William Donohue has joined in the McCarthyite attacks on the Edwards campaign begun the other day by Michelle Malkin. They, or more likely hirelings in the Republican National Committee, have done what any McCarthyite would do and looked at the public record of writing by the two people hired to run the campaign blog. Their plan is to attack Edwards through them.

The left is taking sides in anticipation of the possible firings of the bloggers. Some are defending Edwards, some saying that this is a support killer. As of the time I am writing this we don’t know how he will handle it. Instead of getting upset with one of our own, we should focus our fire on Malkin and Donohue and the other Republicans who are mounting this, the first major attempt to knock off a strong Democratic possibility.

A president’s first loyalty isn’t to the people who are hired for their administration, a presidential candidate’s first loyalty isn’t to the people hired to run their campaign. They are asking The People of the United States for their support, for their permission to be their president and to administer the country. Their first and overwhelming responsibility is to the members of their party whose nomination they are asking for and, if elected, to The People of the country. That responsibility to The People supercedes their loyalty to their friends and staff.

Anyone who signs on to a campaign as a volunteer and, especially, as a paid staffer should realize that they don’t come first, they can’t come first. Campaign workers have to realize that they have an obligation to the campaign and to their candidate. Their decision to participate in the campaign carries obligations. The entire point of the campaign is for their candidate or ballot question or party to win the election.

In George W. Bush we have seen the consequences of someone who puts their friends and cronies before the welfare of the country. We can’t hold our politicians at fault if they recognize that there are bigger stakes and obligations more pressing than personnel issues.

Whoever hired people with a very long and very public paper trail without realizing that the Republicans would go through that with a fine tooth comb to come up with dirt to fling, is the first one who should be fired. There was a clear danger in hiring anyone who has a public record and a colorful writing style. There was nothing that happened here that couldn’t have been predicted. A manager who hasn’t mastered the lessons of the past thirty-five years of dirty Republican campaign tactics isn’t ready for a presidential campaign.

I hope that a way can be found around the problem but there probably isn’t one that will not be a bitter dose of medicine. By pinning the responsibility on John Edwards, on blaming him for the situation and so sinking his campaign we would be finishing exactly what Malkin and Donohue and the Republican fat cats that they take their orders from set out to do. We would turn this into a win for the McCarthyites.

There is a better way to handle than to hand victory over to Malkin and Donohue and it is to put these McCartyites on the spot, put those who give them a platform on the spot and to make them the issue, not John Edwards.

2007-02-06T11:14:00.000-05:00

Commentwhore: Posted about three minutes ago at Eschaton

If a woman consents to having sex with a man but then during intercourse says no, and the man continues, is it rape?

If two men get into a fight and one of them wants to stop but the other one beats him to death, is it still murder?

2007-02-06T09:11:00.000-05:00

Why It’s Just Wrong When Pop Originates Pop Culture.

In my recent squabbles over pop culture a lot of people just didn’t seem to understand why people , like me, in their late middle age wouldn’t be up to date. So you might understand this phenomenon, it all begins like this.

Fads and pop culture begin with older teenagers and very young adults. At least they did when those used to be home made. Sadly, it now seems that a lot of them are content to just adopt whatever stupid junk corporations tell them to. But assuming that it at least has to pass through this age cohort to be a fad, I’ll continue with this entirely unscientific line based on observation.

After the fad has been adopted by it’s “originators” it is then taken up by those insecure conformists, young teenager kulture vultures, and their even more uncertain and insecure fellow second-tier adopters the thirty somethings.

After them come tweens and pre- geezers. With the tweens and even younger people, parents might notice that something is happening. I’d say they notice that something new is happening but by this stage the fad is quickly passing from the ‘originator’ cohort. The spectacle of 40-year-olds...., it’s not pretty. They didn’t learn about the fad from the originators because of the natural stealth of people that age.

It starts getting fuzzy from here but what is almost certain is that the last people to know about the dying fad are geezers, and specifically males in their fifties and up being almost certainly the end of the line. This is roughly the same age group which has authority in important areas of life, having come up through the ranks or, having been pushed up, if you believe in some vaguely amusing theories of business hierarchies. This could explain why people with the authority to make decisions aren’t up on the latest fads. The theory is based on my seeing a man in his fifties with one of those stupid tiny braids down the back of his head well after even I knew it had ceased being a fad. He asked me if I was looking forward to The Stones tour. As they say, lightening struck.

I wish young people would start smashing corporate culture instead of adopting it. It’s geezers who decide what corporations are going to promote as cool. How do you expect these business types to come up with something new? This explains the blandness and stupidity of so much pop culture these days. That’s just wrong. Geezers trying to originate and follow pop culture robs young people of one of the greatest pleasures of youth, theirs by nature and by right, condescending to their elders in matters of coolness. Give it up, Dad.

2007-02-02T09:33:00.000-05:00

Just Can’t Get Molly Off My Mind...

The obituaries of Molly Ivins were all interested in what made her into such a great journalist. Luckily we don’t really have to wonder, great journalist that she was, she reported it. She said that for her, as for so many other Southern liberals, the question that sparked her off was race. Once you figure out that they’re lying to you about race you wonder what else they’re lying to you about. Honest people are really the best source to find out what makes them tick, you don’t need to filter it through some dumb theory. Molly Ivins noted in that passage that children are notoriously honest before they are socialized out of looking for the truth.

That reminded me of how much I love impertinent children. Just love them. Not the button pushing brats who say things and bring up topics just to make their elders squirm. As if that’s possible now that everyone spills their guts everywhere at the drop of a hat. What I really like are children who ask questions and draw conclusions about things that get swept under the rug. Sometimes, like with race, those things are done for the filthiest and most apparent reasons. But sometimes it’s just out of convenience or habit. I’ve got the strongest hunch that any system that is devised, even one that tries to stay honest, will build up a crust of junk out of the exigencies of meeting deadlines, publishing papers and not offending colleagues. It’s been that way in just about anything I’m familiar with. Career building rewards you for ignoring the muck that you know is there, if just in the back of your mind. If a kid looks at it, someone without any career or social status to protect, they can cut through the crap and find the rot underneath.

A child like that gets told that they’re asking an impertinent question, every step of the way. Of course, being inquisitive, they will eventually ask why people insist on calling a question impertinent when it’s really the most pertinent question you can ask. But by the time they’ve learned those words they know that no one is going to answer their questions and they’re going to have to figure it out for themself.

It’s not every kid who does this, a lot of them show certain signs of being socialized in the most unfortunate way. Of course, they’re the cool kids, the ones who are at the top of one or more of the highschool elites and the ones who aspire to that. They don’t ask questions that will lose them status, usually not with their elders, certainly not with their peers. For them it’s the peers who are the bigger danger to curiosity and honesty. The elites of youth are just future conformists of the world, even if they like to strike the pose of being counter culture. I don’t usually worry about elites figuring they are in a position to take care of themselves, but I do worry about the horrors of that kind of anxious, painful maintenance of status in young people, the burden of the facade of cool confidence. If only they could give it up and breathe some really fresh air. After they grow up I’ve got less time to worry about them. Though I lose sleep over wondering what the world is coming to now that adults have extended the culture of highschool well past middle age.

I think I might be drifting, but then so could Molly Ivins. Not in a piece, she was a great worker who wrote about as tight a piece as could be imagined. But she was telling the truth, she never stopped poking around no matter where it led her. What can we do to keep any part of her with us, now that she’s gone on? We do what she did. Ask an impertinent question about something important every day. Ask it without worrying about the consequences from the elites or from your peers. Ask it for Molly. Ask it with heart.

... oh Lord, I hope I never do.

2007-02-02T09:30:00.000-05:00

You Do Know That It’s Only In Cartoons That People Have X-Ray Vision, Don’t You?
I asked an officially impertinent question last night, partly as an experiment, partly because I wanted an answer. The subject was the Boston cartoon scare, to which I will stipulate that the two dolts who set it off are being over charged, perhaps partly out of embarrassment. Though reimbursing the security budget, tight to begin with, is probably not entirely an unimportant consideration. My question was, Would you like to be the first responder at the next incident, wondering if it's some dumb kid pulling a copy cat stunt or if it's a psychopath with access to explosives making believe it's a copy cat stunt?

Well, uncool kid that I have ever been, the question was immediately ruled uncool and boooo-rrrriiing. As such the question was unanswered. Now, what are we to make of the whole thing. The ruling of the student council is that those old farts in Boston should have known that the thing was a promotion of the coool Turner Corporation product. Well, duh!, if that’s still being said anywhere.

First, not everyone is au courant with the ever changing sands of corporate cool culture. This is probably truest for people old enough to be in charge of somewhat important things.

Second, if the authorities were familiar with the trivia of the Cartoon Network how could they have used that fact to look on the other side of the signs to make certain that there wasn’t something dangerous there?

Third, so what about your volunteering for the fire department or other first responders outfit?

And , last and probably least, really cool people don’t look to giant cable TV companies to find counter culture? Cable is not cool with people who really know cool. It will not be on TV.

Maybe it is a matter of culture. I’d have liked to continue asking questions. I’d have liked to know if there were any people who worked as first responders on the threads were the question was posed. How did they feel about it? Or maybe it’s really a matter of class. Did any of the white collar people and students have members of their families or friends who might be the first person on the scene the next time some genius from the corporate world decides to do something like this without notifying the authorities that those signs are just a gimmick. And may I suggest that there be a mechanism set up for corporate imbeciles who pull stunts like this to give official and legal notification of the appropriate authorities who just might have more important things on their plate than Aqua Teen.

There might have been first responders or family members of the same, maybe they agreed with the consensus or maybe they didn’t want to risk asking. I don’t know. That’s another question I’ve got about the blogs. How free are people to ask questions? I'm through with highschool.

2007-02-01T13:27:00.000-05:00

What We Need Are Organized Atheists*

To round out this week, before I go back to things I really think are more important, like trying to save the biosphere (glad there is finally something E.O. Wilson and I can agree on) let me make a practical proposal.

Atheists are a beleaguered group. It is a group to which several of my nearest and dearest belong. Why, my brother, one of the two people I have trusted with my identity is an atheist. He might have made a good president, if he’d not taken a different career path. I would certainly not want him to be discriminated against. How can the irrational bigotry against atheists be lessened and all of us get past that to try to save this, the only life we, perhaps, will ever get?

The problem is bigotry, the hostility that many people have towards those who don’t believe in the existence of a God. How do we end that? Building on the piece posted below on Tuesday, may I propose that the hostility that many, including many atheists and religionists, have towards religious fundamentalists could suggest a solution? Fundamentalists are unpleasant, bigoted and dangerous. They attract some converts but in most cases they also attract enemies and others who avoid them like, well, one of my really long posts. Perhaps what we need in both cases is the establishment of movements of the majority of both groups who believe in freedom of thought, freedom of belief. Maybe a liberal atheists movement to counter the now fashionable Dawkins-Harris style fundamentalism would lessen the annoyance of at least a good portion of the world who believes in religion of some kind.

As observed last Tuesday I have found the “I don’t believe” kind of atheist to be a rather rational and pleasant kind of person. They tend to have both wit and a heart. They, dear atheists, could make a much better poster for atheists than the sheering, disdainful and arrogant face of.... you know who. Maybe instead of engaging in the unnecessary and, I will guarantee you, futile attempt to promote atheism to people who will to believe, you should promote atheists of good will.

Not being an atheist myself, nor a Christian or any other identifiable religious identity you can name, I can’t make the choice for you. You do not have to accept anyone’s authority, not even if they’ve been on the Best Sellers list. You, my friends, are free agents, you have freedom to take whatever course seems to be the one that will get you where you want. Do you want to find more hatred and bigotry at the end of your journey or will you be brave enough to try friendship?

*John Mortimer, the great author of the Rumpole stories once seemed to get a great deal of jolly fun out of talking about about joining a group called “Atheists for Jesus”, a certain, rather bitter old fart wrote a polemic against them but there’s no need to go into that here. I’m not sure this is the same group. It doesn’t look like as much fun as it should be, but people have different views of what’s fun.

Note: I was going to save this for tomorrow but doing something I almost never do, checking my Eugenia Last Astrological Forcast in the paper** it said this for today:

Not everyone will agree with you but things will fall into place. You will hae to be a little outspoken and direct but either you will take the lead or you let others lead you.

I can tell a sign when I'm given one.

** What's the use of being accused of every superstition in the dictionary if you can't indulge a little whimsy now and then?

2007-02-01T08:38:00.000-05:00

Forgot I'd Written That

This is a piece which I wrote a few months back and never posted. Probably could use a bit of editing but I've got an important committment today. I hope you enjoy it.

The Left Doesn’t Owe The “Brights” A Phony, Unnecessary and Potentially Damaging Conflict

Since Sam Harris sort of indicates it was Sept. 11th and the religious motives of the suicide terrorists that knocked him off the horse to Damascus let’s consider that one.

Harris asserts that religion is dangerous because wars and violence have been motivated by religion. Yes they have. The attacks on Sept. 11th were motivated by religion, at least in part. The religious excuse used by Osama bin Ladin played a large part in recruiting for, planning of and carrying out those attacks. We can be fairly confident that there was a religious motive in the men who actually made the attacks.

Bin Ladin wanted to destablize the Saudi oligarches and establish a fundamentalist state because he says that the rigidly conservative Wahabi establishment is insufficiently Islamic to have control of Mecca. To do that he wants the American infidels who play a considerable role in propping up the corrupt ruling family out of the holy land. That’s what he says. But there isn’t any reason we should assume that he is telling the whole truth. It is entirely possible that his real motives include other things, like wanting power over a large and rich country for reasons of his own, personal edification. Stranger things have been known to be true.

We have the testimony of many that bin Ladin is a deeply religious man but we have also been assured the same of just about every autocratic ruler of every country except officially communist ones where purported ideological purity takes the place of religion. Some of those stressed the scientific nature of their ideology. Is it worth going there in search of yet more dangers to humanity from scientists? How accurate bin Ladin’s publicity about his religious adherence might be is unknown. Many of the other publicly devout public figures have feet of clay, religion wise and science wise when exposed full-length.

But arguing that the Sept. 11th attacks and other violent acts mandate the destruction of religion invites other factors in the identity of the attackers to be considered for eradication. An objective and impartial identification of those factors and the call for those to be expunged from the species would seem to be required, following Harris’ line.

They were all males. Why doesn’t this mandate the end of all males? Most of the violence in wars and in daily life is committed by males. But I don’t see Harris or others calling for any curbs on the production of men. Is the fact that males constitute about half of the population the decisive fact in their preservation? Well, religious believers constitute considerably more than half of the species so the numbers argument wouldn’t support men being tolerated any more than religious believers.

If we add that they seem to have all been hetero-sexual males that makes the numbers argument more interesting. Maybe it’s hetero-sexual males that need to be suppressed.

Oh, and let’s see. Some of the 9-11 attackers, Bin Ladin and a lot of the other Al Qaeda terrorists also had training in the sciences, yes, there seems to be a problem here too. Considering the role played by scientists in the production of armaments, well, it must be too dangerous to tolerate.

But maybe the continued tolerance for the existence of heterosexual males with training in the sciences can be defended because some of them aren’t so bad, some are even rather nice, rational and pleasant to be around. Some are downright good people who do good things and don’t do bad things. But the same can be said of religious believers so Harris’ proposition would fail on that account. That might be too big a chance to take. Religious moderates are not to be tolerated, according to one of Harris’ admirers who I argued with a while back, because if maintained they have the potential to spawn dangerous religious fanatics. Ok, if that’s true then looks like that’s it for straight scientists of the male gender.

Looking at the bios of both Harris and Dawkins they seem to have shared more than just gender and sexual identity with the 9-11 attackers. They also all seem to have come largely from the middle and upper classes of their societies. This is a trait they have with everyone who gets to decide if there is going to be a war, they inevitably either came from or successfully joined the upper class. Yet economic leveling of society doesn’t seem to enter into their programs. Surely there isn’t a personal motive in this neglect. Being ready to take on the entire Islamic world, from the front lines of North America Harris certainly couldn’t be afraid to take on the monied interests here.

Organized war by states is certainly the most violent, most murderous, most destructive form of violence and those are always begun and continued by economic and political elites. I am trying to remember a war called by religious authorities in the past century and am having a hard time. Even in the Iraq-Iran war it was the secular leader that started it. There is violence with religion as a feature, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka (sad to say that the non-theistic, Theravada Buddhists seem to be one side in that one), various other horrors, are all fought on the basis or religion. But notice this, around the world there are places where mulitple religious communities have co-existed with minimal trouble for decades or centuries.

Wars and violence have had many different stated motives and even more clear though unstated ones. Is religion the most insidious one of these? Clearly not these days. None of the major wars the United States has fought have even had a stated religious motivation. While there has been support by religious leaders for every one of these wars there have also been opponents to them, on both sides, who based their opposition squarely on religion. Most crimes of violence have absolutely no religious motive attached unless it is directed against a person on the basis of their own religion. It doesn’t seem just to require that the victims of crime give up or suppres their religion because of the opposition of bigots to it.

Motives of enrichment of the ruling classes and their continued rule would seem to be the primary motive of just about all modern war. The tools of bigotry and resentment of ethnic, religious and ideological ‘others’ is just about always a means of talking a populace into fighting a war for the benefit of their rulers, not the real reason that the war is brought. Ignoring that in all western societies and in some others there is religious opposition to these wars is relevant. I’m prepared to go out on a limb and guess that your typical Catholic Sister or Tikkun reader has done more to oppose war and violence than your typical “bright” has in the past half-century. If that is correct it is highly relevant to an objective view of this struggle for the minds and hearts of the left.

2007-01-31T10:03:00.000-05:00

My Friends, What We See Here Is A Cult, Not Science

I suppose there are admirers of Richard Dawkins and maybe even Sam Harris who aren’t dishonest but I’ve met very few of them recently.

Since I wrote this piece last fall I have had intermittent trouble with flaming e-mails and trolls stemming from misrepresentations by self-identified atheists on various blogs of what I wrote on the subject of the Dawkins-Harris school of atheists and their childishness. No, let’s be entirely frank. Since I have repeatedly asked them to stop misrepresenting what I said, pointing out the falsity of what they said, and there has been no correction I am going to call their diatribes what they are, lies. These people represent themselves to be scrupulously realistic and clear headed, holding the world to the highest standard of rigor in proof while being abject liars in defense of their heros. I will point out that there have been some atheists who have agreed with what I said, who think Dawkins is wrong. To put it mildly.

The old charge against the Jesuits, those intellectual warriors of the Pope, is that they were educated in and practiced a very high level of casuistry. Casuistry was one of the principle charges against them, a charge that was made with full justification in too many cases. I just wish that in these fights with the Dawkins cult that they could get to the level of casuistry, it would be several steps up from where they choose to argue. Modern Jesuits include many great and honest thinkers, the late Robert Drinan and the Jesuits murdered by the junta in El Salvador are just a few examples. Many of them are scientists, many of them have led lives of rigorous honesty, devoted to freedom and democracy. Yet these people are some of the primary targets of people who never heard their names or know the first thing about them. That doesn’t stop them from lying about them as a group. Individuals and their responsibility for only those wrongs they have done, don’t seem to matter much for the Dawkinsites, much less so the followers of Harris.

I know that some of the points I’ve tried to make on these subjects are more subtle than the angry blanket condemnations and wholesale conflation that the cult of Dawkins and, more so, the followers of Harris, are used to. But I hate to tell them, they are not my intended audience. I hope to appeal to the reason of people who haven’t drunk the punch and swallowed the pill. I don’t care to convert people who are so content to follow the leader and toe the line. I don’t want converts, I don’t want followers. I want people to think for themselves.

What are we to call a group of people who lie, distort, apply double standards, make special pleadings for and absolve their Masters from even the basic standards of fairness and honesty, isn’t it a quasi-religious cult?* Since all I’ve ever called for in this debate is freedom of thought, I’ll let you decide for yourselves. I know that’s how I’ll think of it until there is evidence that I’m wrong.

I am not in the prediction business, having written specifically against that in most cases, but I’ll make one here. If, someday, the Dawkins cult gains a foothold and even, God save intellectual freedom, power, a new war will break out. In this case it will be a war between the Dawkinsites and the followers of Sam Harris. Dawkinsites will smugly point to his priority and his actually having produced published science. I am confident that they will lord it over that lesser cult, those who have not mastered “the meme” in its full and, by that time, baroque complexity. They, friends, will consider the others to be nothing but hangers on, they will refer to them as Harrisites.

* And I could add insistence on their right to be unquestioned due to their AUTHORITY. Alon Levy, of the blog Abstract Nonsense, one of those who I have requested to not misrepresent what I’ve written, had this to say on why we should kow-tow to Richard Dawkins,

In 2007, I say that the rational layperson must accept scientific authority on issues such as physics, climatology, evolutionary biology, medicine, and chemistry.

Must accept. My friends, do you not appreciate being told that we MUST accept the authority of these people? Because, in the end, where else does “scientific authority” reside but in people?
I could be really cruel and say that by Alon’s declaration we would have to unquestioningly accept the odious and, thankfully, late William Shockley’s tirades on the subject of biology. He was a scientist, a physicist with a Nobel Prize, for crying out loud. So what if he was a total flake and racist, a well funded one who fully used his authority to advance his racism, I’ll point out. If I was as intellectually dishonest as the Dawkinsites I might point that out, it’s the standard they use for other people. I am, however, not going to stoop to that level. I know perfectly well what Alon Levy means and it isn’t that. Now, if only he would return the favor.

I will point out that it is very specifically in the field of Dawkins activities that no such “authority” exists. His beliefs in even his relatively grounded work isn’t universally accepted, there are different viewpoints (see my response at Alon’s website). His more airy speculations are even less widely accepted. Where is the AUTHORITY that we are supposed to genuflect to?

Update: In Which I Rest My Case
Now, of the many people who distorted what I wrote last weekend I chose Alon Levy for two reasons, he is a student in the rigorous sciences, he chooses to repeat his distortions in the face of my factual refutation. Here is what he posted on his blog last night after I gave him a heads up that I was going to be writing about what he said:

You’re damn right they don’t. But recall that the argument against Dawkins, which Olvlzl largely repeats, is,
1. Dawkins demands that Christians not criticize evolution without knowing about evolutionary biology;
2. Dawkins criticizes religion without knowing much about theology;
3. Therefore, Dawkins is inconsistent.
The distinction isn’t between Dawkins’ writings on religion and religious pronouncements, but between evolutionary biology and religious pronouncements.

Considering that the second part of this very sillygism is exactly the point that I kept correcting this student of math on, a point I made to him at least four times with quotes from what I'd written and requests that he point out why he kept repeating it, I suppose this is the best that the Dawkins cult has to offer.

Alon, I don't know if you ever studied either the logic of the syllogism or symbolic logic, but included in the requirements is that the parts of the form have to be true or the argument is false. Please, don't take a job in which you will have a part in designing important systems in real life. And stop lying about what I said.

2007-01-30T09:52:00.000-05:00

Two (non?) Realities?
Dedicated to RMJ and Phila
Much as I’d like to go through the entire wrangle conducted last weekend at Echidne of the Snakes about the professional skeptics’ dishonest use of double standards, the record of what I wrote and the responses to it are there to be read. Why reproduce it? And here again I begin with a lie. The truth is I’d rather not go through that turning door another time just now. Instead I’ll point out something that became clear to me in reading over the responses and considering them in light of my experience.

I think there are essentially two kinds of atheists, there are those who say “I don’t believe in God” and those who say “I know there isn’t a God”. I’ve known both types. The “I don’t believe” type have placed themselves on firm ground, their non-presumptuous stand is based on their not believing something that can’t be proven. It isn’t a position that is open to debate. Oddly, I’ve got a suspicion that the “I know there isn’t a God” type would think this was a wimpy position when it’s actually the stronger one. At least to those interested in honesty and fairness.

The “I know there isn’t a God” position asserts something that can’t be true. You can’t “know there isn’t a God”. I could just point out that old saw “you can’t prove a negative” but what I’ve experienced of this opinion doesn’t give me any faith that even if it was a fact that doing so was impossible would make a dent.

For the rest let me at least explain what I mean. In order to “know” that, you would have to have falsified every possible God that could possibly be proposed. Since a number of proposed Gods are firmly beyond the possibility of either proof or disproof neither their existence or non-existence can be known. For example, take the description in first line in Arnold Schoenberg’s great opera Moses und Aron, God is unimaginable, unseeable and all mighty. How do you disprove the existence of such a God? I could propose any number of Gods which, either fully or in part, and by choice, are beyond discovery. Here, just for fun.

It could be that there was a creator god who died and who no longer directs the universe and whose traces are lost to intelligent detection. It could be that there is one who is unconcerned with the progress of the universe, roughly, the God of the deists. There could be one who directs the entire universe in every single detail and who chooses to entirely cover her tracks from us. You think that an omnipotent and omniscient god couldn’t do that? Maybe god got to be God through really good time management and attention to detail. Maybe just as you don’t tell your mother what she doesn’t need to be bothered with, God wants to relieve us of the petty details which we are too limited to begin to comprehend.

Maybe god is a trickster who created the universe for our entertainment and his own, or he might be a sadist. Maybe god is like an unfair detective writer who is going to hold out the crucial clue till the very end and spring it on whoever is left standing. Maybe that god only cares about those few people at the end of the story and the rest of us are extras. Maybe we are like amoebas to such a god and there is another species somewhere in time or space for whom the entire thing is intended, maybe such a god let them in on the clue. Maybe in the Burgess Shale there are the fossils of a species that knew it all, knew there was an afterlife and that this life was just a beginning. Maybe such a species didn’t bother to evolve or preserve itself because it knew this and so became extinct. Maybe God doesn’t much like Richard Dawkins or his ilk and chooses to bedevil him. Maybe he finds them to be egotistical prigs and he chooses to reveal herself to lesser mortals of more modest abilities or pretensions for Dawkins’ further irritation.

I don’t know if that’s your idea of fun but I enjoyed it. None of these proposed gods would be susceptible to discovery, either by their choice or as a consequence of our limitations. None of them can be “known to not exist” just as their existence would be hidden from reason.

As soon as this proposed difference between two types of atheists came to me I recognized it immediately by its converse, it is exactly the difference between liberal religion and fundamentalism. A liberal religionist says “I believe”, a fundamentalist says “I know”. Maybe the problem of the Dawkinsite fallacy is more one of emotion instead of reason. Fundamentalists don’t do much in the way of reasoning. They might say that it’s wimpy but maybe they really are afraid of the possibility of their being wrong. Liberals tend to believe what they do without fear. Perhaps this is the reason that they are never as congenial targets of the Dawkinsites as religious fundamentalists who start with a flawed assertion of certainty.

I’m going to speculate that if this is true that it might have some relationship to the manners of both groups, the fundamentalists and the liberals of both believers and atheists. As I’ve declared before, I don’t think that what people believe is very important to anyone but themselves. It is their business. It is when they act that their business becomes other peoples’ business. So, what is the really important thing I can leave you with based on my experience? Liberals aren’t as likely to do you harm.

2007-01-24T13:50:00.000-05:00

Looks Like the NYT corp. Is Cannibalizing Yet Another Paper

The night that the decision in Bush v. Gore was announced I was at my brother's house where my nephew was watching "Revenge of the Nerds", the movie made with the booty that Ted Field's got for selling the Chicago Sun Times to Rupert Murdoch. Somehow it seemed to be appropriate. Selling out to Murdoch, the owner of FOX - where Bush cousin John Ellis held up the declaration of Florida for Gore while on the phone with Jeb, the start of the putsch - .... selling the family paper to produce great works of art like the "Nerds" series, let's just say it was a night full of resonance.

The deaths of newspapers, especially great ones is never a good sign. Sometimes it's not even the actual death. The York County Coast Star was one of the best small weekly papers in the United States during the 1970s. Then it's publisher, it's heart and soul was forced to retire and sell out. Unfortunately having a reputation as a great small town paper, it was bought by the New York Times corp. They took the paper, which actually reported news on all of the communities it covered and changed it to a social column covering Poppy and Barbara Bush and their friends. A lot of us stopped reading the shadow of its former self.

When the NYT corp. bought the Boston Globe some of us were afraid that history would repeat itself. Looks like it has.

The New York Times believes that every city should have a great news paper. And it shouldn't be any paper but the New York Times. I wonder how much it would take Sulzy to sell out.

2007-01-24T08:57:00.000-05:00

Jimmy Carter Got Off A Great Line Yesterday
In response to the efforts to have him debate Dershowitz, the former president said to loud applause: "I didn't think Brandeis needed a Harvard professor to come" and tell them how to think.

Who says Carter is without guile?

2007-01-23T08:31:00.000-05:00

Now Watch This Because It Isn't Going to Happen Very Often.

But here's a link to Boston Globe ex-society reporter and Frippery Fellow, Alex Beam on just how much the voices of NPR are paid.

But I did find those NPR newsreader salaries. Nothing terribly shocking there. Renee Montaigne made $308,000; Steve Inskeep , $301,000, and Robert Siegel $288,000. Those aren't shocking numbers. NBC's Brian Williams fixes his hair, stares into a teleprompter , and makes about 20 times that amount.

Sometimes the typing chimp does come up with something.

This puts all three of these news readers at the falsely named National Public Radio firmly in the top 1%, personal income group. I don't remember who said it but it is a mighty rare person who isn't changed by an income over a quarter of a million dollars a year. A sort of aristocratic amnesia sets in, forgetting what it was like to get by on the less than a tenth of that amount, what most Americans have to live on.

It's no surprise that these people are mouthpieces of the establishment. Why would they want to change a system that has provided them with so much?

2007-01-23T08:25:00.000-05:00

Am I Shocked?
In order for NPR to get a balanced look at past retuttals to the State of the Union speech it assigned notedly overpaid and biased Steve Inskeep to have a cozy chat with Timothy Naftali, the first director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

You'd be shocked to find out who came out ahead. Just shocked.

Dump NPR. Dump American Public Media, home of Market Place, while you're at it.

2007-01-22T09:10:00.000-05:00

We Should Be Haunted
A while back, on the program Nova, there was a program about the excavation of the mummified remains of children who had been sacrificed in pre-invasion Peru. It’s was disturbing for a number of reasons, the greatest being the fact that a society could allow children to be murdered by priests in a religio-political act. This theme was also brought back to me by another television program last fall, the one in which Michael Tilson Thomas analyzed pieces of music. The piece in question was The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, in which a virgin is chosen as a sacrifice and then dances herself to death.

The program was pretty well done, I would recommend it to anyone if it is rebroadcast. Thomas goes through the piece concentrating on the instrumentation of the orchestra but also goes into the actual substance of the music. In the course of the program scenes of Thomas and the orchestra players discussing the piece are intercut with scenes as the ballet is danced. Watching the dance scenes it came to me that in the four decades I’ve been listening to the music I’d never actually seen it danced. Watching even those brief scenes brought the faces of the murdered, mummified children to mind, a disturbing experience. Those corpses weren’t the imagination of a composer, those children were deliberately murdered in officially sanctioned rites.

Human sacrifice is something that the three “religions of the book” pride themselves on having abandoned. The story of Abraham’s nearly sacrificing Isaac only to have an angel stop him is the beginning of the tradition those religions share. But that’s only the official story. Human sacrifice on a much wider scale has been practiced by all these and all other societies throughout history. To admit that isn’t to play down the priestly horrors of the past, it’s to try to point out that we are no better. Having a wider knowledge of history, science and current events our society, letting blood at a rate that could keep Mel Gibson in business for eternity, we are more barbaric than all the ignorant homicidal theocratic systems of the past put together. And it’s all done, in the end, for the greater glory of wealth and personal pride. The ideology is just an excuse for that. Their bodies are buried in a conscious act by the governments and media who are in on the act. They are covered with layers of trivia and distraction but they should haunt us, they are killed in our name.

2007-01-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

Our Towns
or Your Skin and Your Teeth.
Local government is generally pretty corrupt. Just like in “The Cradle Will Rock” everyone knows someone who can benefit from contracts being given out or lax enforcement* or some other official act of town government being tweaked or twisted to favor those with connections. The newspaper publisher, if the town is lucky to get news coverage of any kind, is part of the establishment so residents aren’t informed until that can’t be avoided. Since community service is no longer required of radio and TV stations they don’t even enter into the picture anymore. Residents are generally kept ignorant or presented with details in a town report that are hard to follow or sketchy and which come far too late for them to do much about it. Think of the often gaudy corruption of a big city government only spread out over a larger area. That is minus the media coverage.

What happens when the residents become aware of something shady in their town government can be interesting. My brother gave me a piece that was in the November 23rd, 2006 edition of the Norway (Maine) Advertiser Democrat in the column Not So Good Old Days. The un-attributed column mostly quotes from a letter written by Mrs. Cora M. W. Greenleaf, printed in the paper June 30, 1911.

“The Case of Mrs Hefferin” concerned the semi-covert plans of the town council to sell the body of a well-beloved lady of the town. After a life of generosity and doing for others, Mrs. Lucy J. Hefferin fell on hard times in her advanced old age. In her last illness some neighbors took her in but needed help paying for expenses of nursing and other things. The town granted them two dollars a week until, poor Mrs. Hefferin being entirely dependent by that time, her nursing care required four dollars a week. When the woman died the town fathers, as they were most paternalistically called back then, got together and decided that someone good should come out of it. As the letter put it, towns in Maine could “legally sell the bodies of their pauper dead, through the efforts of the town where the above had a residence and dispose of the body to some institution for dissection”.

The townspeople caught wind when the town officials “entered on negotiations for a more profitable disposal of the body,” than a pauper’s grave. Mentioning another local case in which a medical student was shocked to find that he knew the cadaver he’d been assigned to dissect, his college had bought it from a neighboring town for $36, the writer goes right to the heart of the matter,

Now what was done with that money? Who got it? I’ve never known of any mention being made of it in any town report, is it a perquisite of the selectmen’s, one of the ‘pickings’ that go with the office?”

A good question. I wonder if anyone answered it. Questions like that to town officials generally go unanswered, in my experience. It’s too hard to force an answer. They can count on that. From a lifetime of seeing how this kind of thing works, the reason for money’s absence from the town’s annual report probably was along the lines alluded to.

Mrs. Greenleaf, no doubt answering a point of the kind often made to change the subject in those fabled town meetings, asks why the town officials don’t benefit society by selling their own corpses and those of their loved ones if it’s such a good idea. I think I’d have liked her.

The romantic view of local government and small business is part of the mythology of conservatives. They are always gassing on about the virtues of both. Anyone with a passing knowledge of either knows it's just gas. There are virtuous town officials, I’ve known several, and there are honest small businessmen but generally it’s a pretty dismal matter of petty corruption and nonfeasance.

In a lot of places during the recent real estate mania the corruption has been awful. Even relatively small developers have financial resources that make countering their ability to get around rules almost impossible in most cases. I’ve always wished someone would study the per capita occurrence of corruption in the various levels of government, not in actual dollar amounts but in just the number of crimes. If anyone knows about a study like that, please let us know.

If you think that there isn’t a modern equivalent of the story from 1911 you are wrong. Georgia, New Hampshire, New York City, now-a- days it is as likely to be local officials looking the other way when a crematorium or mortician goes bad. Is it any wonder that after writing “Our Town” Thornton Wilder might have felt it necessary to write “By the Skin of Our Teeth,” as a corrective?

What happened to poor Mrs. Hefferin’s body? The people in the town took out a subscription to pay for a funeral and a grave. It isn’t mentioned if any of the selectmen contributed.

* Lax enforcement of zoning and land use laws is epidemic in small towns and big ones. The zoning boards and other officials are often either business partners of local developers or attached in some other way. Similar things can often be said of other parts of local governments and school systems. The things that developers get away with under the law is nothing less than legalized theft. In discussing this with several people who are active in local affairs, none of us could come up with a town without something that looked shady going on.

Having sat through them for many years I’m sorry to have to report to you that, due to ignorance, non-participation and outright rigging, Town Meeting is another part of the romantic myth.

2007-01-22T08:57:00.000-05:00

Did That Glitch Yesterday Fix My Blog?

Well, did it? After several weeks of not being able to post here but having only some problems posting at my weekend, old Blogger haunt, Echidne of the Snakes, my blog seems to be working again.

The mysteries of Blogger.

2006-12-28T08:47:00.000-05:00

My post on Gerald Ford

The political use of Gerald Ford's death is not going to be mentioned, contrast the media's reaction to the funerals of Coretta Scott King and Paul Wellstone.

The reason is that the clear lies being told about him at his death are an intrinsic part of the modern political mythology of the financial-political establishment. That began with his continually re-run speech on taking the presidency. He was not restoring democracy, he was not relieving the country of the nightmare Nixon had started and his subsequent actions put the president above the law. If he had not pardoned Nixon and Nixon had been impeached and convicted of the high crimes he clearly was guilty of, Reagan and the two Bushes would never have dared commit the crimes they have. Gerald Ford, the media and the courts have given the president imperial status. So much for the plain spoken common man garbage.

In retirement he skied and played golf and once in a while said something public. While Jimmy Carter was establishing himself as the greatest ex-president, John Quincy Adams his closest competition, Ford was living the good life that most obnoxious of rat pack songs sang of. The country suffered through three of the most corrupt administrations in its history. And that nightmare continues.

2006-12-23T15:31:00.000-05:00

The Ethics of Pig

by O Henry

On an east-bound train I went into the smoker and found Jefferson Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use his cerebrum cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time.

Jeff is in the line of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans; he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the reckless investor may shy a few inconsequential dollars. He is readily vocalized by tobacco; so, with the aid of two thick and easy-burning brevas, I got the story of his latest Autolycan adventure.

"In my line of business," said Jeff, "the hardest thing is to find an upright, trustworthy, strictly honorable partner to work a graft with. Some of the best men I ever worked with in a swindle would resort to trickery at times.

"So, last summer, I thinks I will go over into this section of country where I hear the serpent has not yet entered, and see if I can find a partner naturally gifted with a talent for crime, but not yet contaminated by success.

"I found a village that seemed to show the right kind of a layout. The inhabitants hadn't found that Adam had been dispossessed, and were going right along naming the animals and killing snakes just as if they were in the Garden of Eden. They call this town Mount Nebo, and it's up near the spot where Kentucky and West Virginia and North Carolina corner together. Them States don't meet? Well, it was in that neighborhood, anyway.

"After putting in a week proving I wasn't a revenue officer, I went over to the store where the rude fourflushers of the hamlet lied, to see if I could get a line on the kind of man I wanted.

"'Gentlemen,' says I, after we had rubbed noses and gathered 'round the dried-apple barrel. 'I don't suppose there's another community in the whole world into which sin and chicanery has less extensively permeated than this. Life here, where all the women are brave and propitious and all the men honest and expedient, must, indeed, be an idol. It reminds me,' says I, 'of Goldstein's beautiful ballad entitled "The Deserted Village," which says:

'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, What art can drive its charms away? The judge rode slowly down the lane, mother. For I'm to be Queen of the May.'

"'Why, yes, Mr. Peters,' says the storekeeper. 'I reckon we air about as moral and torpid a community as there be on the mounting, according to censuses of opinion; but I reckon you ain't ever met Rufe Tatum.'

"'Why, no,' says the town constable, 'he can't hardly have ever. That air Rufe is shore the monstrousest scalawag that has escaped hangin' on the galluses. And that puts me in mind that I ought to have turned Rufe out of the lockup before yesterday. The thirty days he got for killin' Yance Goodloe was up then. A day or two more won't hurt Rufe any, though.'

"'Shucks, now,' says I, in the mountain idiom, 'don't tell me there's a man in Mount Nebo as bad as that.'

"'Worse,' says the storekeeper. 'He steals hogs.'

"I think I will look up this Mr. Tatum; so a day or two after the constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.

"What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the Pitfall & Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff that kept /Eliza/ from sinking into the river.

"He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color of it reminded you of the 'Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American Artist,' that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He was the Reub, without needing a touch. You'd have known him for one, even if you'd seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton suspender and a straw over his ear.

"I told him what I wanted, and found him ready to jump at the job.

"'Overlooking such a trivial little peccadillo as the habit of manslaughter,' says I, 'what have you accomplished in the way of indirect brigandage or nonactionable thriftiness that you could point to, with or without pride, as an evidence of your qualifications for the position?'

"'Why,' says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrastinated accents, 'hain't you heard tell? There ain't any man, black or white, in the Blue Ridge that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without bein' heard, seen, or cotched. I can lift a shoat,' he goes on, 'out of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won't hear a squeal. It's all in the way you grab hold of 'em and carry 'em atterwards. Some day,' goes on this gentle despoiler of pig-pens, 'I hope to become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.'

"'It's proper to be ambitious,' says I; 'and hog-stealing will do very well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, Mr. Tatum, it would be considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We'll go into partnership. I've got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.'

"So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the lowlands. And all the way I coach him for his part in the grafts I had in mind. I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold 'em.

"I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley Brothers' circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry romping into town and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama. I never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent's-outfitted him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.

"They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.

"That night I went down to the circus tents and opened a small shell game. Rufe was to be the capper. I gave him a roll of phony currency to bet with and kept a bunch of it in a special pocket to pay his winnings out of. No; I didn't mistrust him; but I simply can't manipulate the ball to lose when I see real money bet. My fingers go on a strike every time I try it.

"I set up my little table and began to show them how easy it was to guess which shell the little pea was under. The unlettered hinds gathered in a thick semicircle and began to nudge elbows and banter one another to bed. Then was when Rufe ought to have single-footed up and called the turn on the little joker for a few tens and fives to get them started. But, no Rufe. I'd seen him two or three times walking about and looking at the side-show pictures with his mouth full of peanut candy; but he never came nigh.

"The crowd piked a little; but trying to work the shells without a capper is like fishing without a bait. I closed the game with only forty-two dollars of the unearned increment, while I had been counting on yanking the yeomen for two hundred at least. I went home at eleven and went to bed. I supposed that the circus had proved too alluring for Rufe, and that he had succumbed to it, concert and all; but I meant to give him a lecture on general business principles in the morning.

"Just after Morpheus had got both my shoulders to the shuck mattress I hears a houseful of unbecoming and ribald noises like a youngster screeching with green-apple colic. I opens my door and calls out in the hall for the widow lady, and when she sticks her head out, I says: 'Mrs. Peevy, ma'am, would you mind choking off that kid of yours so that honest people can get their rest?'

"'Sir,' says she, 'it's no child of mine. It's the pig squealing that your friend Mr. Tatum brought home to his room a couple of hours ago. And if you are uncle or second cousin or brother to it, I'd appreciate your stopping its mouth, sir, yourself, if you please.'

"I put on some of the polite outside habiliments of external society and went into Rufe's room. He had gotten up and lit his lamp, and was pouring some milk into a tin pan on the floor for a dingy-white, half- grown, squealing pig.

"'How is this, Rufe?' says I. 'You flimflammed in your part of the work to-night and put the game on crutches. And how do you explain the pig? It looks like back-sliding to me.'

"'Now, don't be too hard on me, Jeff,' says he. 'You know how long I've been used to stealing shoats. It's got to be a habit with me. And to-night, when I see such a fine chance, I couldn't help takin' it.'

"'Well,' says I, 'maybe you've really got kleptopigia. And maybe when we get out of the pig belt you'll turn your mind to higher and more remunerative misconduct. Why you should want to stain your soul with such a distasteful, feeble-minded, perverted, roaring beast as that I can't understand.'

"'Why, Jeff,' says he, 'you ain't in sympathy with shoats. You don't understand 'em like I do. This here seems to me to be an animal of more than common powers of ration and intelligence. He walked half across the room on his hind legs a while ago.'

"'Well, I'm going back to bed,' says I. 'See if you can impress it upon your friend's ideas of intelligence that he's not to make so much noise.'

"'He was hungry,' says Rufe. 'He'll go to sleep and keep quiet now.'

"I always get up before breakfast and read the morning paper whenever I happen to be within the radius of a Hoe cylinder or a Washington hand-press. The next morning I got up early, and found a Lexington daily on the front porch where the carrier had thrown it. The first thing I saw in it was a double-column ad. on the front page that read like this:

FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS REWARD

The above amount will be paid, and no questions asked, for the return, alive and uninjured, of Beppo, the famous European educated pig, that strayed or was stolen from the side-show tents of Binkley Bros.' circus last night.

Geo. B. Tapley, Business Manager. At the circus grounds.

"I folded up the paper flat, put it into my inside pocket, and went to Rufe's room. He was nearly dressed, and was feeding the pig the rest of the milk and some apple-peelings.

"'Well, well, well, good morning all,' I says, hearty and amiable. 'So we are up? And piggy is having his breakfast. What had you intended doing with that pig, Rufe?'

"'I'm going to crate him up,' says Rufe, 'and express him to ma in Mount Nebo. He'll be company for her while I am away.'

"'He's a mighty fine pig,' says I, scratching him on the back.

"'You called him a lot of names last night,' says Rufe.

"'Oh, well,' says I, 'he looks better to me this morning. I was raised on a farm, and I'm very fond of pigs. I used to go to bed at sundown, so I never saw one by lamplight before. Tell you what I'll do, Rufe,' I says. 'I'll give you ten dollars for that pig.'

"'I reckon I wouldn't sell this shoat,' says he. 'If it was any other one I might.'

"'Why not this one?' I asked, fearful that he might know something.

"'Why, because,' says he, 'it was the grandest achievement of my life. There ain't airy other man that could have done it. If I ever have a fireside and children, I'll sit beside it and tell 'em how their daddy toted off a shoat from a whole circus full of people. And maybe my grandchildren, too. They'll certainly be proud a whole passel. Why,' says he, 'there was two tents, one openin' into the other. This shoat was on a platform, tied with a little chain. I seen a giant and a lady with a fine chance of bushy white hair in the other tent. I got the shoat and crawled out from under the canvas again without him squeakin' as loud as a mouse. I put him under my coat, and I must have passed a hundred folks before I got out where the streets was dark. I reckon I wouldn't sell that shoat, Jeff. I'd want ma to keep it, so there'd be a witness to what I done.'

"'The pig won't live long enough,' I says, 'to use as an exhibit in your senile fireside mendacity. Your grandchildren will have to take your word for it. I'll give you one hundred dollars for the animal.'

"Rufe looked at me astonished.

"'The shoat can't be worth anything like that to you,' he says. 'What do you want him for?'

"'Viewing me casuistically,' says I, with a rare smile, 'you wouldn't think that I've got an artistic side to my temper. But I have. I'm a collector of pigs. I've scoured the world for unusual pigs. Over in the Wabash Valley I've got a hog ranch with most every specimen on it, from a Merino to a Poland China. This looks like a blooded pig to me, Rufe,' says I. 'I believe it's a genuine Berkshire. That's why I'd like to have it.'

"'I'd shore like to accommodate you,' says he, 'but I've got the artistic tenement, too. I don't see why it ain't art when you can steal a shoat better than anybody else can. Shoats is a kind of inspiration and genius with me. Specially this one. I wouldn't take two hundred and fifty for that animal.'

"'Now, listen,' says I, wiping off my forehead. 'It's not so much a matter of business with me as it is art; and not so much art as it is philanthropy. Being a connoisseur and disseminator of pigs, I wouldn't feel like I'd done my duty to the world unless I added that Berkshire to my collection. Not intrinsically, but according to the ethics of pigs as friends and coadjutors of mankind, I offer you five hundred dollars for the animal.'

"'Jeff,' says this pork esthete, 'it ain't money; it's sentiment with me.'

"'Seven hundred,' says I.

"'Make it eight hundred,' says Rufe, 'and I'll crush the sentiment out of my heart.'

"I went under my clothes for my money-belt, and counted him out forty twenty-dollar gold certificates.

"'I'll just take him into my own room,' says I, 'and lock him up till after breakfast.'

"I took the pig by the hind leg. He turned on a squeal like the steam calliope at the circus.

"'Let me tote him in for you,' says Rufe; and he picks up the beast under one arm, holding his snout with the other hand, and packs him into my room like a sleeping baby.

"After breakfast Rufe, who had a chronic case of haberdashery ever since I got his trousseau, says he believes he will amble down to Misfitzky's and look over some royal-purple socks. And then I got as busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wall-paper. I found an old Negro man with an express wagon to hire; and we tied the pig in a sack and drove down to the circus grounds.

"I found George B. Tapley in a little tent with a window flap open. He was a fattish man with an immediate eye, in a black skull-cap, with a four-ounce diamond screwed into the bosom of his red sweater.

"'Are you George B. Tapley?' I asks.

"'I swear it,' says he.

"'Well, I've got it,' says I.

"'Designate,' says he. 'Are you the guinea pigs for the Asiatic python or the alfalfa for the sacred buffalo?'

"'Neither,' says I. 'I've got Beppo, the educated hog, in a sack in that wagon. I found him rooting up the flowers in my front yard this morning. I'll take the five thousand dollars in large bills, if it's handy.'

"George B. hustles out of his tent, and asks me to follow. We went into one of the side-shows. In there was a jet black pig with a pink ribbon around his neck lying on some hay and eating carrots that a man was feeding to him.

"'Hey, Mac,' calls G. B. 'Nothing wrong with the world-wide this morning, is there?'

"'Him? No,' says the man. 'He's got an appetite like a chorus girl at 1 A.M.'

"'How'd you get this pipe?' says Tapley to me. 'Eating too many pork chops last night?'

"I pulls out the paper and shows him the ad.

"'Fake,' says he. 'Don't know anything about it. You've beheld with your own eyes the marvelous, world-wide porcine wonder of the four- footed kingdom eating with preternatural sagacity his matutinal meal, unstrayed and unstole. Good morning.'

"I was beginning to see. I got in the wagon and told Uncle Ned to drive to the most adjacent orifice of the nearest alley. There I took out my pig, got the range carefully for the other opening, set his sights, and gave him such a kick that he went out the other end of the alley twenty feet ahead of his squeal.

"Then I paid Uncle Ned his fifty cents, and walked down to the newspaper office. I wanted to hear it in cold syllables. I got the advertising man to his window.

"'To decide a bet,' says I, 'wasn't the man who had this ad. put in last night short and fat, with long black whiskers and a club-foot?'

"'He was not,' says the man. 'He would measure about six feet by four and a half inches, with corn-silk hair, and dressed like the pansies of the conservatory.'

"At dinner time I went back to Mrs. Peevy's.

"'Shall I keep some soup hot for Mr. Tatum till he comes back?' she asks.

"'If you do, ma'am,' says I, 'you'll more than exhaust for firewood all the coal in the bosom of the earth and all the forests on the outside of it.'

"So there, you see," said Jefferson Peters, in conclusion, "how hard it is ever to find a fair-minded and honest business-partner."

"But," I began, with the freedom of long acquaintance, "the rule should work both ways. If you had offered to divide the reward you would not have lost--"

Jeff's look of dignified reproach stopped me.

"That don't involve the same principles at all," said he. "Mine was a legitimate and moral attempt at speculation. Buy low and sell high-- don't Wall Street endorse it? Bulls and bears and pigs--what's the difference? Why not bristles as well as horns and fur?"

This story is in the collection "The Gentle Grafter"

2006-12-20T10:41:00.000-05:00

Just Time For A Quick Commentwhore

Got to get back to not spending money.

My irony meter just exploded.
Dr. Wu

Irony in the Age of Bush, too cheap to meter.
olvlzl The Heretic | Homepage | 12.20.06 - 10:43 am

2006-12-19T10:39:00.000-05:00

Alan Dershowitz Has Placed Himself Outside The Realm of Moral and Intellectual Respectability, not Jimmy Carter.

It's entirely understandable to me why Jimmy Carter wouldn't debate with Alan Dershowitz. I don't know exactly why Jimmy Carter wouldn't do it but I wouldn't because Alan Dershowitz is a proponent of torture. A proponent of torture removes themselves from the range of moral respectability. I consider proponents of torture in the same way Deborah Lipstadt considers David Irving and for similar reasons. Like Holocaust deniers they should not be given extra chances to promote themselves or their public careers pretending to be legitimate and respectable members of the intellectual spectrum. Alan Dershowitz used to be a supporter of human rights who was a rather too uncritical supporter of whatever unsupportable actions the Israeli government happened to engage in, now he is a supporter of torture who occasionally also supports selected human rights. I consider him the way Deborah Lipstadt considers David Irving and for similar reasons. It could also be pointed out that Dershowitz isn’t without issues of accuracy and honesty but it’s the support of torture that puts him definitively outside what should be acceptable.

The intellectual puzzle given by supporters of torture poses that the one to be tortured would be able to provide information essential to prevent the deaths of many other people and so needs to be made to talk. The situation is compelling and I believe that if such a situation existed and could be proven in a court that the illegal use of torture saved many lives, it is unlikely that either the torturer would be convicted or that any sentence would be imposed or upheld, at least here. Torture might be morally justifiable, I don't know. I do know that making it legal would open up too many trap doors on too many slippery slopes and would certainly be taken as permission to start "pushing the envelope". It is now. If it is adopted within the offical toolbox of the military and intelligence establisments - and if them why not local police - we will live to rue the day.

The invitation to Jimmy Carter has the feel of a set up job, Jimmy Carter’s new book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid," has a provocative title and it has provoked a response. Of all the people who he could have been invited to debate, choosing Dershowitz, a poison pill if there ever was one, could be taken as evidence that the proposed debate wasn't the real motive of those making the offer.

As for the use of the word apartheid, today’s Boston Globe prints an interesting response by Norman Finklestein which shows that the practice of the Israeli government has been called “apartheid” or its equivalent by none other than Ariel Sharon, the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, and Haaretz.

Indeed, the list apparently includes former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Pointing to his "fixation with Bantustans," Israeli researcher Gershom Gorenberg concluded in 2003 that it is "no accident" that Sharon's plan for the West Bank "bears a striking resemblance to the 'grand apartheid' promoted by the old South African regime." Sharon reportedly stated around that time that "the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict."

Why can the word be used in Israel but not by a former America President with more credibility than any other American in promoting the security of Israel?

2006-12-14T12:12:00.000-05:00

What Needs To Be Done

The news about Sen. Tim Johnson highlights the vital necessity of putting maximum pressure on the "moderate" Republicans, to put that pressure on them on every issue and to not let up on that pressure. The "moderates" hold the ability of keeping the country out of the strangle hold of the Republican-fascists, if they choose to. Their "moderation" is a pose for election purposes, to be abandoned when the Republican-fascists tell them to OR it's a deeply held principle of "moderation". The proof is in what actually happens in real life, not in the mealy-mouthed platitudes that are the only tangible substance of the pose. In other words, as things stand, the "moderates" are a bunch of liars. Let them prove that wrong with their actions, not with their lying mouths.

2006-12-13T09:41:00.000-05:00

Sorry About The Cheney-Poe Baby, How Do You Feel About The Other Children?

The Boston Globe printed an editorial on Wednesday calling for the privacy of Mary Cheney and Heather Poe as they become the parents of a baby. The editorial praises Dick Cheney for not being a Republican morality policeman on the issue of gay rights while attributing this lone spec of light to his having to deal with his daughter’s sexuality.

Sorry, Boston Globe but wrong, wrong, wrong on all counts. Mary Cheney campaigned to put the Republican party in power, the party that has been using hatred of lesbians and gay men as one of the pillars of its frighteningly effective electoral strategy. The Republican Party, with the Log Cabin dupes, is the home of hatred, the epicenter of the attack on all of us who go into the category.

Mary Cheney and Heather Poe gave up any right to privacy on this issue for themselves when they supported putting people in power who were dedicated to taking the same rights away from the rest of us.

It is one of the favorite gambits of wealthy, powerful conservatives to carve out these zones of personal privilege for themselves, even islands of alleged enlightenment as they support those who turn out the lights and break down the doors for those without power and protection. That tactic of “moderate” Republicanism is over. With the defeat of Lincoln Chaffee it is so over. If they don’t like where it leaves them, well isn’t that just too bad. The rest of us are even more inconvenienced by the hate campaign that the stinking Republican Party has waged against us. You don’t like it, Lincoln, Mary, Heather, choose sides but don’t expect us to make any concessions to your other loyalties. If your families and party weren’t using the politics of hate to begin with we wouldn’t even be talking about them.

As for Dick and Lynne Cheney, two bigger hypocrites are seldom to be seen in one marriage. Going so far as publishing, one expects perhaps even profiting from, very badly written lesbian sex scenes while campaigning for the party of gay baiting, campaigning for “traditional morality” against just such sex scenes and while insisting that out of all possible targets of their parties and their own hatred that their child have a place of safety? They are the poster couple of Republican-fascist degeneracy, “The Damned - America 2000 ".

The well positioned in the media, in academia, in the law talk about a lot of different, valued rights. Freedom, privacy, free speech, etc. But they don’t seem to be very much interested in that one value that gives everyone an ironclad incentive to not violate the most cherished rights of other people. EQUALITY, the absolute and firm requirement in the law and in society that rights and liberties that one person or one group is allowed to exercise are exactly the same for every single other person. Equal rights, equal exercise of rights goes to everyone or no one gets to exercise them. Mary and Heather don’t deserve privacy when they, their parents, their party actively violate the privacy of numerous other people and not just gay people and lesbians. They don’t get to promote bigotry while enjoying a sort of social Ziebart to protect themselves.

If you ask what about their child when it is born, what about it's rights and feelings? Well lots of other lesbians and gay men have children. What about them?

2006-12-13T06:27:00.000-05:00

Frontiers in Market Style Education

An e-mail Offer in my Box This Morning

Fw: Do You wan a {}prosperous ufture?

Asbolutely are no demadned tests, classes, books, or interviews !

Bring in a_Bachelors, Master.s, MBA, and Doctorate (PhD) diploma.

Ftech the beneftis and sanction_that comes with a.diploma !

Noobdy is pushed away

Complete Anonyimty set

Telephone Us Right Now!

No proof reading either.

2006-12-12T22:06:00.000-05:00

Oh, Clap Your Hands, Media Whores
Every Time You Say You Don't Believe A Fascist Dictator Dies.

In a move more cruel than telling a little girl that Santa Claus is a myth, Greg Palast breaks the spell. Pinochet's miracle, still fervently believed in even by columnists at the WaPo and other such idiots who can't even surf the web - nevermind track down real news - turns out to have been entirely the surrender to Keynes and Marx:

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

And just to show that in the world of finance, the lessons of history fade faster than anywhere else:

In 1998, the international finance Gang of Four - the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Settlements - offered a $41.5 billion line of credit to Brazil. But before the agencies handed the drowning nation a life preserver, they demanded Brazil commit to swallow the economic medicine that nearly killed Chile. You know the list: fire-sale privatizations, flexible labor markets (i.e. union demolition) and deficit reduction through savage cuts in government services and social security.

In Sao Paulo, the public was assured these cruel measures would ultimately benefit the average Brazilian. What looked like financial colonialism was sold as the cure-all tested in Chile with miraculous results.

But that miracle was in fact a hoax, a fraud, a fairy tale in which everyone did not live happily ever after.

And we thought it was only here that the best and brightest forgot those lessons such as that which Neil Bush's Silverado Savings and Loan should have taught.

2006-12-12T21:43:00.000-05:00

Commies Under The Garden Bed?

Have you ever had a seed catalog that prints letters from customers warning that it is too leftist?

“When you stick to facts and seeds, I am in your camp.... but when you run babbling off into the leftist dogma wilderness... you are close to losing me as a customer,” Customer from Shrewsbury, VT

But the response isn’t all that way. Right below that they printed: “ I love Fedco. The cooperative. The politics. The information. The prices. The catalog!” Customer from Plainfield, VT
You can look at page 55 of the Fedco 2007 Seed catalog to see.

The Fedco Cooperative is my favorite source for seeds and growing supplies. Its catalog is, well, to quote another customer: “This catalog is more engaging than most novels: all those intriguing characters. Who should I root for???” (Page 40)

There are a few other seed catalogs that come close to matching the number of varieties but none that match the Fedco catalog for its informative and entertaining descriptions and boundless asides.

Here, from a sidebar on it’s essay on global warming, Top ten reasons for not curbing global warming:
8. Does evolution really work? - we’ll soon find out.
5. No more Florida election surprises.
1. Maine-grown coffee at MOFGA’s Common Ground fair.*
All joking aside, the essay on page 6 is serious and worth reading.

The pictures, all black and white on newsprint, are funny and beautiful and make wonderful coloring books. It is one of the few seed catalogs that I’ve seen children who are uninterested in gardening leaf through.

Other than being a customer and an admirer, I have no financial interest in Fedco Seeds, Moose Tubers or Organic Grower’s Supply. If you are interested they have a website but the paper catalog that carries the mystique. There is nothing like picking it up on a snowy January day when the power is out and imagining the garden in August. To conserve paper, you can download it. All seed is untreated, many heirloom and open varieties are sold and all of them are worth considering if you have a garden.

* The Maine Organic Farmer’s and Gardener’s Assoc. fair’s “no coffee because it’s not a Maine grown product” fight is one of the most enduring controversies up here. Ok, so it’s an inside joke, unless you get stuck at the fair with caffeine withdrawal.

2006-12-12T06:39:00.000-05:00

This is Disturbing

The fact that in 2006 there are enough supporters of a known mass murderer and mega-thief to require that the place his foetid body was lying in state to stay open all night is really disturbing. Ted Bundy murdered at most several dozen people, Augusto Pinochet murdered thousands. If I was living in Chile I’d be proposing immediate steps to de-fascify the country. And if that word doesn’t exist it needs to.

Isn’t it time to put Henry Kissinger on trial for crimes against humanity?

2006-12-12T06:32:00.000-05:00

Theory is Sloppy And So Was I

Arggh! I think that's how it's spelled. I left off the punch line when I was copying the story about Brooks' phony sociology about charity.

The last line, after mentioning the bilge suckers of his kind of phony number rigging is, "I wonder how many of Brooks' admirers have uttered the line, ' Evolution is only a theory,".

2006-12-11T09:44:00.000-05:00

Before The Bargaining Begins

Without environmental and worker’s protection here and abroad the answer would have been, no dice. So it’s good that Open Source had Barney Frank on the other night to explain his proposed grand bargain. That’s the one in which businesses get a decrease in some kinds of regulations and more open trade in return for things like a more friendly climate for unionization, increased wages and national health coverage. Robert Kuttner has a column last Saturday that gives more information about the deal and why it could bring in a return to policies that built the now moribund middle class.

I’m not entirely sold on the bargain and am very skeptical that it will be taken up. Kuttner mentions in his column that the ideas seem strange to the left because they haven’t been taken seriously by those in power for decades. That is primarily the fault of conservatives who from the late 40s till today have done everything they could to destroy the New Deal and other programs that benefitted the large majority of people in the United States. They owned the media that carped about every tiny fault and blew those into a climate of cynical dismissal of both the public sector and unions. When they didn’t have anything to blow up, they invented it. And there was also the conservative, entrenched leadership of the unions who not only played the very unattractive roles assigned to them by the conservative media, they squandered too many opportunities to increase membership. Without an expanded membership the union movement started to die. Both will have to be overcome to make this bargain work, neither side will give up their perks without being forced to.

One of the other guests on Open Source gave one more essential part of the bargain, this time business goes second. Last time, with NAFTA etc. they went first and our turn never came. Without the pressure of them not getting what they want, they will never allow us to get what we need. After the failure of the Clinton administration to give us health care and the essential protections that should have been a preliminary requirement, NAFTA should never have been passed. Our rule going into this has to be that without us getting the things we need in the bargain then the others things don’t happen.

And if it fails, if the conservatives refuse the offer? What then? I hope that Barney Frank has thought of that. I can’t imagine he hasn’t. If it fails then, among other things, free trade should be scrapped. Without the things Frank has listed as the requirements of the labor side then free trade is a quick trip to the bottom, the one the middle class has been on since Reagan took office. If a decent standard of living isn’t possible under the rules as they stand, it’s not time to give up on people having a decent standard of living. It’s time to burn the rule book and get rules that provide for one. To start, I’d say that the program in Marjorie Kelly’s book, The Divine Right of Capital, is a good place to start.

Why is it that workers who produce all of the wealth don’t have at least as much ownership of a company as the one-time investor gets in perpetuity? Investor ownership is eternal. Stock can be sold over and over again without a single cent of additional capital investment in the company being made. Yet a worker who works for the company from the beginning till her job gets outsourced when the eighteenth owner of the stock decides that slave-labor overseas will maximize the value of the stock, has no legally protected ownership rights at all.

2006-12-11T09:41:00.000-05:00

Swellfare Cassocked Hacks? Is It Really Charity?

Is the book "Who Really Cares" by Arthur C. Brooks an indictment of stingy liberals who don’t put their wallets where their mouths are or is it yet another in the long, long series of books written to both further the ideological propaganda effort of conservatives and make them feel smug? Is it another fat-cat and wannabe, feel good book? I haven’t read it so I don’t know. What I’ve seen about it doesn’t exactly put it on the top of my “to read” list.

"Who Really Cares" is creating a stir in philanthropy circles -- and garnering acclaim from conservative pundits like ABC News's John Stossel and the radio host Michael Medved -- but is it to be trusted? At the AEI forum, Alan Abramson, director of the philanthropy program of the Aspen Institute, said that one should treat Brooks's sweeping conclusions with caution, given the "softness of the data" on charity in general. (He noted that Brooks himself concedes that we don't even know with certainty whether 50 percent or 80 percent of adult Americans donate to charity.)

I’ll pass up the temptations presented by the Stossel and Medved acclaim, though their recommendation would be a red flag of fawning that what was contained within was probably predictable B.S.* What really should concern anyone who is interested in the truth is Abramson’s “softness of the data” statement. Soft numbers can’t give you accurate results. They can’t and anyone who uses them should be called on their use. Even professors at Syracuse University. No, make that, especially professors at major universities.

Brook’s concession that there could be as great a gap as thirty percent in such a basic number makes me wonder why he would have gone on to write the book. Even the gap in the value of that variable would be enough to make everything else unreliable. But even if you had a solid value, what does it mean? Would it really show what Brooks and his happy audience of right wingers say it does? It all depends on how you define “charity”, the rigor with which you observe your defined limits and the general agreement that your definition is the right one.

Junk in junk out is the polite way of putting it. You plug in all kinds of numbers collected from various places and dazzle the innumerate press and the side your results are spun for and no one looks to see where the numbers came from and what they mean. When it comes to crunching numbers dealing with complex phenomenon, such as an observable behavior, it becomes a bit tricky to even tell if what the hopeful researcher wants to see is what was really there. If it is something too complex and diffuse to observe, say “charitable giving”, then the numbers can really mask other intentions.

First, what constitutes “charitable giving”? Giving itself can be anything from entirely self-serving to entirely selfless. Is that huge donation, with tax exemption, going to get your name put on a building at Harvard or will it go anonymously to pay tuition and instructors at Roxbury Community College? Does the condition and level of need of the recipient matter? Does ten-grand given to the Mercedes fund for the pastor of a mega-church qualify as charity? How about paying for a piece of stained glass in a window of dubious artistic merit? How about giving to an ideological institution which will lobby against the estate tax? Of the above, only the donation to the Roxbury Community College, if it goes to teaching children in need, makes it as charity with me.

Before I’m going to even consider a book about who is more generous I’m going to have to know what the numbers represent in both their raw form and in their refined form.

In preparing this post I looked, for the first time, at the reviews of the book on Amazon.com. J. Straka’s was interesting. He makes some interesting observations, the ones I have had time to look into, check out. **

*Stossel in particular is untrustworthy. A “journalist” who has declared that his job is to promote the corporate agenda is a self-proclaimed propagandist dishonestly pretending to be a reporter. Junk in guarantees junk out. Medved is one of the legion of those Hollywood hangers on who can tell us what Mel Gibson’s shoes taste like. Anyone who wants me to read their book should not use their blurbs on the cover.

**J. Straka - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) In the national press release for this book, the big "news" is that "religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals...". What an interesting spin! What makes it especially interesting is that in an October 2003 article by Arthur Brooks in the Policy Review, he states that religious liberals give and volunteer at rates comparable to religious conservatives. Now that is an apples to apples comparison, but not very interesting "spin material". I wonder why the press release didn't contain the findings found on Mr. Brooks' own web page showing that the "working poor" give more to charity than both the middle and upper class. That statistic wouldn't sell books to his conservative audience, I guess. And while Mr. Brooks tries to come off as a neutral observer "shocked" by the results of his studies, all the other articles he has written on the internet shows he has no love for the liberals (one article entitled "The Fertility Gap" predicts the demise of the liberal party because they were having 41% fewer babies than the conservatives!).

I question the need for this book: if you are giving your money and time to those in need out of true compassion, why do you need to compare yourself to others? If you have a need to compare and judge and belittle others, I really question that you are that compassionate. Though I'm sure many conservatives will buy this biased book because it will make them feel good about themselves, they would be much further ahead to donate the money to a charity.

Note: I wonder why only 24 of 126 people found his review helpful. Maybe Brooks is preaching to the choir gloriously robed in his kind of charity.

2006-12-06T20:19:00.000-05:00

Still Reading the IGS Report

so no comments yet except to say if you think Bush is going to do anything decent or wise except by threat, fat chance. Before I'm ready to comment here's one of the best comments on Bush War II as it is presented by our kept media.

Now we have brought to Iraq a civil war and we must call it such. But, even that is far too tame a term to use for the senseless and barbaric slaughter of a guiltless people. When I first read The Lancet’s account of how many Iraqis now dead which is 655,000 my sympathy is for them and not Bush Sr. As each of those deaths occurred, people did cry and their tears could probably fill an ocean.

If we as a sympathetic society are to feel sympathy for anyone’s tears, let them go to a little girl whose father was lost in this most immoral war. I saw the photo below days before Election Day and wrote of what her father will miss out on because Bush Sr’s son took her father away. Let her tears be the ones to remember and not that of the late president. It is time for his family’s dynasty to end.

Good post, Mary MacElveen.

2006-12-06T08:20:00.000-05:00

My Best Christmas Present Ever!!!! Can Now Be Yours Too

A war on Christmas proposal

Getting asked once too often decades ago what my best Christmas present ever was my usual response is "I don't know,". But having thought about it again I've got a definite answer, one that can keep on giving.

Once in a meeting of the board of a small, local non-profit I used to sit on, our most irritatingly juvenile member proposed that we "aren't doing enough for our volunteers. We need to show how much we value them by throwing them a Christmas party,". All of us slumped in our seats. Not another damned Christmas event we would have to go to.

In a really impressive bit of quick thinking, for which all of us have since been truly thankful, one of our members said, "Yes, let's have something but not now. How about in May,". Everyone, almost, immediately brightened, even smiled. The vote in favor was unanimous. A small non-profit was spared from instituting one of the most onerous burdens of the season, it has not had a single "Volunteer Christmas Party" since that blessed night.