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2006-02-18T19:40:00.000-08:00

Big Bang Debate

I thought this conversation in my Comments section was worth putting up as a post. It's a bit long, but if you're interested:

Rex

Stevie, perhaps you can explain the current data that is used to support the Big Bang theory, and explain why it is philosophical in nature? For example, consider the cosmic background radiation. (There are many other things to consider.)

Me:

Here's the basic short answer to that: Science in the strict sense involves forming falsifiable hypotheses that are then confirmed by their positive instances. Clearly we can't form a 'When X conditions obtain, there's a Big Bang'. The Big Bang requires more of a comprehensive theory that involves the fitting together of lots of particular hypotheses; theoretical physicists look at experimental evidence and try to come up with a story (broad theory) that makes it all fit together. Broad theories of this type are what lead to backward speculation about the beginning of the universe. But broad theory building, while certainly part of the actual practice of what we call 'the scientific field' goes far beyond the principles of what is strictly science. You can of course broaden your definition of 'science', but then you lose out on what people think makes it plausible as a practice.

Bill, ou might also want to teach your children that the theory of gravity is just a theory--after all, in Matthew 12:29, Peter walks on water to Jesus (who is walking on water), which clearly contradicts the idea that two bodies attract each other with a force equal to -G*m*M/r^2. Maybe Newton's laws of motion are wrong also. Given all the wind and the lack of traction against the water, there doesn't seem to be equal and opposite forces involved. Clearly, a literal reading of the Bible produces a much better understanding of the workings of the physical world than does actually studying the physical world.

No one (except for 'the folk') actually understand gravity in that way anymore. From what I'm told, the dominant view now has something to do about how massive objects cause deformities in the space-time field, yadda yadda.

Even when gravity was understood that way, no one would be crazy enough to argue that it rules out the possibility of someone walking on water. It could only rule out a situation that was defined very narrowly in such a way that no other forces could have been acting. From what I remember the Bible just says "They saw Jesus walking on water" or something like that. That doesn't threaten the theory of gravity any more than my 'floating pen' on a magnetic base - you've seen those, right?

In any case, if the Bible suggests that Newton's laws/principles are wrong, then that's a point in favor of the Bible. Physicists dumped Newtonian physics ages ago - Newton was wrong - get with the program:P

Style Council, there's a difference between arrogance and confidence. The scientific process by construction lends confidence. It is the same process, formalized, that you use to determine with confidence that, for example, you cannot walk through walls (and develop ideas of solidity to explain this), and that heavy objects fall downwards (gravity), and so on. Do you think, maybe, if you pray hard enough, you will be able to walk through walls? Maybe not.

You're suggesting, I take it, that science is no more than a formalization of implicit inductive reasoning?

That might not be off base entirely, but science smuggles a lot more than that in. And in any case, it's doubtful that science accurately captures our implicit inductive processes. We don't even have a generally accepted system of formal rules for inductive logic - I don't even know if there are any contenders.

Rex

"When X conditions obtain, there is a Big Bang" does not a falsifiable prediction make. What does the trick is "When there is a Big Bang, then X conditions obtain." If we observe not-X, then we must conclude not-(Big Bang). Straightforward deductive logic, and that's exactly how the Big Bang is evaluated scientifically.

We may not know all the details--there's lots of cosmology that goes beyond what is meaningfully testable--but the basic idea that things are expanding and have been for a very, very long time is not really in question when one looks at the evidence.

My point about Peter walking on water is just that you don't throw out scientifically tested results because you happen to be particularly fond of a particular passage in the Bible. You might want to check the results again, and you might want to check your interpretation again, but it's pretty dangerous to assume that when there's an apparent conflict between an interpretation of the Bible and science, that it is always science that is wrong--even if you believe the Bible is the infallible word of God. Last I checked, humans weren't infallible at interpreting much of anything (which makes me wonder what the attraction is to infallible texts).

And, finally, I am saying that science is a formalization of the process of implicit inductive reasoning. It's not quite so implicit once it's formalized. It sidesteps the problem of what constitutes valid inductive reasoning by using hypothesis-falsification, which is basically deductive in nature. So the stance is effectively, "I'm not sure how far we can get with induction, or how valid it is, but we'll tentatively accept those propositions that we've tried to prove wrong and failed."

(At least, this is a formal-logic interpretation of what is going on. I don't think this is quite right, since reality seems based more upon principles of statistics and signal to noise than truth-values of propositions, but for a first pass this is pretty close.)

Me:

"When X conditions obtain, there is a Big Bang" does not a falsifiable prediction make. What does the trick is "When there is a Big Bang, then X conditions obtain." If we observe not-X, then we must conclude not-(Big Bang). Straightforward deductive logic, and that's exactly how the Big Bang is evaluated scientifically.

That works? Great! Then I'm going to prove intelligent design (by the Great Purple Chicken):

When the world is created by the Great Purple Chicken, then X conditions obtain.

(X conditions being an accurate description of the entire history of the actual world/universe).

That's falsifiable too.

So I guess the Great Purple Chicken is on equal standing with the Big Bang Theory?

Rex

The connection between the Big Bang and X is not simply a string of words. Rather, saying "the Big Bang" implies a bunch of premises, and one can follow the implications through until one reaches X.

For example, the Big Bang means that the universe started in a single explosion from a small area or point. When things explode, bits of that thing travel outwards. Therefore, if there was a Big Bang, then bits of the universe should travel outwards.

So the Great Purple Chicken theory would have to meet the same standards.

If, indeed, it actually implied X (as opposed to X or Y or Z or A or B or ...), then you'd find that "Great Purple Chicken" was in large part just a peculiarly-chosen synonym for "Big Bang".

Now, they might not be exactly the same implications--the Big Bang might predict X and W, while the Great Purple Chicken predicts X and V. Then you could test W and V and distinguish between the two. Or perhaps the Great Purple Chicken predicts X but is not informative regarding W or anything else. Then, if we observe X and we observe W, we tentatively pick the Big Bang hypothesis and discard the GPC hypothesis because the Big Bang is better tested and/or is more useful for predicting events. If the Big Bang can be easily described, and GPC is not easily described, then we pick the Big Bang because it's more convenient.

For example, the "walls are solid" hypothesis is simpler and provides stronger predictions than a "the east outer wall of my house is solid and the west outer wall of my house is solid and..." hypothesis.

The idea of falsification is a strong basis to start from, but one still has to use it properly in order to generate useful information.

Me:

The only significant difference between the Big Bang (BB) hypothesis and the Great Purple Chicken (GPC)is that I'm too lazy to specify particulars about what the (GPC) implies.

Here's why (GPC) wouldn't be just a synonym for (BB):

(BB) supposedly implies (with some degree of specificity) a particular world history that has our current time as being something like 12 billion years after the big bang. In between then and now, this and that and so on happened.

According to (GPC), none of that happened. The world was created, say, 150 years ago. The Great Purple Chicken created everything just the way it was 150 years ago, putting all matter in place and giving it the correct push to make it expand outward and behave in the ways it does now.

(GPC) is falsifiable, because if it had turned out that things weren't the way they are now, it would be falsified.

It isn't non-falsifiable because "if things were different, you could just say the Chicken created it in some different way" - no, the (GPC) hypothesis is fixed in the same way as (BB). If any of the details were changed it wouldn't be (GPC).

All of the implications of (GPC) for any time after 150 years ago are the same as they are for (BB), so there is no way to distinguish them as far as evidence goes (the same would be the case if GPC said the world was created ten seconds ago, of course).

ringing simplicity in as a criterion isn't going to get us anywhere.

If we were just in the business of coming up with convenient prediction-making models, then simplicity is just fine. In such a context we aren't concerned with accurate description at all, and have no pretensions of coming up with theories that actually describe the world. The Big Bang theory is useless in that context - it isn't happening again anytime soon, and it's not something we can control or manipulate. The origin of the universe is a pointless question from the standpoint of practically-oriented science/prediction-making.

So if we are going to discuss the origin of the universe, it is reasonable only to assume that we have some interest in the fact of the matter, which rules out our invocation of the simplicity criterion.

Rex

Simplicity gets us everywhere. (GPC) is incredibly, uselessly complicated--it is just a description of things now (or 150 years ago), plus an evidence-free postulate that things were created de novo 150 years ago such that it looked like the system had been in place for many billions of years.

The portion of the GPC that is not just a description is not testable, by construction. Therefore, there is nothing to distinguish GPC from any of the "models" that are just descriptions of everything that we know now. The 150 years thing is, therefore, not scientific.

GPC-style models must be a description of everything we know now, not "it turned out the way it is" as a generic statement, or it would *really* not be falsifiable, since by construction there is no observation that it could contradict. Furthermore, quite a few of our observations are probably in error in some way, which would falsify GPC, but there are deeper problems.

The class of models that describe everything we see now have no predictive power on their own. One can use them to make inferential models, using the scientific method, for example, but the whole point is that we're trying to make inferential models here, not just gather data. This is where the requirement for simplicity comes in--a simple model typically can be easily used to generate predictions about what one will observe in the future (or as one looks at more data regarding things that have happened in the past).

I'm not sure whether a maximum-power-for-the-size-of-the-theory criterion is better or worse than simply a minimum-size one; the latter is Occam's Razor, while the former seems potentially more useful. Either way, this is a way to pick out particularly helpful perspectives. When two perspectives end up being logically and experimentally equivalent, as was the case with the Schrodinger and Heisenberg formulations of quantum mechanics, people generally use whichever is more convenient at the time.

Of course, we have an interest in the fact of the matter, but the question is, what do we *mean* by the fact of the matter? There isn't any obvious linkage between truth-statements and matter. If we go back and look at things that we call facts, such as "fire is hot", we find exactly the kind of compact explanatory power based on evidence that one looks for with the scientific method.

That is, "fire is hot" is considered true because we have a general concept of hotness (and of fire), and all everyday evidence about the hotness of fire indicates that fire is hot and this is a very compact but powerfully predictive description of something we come across fairly often.

Me:

Simplicity gets us everywhere. (GPC) is incredibly, uselessly complicated--it is just a description of things now (or 150 years ago), plus an evidence-free postulate that things were created de novo 150 years ago such that it looked like the system had been in place for many billions of years.

The Big Bang Theory is just as much of an evidence-free postulate that things were created 150 years ago. There is no "looked like the universe had been in place for many billions of years" - that's a wild speculation that is entirely theory-based. The universe only "looks" that way if we accept a load of assumptions about its origins, how matter behaves, the consistency of such behavior, etc.

It's not unreasonable to say that man-made objects "look new" or "look old" because we have actual experience with the way these things change over time. We have absolutely no experience of what it is for planets and galaxies to change over millions and billions of years, so it would be preposterous to claim that the whole universe could just "look old".

Say this debate were between your version of the Big Bang theory and my alternative, BB+1. According to BB+1, the universe began in pretty much the same way as the Big Bang theory suggested, except that it started exactly one second later, and the initial conditions were exactly those that your theory says obtained one second after the Big Bang. So basically BB+1 says that the ball of mass (or whatever) was bigger to begin with.

You can't try to argue that the universe looks as if it is one second older than BB+1 says it is; given the laws and such posited by each of our theories along with the initial conditions each includes, we would expect the world to be just as it is now. And the same would be true if the theory was BB+20(seconds) - different initial conditions, but if we agree on how everything behaves afterward, same result.

So if instead of the Great Purple Chicken theory I'd put forth BB+12billionish-years, a theory allowing the same behavior of matter and such but including the assertion that the initial conditions simply were those that obtained 150 years ago (and these would be described to some level of specificity), you would have no grounds on which to say the universe "looks older". It "looks" as if it were created 150 years ago given particular starting conditions plus laws just as much as it "looks" as if it were created 12 billion years ago with different initial conditions and the same laws. If that argument isn't going to work for BB+12billionish-years, it's not going to work for the Great Purple Chicken hypothesis either.

The portion of the GPC that is not just a description is not testable, by construction. Therefore, there is nothing to distinguish GPC from any of the "models" that are just descriptions of everything that we know now. The 150 years thing is, therefore, not scientific.

It's just as testable as the non-descriptive aspect of the BB.

BB says we had X starting conditions and Y set of laws describing the consistent behavior of matter/energy afterward. We can't test X of course, but Y is testable in two ways: We can, for one, come up with a model of X starting conditions and then "run" it through with Y set of laws to see what kind of outcome we would get. On BB, we would expect the model to look pretty much like the current, actual universe about 12 billion years after X starting conditions. If it didn't, BB would be falsified. The second way would be to perform experiments testing Y set of laws. Does matter/energy actual behave in accordance with those laws now, insofar as we can test it? If not, BB is falsified.

So what's the difference with GPC? You're right that in some aspects, GPC is another version of BB - it describes initial conditions and then gives a story about how the universe behaved afterward. But that's a similarity we would expect it to bear to any theory of the origin of the universe.

GPC says we had Z starting conditions, followed by behavior of matter/energy that can be described by Y set of laws/generalizations (which are the same as those posited by BB).

One differnce is that when we set up and run our models of BB and GPC, the BB model starts to look like the actual current universe after 12 billion years, while the GPC model looks like the actual current universe after 150.

The other is simply that BB and GPC provide different stories for the initial conditions and the laws. On BB, the initial conditions basically just happened to obtain - no explanation is given or asked for. On GPC, a Great Purple Chicken arranged it that way. On BB, the laws just happen to be what they do because, as a matter of fact, the universe exhibits certain patterns of behavior. Why? Who knows - that's not a question that even comes up on BB. On GPC, it is posited that the reason is that the Great Purple Chicken uses his magic to keep things working that way.

Granted, the chicken aspect of GPC doesn't add anything testable. It becomes a matter of faith, or of just making a guess. Perhaps it is best to remain agnostic and say that we don't know anything about why the initial conditions were what they were, or why energy/matter behaves in the way it does - we cannot support or rule out any kind of explanation for that. But if we are going to hazard a guess, it is every bit as reasonable to say the reason is the Great Purple Chicken as it is to say that it simply is that way, and there is not anything more to explain it.

Now, the important thing here is the relevant similarities between BB and GPC:

Just as we did with BB, we run a model of GPC based on Z initial conditions and Y set of laws. GPC is falsified if the model does not, at some point, look like the actual current universe. And again, GPC is falsified in the same way as BB if Y set of laws it posits do not describe the behavior of matter/energy that we actually observe in experimental settings.

GPC-style models must be a description of everything we know now, not "it turned out the way it is" as a generic statement, or it would *really* not be falsifiable, since by construction there is no observation that it could contradict. Furthermore, quite a few of our observations are probably in error in some way, which would falsify GPC, but there are deeper problems.

I don't know why you seem to think that GPC is the same as a model that simply says a chicken created the world just as it is in this very instant...

The GPC model has initial conditions just like BB. If you believe BB, then you're going to believe that X initial conditions are those that actually obtained 12 billion years ago. There's no significant difference between that and GPC, which has initial conditions that match the actual conditions of 150 years ago if GPC is true.

And as I've already noted, GPC includes laws/generalizations that are as testable as those of BB.

But, on to the main point, as I have other work to get to:

I've shown that BB and GPC are equivalent in all the important ways - they both include initial conditions, laws, and are testable. GPC is as valid a hypothesis as BB is. Both BB and GPC give us the same end result (the actual current universe). But they are clearly not the same, however you want to spin it; the initial conditions are different, and on GPC the universe is only 150 years old.

This is only a demonstration of what is widely accepted as being true - it is possible to have substantially different theoretical models that describe the same end result.

This principle is usually brought up in discussion of laws - we can formulate generalizations that accurately describe the behavior of matter/energy and that make predictions that are actually borne out. In the case of laws, the different generalizations are usually actually indistinguishable; there is no testable difference between them in principle. It is not entirely unreasonable to suggest that they simply may be differently worded but equivalent descriptions.

But BB and GPC are not indistinguishable in principle. It happens to be the case that we cannot actually go back in time and see if the universe was around 200 years ago, or if the furthest back we can go is 150 years. But anyone will recognize that it is not a trivial difference that one theory says the universe is 12 billion years old, while the other says it is 150 years old. It is just a matter of practical limitations that we cannot in fact come up with evidence to support one theory over the other.

The short of it all is this: We do not have, and cannot have (due to practical limitations) the kind of evidence that would support the Big Bang theory over other theories regarding the origin of the universe that are substantially different.

Sure, we can say that BB is simpler than GPC and other theories. But again, we're not just interested in how convenient each theory is for predictions; if that's all we wanted we wouldn't care about the origin of the universe. To say that BB's being simpler (if it were) makes it more likely to be true is something of a 'philosophical' assertion (though a pretty silly one).

Now you can ponder the relation of statements to facts of the matter all you like, but we're talking about 'The universe is 12 billion years old' versus 'The universe is 150 years old' here - so I should think that we agree that we have a pretty good idea about the relevant difference in the way things actually are that is associated with each statement. We understand that BB and GPC are substantially different, as we have a good idea as to the real world difference that one entails in relation to the other. We also understand that there is a fact of the matter about the issue; one really is a more apt description of the world (and its history), and not in a trivial way.

Rex

There is no "looked like the universe had been in place for many billions of years" - that's a wild speculation that is entirely theory-based.

You don't know what you're talking about. It's very hard to have a meaningful debate starting from a position of ignorance.

(Alternatively, maybe you're starting from a position of radical nihilism, in that you believe that everything is a wild speculation that is entirely theory-based, and knowledge of any sort is impossible.)

In any case, the speculation is not wild, and the theories upon which the apparent age of the universe is interpreted have themselves been well-tested.

Here's just one example. The universe, now, is pretty big. Light can only travel so fast, yet we can see things really far away. So, the universe looks like it's old enough for the light from the really far away things to have reached us.

If that doesn't seem non-wild and based on evidence, then I submit that you could be in a box just larger than your fingertips can touch, with illusions projected from the walls (stereoscopically), and with tactile objects appearing and disappearing within the box, and that any appeal to how things appear is just wild speculation that is entirely theory-based.

The universe only "looks" that way if we accept a load of assumptions about its origins, how matter behaves, the consistency of such behavior, etc.

It's not unreasonable to say that man-made objects "look new" or "look old" because we have actual experience with the way these things change over time.

This is absurd. Having actual experience about how matter behaves doesn't count, but having actual experience about how appearances change with time does count? What is the justification for this distinction?

You don't even watch the same objects the whole time, between when they are new and when they are old. You're making a load of assumptions about what it means to be an object, which old objects correspond with which new objects, and so on.

They just happen to be very good, and well-tested "assumptions". Likewise (with slightly less certainty) with assumptions that leads one to conclude that the universe is very old.

Initial conditions are not free. GPC has a vastly less compact description of initial conditions than BB. BB wins.

Predictive power does not only go forward in time, it also goes backward, or both backward and forward. BB wins there, too, because you can see things that appear to have happened far in the past and predict what you would expect to find evidence of farther in the past, or you can see processes that have unfolded in the past and expect to see the same unfolding with processes that start occurring now. For example, what does GPC say about the lifetime of our sun? BB wins again.

Also, if one has a class of theories that are pretty much equivalent and they differ in important but untestable ways--for example, suppose we have evidence that the universe was created 150 years ago, but we have no evidence regarding the color or species of bird that did it--then the appropriate scientific stance is to not commit to any particular class. It's not to say that no such bird exists just because you can't pin down which one--you just say you don't know which bird exists.

People who then promote Great Purple Chickens, as opposed to Subtle White Hummingbirds, are being non-scientific. But the point is that it doesn't really matter, materially, who is right or whether anyone is right. If the different claims cannot be distinguished via evidence, then they also cannot differentially impact the world (or at least, they can't until they leave some distinguishing trace).

So, it may be that a Great Purple Chicken created the universe 150 years ago, to look as though it had been around for billions of years; it may even have created everything 10 minutes ago, with our memories and this discussion fully formed (why not?--if it can put every photon in place as if it had traveled from distant stars, surely constructing memories isn't so hard). But in these cases, it is still appropriate to behave as if the universe had been created billions of years ago, since it was designed to behave as if this were the case.

This is exactly the same thing we do everyday. It might be that all walls are insubstantial, but invisible pixies push on us really hard when we touch a wall, so we can't go through. We can't rule this out with everyday experience. We just say, hey, walls are solid. (If we really want to worry about it, then perhaps pixies are implementing that which we call the solidity of walls--either way, we can't walk through them.)

Me:

You don't know what you're talking about. It's very hard to have a meaningful debate starting from a position of ignorance.

Rex, you've clearly given up on the discussion and demonstrated your own lack of understanding - particularly by your insistence on ignoring almost all of the arguments.

But nevermind that. Answer this question. You said:

Here's just one example. The universe, now, is pretty big. Light can only travel so fast, yet we can see things really far away. So, the universe looks like it's old enough for the light from the really far away things to have reached us.

Now please at least try to refute this counter-argument (if you're interested in participating in the discussion):

We don't know that the universe is really big. We detect light and other forms of radiation coming in at us.

We infer that this light/radiation is coming from stars and other matter that's really far out there. We have the light, but that doesn't require the existence of such objects. The Chicken could have set up the appropriate light and radiation conditions 150 years ago and it would look just the same.

So we have two options for describing how the universe looks:

1. It looks like it is 12 billion years old and had X starting conditions.

2. It looks like it is 150 years old and had Y starting conditions.

Both would entail it looking the same way to us as it does now.

So tell me why you pick 1 over 2?

If you're going to keep yapping about 'simplicity', then define simplicity and refute my arguments as to why simplicity is irrelevant in a context when our purpose is not making predictions.

Rex

I am ignoring things that appear not to be coherent arguments. I also already answered the question regarding why one prefers X over Y. But I will do so again, since you asked specifically.

In particular, perhaps the problem is that you have not yet managed to come up with a scenario where predictions are not a relevant part of the picture.

Simplicity is somewhat subjective, because it is difficult to precisely define human cognitive abilities, and it is really measured with respect to that. However, it is closely related to the minimum description length in a hypothetical content-neutral language. Those things that can be described compactly are "simple", and those that cannot are less "simple".

Both conditions 1 and 2 entail it looking the same way as it does now (as does the condition where the world and our memories were created ten minutes ago).

However, suppose one considers the radiation observed that appears to have been emitted by a distant star. In describing this information, you can either say

(1) The radiation was emitted 50,000 years ago from a star and has spread out spherically since then, or

(2a) The radiation was created 150 years ago as if it had been emitted 50,000 years ago from a star and had then spread out spherically since then, or

(2b) The radiation was created 150 years ago at (huge list of locations) traveling in the direction (huge list of angles).

Now, (1) is simpler than (2a), which makes it easier to deal with. In any case, (2a) is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from (1) since one could say that "the past" instead of GPC had created what was there 150 years ago. And (2b), which is a non-equivalent description, is much more complicated.

If you can come up with a scenario where there aren't predictions to be made, or descriptions to be written, then I'll address those arguments.

I am not particularly concerned with those cases where one doesn't care about predictions--if one doesn't care about the scientific method, it can't make them care--but only those where predictions cannot be made or descriptions are of equal utility and convenience in making predictions.

Me:

In particular, perhaps the problem is that you have not yet managed to come up with a scenario where predictions are not a relevant part of the picture.

You might as well have skipped the rest of your comment - the argument that one is simpler than another is an interesting conversation on its own, but not the one we're having here. The real question we're looking at now is why simplicity, so I'll stick to that for our purposes here.

At this point, the debate boils down to this:

You're demanding that simplicity is relevant to considerations regarding the origin of the universe; I'm saying it's not.

I think we agree that simplicity is a fine criterion when all we care about is making predictions; if that's what we want, we might as well select the model that is easier to use if we have two that give us identical predictions about the future.

But you go on to say:

If you can come up with a scenario where there aren't predictions to be made, or descriptions to be written, then I'll address those arguments.

But you have not established that our making predictions automatically buys you justification for the simplicity criterion. As I explained, it makes sense if all you care about are predictions. But if you care about predictions/descriptions, and more, you aren't necessarily justified in invoking simplicity.

And that's the situation we're in when it comes to speculation about the origin of the universe. We are concerned about accurate descriptions in this case. We want the right theory.

Can you give any reason for us to think that a simpler alternative will be the right one in this way?

Rex

Scientifically, I don't think you can have more. You get descriptions, and you get predictive power. To the extent that one calls a theory "right" when it gives compact desciptions and powerful predictive capabilities, then this will give you theories that are "right". The compactness is partly a matter of convenience, and partly based on the experience of compact theories usually holding up well (which suggests something about the structure of the universe).

We have a great deal of evidence that these conclusions are unusually solid compared to other sources of human knowledge, save for direct experience which we appear to analyze using the same method (i.e. is it simple, predictive, descriptive--if so, then that is what we believe). For example, Newtonian mechanics is still considered the "right" description of what happens at moderate speeds and masses.

If we want all this and more, then the scientific method is not built to help us out. If one wants to supplement a scientific description of the world with additional beliefs that are not (currently, anyway) scientifically testable, such as the immorality of polygamy and polyandry, that's fine.

But when one starts throwing out science in favor of of untested/untestable beliefs, then there is a problem, just like when one starts throwing out direct sensory experience in favor of untested/untestable beliefs.

So if you ask me if there's a reason to prefer simplicity in untested/untestable beliefs, then the answer is no, not particularly, as long as the belief is sufficiently simple for someone to comprehend (something that is too complex to comprehend probably cannot be held as a belief anyway). As a personal matter, one might wish to tend towards simpler beliefs just out of convenience.

The (2a) interpretation of GPC is a belief of this type.

If you ask me if there's a reason to prefer simple tested beliefs over more complex untestable beliefs, then the answer is yes, absolutely, at least to the degree that one values sanely operating in the physical world.

The (2b) interpretation of GPC is probably of this type.

Me:

Scientifically, I don't think you can have more. You get descriptions, and you get predictive power. To the extent that one calls a theory "right" when it gives compact desciptions and powerful predictive capabilities, then this will give you theories that are "right".

Wouldn't this suggest, then, that the question of the origin of the universe is not really a scientific matter?

You say:

But when one starts throwing out science in favor of of untested/untestable beliefs, then there is a problem,

But I fail to see how adopting the Big Bang theory is any less a throwing out of science in favor of untestable beliefs than is adopting GPC - if we're in 'scientific mode' then we shouldn't be demanding that our theories are "right", only useful, but people who adopt the Big Bang theory do tend to believe that is is right.

The Big Bang is testable in some sense - some of its predictions (those involving the condition of the world now) can be falsified, but theories like GPC are testable in the same way.

Preferring to believe simpler theories when the simplicity criterion does not really apply (when we are interested in truth), just as a matter of personal preference for convenience, is fine of course. But if we admit that this is our reason for adopting one belief over another, that gives us reason to be quite moderate in our committment.

The compactness is partly a matter of convenience, and partly based on the experience of compact theories usually holding up well

We have experience that compact theories usually hold up well? I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that...

If you mean historically, of our major theories in the practice of science, you have a selection bias problem; if scientists prefer simpler explanations as a matter of policy, you wouldn't expect to find less compact theories that were found to 'hold up' (as well as the more compact theories) just because they aren't usually being considered.

But if you mean something like that of all the theories we might come up with, assuming we had no bias for the simpler, we would find that the more compact ones hold up better, I don't see how you could be right. It is generally accepted that for any finite set of data, there are an infinite number of models that could be used to describe it. So for every simple theory that you would count as 'holding up', there are many (probably infinitely many) alternative theories that would also hold up just as well, as they would be compatible with all observed data.

And actually, since I take it that only one theory out of such a large, maybe infinitely large, set of theories compatible with the data set can be the simplest theory, it would seem that most of the theories that 'hold up' are not simple. We choose to use the simplest ones that are compatible with the data, but out of all of our potential choices, most that hold up are not simple.

(which suggests something about the structure of the universe).

Even if it were true that compact theories hold up well in comparison to less compact theories, what would that suggest about the structure of the universe?

I don't see how the way we can describe our experience of the universe necessarily affords us any insight into its very structure.

For example, Newtonian mechanics is still considered the "right" description of what happens at moderate speeds and masses.

By whom? I don't think I know anyone who would make such a claim. People might admit that Newtonian mechanics makes predictions that are generally right, but the claim about people considering it a right description seems very dubious.

Rex

Wouldn't this suggest, then, that the question of the origin of the universe is not really a scientific matter?

At some point, yes, but it's not entirely clear what that point is. It's certainly early enough for the "Big Bang" to be considered factual; details of what exactly it was that caused it, how big the starting system was, and such, are currently difficult to test (people are trying). But the basic idea that the universe was a lot smaller and is expanding outwards does not appear to be in serious doubt.

The Big Bang is testable in some sense - some of its predictions (those involving the condition of the world now) can be falsified, but theories like GPC are testable in the same way.

Yes, but you only get those predictions with the (2a) interpretation of GPC, which basically says, "Everything is just as you'd expect if there were a Big Bang, except a Great Purple Chicken made everything 150 years ago to look that way." If you stay away from the interpretations of the nature of time and history, it's basically the Big Bang, so it's reasonable to say that the Big Bang part is "right", and the decorations with chickens or lack thereof are not science.

Preferring to believe simpler theories when the simplicity criterion does not really apply (when we are interested in truth), just as a matter of personal preference for convenience, is fine of course. But if we admit that this is our reason for adopting one belief over another, that gives us reason to be quite moderate in our committment.

Yeah, that's part of science too. Committments are supposed to be tentative.

Also, there is a really good reason for favoring simple models over incomprehensibly complex models, as the latter cannot be used, tested, or even meaningfully be true-for-us.

It is generally accepted that for any finite set of data, there are an infinite number of models that could be used to describe it.

Right, but we don't have access to all of those models. We only have access to moderately-sized models, but we have access to vast data sets. This rather limits how many models we're likely to come up with that explain the data and are not equivalent to each other. Generally, we'd expect to come up with zero models, or one if we're lucky.

Even if it were true that compact theories hold up well in comparison to less compact theories, what would that suggest about the structure of the universe?

It suggests that the fundamental behaviors of the universe are, at least in part, not terribly complicated (i.e. basic interactions involve a low information content). It didn't have to be that way, but the success of, for instance, particle physics depends upon the existence of simple rules.

I can easily imagine a universe where such things were uncomprehensibly complex, or were directed by whimsical intelligences, or whatever. Fortunately, this does not appear to be the case.

People might admit that Newtonian mechanics makes predictions that are generally right, but the claim about people considering it a right description seems very dubious.

It's a matter of terminology, I suppose. Newtonian mechanics works very well over a range of situations. Quantum mechanics works well over a larger range, simplifying to Newtonian mechanics in one limit. Relativisistic mechanics works well over a different larger range, also simplifying to Newtonian mechanics. We have data that none of these can explain, and know of areas for which we cannot sensibly make predictions (e.g. quantum gravity). So they're all in the same boat. You either call none of them right, or all of them right. I prefer to call them all right, with the understanding that "right" only applies to their accuracy in a certain regime, since if I fail to call the "right", it is not clear that I can call anything "right". That seems like a loss of a perfectly useful concept.

cheney shoots hunter alf

2006-02-12T12:58:00.000-08:00

Dick Cheney Shoots a Quail Hunter
sparks rumors of ALF membership

Vice President Dick Cheney was on a quail hunting trip this weekend when he shot Harry Whittington, a 78 year old hunter, with his shotgun.

While making a press statement about the incident, he explained:

Cheney: Uhh, I thought he was a quail. See, he popped up out of the bushes, and the back of his head sort of looks like - well the important thing is that it was an accident, and he's doing fine.

from Yahoo News

The incident has led to a flurry of rumors suggesting that Vice President Cheney is a member of the controversial animal rights group, Animal Liberation Front, or ALF. His explanation of the incident and allegation that the shooting was accidental have seemed unsatisfactory to many; some have suggested that they were intentionally unbelievable.

Reports indicate that the group received an anonymous email message explaining an incident bearing a strong resemblance to the incident involving Cheney. The text of the message has not been released at this time.

Other rumors have suggested that the shooting had nothing to do with Cheney being a closet animal rights activist. According to a statement by an anonymous government source, Cheney had lost a large portion of his stock in Halliburton to Whittington in a poker game the night before. The source suggested that Cheney did not intend to kill Whittington, but only to send a strong message that he had no intention of ponying up and that there was nothing Whittington could do about it.

black people run faster?

2005-10-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

Black People Run Faster?

The Air Force Academy "has a zero-tolerance policy for any racial or ethnic discrimination or discrimination of any kind." Apparently suggesting that black people run faster than people of other ethnicities counts as discrimination. (source)

Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry was reprimanded for some comments he made:

On Tuesday, in discussing last weekend's 48-10 loss to TCU, DeBerry said it was clear TCU "had a lot more Afro-American players than we did and they ran a lot faster than we did."

"It just seems to me to be that way," he said. "Afro-American kids can run very well. That doesn't mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me that they run extremely well."

DeBerry first discussed the topic Monday, telling The Gazette of Colorado Springs the academy needed to recruit faster players and noting, "you don't see many minority athletes in our program."

So what's the problem here? I don't think it's the term 'Afro-American'. As far as I remember, that was simply the term that was used in place of 'African-American' or 'Black' during a certain period. I could be mistaken, but I recall it being the PC term of choice in that time.

DeBerry's pointing out that the program doesn't have many minority athletes doesn't seem problematic. I'm not going to go look up the numbers, but I assume it's true relative to the number of minority athletes in competing teams. If the program has less minority athletes than one would expect given the relative number of minorities in the Academy and in the population, DeBerry might even be pointing out a fact that might suggest a problem with discrimination (I don't know whether or not it does - but that seems like a reasonable possibility).

Was it wrong of DeBerry to claim that black people run faster than non-black people?

Maybe we should first consider whether or not it counts as discrimination. I assume that the Academy's prohibition on racial discrimination is prohibition of discrimination understood as "Unfair exclusion of a person or group on the basis of prejudice." DeBerry certainly isn't discriminating against black people then - unless we take running fast to be a bad thing. He's a football coach, so I doubt very much that he does.

His statements could, perhaps, be interpreted as suggesting discrimination against non-black people. If running fast is good in football and you think non-black people don't run as quickly as black people, it might make sense for you to prefer black people to non-black people when recruiting for a football team. Assuming the generalization is not true (as far as I know, it's not - but that's a guess) and that DeBarry or others would choose a black person over a non-black person even if the two actually could run as fast as one another (etc.), then DeBarry actually would be discriminating against non-white people.

But is he being reprimanded for discriminating against non-black people? I can only infer that the answer is no; the story would probably be more interesting if a coach was being reprimanded for discrimating against non-black people. I can see the headlines: "Coach reprimanded for reverse discrimination!" and the like. Again, I can't be certain. But I think most of you will feel pretty secure in assuming that this isn't about reverse discrimination.

So what is the reprimand all about anyway? According to the news report, no one on the team was offended.

Asked what, exactly, was wrong with saying that blacks run very well, DeBerry replied: "I don't think there is anything wrong with that. We have some Caucasian players that run very, very well, also. My choice of words, I probably should have said 'players,' rather than expressing a particular ethnic group."

Mueh made it clear that the entire idea DeBerry was discussing was inappropriate.

"Fisher's already apologized for that statement," Mueh said. "What we're talking about is speed. There's speed that cuts across black, white, gray, blue, whatever. It was just an inappropriate comment and you all know it was an inappropriate comment."

Do we all know it was an inappropriate comment? On some level, I suspect that many of us do think it inappropriate. Not because it was discriminatory against black people. Not even because it implied anything negative about black people. But simply because DeBarry made a generalization about people that was based on race.

In some sense, I agree that the comment was inappropriate - or rather, the sentiment behind it. If DeBarry is inclined to make generalizations about people based on race, it seems probable that he is just as likely to make negative generalizations as positive ones. This is, of course, based on the assumption that it is not true that black people, in general, run faster than non-black people - or at least on the assumption that DeBarry didn't have the kind of evidence you would need to properly make that sort of generalization. His statements seem to reinforce the idea that racially-based generalizing is okay. And strictly speaking, maybe it is - maybe there is nothing wrong with correctly making race-based generalizations. But most of us (aside from racists) don't think that there are any important generalizations (aside from certain physical characteristics) that should be made according to race. If there are generalizations to be made, they are the result of contingent facts about history - not because of intrinsic differences between people of different races.

intelligent design Michael Behe

2005-10-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Design Debates Continue

One of the many arenas for the debate over "intelligent design" education is the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania. Yesterday proponent of intelligent design education Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe spoke as the board's first "witness".

As is the case in most politicized debates, the level of discourse in not particularly high. Both sides tend to use arguments that don't make much sense. Though I don't have the time to go deeply into the issue, I wanted to make a quick point that is certainly worth considering:

A statement about Intelligent Design Theory from Intelligent Design Network:

Objectivity results from the use of the scientific method without philosophic or religious assumptions in seeking answers to the question: Where do we come from?

[1]: This statement seems to imply a contradiction. The scientific method itself is mired in philosophic/religious assumptions. Strictly speaking, (most) interesting assumptions are not necessary to the scientific method. Taking the scientific method without any generally controversial assumptions requires taking it as no more than a description of a method that a person might choose to follow. We cannot say why a person would use the method, or what they would use it for - or not, at least, that we have any reason to think that the scientific method would be useful for any particular purpose.

An analogy: Take standardized, multiple-choice testing. We can consider the method of this practice on its own, free from any assumptions, as no more than a potential method that a person might choose to follow. Without further assumptions, we can't say that we can use this method to test learning, knowledge, intelligence, etc.. As soon as we hold that the test is a test of something, that it is useful for some end, we are bound to a whole mess of assumptions.

The same goes for the scientific method. The real problem people have with the teaching of evolution is, I take it, that evolutionary theory is taught from the perspective of Scientific Realism. Scientific Realism is the philosophical position that we should take our best science to be thoroughly true. That is, if our best atomic theories involve electrons and protons and quarks and so forth, the scientific realist is committed to the existence of electrons, photons, and quarks.

One alternative view is Scientific Instrumentalism. On this view, we might use the scientific method because that method seems to be of practical use for us. It seems to allow us to make successful predictions that enable us to come up with technologies that we like, etc. But the instrumentalism is not committed to saying that our best theories are true, or that there really are things like electrons, protons, and quarks. The theories may be true, or they may not - the important thing is that they are useful. Many people find this an attractive view, especially those influenced by people like Kuhn or Feyerabend who point out the massive shifts in the scientific atmosphere from time to time. After all, if almost every scientific theory (except the most current) has been shown to be wrong in the past, it seems reasonable to expect that our current theories will one day be overturned. Maybe, hopefully, they will be replaced with better onces. But unless we have some clear indication that we have reached the correct theory (current science gives us no such indication, as almost any scientist would readily agree), we may never reach a point where we can be even reasonably sure that our current theories will not one day be overturned. If there is a reasonable chance that our current theories will be overturned some day, it does not seem unreasonable to take up a view of Scientific Instrumentalism as a kind of epistemic modesty.

If evolution was not taught under the philosophical assumption of Scientific Realism, anti-evolutionists would not have much cause for complaint. Under the assumption of Scientific Instrumentalism, evolutionary theory poses no threat - it would simply be presented as a useful theory. It would not be presented as true, and there would be no implication that using it or learning it even suggested that alternative views (like creationism) were wrong.

Evolution or scientific method taught either way is clearly not at all free from controversial philosophic assumptions. Teaching it without either assumption would require a context of epistemic uncertainty: "Here's evolutionary theory. It seems useful to know, but we can't really say whether or not we should believe it. Maybe it's true, maybe not."

The problem is that such (relative) neutrality may be practically impossible. Scientific education begins at a young age, and most of the children learning about it are not in a position to understand the philosophical underpinnings of either understanding. Perhaps by high school many students would be capable of grasping he basics of each view, but what would we do before then? Presenting science under the assumption of scientific realism seems much simpler. Theories would be presented as being true, and it is probably much easier to understand that a theory is true than it is to understand that a theory is practically useful even though it may not be true.

Case in point: Many/most students still learn something about Newtonian physics, even though no one takes Newtonian physical theory to be strictly true. The common view is that the Newtonian laws generally hold within a properly limited domain, but all sorts of examples show that they are not actually The Laws of Nature (whatever that means). But most students, and almost all of the younger students in any case, are taught the Newtonian laws as if they were true. It simply takes a certain level of sophistication to understand how some laws could work even if they aren't true (or why we would be taught something that isn't true), and most people don't have that early on (if they ever do).

What's the upshot of all this?

There is a deeper problem behind the current intelligent design theory debates, but these debates don't really touch on it. Problems in any number of areas come up when we take current scientific theory to be Really True - the fact that the current hot topic has to do with evolution is a secondary matter. If we want schools to teach the scientific method objectively, we would have to demand that scientific method (and evolution, and other theories) was not presented under the assumption of Scientific Realism. We can't even pretend to approach "objectivity" without turning science courses into philosophy of science courses. But we can't do that without making the subject far more complicated than most students can possibly understand.

And that is the real issue here. We want students to learn, but we don't want particular views forced on them. But until students do learn, mature, and come to a point where they can recognize and critically evaluate the philosophical underpinnings of various branches of study, it seems practically impossible to teach them in a neutral way.

We want to cross a river without getting wet, but the wood required to build a bridge is on the other side.

stupid white racist

2005-10-10T19:07:00.000-07:00

I'm a stupid white girl who hates black people

Really, I am. According to some some random website I've never heard of anyway.

From the site:

Amanda Doerty is the type of white girl who says she's not racist because she has many black friends. Occasionally she might also say things like, "Wow, he's really articulate for a black guy. . .

Like George Bush, Amanda Doerty may not be out beating citizens with New Orleans policemen, but she certainly doesn't care about black people. . .

This is all in reponse to my post about "American Idol" Fantasia Barrino, who happens to be, as a mattar of fact, an illiterature high school dropout and unwed mother. More:

The real irony is that Amanda's simplistic conclusion (black + illiterate = retarded) reveals her own lack of brain cells. The notion that black people are stupid because they choose to be that way is so wrought with racist undertones, that George Bush might have to nominate her to head of FEMA or the Supreme court. By Amanda's logic, black people who commit crimes are just lazy, so we should abort their babies to reduce the crime rate.

Amanda finds it rather difficult to place an individual within a larger societal or global context. But when you call yourself "Hot Abercrombie Chick," how cosmopolitan can you be.

To set the record straight:

I've never said that I'm racist because I have black friends. As far as I remember, I've never even said that I have black friends. (Nor have I said anything that might be construed, on even the wildest interpretation, as "Wow, he's really articulate for a black guy.") Some people are apparently so obsessed with ethnicity that they bring it into everything.

Take the situation in New Orleans after the hurricane. Everywhere you would see the words "poor" and "black" put together. As the skin-color-obsessed reviewer of my blog implied, "George Bush doesn't care about the residents of New Orleans because they're poor and black". I saw the sentiment in the news, even in a cartoon in my school newspaper.

Strangely enough, I never saw so much as an attempt to support the claim. People would offer reasons why Bush (and many other people) didn't care about the people because they were poor - these 'arguments' never got much better than pointing out that the more affluent sections of New Orleans seemed to receive aid first.

The strategy was clever enough. The affluent sections are mostly white, the poor sections mostly black. So just attach "white" to "affluent" and "black" to "poor" (never mind the lack of any clear reason for doing so) and you've managed to create a race issue out of the void. Did you ever stop to think that maybe Bush doesn't care simply because they were poor and didn't (and probably never will) pay the taxes that are being and will be spent on relief efforts and rebuilding the city?

Same strategy from this unfortunately clueless reviewer on the "black + illiterate = retarded" and "The notion that black people are stupid because they choose to be that way."

Where's the "black" in my equation? My inference from Fantasia's illiteracy to her retardation was obviously hyperbolic. It was not wholly a joke, of course - I have little doubt that Fantasia is not particularly bright. That's a pretty safe bet when it comes to illiterate high school dropouts who are unwed mothers at nineteen. If you were forced to put money on it, you know you'd be making the same bet. No one says that every single person who fits that description is stupid - only most of them. Go look up the statistics.

But what does this have to do with black people? I realize that Fantasia is black, but that's not much to base an while crazy theory on. She's also overweight, and she has funny hair. Why not "fat + illiterate = retarded" or "funny hair + illiterate = retarded"? I'm asking a rhetorical question of course. It's "black + illiterate" because race is what the reviewer had on his or her mind. And because everyone is of at least one (though almost always more than one) race/ethnicity, race is super-easy to force into any issue. And for people who only care about pushing an agenda and not the reality of any particular situation, super-easy is what it's all about.

And what's this about "The notion that black people are stupid because they choose to be that way"? I thought that the purpose of criticism of any person/thing was to actually criticize that person/thing. Does making up quotes serve that purpose?

For the record, I don't think that, for the most part, people are stupid because they choose to be stupid. Some people do things that contribute to a decline of their mental abilities, but for the most part it's going from dumb to dumber.

Why are some people stupid? Our best science (which some people are all too quick to cite until it tells them something they don't like) tells us that intelligence has an awful lot to do with genetics. And "intelligence" measured as IQ isn't some vague, wishy-washy, ethno-centric notion. It's a measure, accepted by the almost everyone in the relevant scientific disciplines, of general cognitive ability. It is not just highly correlated with your verbal knowledge or ability to answer possibly culturally-biased questions. It's also highly correlated with ability in mathematics (which is about as culturally unbiased as you can get) and general puzzle-solving.

It is widely accepted that intelligence is highly correlated with genetics - as far as I know, no serious argument to the contrary has been successful. Genetics comes first, so it's not likely that stupidity is causing a change in genetics.

So why is Fantasia stupid? Probably not because she chose to be stupid. It's probably because her parents were stupid. Or perhaps her parents were not stupid, but a random genetic mutation knocked her down into the short bus. Or maybe her mother drank too much alcohol or smoked, damaging the fetus-Fantasia. Who knows - perhaps Fantasia was very intelligence once, but she decided to give herself brain damage by using a lot of drugs or banging her head against the wall. But I doubt that one. My money would be on one of the first three.

But again, what does this have to do with race? I never mentioned it. I never said anything that would lead a normal person to think that my criticism had anything to do with her race, or that I wouldn't have said the same if she was a poor white illiterate unwed mother from a trailer park. (By "normal" I mean the kind of person who doesn't force the issue of race into everything, without reason for doing so.)

But I don't care. Call me a racist if you want - especially if your requirements for being non-racist include a prohibition on criticizing anyone who happens to be non-white. But don't forget to link me when you do. Send me all the traffic you want, and let everyone who reads your criticism wonder why you are so obsessed with skin color.

Fantasia Barrino Illiterate Retarded

2005-10-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

"American Idol" is Retarded

No, I don't mean the show. Well, I do. But I also mean "American Idol" winner Fantasia Barrino. If she read this, she might be offended. But don't worry - she can't: Fantasia Barrino Reveals She's Illiterate.

Okay, so we only know that she's illiterate, so we can only infer that she is retarded. I'll let you know when we get the results of the IQ test.

Why am I even bothering to post this? Just sharing the irony of an "American Idol" being illiterate. That's really something to aspire to. Be sure to tell every little girl you know that she too can be an illiterate high-school drop out unwed mother, if she tries really hard.

Chai Soua Vang Redneck Slayer

2005-09-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

Chai Soua Vang, Redneck Slayer

Well now, this is unfortunate:

HAYWARD, Wis. - A jury on Friday convicted an immigrant truck driver of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of six deer hunters during a confrontation over trespassing, rejecting his claims that he fired in self-defense after one hunter used racial slurs and another shot at him.

What kind of country are we in where we have lost even the right to hunt rednecks? This erosion of my civil (and natural!) rights has got to stop.

Okay, I realize that some people, especially that whiny PETR lot (People for the Ethical Treatment of Rednecks) complain about the "cruelty". But let's be honest - rednecks just aren't people, and it's silly to insist that they have the same "rights". Or any rights at all. God put rednecks on this Earth for our use and abuse and granted us dominion over them, so sayeth the Lord.

Besides, it's not like we hunt them for no reason; we have to control the population! They would be much worse off if we didn't. The females pop out baby after baby, and without some population control, they'd be fighting for scraps of food and eating the remains of their dead. Isn't it actually an act of mercy to give some a quick death by gunshot rather than letting them all suffer the horrors of starvation?

Okay, I know some will argue (those pesky PETRs again) that we could control the population in other ways. We could go to the trouble of capturing wild rednecks and spaying and neutering them, or as some have suggested, developing some kind of "redneck birth control pill". If we just slipped some of that into the beer supply, we'd have population control no problem.

But tranquilizer guns cost money, and the r&d for a redneck birth control drug could cost even more. Who's going to pay that? I don't hear PETR offering - no, they want honest taxpayers like you and me to foot the bill. So not only do they want to take money out of our pockets by effectively shutting down the market for redneck taxidermy and those delicious redneck jerky treats, but they want to slap us on the other cheek by taxing us for population control. You know what, you redneck-hugging PETR freaks? We've already got an effective (and cheap!) method of population control: it's called me, my thirty-ought-six, and a tree stand in the middle of redneck country.

So long live the dream of free America! Long live the tradition of father and son in matching orange hats and vests, out for the early hunt. And long live Chai Soua Vang, Redneck Slayer. Chai, America salutes you!

assassinate pat robertson

2005-08-24T05:17:00.000-07:00

Let's Assassinate Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson (you know, crazy right-winger who might possibly be the Antichrist) wants to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez because Chavez is a bad dictator-man.

Some Venezuelian Catholics who have had their own troubles with Chavez disagree:

Catholic theologian Sixto Garcia, of Palm Beach County, noted that despite Chávez's verbal clashes with Catholic authorities in Venezuela, it was "reprehensible and morally prohibitive," to consider killing a head of state.

"What this gentleman suggests is not an option," said the Rev. Maria Jimenez, chaplain of the Seafarers House ministry at Port Everglades. "I can't believe that a person in a position of responsibility, and an example of virtue, would recommend harm to anybody. As Christians, our first commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself."

Source: Bush critics, fans in S. Florida blast Pat Robertson's assassination remark

Folks, there you have it - seems the Christian camp (and let's be honest; we know Pat Robertson's whatever-the-heck-you-call-it religious movement doesn't count as Christian, especially not in comparison to the Catholic Church) isn't into assassination.

I must say, I'm a little disappointed. What happened to the Church that sparked the Crusades? Christianity used to be awfully pro-war. What changed
I'm not particularly opposed to the idea of assassination. In fact, as of this morning, I think I'm going to count myself as a proponent of it.

Assassinate Pat Robertson!

I'm hoping to convince the Church on this one. Possible justifications?

1 - Self-defense. I think it evident that Pat Robertson is a threat to all of us. Clearly his brand of crazy religion is a moral threat to all of us, and his politics are probably a physical threat. Not to mention his apparent desire to get potential terrorists worked up.

2 - Heresy. We used to burn people alive for that. We even burned people alive for supporting doctrines that didn't actually threaten the Church. Galileo might have gotten lucky and avoided the death sentence, but he came close enough - and the Church later accepted his ideas.

3 - Pat Robertson may be the Antichrist. I'll have to check with my local theologian on this one, but it seems possible. And if The Omen series (with the exception of The Omen IV, which I don't consider part of the series at all) is accurate (and who could deny that it is?), Christians are permitted to kill the Antichrist with seven rusty daggers.

So there you have it. Let's get to it.

(P.S. This is a parody. I'm not encouraging you to assassinate Pat Robertson. My stance on the issue of whether or not Pat Robertson should be assassinated is neutral.)

Pharrell Williams Best Dressed

2005-08-12T00:20:00.000-07:00

Pharrel Williams, Best Dressed Man?
What's this world coming to?

Darrell Williams from The Neptunes (whatever the heck that is) is number one on Esquire's "Best Dressed Men in the World" list.

.

Sure, that doesn't look terrible. True, every male lawyer and businessman in America does the tie-less unbuttoned white shirt under a dark blazer thing after work. But still. The vest thing isn't bad - he looks a bit like a clean-cut post-doc.

Maybe that's his new look - and I'd congratulate him on the change. But his fashion history is a truly sordid tale. Have a look:

Pharrell, what's going on here? Okay, he's not exactly dressed... but what the heck is on that massive chain around his neck? Let's move on - it gets worse.

What's this? You don't wear a clean white shirt while holding up some Star Trek hand sign, displaying the massive (and terribly ugly) yellow (yuck!) gold ring on your finger. You just don't...

I told you it was going to get worse. Look at me, I'm wearing a big coat with faux fur trim. On a bicycle!. People who wear big coats do not belong on best dressed lists. Big coat with fur (or faux fur) trim - that should get you banned for life.

Big camo jacket and some sort of a Walkman sticking out of his low-riding pants pocket? Ouch. What's with the star on the hoodie? Did he steal that from Zero-era Billy Corgan?

The worst... maybe. Camo under a letter jacket? I remember kids like that from high school - they didn't have time to change for school after deer hunting at 4am, so they just threw on their baseball letter jacket. Is that the look he's going for? Maybe it's a track letter jacket - P.Diddy (I think that's it, unless he changed names again) looks like he just got back from a jog.

whiny gi mom

2005-08-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

What's Up with the Whiny GI Mom?

The mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq warned she would camp outside the White House next month if US President George W. Bush refuses to meet with her here at his ranch.

"I don't understand why he cannot spend ten minutes of his time to talk to somebody whose life he has devastated," said Cindy Sheehan, 48, who has been camped out about a kilometer from the gates of Bush's ranch since Saturday.

from Mother of US Iraq casualty vows to follow Bush

Hey lady, our tax dollars pay for that ten minutes of time you want.

My apologies if I'm unsympathetic. I try not to be; I think it's sad when a person dies. I'll admit, I do get a bit annoyed at the constant media reports of "Two More Soldiers killed in Iraq!" and "Death toll now at 1,800!" and the like. Are they reporting every increase of 100 now?

Maybe it's just me, but 1,800 doesn't seem like that many. We lost something like 58,000 in Vietnam, and let's not even go into the World Wars. But hey, it's a war. Don't join the military if you think the risk is too great.

And if 1,800 U.S. deaths in Iraq is an outrage, why aren't we even more alarmed by the 40,000+ traffic fatalities in the U.S. each year? Maybe we can argue about getting out of Iraq once we get drunk drivers off of the road.

But back on topic: The Whiny GI Mom. She doesn't think we should be in Iraq. Okay, what are her reasons? Does she have a novel argument, or is it more of the same stuff we've been hearing since way back when? She said "I don't think aggression on a country that was no threat to the United States is noble". That's nice, but we've heard it before. Even if she's right, she's not adding to the discussion. So why waste the President's time?

humanitarian crisis arizona border

2005-08-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

"Humanitarian Crisis" on the Arizona Border?

In Beyond the season of death on the US-Mexico border, Joseph Nevins refers to the deaths of people attempting to illegally enter the United States - 221 in Arizona's Sonoran Desert last federal fiscal year, and 190 since October of this year - as a "humanitarian crisis".

I won't debate whether or not we should label the deaths a "humanitarian crisis" or not - the label makes little difference. Nevins, however, cites the deaths as reason for the U.S. to rethink its immigration and border policing policies - and that's a load of you-know-what.

I'm not claiming to be fond of our immigration policies, and I'm not claiming that our method of border protection is particularly effective. I'm sure there are many reasons we might want to rethink these policies. But I am disputing the claim that these deaths should qualify as such a reason.

Many people in Mexico want to come to the U.S. Perhaps if conditions in Mexico were ideal, this wouldn't be an issue - but fixing up Mexico isn't our obligation, and we aren't morally responsible for the results if we fail to help out.

Fixing up our immigration policy - that we are responsible for. I suspect that there is a good deal wrong with it. But even under the ideal immigration policy (or perhaps the least morally objectionable one that is pratically possible), not every person who wants to immigrate to the U.S. is going to be allowed - not every person will have a legitimate right to come in. We, then, have a legitimate right to keep such individuals out.

There will probably always be some possibility of getting past border security. We've put up fences, walls, video cameras, and increased border patrols in an attempt to cut down on the number of people who succeed in doing this. I find nothing about that objectionable. If some other method would be more effective, we'd have no excuse not to use that instead - but I'm sure the people in charge of border security are doing the best they can.

So some people can't get in legally and try to sneak in through the desert. Many of them, at least 3,000 in Arizona since 1995 and probably more, have died. It may sound callous, but so what? Sure, it's sad. It would be a nice thing to do to try to prevent these deaths. But are we under any obligation to do so? We have the right to control traffic through our borders, and these people are making the free choice to risk their lives by trying to sneak through. Are many pressured by poverty? Sure, but they still made the choice - and again, we have no obligation to improve living conditions in Mexico.

Some individuals, tormented by depression or failure, throw themselves off of bridges and tall buildings. I see the situations as roughly parallel. We've created environments that are dangerous in certain conditions - primarily when people choose, for whatever reason, to put themselves in a position a person would not normally put him or herself in. We aren't talking about environments that are dangerous when people stick to the normal, intended behavior for that environment. This isn't about people slipping and falling off of normal pedestrian bridges; it's about people who decide to endanger or kill themselves by climbing over the railing and jumping off the bridge, or trying to hike through a desert in summertime.

Are we (or the owner of the building/bridges in question) responsible for preventing that sort of death or injury? I can't imagine how we would be. We might as well sue gun-makers because some people use the weapons on themselves (or others, for that matter).

canada private medicine

2005-08-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

A Move Toward Private Medicine in Canada?

This is the last thing I was expecting - the Canadian Supreme Court struck down a Quebec law that made private insurance illegal.

I'd only recently discovered that Canada actually prohibited private insurance. I knew about the public healthcare system, but who would have thought that it would be illegal for people to go outside of that system and buy private health insurance? They'd still have to support the public system through taxes, so why not? But it turned out that things were far worse than I'd imagined.

But now I can take some comfort in the reversal of the private insurance prohibition; now the Canadian system is at least slightly less oppressive and morally repugnant.

What kind of person could actually support such a prohibition? What possible thought process could lead a person to the conclusion that it is okay? I'd always been curious:

Allowing people to buy private health insurance violates fundamental rights, McBane [coordinator of the Canadian Health Coalition, a healthcare advocacy group] says, because not everyone will be able to afford it.

"You can't discriminate based on the size of your wallet on something as important as healthcare," McBane says. "I would say this is an aberration and the democratic process will correct it."

from Canada inches toward private medicine

It's frightening that someone actually believes that. Allowing people to purchase services and engage in contracts with other willing people is a violation of fundamental rights? Of what rights?

McBane seems to imply that it violates some fundamental right of people who can't afford private health insurance, because that is 'healthcare discrimination'. Is it just me, or can no one else make sense out of this? Let's see... to begin with, Canada already has a system of public healthcare in place. Everyone has to pay for it, even if they also choose (or would choose) to buy private insurance. Everyone has access to this public healthcare. So it's not even an issue of some people being denied healthcare because they can't afford it.

So what fundamental rights are being violated? Did the Canadian God of Fundamental Rights decree that every person has a fundamental right to have access to the very same quality of healthcare as the wealthiest members of society? McBane apparently thinks so - I can't see how else he could think allowing private health insurance violated anyone's fundamental rights.

But by that logic, shouldn't it be illegal for wealthy members of society to pay cash for better or faster health services? I'm fairly sure that Canada does not prohibit doctors from opting out of the public health system and taking payments directly from patients - it's just illegal for people to get private insurance to cover such services. And as the article mentioned, wealthy Canadians sometimes head on down to the U.S. for better and faster medical care. Is that a violation of fundamental rights too?

You can politicize it and try to embed it in "the complex network of social structure and interaction" all you want, but the reality of it is the same: Some people want to make deals with insurers, trading for the guarantee that the insurers will assist them in securing the services of doctors. People freely dealing and contracting with other people. The only violation of fundamental rights here is occuring when the government decides to forcibly prevent people from such free interaction.

guestbook humor eugene

2005-07-30T13:49:00.000-07:00

Guestbook Humor - Eugene

I occasionally get the urge to remove the guestbook. Most of the people who post there don't read anything I've written, so it's not a terribly high level of discourse. But every once in a while I find something amusing enough that I give the guestbook another chance. Here's a real gem:

Eugene Debs

Do you really like all that Abercrombie/J.Crew/Gap Bull****? If you're as intelligent as you say you are can't you see through that pop culture bull****. To me that Britney Spears/Abercrombie stuff is garbage. Or are you really just some party girl who learned some philosophers names in a class and is projecting a false persona?

Eugene - You wouldn't happen to be one of those awkward closet-teenie-boppers who likes to whine about how Society is trying to get them down with like, conformity man, are you? For whatever reason, people stuck in this high school social outcast mindset are the only ones who ever seem to whine about "that pop culture bs".

Eugene Debs

Actually, "Amanda," I'm older and more educated than you are (that's not meant in a derisive tone, it's just a matter of facts). People have critiqued mass culture for years. If you want to wear a&f; whatever, it's a free country. All I'm saying is someone, especially a philosophy student, shouldn't fall for the bs that is marketed to them. Namely that you got to be blue eyed, blonde, wear a&f or banana republic, watch the oc and listen to the teen pop queen du jour to be accepted. If that makes me "uncool," in your eyes, hell I really don't care. I'm just not going to swallow what Hollywood/Madison Ave. is throwing at me, that's all. That Critical thinking you've learned in philosophy class should be applied to pop culture as well. Have a nice life.

Eugene - If you have in fact achieved a higher level of education than me, that reflects poorly upon whatever institution granted your degrees. It's quality, not just level.

I say that because I can't imagine how a person of anything more than average intelligence could make the ridiculous assertions you have (implied). Because a person wears a certain kind of clothing, it means that he or she has been brainwashed by the big bad pop culture beast? Absurd. You're the only one ranting about "coolness" here. You seem to have rather juvenile concerns on your mind, don't you think? I'm certainly not spending my time whining about people's fashion choices.

And anyway, what's this rubbish about Banana Republic, the OC, and pop music? I don't believe I've ever mentioned any of those in my blog. You think a person whose blog title includes the word "Abercrombie" must have "fallen for that bs that is marketed to them", no need for any actual indication of it? You, sir, are an idiot.

"That Critical thinking you've learned in philosophy class should be applied to pop culture as well."

How insightful. If I wear something from Abercrombie, it is simply necessarily true that I can't have thought much about it. The commercial told me to buy it so I did. Because no one who was thinking critically would buy Abercrombie. Because... well, just because.

I have some doubts about the whole higher level of education claim. How many PhDs (or grad students at least) do you know who spend their time saying "Hey dude, someone put 'Abercrombie' in their blog name, I'm gunna post in their guestbook about how stupid people who wear Abercrombie are!"?

Just for the record: I don't listen to pop music, or not much of it. I suppose U2 qualifies, and I have a few of their albums. I'm not sure what The Cure (in their better moments) are considered, but I suppose they might quality. Sorry Eugene. My frequent listening mix at the moment is pretty heavy on Bee and Flower and some of Steve Von Til's solo work. Good stuff.

As for the OC, I don't really watch television. Closest I get is watching The Simpsons dvds. I know, not exactly super-high-brow entertainment. I guess I forgot to apply my critical thinking to the Fox network.

Banana Republic? Well, I suppose they deserve some credit for encouraging the mid-middle class guy to put on a shirt with buttons and stop dressing like a total slob. Their female line is pretty unremarkable. I know, good gravy, the Man trying to make everyone conform and look a bit more like respectable people - Eugene must be right.

thomas cottone purple heart

2005-07-25T01:33:00.000-07:00

Thomas Cottone, Jr. is a Big, Big Man. Be Afraid.

Well, well - seems that the FBI has a special guy in charge of harassing people who falsely claim to have a medal of honor, like the main characters in the movie 'Wedding Crashers' who try to impress women by claiming they are Purple Heart recipients.

Cottone, Jr. [is] a special agent with the FBI who enforces a federal law that prohibits wearing, manufacturing, buying, selling or trading a Medal of Honor.

I can understand the manufacturing part. The government has rights to the designs of these medals. Still, shouldn't trademark law be enough protection for that? Always laws, laws, and more laws.

The wearing, buying, selling, or trading part bothers me more. If you earn a Purple Heart or some other medal, shouldn't you be able to do whatever the heck you want with it? Isn't there just too much irony in the fact that someone who is wounded "fighting to protect our freedom" is legally prohibited from freely selling or trading his or her medal?

According to the news report: "A bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives Friday would expand federal law to allow prosecution of anyone who falsely claims to have earned a military medal or a Purple Heart."

Federal prosecution for the offense of trying to impress a member of the opposite sex by pretending to have earned a military medal? Come on now, aren't we going a bit far here?

I think this is just another symptom of a terrible disease that has become epidemic: People propose legislation for no other reason than because they think it would be good. "Hey, let's preserve the honor of these medals by not allowing soldiers who earn them to sell them off. And let's fine or imprison people who falsely claim they earned one!"

People don't take legislation seriously. Using the awful coercive powers of the state to force people to abide by certain rules? Eh, no big deal.

No one seems to be asking the question "I know this might have a result we like, but are we really justified in using yet more force against people to do it?" Enforcing rules with the government involves pulling out some pretty big guns - shouldn't we perhaps limit ourselves to doing that only when we have a really, really good reason? Or just a really good reason even.

But then again, who cares. It's easier not to ask questions that might result in an answer we don't like.

Arthur Fletcher Cashes Out

2005-07-24T13:58:00.000-07:00

Arthur Fletcher, 'Father of Affirmative Action', Cashes Out.

"Arthur Fletcher, an adviser to Republican presidents and an early booster of affirmative action, died of natural causes Tuesday at his Washington home. He was 80. Fletcher served as an adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush."

He's dead.

Good.

universal health care again

2005-07-10T17:17:00.000-07:00

Universal Healthcare People at it Again

Oh, yeah, this is great - Universal Health Care Push Being Revived.

Yet another reason why democracy is rotten.

Auto worker David Pavlick says "The system we have now is immoral". Translation: Oh golly, I have to pay an awful lot for insurance and I don't like it. I sure would like the government to force people who are more successful than me to foot the bill!.

These people should be shot. (For legal reasons, I should probably ask you to not actually shoot them. Or beat them up, even though they really deserve it. So don't. Unfortunately, we don't have any laws against promoting communism.)

communist china politicizing trade

2005-07-06T13:33:00.000-07:00

Now Communists Want to Stop Politicizing Economic Issues?

from China berates U.S. over Unocal vote :

"We demand that the U.S. Congress correct its mistaken ways of politicizing economic and trade issues and stop interfering in the normal commercial exchanges between enterprises of two countries," the Foreign Ministry said in a faxed statement.

Details aside - the irony of an official of communist China demanding that anyone stop "politicizing economic and trade issues" and "stop interfering in .. normal commercial exchanges" is astounding.

flag burning irony

2005-06-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

Flag Burning - Oh, the Irony

In my last post, Quran Anti-Defilement Rule, I asked: "We can rip up Bibles and burn American flags (as we darn well should be able to do legally). So why is defiling the Quran a no-no?"

Well shut my mouth - maybe we don't: Vote on flag desecration may be 'cliffhanger'. According to that article, "The Senate may be within one or two votes of passing a constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the U.S. flag, clearing the way for ratification by the states, a key opponent of the measure said Tuesday."

Sorry guys - it's just a brightly colored piece of cloth.

Oh, I hear you - "...represents all we've fought and died for... blood of the patriots... gave their lives for freedom... and so on." I know. But we all recognize that the flag merely represents these things. And we all know that proponents of no-American-flag-burning laws or amendments aren't against burning a piece of cloth - they're against what it stands for because of what that cloth represents. In short, they're against people having the right to express whatever sentiment the burning of such a symbol represents. They're against the expression.

I'll tell you this: If such an amendment ever goes through, the flag should be burned. Every single American flag out there ought to be burned.

As for the lawmakers who support it: they should be captured as terrorists, secretly deported to a real prison camp (not the "gulag" of Guantanamo Bay), and beaten and tortured for the rest of their natural lives. I think that's being fairly generous.

quran defilement policy

2005-06-03T20:15:00.000-07:00

Quran Anti-Defilement Rule?

Maybe I'm missing something here... but why all this chatter about "mishandling" of the Quran?

from U.S. Confirms Gitmo Soldier Kicked Quran:

The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Quran and was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior."

All of the news I read on this seems to imply some general sentiment that this "mishandling" is somehow wrong. I don't get it. We can rip up Bibles and burn American flags (as we darn well should be able to do legally). So why is defiling the Quran a no-no?

Sure, the reports of it sparked some riots, but the "mishandling" didn't exactly cause riots - people got angry and made some bad choices and there was a riot. As far as I know, there haven't been any riots when American news shows images of foreigners burning an American flag. And even if there were, it would be the rioters' fault, not the flag-burners'.

I suspect that part of it has to do with the fact that we're talking about military guards, whose actions might be thought to reflect some official American/government anti-Islamic stance. There might be some validity to that. But on the other hand, we might view such actions as a sort of expediant means to reach some result - keeping prisoners in line, encouraging them to give up information, etc.

I suppose the issue is partly dependent on the question of what sorts of behaviors are appropriate in a prison/prisoners of war type situation. Most people agree that the most extreme forms of physical torture should not be allowed, but the issue of what might be called "psychological torture" isn't so easy to settle. I'm inclined to view non-physical methods as far more likely to be permissible, even if they are deeply offensive to prisoners.

the kennedy test

2005-06-02T18:27:00.000-07:00

The Kennedy Test

Senator Edward Kennedy seems to be proposing a new requirement for appointment to a federal court.

Speaking about Janice Rogers Brown, Kennedy said:

"She has criticized the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, the minimum wage, and fair labor laws. She's questioned whether age discrimination laws benefit the public interest. . . No one with these views should be confirmed to a federal court and certainly not to the federal court most responsible for cases affecting government action."

from Brown Model Jurist for Filibuster Fight

I suggest we refer to this as The Kennedy Test - you aren't allowed to have a position on a federal court if you don't agree with Edward Kennedy's views.

jesus doesn't like welfare

2005-06-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

Jesus Doesn't Like Welfare

Word up infidels - supporting welfare is a sin.

Every once in a while I come across some crackpot saying "Heeeey, Jesus wouldn't like your anti-welfare views, he was all about helping people and stuff!" Well, yes and no.

Jesus was pro-charity. You know, going out and giving food to the poor voluntarily. He wanted you to want to help the needy. He wanted you to believe that you should.

Funny, though - I don't recall Jesus waving a cane in the air and shouting "Throw down some silver or I break your kneecaps. Fund Jesus's Miracle Network - or else!"

In sort: Jesus never promoted mandatory "charity" like government welfare. And if I recall, the "Thou shalt not steal" commandment didn't come with fine print reading "Except in the case of taxation, which shall not be considered theft because of an implicit social contract obligating all members of a society to provide for the needy through welfare programs, along with any other program the government might enact." I don't know, did they edit that part out?

So, self-proclaimed "Christian Soldiers" (or whatever you're calling yourselves nowadays): Turn away from sin, end your support for government-funded welfare programs. If you believe in helping the poor, open your wallet and do it yourself. Sure, not everyone else is going to do it, so it might cost you more. But that's a shame - you never mentioned that you only supported the needy as long as doing so cost less than X percent of your income.

government action

2005-05-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

Government Action

I'm often amazed at how little most people think of suggesting that the government should do/fund this or that. It's possible, I suppose, that all of these people have spent a lot of time thinking about the question of what the government is or is not justified in doing, and have concluded that the government should pretty much play the universal Mommy and Daddy and do whatever seems best for us. But I'm not optimistic about that - I doubt that most people put much thought into the question of justification.

An example of this often comes up in discussions when one person is questioning whether or not we are justified in using force/coercion to do something thing or another, and the other person flippantly replies with something like "Oh, you mean doing X through taxation?"

The implication, of course, is that collecting taxes to feed the poor or do research or fund a war is no big deal - governments tax people, and that's just the way things are. But this is a pretty obvious fallacy. People who make such statements are appealing to convention to support justification. But convention isn't relevant. Convention means people are so used to something that they don't bother to question it; it doesn't mean that the activity in question is actually justified.

Supporting some program through taxation is supporting it through force. That's clear enough if you take a second to think about it. People have to pay taxes or they'll be forcibly jailed; if they resist, they'll be attacked and possibly killed.

That doesn't mean that taxation is automatically unjustified, but it really should make you think a little more before casually suggesting that the government fund this or that. The idea that a suggestion of the use of force automatically calls for justification (as opposed to the alternative of not using force) seems pretty universal - that's one of the underlying assumptions behind any kind of political philosophy that aims to explain why a government of whatever form is justified.

The Distant Hand of Uncle Sam

I also get the impression that people are comfortable suggesting the use of force to support various programs because that force is exercised through some immense, faceless entity - the government.

Let's take social security as an example - though any other will work as well. How many people, I have to wonder, who now support social security would still support it if they had to establish and keep it running through force they had to exercise themselves?

Imagine we were in a very small society - consider a town of 10,000 or so as a microcosm of our entire actual society. In this town, some people decide that a social security type program would be a good idea, to care for people who don't save up for retirement or get disabled and have no savings or disability insurance.

Maybe there's a pretty strong majority who think this would be a good idea - three out of four people, so 7,500 in the town of 10,000. There are two obvious paths for implenting this program. The first would be privately - it could be an opt-in program that only covered people who paid into it (a sort of collective insurance), or a more general charity program funded by whoever was willing to fund it and that covered everyone. The alternative is a mandatory public program - everyone has to pay into it, whether they like the idea or not.

Chances are, the mandatory program will cost less. People who have been saving up for retirement and paying for disability insurance probably aren't going to want to hand out more money. So if the program was optional, many of the people with the most money won't want to join. Most of the people who would benefit probably will. So the opt-in program would have a lot of people who needed money and not that many people who could provide it. The same would go for the optional charity program - there would be even less benefit for the people who could afford it, so there would be even fewer people putting money in and even more people who needed that money.

Because most people who support such a program would rather pay less than more, chances are they would prefer a program in which everyone has to participate. The only way to accomplish this would be through the use of force.

So, if we imagine that there is no distant faceless government to do the dirty duty for them, the people who want the program to be mandatory are going to have to enforce it. They will have to personally approach the 2,500 people who don't want to be involved in the program. They will have to personally demand: "Give me y amount of money for our social security program. If you don't give it to me, I'm going to lock you up in a jail cell. If you won't go voluntarily, I will use force to put you there. If you fight back, I will attack and possibly kill you."

I'm sure there will be some hard-liners who would be willing to do that. But I suspect that a good many of the rest would think twice about any sort of mandatory program.

The real-life application? I would suggest that we do this same thought experiment for any program we would argue that the government should support. It's the same force being used in real life, even though we get to sit back and have hired hands do it for us. If we're going to hold the position that some program is important enough for mandatory public funding, we had darn well better have a strong justificatory argument for it.

Protest Update

2005-04-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Protest Update

With one week of classes left, the Living Wage protestors are still occupying the Admissions Office. There have been reports of administrative action against them - I've heard that they were not allowed to register for courses for next semester, that they might not receive credit for their courses this semester, and that some of them might be expelled. But I don't know if these were merely threats or if any of them have actually been carried out. I'm fairly certain that no one has been expelled, and for reasons I don't entirely understand (the threat of bad PR maybe?), none of the students refusing the leave the Admissions Office have been arrested.

I've been asked to give some publicity to an Anti-SWA (Student Worker Alliance - the group behind the occupation) group's website:

SWA Go Home!

It's an amusing counter-propaganda campaign - not exactly my style, but I suppose it serves as a commentary on the level of discourse (or lack thereof) involved in the issue. That's the charitable interpretation anyway.

washington university SWA protest

2005-04-12T17:03:00.000-07:00

Please, Not on My Campus...
Belligerent Students Throw a Temper Tantrum

So here's the story: A student group at Washington University in St. Louis, the SWA (Student-Worker Alliance), decided to prove how very, very liberal and cool and politically active they are by holding a student protest. Some of the unskilled workers here only make around $8.00 an hour plus benefits, but that's not enough. The SWA wants the university and its subcontractors to pay around $10 an hour to meet the proposed "living wage" for a single parent supporting two children.

For shame. The workers, of course, make the choice to work here - no one is twisting any arms. Let's also remember that no one was twisting any arms when these workers decided to start having children they couldn't support on account of their not having any work skills.

I'm not against the workers. If you aren't interested in education and will be happy doing unskilled labor, that's your choice and I absolutely respect it. Money isn't everything, and it really doesn't take much to get by on if you aren't interested in fancy living. But I do expect people to live within their means. You shouldn't, for example, buy a house you can't afford to make payments on. You shouldn't blow all your money at the mall (or on alcohol, or on fine dining, or whatever) if you won't have enough to buy groceries. If you're going to have a family, you should probably finish school and at least go through some job training so you can support it. That's common sense, right?

It's not my job to fund your poor life choices. Sorry. It's not your employer's either. Come on, how many children do they expect employers to support? If you decide to have ten, can you legitimately argue that you deserve a bigger paycheck? Should the university also raise wages if someone has a drug habit they need to support?

Anyway, that's just my view on the issue. Disagreement is fine, discussion is fine. It's even good for you. But there are standards for discussion. You don't, for example, have your Pro-Your-Position group push its way into my home or business, sit down, and refuse to leave until I start doing whatever I'm doing your way. But the SWA at Washington University have done just that. They've been having a "sit-in" in the admissions office for a week, making it impossible for the staff to do any work. They chant, rant, and yell out the windows. They even made the secretary cry.

Finally, after a week, the Chancellor (the head guy and target of SWA protests since he won't get on his knees and submit to their demands of raising wages) has decided to tell them to get the heck out. Frankly, I don't see why he waited so long. The protestors are out of line occupying private property and halting everyone's work just to get some attention. I assume that most of them believe in the democratic process - and it's not very democratic to demand that everyone do it your way or else. (news article about the protests here)

Some of the protestors are still refusing to leave. No one has been arrested so far (though the police had to break up a group of the protestors who want to the Chancellor's house and protested on his lawn), but some students face penalties including expulsion for flagrantly disregarding university rules that obviously prohibit students from throwing childish tantrums in the middle of staff offices. Expulsion is, I think, very appropriate. The protestors could have been just as visible if all of them had remained camping out in the quad (grassy area in the middle of main campus), but I suppose that wasn't immature enough for them. They had to be disruptive, to prove how very much they truly cared. Yeah, right.

Viva Il Papa

2005-04-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

Viva Il Papa

Late notice by now, but the pope has died. I suppose one should take some comfort from knowing that he lived a full life and probably died as he would have wanted.

5:15pm - The lights are still on in the papal apartment. No news from the Vatican since the announcement that Pope John Paul II is near death. The gatherers at St. Peter's square are waiting and watching, sometimes singing.

4:52pm - I'm joining many people around the world and in St. Peter's square in voicing my respect for the dying Pope. Viva Il Papa!

mccain baseball steroids

2005-03-20T15:38:00.000-08:00

Drop It, McCain

Senator John McCain (the one who didn't get nominated to run for President) thinks he's Mr. Baseball. "Baseball", he says, "can't be trusted" to enforce a no-steroids policy. According to Yahoo Sports, McCain warned that "legislation might be needed to force the sport to change its steroids policy"

What's this? McCain wants to use the heavy hand of the government to change baseball's policies? I was under the impression that Major League Baseball was not part of the United States government... am I wrong?

News to McCain: You're a United States senator, not El President of Baseball. Sorry buddy. We didn't elect you based on your Official Baseball Policies Platform. Please, let the commissioners run their organization as they wish.

McCain's fellow senators ought to knock him off his imperial horse with the Smaller Government stick. Republicans used to believe in smaller government, didn't they?

real live sick room

2005-03-13T00:07:00.000-08:00

A Real Live Sick Room

The "Sick Room" was introduced in a cheesy "B" horror movie, Cradle of Fear. It is (in the movie) "The Ultimate in Snuff Reality" You log into the 'Sick Room' website where "You are the Murderer" - you watch a live victim on webcam and purchase different methods of real, remote torture. You can have the victim beaten, stabbed, pounded with a hammer, cut apart with a chainsaw, and even shot to death.

When I heard about Live Shot.com from this news story, I couldn't help but make the comparison.

What's Live Shot all about? You pay some money, log in to the website, and shoot animals with a remote-controlled rifle while you watch over a webcam.

This is only during specified "hunt" times - the rest of the time, you can pay to fire a rifle at a paper target. For this, you pay a $14.95 monthly fee, $5.95 to fire ten shots at the target, and then have the option to buy a DVD recording of your session for $9.95 plus shipping and have the paper target mailed to you for $2.95 plus shipping.

You pay more to kill actual animals - $150 per hunt, a currently unspecified "harvest" fee, a $175 taxidermist deposit, $60 for meat processing.

Who would want to do this? The Live Shot site indicates that their services are for "Disabled and handicapped hunters, as well as others who would like to try this type of hunting". Hunter "Dale Hagberg of Indiana, paralyzed and bed-ridden," plans on trying out the next hunt in April.

I must admit, I don't find the idea necessarily unappealing. It might be worth $5.95 for ten shots at that Hagberg fellow;)

still here

2005-03-06T07:52:00.000-08:00

I'm Still Here

Since it's going on three weeks since my last post, I thought I'd do a quick one to say that I'm still here. The past few weeks of school have kept me busy with tests and essays and the like, but now I'm off for a week of break. So there will be new posts soon. Promise.

nobody died when clinton lied

2005-02-17T12:46:00.000-08:00

Nobody Died When Clinton Lied

I see this "Nobody Died When Clinton Lied" bumper sticker on a few cars I pass by fairly regularly. Simplistic political rhetoric (and it's all simplistic, on either side) tends to amuse me. So I thought I'd try my hand at it for fun:

According to The El Shifa Tragedy:

On August 20, 1998 Bill Clinton launched 79 cruise missiles at seven defenseless targets in the Middle East. One was a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan called El Shifa. A pair of outstanding articles in Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ, Winter, 99) illustrates what a colossal crime was committed by this act of terrorism from our now-unimpeachable president.

According to a well-researched article written by Richard Becker, Sara Flounders and John Parker in CAQ, the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant was responsible for over 50% of Sudan's medicine. This included 90% of the most critically needed drugs.

I'm no more (or less) against Clinton than I am most any other politician of modern times. I don't follow politics all that closely, but from what I've heard, he did do a decent job of improving part of the American welfare system.

But that's beside the point - you aren't supposed to think too much about political rhetoric. You're supposed to think that you've thought a lot about the silly little slogan you slap on your car's back bumper, but that's just so you can pretend to be a concerned, intelligent citizen as shown by your sophisticated political awareness.

Maybe someone should put my modified slogan on a bumper sticker.

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animals sixth sense again

2005-02-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

More on Animals' "Sixth Sense"

A while back, I wrote Animals' Sixth Sense about the apparently (but not really) mystical ability animals seem to have of detecting certain kinds of impending danger.

Jan of UISION has written a followup with some additional information and speculation.

from Sixth Sense in Animals:

... A point of Addition, Clarification and Correction, the latest findings are about two years old and state that science has found a part within the brain, frontal lobe area, which plays a part within our controlling sense organ the brain. Some people are able, as with animals, of perceiving a natural catastrophe from the wavering electrical magnetic fields in a flex of discrepancy around them ...

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account information personal checks

2005-02-16T07:34:00.000-08:00

Account Information on Personal Checks
Does this concern anyone else?

Just an observation: I've never been a paper-check person. I tend to use a credit card when possible (many of them have standard fraud protection policies), or a debit card or cash otherwise. Some time ago I was setting up my credit card account for instant payments from my checkings account (standard American Express online card management option). It's easy - enter your bank routing number and your bank account number, both of which can be found on the bottom of your personal checks, and that's it.

I was always under the impression that you were supposed to keep your bank account number secret. So why is it, along with your bank routing number, at the bottom of all your personal checks? I've become somewhat wary of using checks, especially through the mail when there seems to be an increased risk of the check getting into the hands of someone who shouldn't have it.

A few years ago I remember a television special about people who would steal checks from the mail, use ink-removed chemicals, and then basically write it out to themselves or someone else so they could steal your money. Now that things are even more automatized and with so much done over the internet through direct transfers and the like, check theft seems even more dangerous because the thief would have your bank routing number and account number.

Maybe that hasn't become a problem (or hasn't become one yet) for some reason, or maybe there are some protective measures I'm unaware of. Maybe (hopefully) if there are, someone who knows more about it than me can explain it.

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liberals ideology science

2005-02-13T19:28:00.000-08:00

Ideology before Science
Wait, I thought that was a Republican Thing?

I found this rather ironic, considering all the criticism of Bush for letting religion interfere with scientific advancement.

More people are whining about comments Harvard President Summers made at a conference. During the conference, "Summers advocated study of whether there are biological explanations for the lower numbers of women achieving top scores on math and science tests," (source). Three university presidents wrote the following in an essay motivated by these comments:

"Speculation that 'innate differences' may be a significant cause of underrepresentation by women in science and engineering may rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases," they wrote.

This isn't a question of whether there are or are not 'innate differences' between men and women that might affect ability in science and engineering. Anyone who claims that that question has been conclusively answered is probably lying. Men have an XY chromosome pair, women have an XX - and on those chromosomes are genes that affect all sorts of things. That may or may not include differences in learning ability, thinking styles, and strengths and weaknesses at various kinds of tasks. I don't know. Summers doesn't know, and I don't think anyone else knows - genetics is a fairly new field, and there's a lot of work to do.

Does anyone else see the problem here? The people reacting to Summers' comments in this way as basically saying "Hey, you can't consider that possibility. It's off limits. It conflicts with our ideology, with what we want to be true, so you'd better not even mention it. And for goodness sakes, you'd better not do any scientific research that might give support to it!"

I for one don't see how promoting scientific research is going to "rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases". If this 'innate differences' speculation is wrong, research would only serve to show that these old myths are unfounded. That's a good thing, right?

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free exercise conclusion

2005-01-22T15:22:00.000-08:00

Why We Ought to Do Away with the "Free Exercise" Clause: Conclusion

This section wraps up this particular topic, giving a brief overview of the ground covered so far and showing how they all support the idea that the "Free Exercise" clause in effect arbitrarily deprives certain groups of rights that others are granted.

continued from The Arbitrariness of the "Religion" Label

Since state recognition of free exercise of religion as a fundamental right leads to an arbitrary and unjust distribution of special rights, the state should not recognize free exercise as a fundamental right. Not only that, but a state should not need to recognize free exercise as a fundamental right. I am of the opinion that any law the state cannot give a compelling justification for is probably an unjust law to begin with. Any time we are inclined to alter a law to prevent burdening a religious group's practices, we ought to be inclined to get rid of the law altogether to prevent burdening people who might simply want to act contrary to the law. Simply wanting to be exempted from a law should be, as far as the state is concerned, just as good a reason as that of a religious group whose rituals or practice would violate the law - the state should not be in the business as judging the worthiness of our motivations. If a law is important enough that it should stand even though people do not want to follow it for personal reasons, it is probably important enough that people should have to follow it even if doing so interferes with their religious practice. The right to free exercise should be considered no more than a derived right. We should be free to practice religion not for the sake of practicing religion but for the sake of our general freedom to do as we will. Any law justified despite its interference with personal freedom is justified despite its interference with religion practice.

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arbitrariness religion label

2005-01-22T15:20:00.000-08:00

The Arbitrariness of the "Religion" Label

continued from Excluded Groups, Limited Exemptions and Limited Recognition, and Compelling Interest

In this post I argue that "religion" is an ultimately arbitrary label. There is no fundamental quality that sets a religious group apart from a cult, ideological group, or explicitly non-religious group - except, perhaps, the historical accident of one group being labeled as "religious" and others not. This gives us reason to question the granting of special rights to "religious" groups that is necessary when "Free Exercise" is recognized as a fundamental right.

What Counts as a Religion?

Another method of reducing the trouble religious exemptions might cause would be for the government to limit which groups it recognizes as religions. But this too is problematic. There are some groups the state might legitimately seek to exclude. Those formed for the purpose of seeking religious exemption from a particular law simply because it would benefit members of the group to do so, for example, would be good candidates for exclusions. So the Church of Doing Illegal Drugs is probably out of the running. Or is it? It might so happen that the members of the church sincerely believe that they ought to be able to use currently illegal drugs. They might even believe that God gave them this right. Perhaps, even, they believe that God created the world in such a way that humans could discover and use mind-altering chemicals that God provided to help us relax, expand our minds, etc. Throwing in the talk about God, especially when the beliefs might be sincere, seems to go a long way in making a belief system seem like a religion. Maybe such a group would not be sincere in their beliefs - but then again, maybe they would be. And in any case, it is not clear that the state should be in the business of judging the sincerity of people's belief systems to begin with.

But aside from obviously rhetorical examples, the task of assigning the "religion" label is difficult. Is a written book required? Not every recognized religion has one. One or more gods? Not every recognized religion has those either. Some core belief system common to all members of the group? Maybe - but how big must the group be, and how general or particular must the belief system be? Even in the case of "established" religions, the many different sects and churches make it hard to determine what the truly necessary beliefs are. In some recognized religions, a person might count as a member of the religious group based on who she is rather than what she believes. Historically, it seems that the "religion" label is applied to groups based on their size, age, and the agreement of their members that they belong to that religion. But it seems unfair to privilege groups just because of size and age - members of some new "religious" group might have just as much or more conviction than those of recognized religions, and they might take their beliefs just as seriously. And the fact that all members of the Church of Doing Illegal Drugs agree that they belong to that particular "religion" does not seem to support their claim to status as a religion.

Arbitrary Divide

The difficulty one encounters in decided what is or is not a religion results from, I contend, the fact that "religion" is an arbitrary classification. Although a strict definition could be formulated, it would likely exclude some belief system or group that has been historically recognized as a religion. Even if we did manage to come up with a definition that encompassed all groups throughout history commonly recognized as religions, we could probably come up with hypothetical groups that would not fit the definition of religion but would still intuitively seem to fit the bill of what a religion is.

I have already shown that simple classifications based on belief in one or more gods, some shared core belief system, group size and age, and common agreement of belonging among members do not seem to be good criteria by which to define religion. Even if they could somehow be used in a definition that fit all historically recognized religions, it still is not clear that they would mark particularly meaningful distinctions. Even individuals who are openly opposed to religion (or the collection of commonly recognized religious groups) can hold very strong and sincere beliefs. Regardless or whether or not they belong to a group sharing those beliefs, is there any justification for affording higher official status and special rights to the beliefs of a member of a religious group (whose beliefs might not even be terribly sincere) over that of a non-religious person with strong philosophical or ideological beliefs? I can imagine no such justification.

Even if the classification of religion is not arbitrary (and I think we have good reason to believe that it is), the decision to automatically favor religious belief over non-religious belief is arbitrary. I might not have the Bible backing one of my strongly held beliefs, but I might have Locke or Hume or Kant or my own argument. What makes one better than the other? A religious belief is more likely to be true than a non-religious one. There are probably few if any points that all religions agree on, so someone must be wrong. If a belief's being a religious belief does not guarantee (or even make it more likely compared to a non-religious belief) that it is true, sincerely held, or an important part of an individual's life, there is no good reason to give religious belief special consideration when it comes to the law. Doing so privileges people who happen to be members of historically recognized religious groups. Recognizing free exercise of religion as a fundamental right grants certain individuals special rights denied to others who do not belong to "religious" groups. Because there is no justification for disparity of rights, this practice is unjust.

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excluded groups limited exemptions

2005-01-22T15:11:00.000-08:00

Excluded Groups, Limited Exemptions and Limited Recognition, and Compelling Interest

continued from Official Recognition and Special Rights

This post explains how recognition of an official (basic) 'Free Exercise' right requires that the government exclude some groups from the special rights it grants to officially recognizes religions. I also consider and reject a few counter-arguments asserting that there is a way in which the government might fairly and justly grant special rights (through religious exemptions) to certain groups recognized as religious but not to all groups.

Excluded Groups

I have shown that state recognition of free exercise as a fundamental right requires that new rights (derived from this fundamental right) be granted to members of religious groups. In practice, this requires that the state not recognize every group that might claim religion status as a religion. In a state that gives official recognition to religions but does not grant any special rights (meaning it does not recognize free exercise as a fundamental right), exclusion is not a problem - there is no harm in adding another group name to the list of official religions because nothing follows from that. But because a state recognizing a fundamental right to free exercise must grant at least some new rights to members of religious groups (if it does not, it is not recognizing free exercise as a fundamental right), there is great incentive for individuals to belong to a religion that might benefit them with some useful rights.

Hirsch mentions the case Oregon v. Smith, a case related to sacramental use of peyote by Native Americans ("Let Them Eat Indicidentals: RFRA, The Rehnquist Court, and Freedom of Religion"). Though the case does not directly relate to drug laws, it brings up the issue of whether or not Native Americans ought to be allowed to use peyote (which is otherwise illegal) in religious ceremonies. In any state that prohibits certain drugs, there will likely be a significant portion of the population that would be happy to find a way to get around those laws. In a state granting a religious exemption to a law prohibiting peyote, there would probably be a rush to the Office of New Religion Registration if that state would add just any group to the Official Religion List.

So states must exclude some groups requesting classification as a religion. If they did not, the fundamental right to free exercise would become irrelevant. Any law worth being exempted from would in effect simply become void from all of the groups seeking religious status for the purpose of getting an exemption. States would have to refuse some (or most) of the groups seeking religious status for these reasons.

Limited Exemptions and Limited Recognition

A state might seek to overcome the difficulties of laws becoming in effect void from too many exemptions by making it harder for a group to get an exemption from a law or by making it harder for a group to gain official recognition as a religion. The first method might only allow religious exemptions to a law when that law was shown to prevent individuals from adhering to required practices of religion, and the second could filter out groups whose allegedly religious beliefs did not seem sincere enough or important enough to them to warrant the granting of new rights.

Both of these possibilities seem problematic, however. It is not clear that it would be much less of a violation of a fundamental right to free exercise for an optional religious practice to be prohibited than it would for a religiously required practice to be prohibited. In the first case, it is true that the law would force an individual to violate her religious beliefs. But the second case may effectively prevent a person from practicing her religion at all, even if this is not a direct violation of her beliefs. I deal with the second possibility, limited recognition, in a later section.

Compelling Interest

The option of only allowing religious exemptions when not doing so would force individuals to violate their religious beliefs is too strong for some. Hirsch seems to favor the "compelling interest" test adopted in Sherbert v. Verner. By this test, whenever a law puts a "substantial burden" on the practice of one's religion (which includes optional practices as well as required), a religious exemption should only be denied when there is a compelling government interest in enforcing the law despite its burden on religious practices ("Let Them Eat Indicidentals: RFRA, The Rehnquist Court, and Freedom of Religion").

This test would clearly deny religious exemptions to laws against murder, assault, theft, etc., but it is unclear how many other laws would survive it. If the high rate of overturning for laws subjected to the similar test of strict scrutiny by the courts is any indication, a sizable portion of U.S. law would be subject to modification by religious exemptions. If a large portion of the population converted to some divinely-inspired libertarian-type religion, their beliefs might well justify their being exempted from the majority of laws on the books if by the compelling interest test.

This possibility, or the possibility of multiple religious groups representing a large portion of the population each being entitled to a religious exemption from certain laws, raises another issue. It may not cause a problem for a small minority religious group to be exempted from some laws. But problems might arise if a large portion of the population was exempted. What would the state do in such a case? It could deny exemptions to any group, but this seems unfair - why should one group be denied a right they would otherwise be granted just because another group can make a claim to be granted that right as well? At the same time, it seems problematic for the state to pick which religious groups are more deserving of a particular right when all groups might feel justified in claiming it. But the state would have to pick one of these options if it could only allow a certain portion of the population to be exempted from a law before serious problems arose.

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Unsupportable Assumptions

2005-01-14T15:50:00.000-08:00

Unsupported and Unsupportable Assumptions

Continued from What Does 'Irrational' Mean?.

Some people think that religious belief or belief in one or more gods is irrational. They might ask "What is rational about believing something for which there is no credible evidence?" (from the discussion of my post Why We Ought to Do Away with the 'Free Exercise' Clause).

Such a question clearly implies that the person asking it has made a number of assumptions regarding what justifies belief, what counts as evidence, what it is to be credible, etc. Let's say one of them is "You shouldn't believe anything for which there is no evidence." Try asking such a person what justification there is for that statement. They might simply snort and ask "What do you mean? I don't need to justify that - that's just the truth, plain and simple."

But what makes it true? How are we justified in believing that it's true? What evidence do we have to support the claim that we can only believe that for which there is evidence? Any attempt to answer what evidence we have to support the claim that we should only believe that for which there is evidence is going to lead us in a big ugly circle. It's just not going to work.

A slightly more clever person might say something like "Well, if something is true, then there must be evidence for it. That's why we should only believe that for which there is evidence." That's a nice try, but that doesn't cut it either. What's the justification for believing that if something is true, there must be evidence for it? Our slightly more clever person might say "Well, tell me something true for which there is no evidence." You can try almost anything you want - "It's wrong to kill people for no reason," or "God exists," or "There are twelve gods reigning over the earth." Something of that nature.

The reply will be something like "That's not true," "You don't know that that's true," or "How do you know that's true?" But these responses beg the question - the person you're debating is already assuming that you should only believe something you have evidence for. Her argument is circular.

Another way to think about this problem is simply to think about what sort of answer a person could ever give that would prevent you from asking "And what is your justification for that?". Even if you agree with something, even if someone convinces you to believe some point or another, there will never be a point at which you can't still ask what her justification for some assumption is. And if you keep asking, her answers will either become circular, or she will at some point concede that she "just knows" or "just believes" that some assumption is true. We're all in the same boat with that one - no one is in some special position of not having any ultimately unjustified assumptions.

The commentor in question, I gather, is one of those people who thinks she adheres to a "scientific" ideology while failing to understand exactly what science is or what science does, or that science and scientific methodology rely on a great many (admittedly, ultimately unproven and unprovable) assumptions. For more on the science topic, check out the following posts:

Regarding the Evolution/Creation debate:
Is Evolutionary Theory Scientific?
Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?
Man Living with Dinosaurs?
Is the More Comprehensive View of Evolution Scientific?

And another related:
Must a True Theory be Scientific?

Concluding Remarks

It's always fun and amusing to show the inconsistencies of someone's beliefs, and this is particularly easy for (almost all) people who claim the view about rationality I've been discussing (basically believing that you shouldn't believe something you have no evidence for). Because chances are that these people have some beliefs for which it should be clear, even from their muddled thinking on the subject, there is no evidence for.

Anything regarding morality, for example. Is it wrong to cause others to suffer for your own amusement? How about you, right now - would it be wrong if I did that to you in this situation? If you think there is anything at all wrong about such actions, you're making some (very un-scientific) assumptions. What's your evidence for thinking it's wrong? You simply believing it's wrong doesn't count as evidence, nor does the fact that most other people in the world probably agree with you - people are mistaken in their beliefs all the time. Do your "bad feelings" when you think about some type of action count as evidence that that action is wrong? The person in the position I've mentioned must either give up all such beliefs (really, all beliefs) or give in and admit that they are wrong. Because, again, every belief is based on assumptions, and those assumptions are based on other assumptions, which are based on others, and so on, until we are left with assumptions that we simply accept even though we have no justification for doing so.

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what does irrational mean

2005-01-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

What Does 'Irrational' Mean?

There are a few terms that I find misapplied and misunderstood over and over again. Topping the list are 'irrational' and 'unnatural'. Here's an example of a common (incorrect) use of 'irrational' from the discussion of my post Why We Ought to Do Away with the 'Free Exercise' Clause:

All religious belief (whether it has a name or is simply a vague belief in god or similar supernatural being) has the potential to lead to conflict simply because all religious belief relies to some degree on irrational thinking, validating this type of thinking. By practicing and justifying irrational thinking, people behave irrationally in other areas of life and come into conflict with others.

And a few others:

Belief in the supernatural is irrational. It has nothing to do with the values one might derive from that belief. That's a separate issue. Belief in something for which no evidence exists is irrational. Not all action that stems from religious belief is irrational, but the belief itself relies to some degree on irrationality.

What is rational about believing something for which there is no credible evidence? Something doesn't become rational simply because it can be rationalized. If that were the case, nothing would be irrational because we can rationalize anything. Rationalization of supernatural belief always relies in some way on at least one if not several suppositions that are not rational. This does not mean that some aspects of the rationalization aren't rational but that the rationalization contains and depends on at least one if not several arguments that are not rational.

The Meaning of 'Rational'

Irrational belief is simply belief that is not rational. But what exactly is rationality? The commentor I quoted seems to have the impression that rationality implies having some certain set of assumptions (presumably those she herself has).

But rationality isn't about what assumptions you have. Every belief is ultimately based on assumptions for which there is no justification - but more on that later. Rationality has to do with your process of reasoning for assumptions to conclusions. I'll consider a fairly strong version of 'rational' here, though much weaker versions as possible. In this strict sense, a rational belief is one that a person has come to through a process of reasoning that is logically valid.

So we don't allow anything like "A and not-A" ("A" standing for any particular assertion, like "grass is green" or the like), or "If A, then B. A is the case. Not-B." and so on.

So is there anything irrational about religious belief in general? Unless someone can show some contradiction that is necessary to religious belief (or belief in one or more "higher powers", etc.), the answer to that has to be "no".

About Assumptions

The commentor in question seems to think that some assumptions aren't "good enough" to count as rational. And of course, although some particular belief might be rational within a person's larger belief system (it follows from other beliefs he or she has, or at least does not contradict them), if some of their assumptions are irrational, their belief system as a whole won't be a rational one.

But, as I mentioned before, every belief system ultimately rests on certain assumptions that cannot be proven, argued for, or even supported by evidence - this is what the commentor I've quoted fails to realize.

Unsupported and Unsupportable Assumptions - click here to continue.

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Muslim Headscarves Tennessee

2005-01-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

Tennessee School Allows Muslim Headscarves

I saw this in this news and thought I'd use it as a timely illustration of the current topic under discussion, Why We Ought to Do Away With the Free Exercise Clause.

from Tenn. School Allows Muslim Headscarves:

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. - A public high school changed its dress code to allow religious headscarves after a national civil rights group for Muslims complained to the principal on behalf of a student.

...

The letter said religious headscarves are protected by the Constitution and laws against discrimination in a public school.

Rick Smith, an assistant superintendent for Hamilton County schools, said the school had banned all head wear, but the principal agreed to allow Emily Smith's hijab after attorneys were consulted.

"This particular item was a little different because it is a religious garment," Rick Smith said.

This is what I'm talking about in Official Recognition and Special Rights. The no-headgear school policy isn't exactly a law, but it came about because of various laws allowing administrations at public schools the power the make rules regarding student attire.

Like most public schools, this one didn't allow headwear. Not for anyone, regardless of religion. There was no intention to infringe on anyone's religious practices - but it so happened that the version of Islam practiced by the girl in question required her to wear a hijab. This is an example of laws/rules generally considered to be acceptable that happen (accidentally) to interfere with the practice of some people's religion.

There are a variety of ways a rule or law might interfere. Some laws might compel a person to do something directly against their religious beliefs (or face punishment for refusing). Others might prohibit a person from carrying out either a mandatory or an optional religious practice.

So we are left in the position of having some rules and laws (some of which, at least, we can assume are justified) that conflict with the "free exercise" right if we consider it a fundamental right - that is, one from which other rights (wearing a hajib to public school for example) are derived.

I'm getting ahead of the order of discussion a bit here, but when situations like this arise, I think there should be one of two outcomes: (1) We realize that the law or rule was either wholly or partially unjustified to begin with, then change or eliminate it, or (2) if the rule or law is wholly justified, no religious excemptions should be made.

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official recognition religion

2005-01-12T13:37:00.000-08:00

Official Recognition and Special Rights

continued from Why We Ought to Eliminate the Free Exercise Clause.

This post explains why recognizing the free exercise of religion as a fundamental right requires both that the state grant official recognition to some groups as "religious" and that these groups be given special rights.

Official Recognition of Religion

In his essay "Let Them Eat Indicidentals: RFRA, The Rehnquist Court, and Freedom of Religion", H.N. Hirsch cites the Boerne case as an example of a law interfering with individuals' religious exercise. A Catholic archbishop wanted to expand a church in Boerne, Texas because it was not big enough to seat the entire congregation. During some Sunday masses, forty to sixty members had no seats. For zoning reasons concerning historical preservation, the archbishop was denied a building permit. According to Hirsch, this was a violation of the right to free exercise for the individuals who could not be seated at mass.

Accepting this as a violation first requires recognizing Catholicism as a religion. Even if the state does not always grant religious exemptions to remedy such violations (the court did not in Boerne), its very recognition of a violation gives the group in question the status of state-recognized religion. There could be no violation of an individual's right to free exercise of religion if religion was not involved to begin with. Questions involving individuals rather than groups require group recognition as well. A person's religious practice could only be protected as the exercise of religion if it was distinguished from non-religious and non-protected practices, which would require the recognition of a (presumably shared) belief system as a religion that could motivate religious practice.

Special Rights for State-Recognized Religions

Mere state recognition of religious groups is not the most important issue at hand. If the state kept a list of officially recognized religions but did not use it for anything, complaints from groups excluded from that list would be mostly superficial. There would be no real reason for the state to exclude groups from the list anyway; recognizing even the most obviously contrived "religions" would do no harm. State recognition of a fundamental right to free exercise of religion is problematic because it requires the state to give special rights to members of religious groups, which makes it necessary to exclude some groups from consideration. Members of excluded groups are afforded less rights than members of recognized groups.

The state cannot recognize a fundamental right to free exercise without granting new rights to members of recognized religious groups. These rights often take the form of religious groups being considered for exclusion from certain laws because they are religious groups. Non-religious groups would not be considered for exclusion in most cases. In the Boerne case, the possibility of making an exception to the zoning laws for the archbishop and the church was considered because not doing so would (it was claimed) violate the right to free exercise of people who could not sit in the church during mass.

If the state had made an exception to the zoning laws to protect some other right, it would not be a matter of the state protecting the right to free exercise. Fundamental rights must grant new rights - otherwise they are just derived rights. Although I might have the right to eat breakfast whenever I please, this is not a fundamental right. I only have this right insofar as I can derive it from true fundamental rights I have: the basic right to act freely without harming others and the right to dispose of my property (my food in this case) as I see fit, for example. Derived rights are no longer rights when a change in condition makes it the case that they can no longer be derived from fundamental rights. If my toaster is broken and I cannot afford a new one, for example, I cannot cite my right to eat breakfast whenever I please as justification for stealing my neighbor's toaster. Later, I will argue that the right to free exercise actually should be considered a derived right rather than a fundamental right. But for now, I will continue dealing with the claims of people like Hirsch who do consider free exercise a fundamental right.

next: Excluded Groups, Limited Exemptions and Limited Recognition, and Compelling Interest

Other Posts on this Topic:

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jack van impe devil

2005-01-09T21:50:00.000-08:00

Jack Van Impe and the Devil

Left: Jack Van Impe
Right: The Devil*

* - also known as: Abaddon, The accuser of our brethren, The adversary, Apollyon, Beelzebub, Belial, dragon, the enemy, father of all lies, god of this world, king of Babylon, king of Tyrus, little horn, Lucifer, man of sin, that old serpant, power of darkness, power of the air, prince that shall come, prince of Tyrus, prince of this world, Rexelle Van Impe, ruler of the darkness of this world, Satan, serpant, son of perdition, the temptor, and the wicked one.

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eliminate free exercise clause

2005-01-08T13:53:00.000-08:00

Why We Ought to Do Away with the 'Free Exercise' Clause

I don't like the 'Free Exercise' clause - the one granting Americans the right to freedom of religion. In fact, I would prefer that it be done away with. My reason for this is not that I dislike religion, or that I think (generally) anyone's religious practices should be prohibited. Those of you who regularly read my postings know that I'm generally against government prohibition of most everything that doesn't involve one individual harming another.

The problem with the 'Free Exercise' clause is that it is interpreted as giving people a fundamental (though not absolute) right to practice their religion - fundamental meaning a right from which other rights are derived. The right to free exercise has been claimed by some groups as reason to make them excempt from certain laws - Native Americans and laws prohibiting peyote use, for example.

In the next few posts, I'm going to lay out a fuller version of my basic argument, which is as follows:

The free exercise of religion should be considered, at best, a right derived from fundamental rights. Only fundamental rights confer new rights upon individuals, so free exercise as a derived right would not involve rights individuals do not already have.

State recognition of free exercise as a fundamental right requires state recognition of religious groups, as well as the granting of special rights (such as possible exemptions from certain laws) to these groups. This requires that other groups not be granted these rights (including non-religious groups and groups simply denied the 'religious' classification). These groups now have less rights than officially recognized religious groups. This is problematic because the classification of certain belief systems as religious rather than non-religious is ultimately arbitrary, so granting special rights to 'religious' groups is itself ultimately arbitrary and unjust.

Other Posts on this Topic:

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support blogad sponsors

2005-01-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

Support My Blogads Sponsors

As a thank you to my blogads sponsors (those on the leftbar), and because most of the sites are pretty amusing and/or interesting, I thought I'd remind my readers to take a look at any of them that might be of interest. We have:

PBS Program Club

Everyone loves PBS, right? Well, this time they aren't asking you for money - they're just trying to promote their programming by encouraging you to start a discussion club. It sounds pretty simple, and potentially entertaining - and did I mention they'll send you a free gift basket of food?

Being Good

A Novel by Todd A. Described as "Schoolgirls, Strippers and Secretaries. Slav O Se has girl trouble. He should. He's an unrepentant lothario, a teacher at a girls' high school, and he has four sisters." Sound good? Then check it out.

Conservative Match

This one has been up there a long time - apparently I attract a lot of conservatives. If you're into online dating sites (hey, if nothing else, it's fun to look at the profiles) and you think you'd fit in, consider signing up.

Kevin McCullough

Conservative "Radio Talk Show Host, Syndicated Columnist, and past recipient of the Tesla and Marconi Awards". Recent posts on his blog include "N.J.'s Schundler calling Corzine on the carpet..." and "KERRY trashes BUSH in BAGHDAD..."

Tickets in a Flash!

You can buy tickets to sporting events, concerts, and the theatre here. Tickets to everything from football and basketball events (if you're into that sort of thing) to Hilary Duff concerts. You do love Hilary Duff, right?

Other site of interest: A Theory of Power

I found this link from the other ads on my site. A Theory of Power, "Jeff Vail's Analysis of Pattern, Heirarchy, and Human Mechanics" is a blog, and there's also a book with the "A Theory of Power" name. I found the post on "swarming" to be very interesting. Swarming is a "Swarming is the tactical (or, in some cases, operational) maneuver of converging of highly distributed forces at a single point to leverage the military principle of mass." Less than peaceful WTO protestors used it, as did the Scythians at Eschate when Alexander the Great attacked.

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fundamentalists alexander great

2005-01-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

Did Fundamentalists Kill Alexander the Great?
(the movie, I mean)

Oliver Stone sure thinks so:

"There's a raging fundamentalism in morality in the United States. From day one audiences didn't show up. They didn't even read the reviews in the south because the media was using the words: 'Alex is Gay'."

(from Stone blames 'fundamentalism' in US for 'Alexander' flop)

Well folks, Alexander was gay. Both in the movie and, as far as I know, in real life. Or so I remember from a book I read on him way back in junior high. Okay, maybe he swung both ways, but you wouldn't have known it from the movie. Was there any guy in there who wasn't trying to seduce him? I'm convinced there wasn't.

And that's certainly nothing to complain about, especially with Jared Leto as his permanent boy-love. You have to love that guy - especially if you saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch (the movie).

But, unfortunately, the amusing constant-homosexual-seductive atmosphere was the only interesting thing about the whole movie. I'm not picky when it comes to movies - I'll watch and enjoy just about anything (I know, lack of taste). But I was just waiting for Alexander to die to get the movie over with an hour (or less) into it.

I usually like Oliver Stone movies, so I was surprised that I really didn't like this one. But something felt off about it. I think it had something to do with the old guy (Anthony Hopkins) narrative framing device. All of the Egyptian stuff was wholly unbelievable. Maybe the backgrounds weren't done well enough, maybe it was all a little too bright and clean.. but for whatever reason, it might it very difficult for me to get into the movie.

So maybe some people didn't watch the movie because they're crazy fundamentalists. But sorry Oliver.. a lot of them probably didn't watch because it stunk.

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true theories scientific

2005-01-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

Must a True Theory be Scientific?

In the discussion of my post Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?, a commentor expressed interest in some epistemological issues related to the recent discussions on the falsifiability requirement of scientific theories. So I'll consider the following questions now: Can a theory be true even if it isn't scientific?

Theories Regarding the Past

For some theories, particularly those regarding the past, whether or not a theory is scientific is a matter of chance that has nothing to do with the theory itself. A (fictional) example:

Theory A: The Color of Prehistoric Flower J32
This theory states that because of various environmental factors, "Flower J32", a plant known to exist in prehistoric times (from carbon dating of fossils), had bright orange colored petals.

Let's assume that Theory A is true. The flower in question really did have orange petals. So the theory is true, but is it scientific?

That will depend on what are basically chance factors. It may be the case that there exist fossils of Flower J32 that would allow us to determine what color it was. Maybe a specimen was somehow encased in amber (or some similar occurence), so the actual color would be preserved. In this case, Theory A would meet the falsifiability requirement because the finding of such fossils could either confirm it or show it to be false.

But the situation might be otherwise. Perhaps, for whatever reason, every bit of evidence that could possibly be used to give direct evidence for the color of Flower J32 has been destroyed. The theory is still true, but in this case there is no evidence that could possibly falsify it - this, it is not scientific.

Conclusion:

It's probably no surprise to most people that a theory doesn't have to be scientific to be true. But it's a point worth repeating. I chose the example I did because of its special relevance to theories I've recently been discussing. In many cases of theories regarding the past, much of the possible evidence may no longer exist. One problem, of course, is that it is often not practically possible to know whether the evidence no longer exists or if we just haven't found it. We won't know, then, whether or not some theories are scientific. We may never know that some are not scientific due to the destruction of evidence because we would never be sure that all the possible evidence had been destroyed.

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comprehensive evolutionary theory scientific

2005-01-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

Is the More Comprehensive View of Evolution Scientific?

continued from: Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific? .

By "comprehensive" view of evolutionary theory, I mean evolutionary theories that make claims about the past - particularly the claim that evolution was the mechanism by which life on earth originally arose and became what is is today. (This differs from the limited view as described in the earlier post, which I consider as theories that only consider current and ongoing processes).

Again, I'm considering whether or not such theories meet the criterion of falsifiability, which must be met for a theory to be scientific. And again, although the non-falsifiability of a theory makes it non-scientific, that does not mean that it isn't true - it means that it cannot be dealt with from within scientific methodology.

I'm going to subdivide the comprehensive view into two other types. The first category will be specific comprehensive evolutionary theories. These are theories that make very specific predictions about what earlier life on earth was like (and makes specific predictions about the future). The second category will be general comprehensive evolutionary theories that more or less state that evolution is the mechanism by which life formed and evolved without providing specific predictions about what past life would have been like or about future life.

Specific Comprehensive Evolutionary Theories

Since these theories make specific predictions, they will be (partially) falsifiable. Predictions about the future are easy enough to falsify - just wait to see what happens. Predictions about what life in the past was like are not quite as easy. In some cases, it may be the case that the evidence to falsify (or confirm) a prediction is no longer present. In these cases, the prediction does not meet the falsifiability requirement. But we probably shouldn't assume that we couldn't ever come across some evidence that could falsify a prediction about past life. In the future we might find some new method by which we can gain information about the past, and that new methodology may well be able to falsify predictions that we couldn't falsify before. So predictions about past life on earth should be considered at least possibly falsifiable.

It is important to note that I've been referring to specific predictions as being falsifiable or not rather than the theory as a whole. There is an important difference between the predictions a theory makes and the whole of a theory itself. Imagine, for example, a situation in which some leading evolutionary scientist made a number of predictions about past life on earth. And it so happens that some new archeological findings show that these predictions were wrong. Are evolutionists going to say "Well then, I guess they falsified evolutionary theory,"? Of course not. The general part of the theory will be held on to, and only the particular formulation of evolutionary theory will be considered as mistaken. Which brings us to:

General Comprehensive Evolutionary Theories

General comprehensive evolutionary theories are the foundation of specific theories (though they also stand on their own). They don't make specific predictions. Rather, these theories simply assert that evolution was the mechanism by which life on earth formed and came to be what it is today.

These theories do not meet the falsifiability requirement. There are no specific predictions necessary to a general comprehensive evolutionary theory - the claims are very general. So general, in fact, that there is really no evidence that could falsify them.

This is evident when you consider what sort of evidence could possibly falsify the most general comprehensive evolutionary theory. Even if man and dinosaurs lived together, that wouldn't falsify a general theory. The general theory would simply imply that evolution worked out in such a way that dinosaurs and man happened to live at the same time.

The David E. Thomas April Fool's Joke

This site explains why David E. Thomas played the man being eaten by a dinosaur joke to point out the gullibility of creationists. He writes:

Earlier this year, I debated Paul Gammill at our January 13th NMSR meeting. Gammill presented the case for "Intelligent Design," and I presented the case for "Evolution." Both of us had agreed to present hypothetical findings which could, in principle, falsify the theory each of us was defending. One of the arguments I presented as something which would certainly call evolution into question, if it were ever discovered, would be to find the bones of a human and a dinosaur inextricably linked, as shown below.

from http://www.nmsr.org/april_fool.html

Response to Thomas:

Thomas is correct in asserting that the finding of such a fossil (the bones of a man inside a dinosaur's stomach) would falsify some specific evolutionary theories - those predicting that dinosaurs and man did not live at the same time. But as I mentioned before, such a finding would not mean that Evolution (that is, the general evolutionary theory) had been disproven. Perhaps we just got something with the specific theory wrong, and it turns out that the mechanism of evolution had man and dinosaur living side by side.

Conclusion:

Any specific evolutionary theory may well be falsifiable, assuming that the kind of evidence that would be needed to falsify it has survived to our time. But we should remember that it will likely be difficult to tell whether evidence that would falsify specific predictions simply never existed or if it just doesn't exist anymore. Still, in general, specific evolutionary theories have at least the possibility of being falsifiable, and are thus potentially scientific.

But "Evolution" in general is not falsifiable - mostly, perhaps, because its claims are so general that they could accomodate pretty much any evidence found (from the past or the future). Thus, Evolution (general evolutionary theories) are non-falsifiable and non-scientific.

Again, I want to emphasize the fact that the non-scientific status of general evolutionary theory does not make it false. It may not (depending on your epistemology) even mean that we don't have good reason to believe in general evolutionary theory. To put my own cards on the table, I happen to consider the general theory of evolution as being probably true, despite its being a non-scientific theory.

Is Evolutionary Theory Scientific?
Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?
Man Living with Dinosaurs?
Is the More Comprehensive View of Evolution Scientific?

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other blogs of interest

2005-01-03T17:13:00.000-08:00

Other Blog Postings of Interest
from around the Blogosphere

Found on Phi Island, Thailand
by Wizbang

Photos from a camera found in Thailand - Wizbang helps spread the word with the intent of finding the owners. Some interesting conversations in the Comments section.

Republican Ethics Repeal Act of 2005
by Eschaton

Discontent with attempts to weaken the House ethics rules. Some claim the changes some are trying to make will make it easier for congresspeople to accept bribes, among other things.

Al Maghrib Community Forums: Christians Cause Tsunamis
by Right Wing News

Are the Christians at fault? Yeah.. you never know, right? There was a posting on an American Muslim bulletin board listing disasters since 1815... most of them took place during the months when Christmas and Easter are celebrated.

Retirement Age
by Matthew Yglesias

A suggestion for how to deal with Social Security retirement age - reduced payments for people who retire earlier, and proportionally greater payouts for those who retire later.

World Relief Day Set For January 12
by One Hand Clapping

Call for donations, to World Vision or to other charities. Donald Sensing donates to the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

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man living with dinosaurs fossil

2005-01-03T13:46:00.002-08:00

Man Living with Dinosaurs?

from Bibleland Studios - Dinosaurs Swallows Human?

I found this on Bibleland Studios through an ad on my post Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?.

There's more at this site, set up by those who "found" the fossil. There's some relevance to the topic of whether or not evolutionary theory is falsifiable, which will be evident in the next post.

Other posts on this topic:

Is Evolutionary Theory Scientific?
Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?
Man Living with Dinosaurs?
Is the More Comprehensive View of Evolution Scientific?

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limited evolutionary theory scientific

2005-01-02T19:22:00.000-08:00

Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?

continued from Is Evolutionary Theory Scientific?

First, I'll consider the more limited meaning of evolutionary theory that doesn't involve claims about the past. To keep it simple, I'll consider this theory as just involving something like the following: "The fittest members of a species survive to pass their genes on to the next generation, so traits that make an individual more likely to survive to produce offspring will be more likely to appear in future generations."

This theory is of course falsifiable to a certain extent - if the genetic assumptions included in it weren't right, experiments could show that to be the case. If, for example, the offspring of two individuals did not have a genetic makeup derived from theirs, that particular aspect of the theory would be shown false.

But a theory needs to be generally falsifiable, not just partially falsifiable, to count as scientific. Otherwise all sorts of whacky, partially-falsifiable theories would count as scientific. So the question is whether or not the limited evolutionary theory as a whole is falsifiable.

The limited evolutionary theory does make future predictions: the fittest members of a any particular species will, in general, pass on their genes/traits to future generations more than less fit members will. This seems at least possibly falsifiable - you could observe a species over time and see that the genes/traits passed along were not generally from its fittest members. This would show that this particular formulation of evolutionary theory didn't hold up.

But then again, this formulation of the theory almost seems like a tautology. Don't we simply define "fittest members of a species" as those who do survive to pass on their genes/traits? That means that whatever members generally don't pass on their genes are by definition not the fittest. But this would mean the theory was generally not falsifiable.

We could try to save the theory by using some other definition of "fittest" - maybe as "members of a species most likely to live long, healthy lives". But that won't necessarily fit with the facts - genes are passed on by members of a species who have the most offspring (that also have offspring that have offspring...). This means that any genes not affecting individuals until after the normal child-bearing period can be passed along even if they are harmful later on.

Examples of this in humans are genetic disorders like Huntington's disease that are devastating later in life but generally don't affect their ability to father/mother offspring. Others are possible - even disorders that would increase an individual's likelihood to pass on genes but making him or her less fit according to the "members of a species most likely to live long, healthy lives" definition. There could be a disorder that made an individual extremely fertile, and thus more likely to have offspring, but that also made that individual die early (as long as it wasn't too early to produce a good number of offspring).

As long as we consider the situation I just mentioned as being possible (I see no reason to think that it isn't), then we have to either modify our theory of evolution or give up this new definition of fitness. But unless we come up with some definition of fitness other than the one just mentioned, we are back to the first, which risks making our theory unfalsifiable.

Conclusions: The limited evolutionary theory is quite possibly generally non-falsifiable and thus non-scientific. But I'm sure there's more to be said for each side of the debate, so I'm not prepared to conclude that it is not falsifiable for sure. But its falsifiability is certainly questionable, at best.

Next: The more comprehensive view of the theory of evolution.

Is Evolutionary Theory Scientific?
Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?
Man Living with Dinosaurs?
Is the More Comprehensive View of Evolution Scientific?

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is evolutionary theory scientific

2005-01-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

Is Evolutionary Theory Scientific?

In discussion of an earlier post, a commentor and I debated whether or not Darwinism is a scientific theory. This was in context of his assertion that evolutionary theory somehow disproves the existence of one (or more) divine beings. I won't discuss that particular issue now, as I think most people realize that Darwinism and evolutionary theories in general have nothing to say about whether or not God (or gods) exist/s. The question at hand, for now, is whether evolutionary theories are or are not scientific.

Falsifiability

For a hypothesis/theory to be scientific, it must (by Popper's generally accepted standard) be falsifiable - that is, it must be possible for it to be shown to be false. If a theory isn't of the sort that could be shown to be false, it doesn't count as a scientific theory. That does not, of course, mean that it is not or could not be true - it simply means that it isn't something that can be dealt with from within scientific methodology.

The question, then, is whether or not evolutionary theory is falsifiable.

The answer to that question depends on what you mean by evolutionary theory. You might mean "evolutionary theory" to refer to the current and ongoing process by which species evolve by natural selection. You might also mean it as a more comprehensive theory that also explains the origins of life.

Next: The more limited view of evolutionary theory.

Is Evolutionary Theory Scientific?
Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?
Man Living with Dinosaurs?
Is the More Comprehensive View of Evolution Scientific?

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heaven perfect world

2005-01-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

What Is/Would Heaven Be Like?

Pearly gates, golden streets, eternal profound joy...

Sound a tad boring to anyone else?

"And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. And he who talked to me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its breadth; and he measured the city with his rod, twelve thousand stadia; its length and breadth and height are equal. He also measured its wall, a hundred and forty-four cubits by a man's measure, that is, an angel's.

"The wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every jewel; the first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass.

from the book of Revelation

Sounds a little like H.P. Lovecraft - though I suppose the influence probably goes from the former to the latter. I'll assume this is merely a metaphorical description - if not, I'm in trouble - I don't think I'd like that particular heaven.

But when I think about heaven as being the most wonderful sort of place I can imagine, I end up imagining a place that would probably get boring pretty quickly. So if there is a heaven, and it is as good as they say it is, I must be mistaken in my imagining it.

I know that heaven is supposed to be so good that it's unimaginable - but it never hurts to try. So I suppose a better question would be: What would you want heaven to be like?

If you don't like heaven, feel free to replace it with "the perfect world" or something like that. What do you come up with? Personally, I've found that I encounter something of a paradox.

No sickness or death - that seems like a good place to start. But the world (and I happen to be fairly fond of it just the way it is) would be a lot different without sickness or death. Would it be better in some ways? Sure. But I'm also convinced that we would lose out on some things that I would miss.

If you can't ever get sick or die, that takes a lot of worry out of life. There are plenty of other bad things that could happen to you, but there would also be that safety base line "Well, at least I'll live." Of course, what many people consider the worse thing that could happen is the illness, injury, or death of a friend or loved one - and if those are out of the picture completely, we don't have to worry about that class of bad things.

Again, there's a lot of good that goes with this. You can quit your silly, ultimately pointless job (unless you have one you enjoy). You can spend all of your time with family and friends, enjoying each other's company, dancing, playing games, and whatever else people in this happy happy place would like to do. Great - but wouldn't that get old?

One of my personal favorite activities is getting to know people - meeting new people, and learning more about those I already know. Much of the fun in this is the diversity of people to be met. And I have to wonder, if we lived in some wonderful world with no death, sickness, etc., wouldn't that cut down on the diversity of personalities one would be likely to meet?

Maybe cutting out sickness and death isn't enough to put any severe limits on diversity of personalities - but what if we cut out depression, major sadness, turmoil, suffering, and the like? Most people wouldn't imagine these as belonging in heaven or the perfect world. Indeed, I feel inclined to agree that they don't. But then, I don't see how the lack of any majoy "bad events" could not limit the diversity of personalities you would encounter. Everyone would be more or less happy, worry-free, and generally okay... which, again, seems paradoxically wonderfully good yet also terribly boring.

My point? None, really - just the amusement of wild religious/spiritual speculation. But I'd love to know your thoughts on the matter - so feel free to use the 'Comments' section to share them.

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animals sixth sense

2004-12-30T15:01:00.000-08:00

Animals' "Sixth Sense"

Despite the many human victims of the recent Asian disaster (currently around 120,000), few animal bodies have been found. In fact, wildlife officials in Sri Lanka have found no bodies of animals (source).

This has fueled new talk about animals' apparent abilities to sense impending danger, especially in the form of natural disasters. But if they do, is there anything "mythical" about this "sixth sense"?

To answer that question, it is useful to consider the traditional distinction between "primary" and "secondary" qualities as made by John Locke (and many others):

Primary and Secondary Qualities

Qualities are powers objects have to produce ideas in our minds (b.II, c.VII, P.8, p134). Locke distinguishes between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities. Tertiary qualities are powers to produce change in objects (b.II, v.VII, P.10, p135). Primary qualities exist in objects themselves, and the Patterns [in our Ideas of them] really do exist in the Bodies themselves," (b.II, c.VII, P.15, p137). These qualities are Solidity, Extension, Figure, Motion, or Rest, and Number," (b.II, c.VII, P.9, p135). Secondary qualities are mind-dependent and exist only when perceived (b.II, c.VII, P.17, p137-138). They include color, smell, taste, sound, and other sensible qualities (b.II, c.VII, P.14, p137).

(reference: Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1698. Nidditch, Peter H., ed . New York: Oxford U. P., 1975.)

Relevance to the "Sixth Sense"

Assuming something like this distinction holds, it follows that many (perhaps infinitely many) secondary qualities are possible depending on the observer's sense organs. Since secondary qualities are the result of objects interacting with an observer's sense organs, different sense organs would cause the perception of some other sort of secondary quality.

It also seems that there are other qualities that could be considered "primary" qualities - the electromagnetic properties of an object, for example. With proper sense organs, it should be possible to perceive these properties as well.

One common, non-mythical "six sense" is the apparent faculty of migratory birds to perceive the earth's magnetic fields. Last I checked, this wasn't necessarily the only theory in the running to explain birds' migratory behavior, but it was pretty commonly accepted.

If birds can navigate with the aid of a magnetically-sensitive faculty, it isn't much of a stretch to assume that birds and other animals have similar faculties providing them with information about the world around them that we humans don't have.

Natural disasters don't happen randomly - they follow from certain pre-existing conditions. Plate tectonic activity for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, atmospheric conditions for tornados, etc. We humans can detect many of these changes with scientific equipment. There is no reason, of course, to think that we have exhausted our possible predictive abilities - as time goes on, we will learn more and more about detectable conditions that precede natural disasters.

It isn't unreasonable to assume that animals with different/additional sensory faculties could already know how to detect the conditions that precede natural disasters - especially considering the evolutionary benefit of doing so.

Conclusion

Because there is no reason to think it impossible or unlikely for (some) animals to be able to detect conditions that usually precede natural disasters, I think the common anecdotal evidence for animals having some sort of (non-mythical) "sixth sense" is enough to make it reasonable to believe they might. Denying the possibility might even be unreasonable. Still, we should remember that attributing such abilities to animals doesn't require that we think anything "mythical" or "supernatural" is going on - there are convincing explanations from within a completely mundane worldview.

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out of body experiences

2004-12-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

Out of Body (Near-Death) Experiences

It's been a while since I've lived up to the "Philosophy, religion, politics, and culture" slogan, so I've decided to post on some religious/spiritual topics for a while.

I've always been somewhat familiar with reports of near-death, out-of-body experiences - mostly from television programs like Sightings that I watched when I was younger. Since I'm on break now, I've actually spent some time watching the television, and I saw a program on some Christian satellite channel about this phenomena.

According to the program, near-death experiences are fairly common. People (so it was said) often report seeing their bodies as doctors work on them or declare them dead, and can report what people were saying in the operating room and sometimes other rooms.

I found a website, Near-Death.com, with more information. One woman's experience is given:

Dr. Michael Sabom is a cardiologist whose latest book, Light and Death, includes a detailed medical and scientific analysis of an amazing near-death experience of a woman named Pam Reynolds. She underwent a rare operation to remove a giant basilar artery aneurysm in her brain that threatened her life. The size and location of the aneurysm, however, precluded its safe removal using the standard neuro-surgical techniques. She was referred to a doctor who had pioneered a daring surgical procedure known as hypothermic cardiac arrest. It allowed Pam's aneurysm to be excised with a reasonable chance of success. This operation, nicknamed "standstill" by the doctors who perform it, required that Pam's body temperature be lowered to 60 degrees, her heartbeat and breathing stopped, her brain waves flattened, and the blood drained from her head. In everyday terms, she was put to death. After removing the aneurysm, she was restored to life. During the time that Pam was in standstill, she experienced a NDE. Her remarkably detailed veridical out-of-body observations during her surgery were later verified to be very accurate. This case is considered to be one of the strongest cases of veridical evidence in NDE research because of her ability to describe the unique surgical instruments and procedures used and her ability to describe in detail these events while she was clinically and brain dead.

First Question

Such experiences are cited as evidence of life after death, the reality (and immortality) of the soul, etc., because people have accurate memories of events occuring when they are brain-dead, when it should be physically impossible for them to have these perceptions and form any memories.

The first question that came to my mind was this: Even if these experiences are really a person's soul (consciousness, spirit, etc.) operating independently of his or her body, how do they retain the memory once their body has been revived?

For the sake of argument, it is necessary to grant the existence of some sort of a soul that has perceptive powers, as well as the faculty of memory. But in normal, bodily-life, we don't make use of these powers (as far as we know). When we are asleep, we don't perceive and remember what's going on around the house through soul-perception and soul-memory. We don't see with our souls when we close our eyes. We don't remember things unless the physical memory faculties in our brains allow us to do so. When memory fails, we can't switch over to soul-memory for assistance.

Could there be exceptions? I'll grant the possibility. But in general we can assume that any memory a person describes (especially a lasting memory) is stored in his or her brain, and that reporting that memory involves retrieving it from that part of the brain (I'm not a neuroscientist, but you get the idea). So people reporting memories of near-death experiences are reporting memories actually stored in their brains.

But as I mentioned before, memory-formation isn't supposed to be possible during states of brain-death. And in any case, near-death experience memories aren't from a bodily viewpoint anyway. So how is it that memories of non-bodily experiences occuring when the brain is unable to form memories become brain-based memories that a person can report when they are revived?

The program I watched didn't address that question, and so far I haven't come across a good answer to it. But since this and related issue are my focus for a while, I hope to go further into this and other questions. As always, I encourage discussion in the 'Comments' section.

Get your blog listed on my main page! by linking to this post. How do you do it? Click here to find out.

12-24-2004 new site design

2004-12-24T14:37:00.000-08:00

12/24/2004 Site Updates

As I'm sure you've noticed, I've re-designed the main page again. I'm out of school for winter break, and I realized how slowly the old page loads when you aren't on a super-fast connection. So I went to work, and I came up with what's on there now.

It should load a lot faster, and I'm hoping it is just as easy (or easier) to navigate. I did add some things that I'd wanted before but couldn't work into the old layouts - a 'Site News' and 'Recent Posts' section at the top, and then a 'Recent Trackbacks' section (to encourage people to link to my posts) and a 'Friends on the Blogroll' section (which is, I think, a better way to manage my Blogroll).

And of course there is the longer listing of recent posts with descriptions (shorter than the ones I used before). I did away with the right sidebar in favor of putting the important links at the top of the page in button-style.

As always, please let me know what you think in the 'Comments' section. Feel free to tell me if you hate it - but don't forget that giving specific reasons will be most helpful. I'm still changing things around a bit, so your suggestions are appreciated.

Note: As of right now, I'm still working on changing the format of the individual posts. The topbar and leftbar will be the same as the main page, but I'll leave out the four sections at the top.

add me trackback list

2004-12-24T13:54:00.000-08:00

How Do I Add My Site to 'Recent Trackbacks'?

The 'Recent Trackbacks' section shows each visitor three random sites from the list of people who have linked to one or more of my posts and then sent a trackback ping. The list will only include the past few months of trackbacks, which is usually not all that long.

This means that every site on the list will be shown on the 'Recent Trackbacks' section many times each day - that is, hundreds, even thousands of times daily depending on how many sites are on the list and how many page views the main page gets.

How do I add my site? First, you have to mention one of my posts in one of your posts. Then, Send a Trackback Ping to show that you've linked me.

On each of my posts, there is a 'Trackback' link at the bottom. If you click this link, a window showing you the Trackback URL will open. Enter this in the 'Trackback URL' section of the Trackback Pinger. Then enter your blog name, the name of your post, the address of your post, and an excerpt. After you've done this, click on the 'Trackback' link on my post again. If you've sent the ping correctly, your site should now be listed.

Sending a trackback ping does two things. First, when someone clicks the 'Trackback' link for a post, they will see a link to the post in which you mentioned and linked to my post. So people looking to see what others are saying about something I've written can find you easily. And second: I can see that you've linked to one of my posts, so I can put you in my 'Recent Trackbacks' list.

This is a mutually beneficial blog-networking setup. It encourages people like you to comment on my posts on your blog (or at least to mention them). This helps me know what other people think about my writing and helps bring new readers to my blog. And it gives your posts and blog exposure here, sending new readers your way as well. So what are you waiting for?

become friend on blogroll

2004-12-24T13:44:00.000-08:00

How Do I Add My Site to 'Friends on the Blogroll'?

The 'Friends on the Blogroll' section on the main page shows three random blogs from my 'Friends on the Blogroll' list to each visitor. Showing the site address is much easier than showing names for every site, so for now only the address will be shown.

How do you get on the list? It's simple: Blogroll me. I recommend using one of the Blogroll Me! links found on my site - otherwise, I may not be able to tell that you've linked me.

I check the official list of people who have added my site to their Blogrolls to see who has added me. If you've added me and you aren't on the list, try adding me again with one of the Blogroll Me! links found on my site. I use the official list because it is much simpler than trying to add everyone who leaves a comment saying they've added me. It also makes it very simple to remove people who have taken me off of their Blogrolls.

Dimebag Darrell Fatally Shot

2004-12-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

Dimebag Darrell Fatally Shot

It's a general fact that people are more bothered by the deaths of people we somehow know of or are fond of. I happened to be rather fond of DimeBag Darrell as a musician, especially for his work on Pantera's album The Great Southern Trendkill. I wasn't the most devoted fan, but I really liked that album and happened to think that Darrell was one of the best guitar players out there.

Mourner lays flowers outside the Alrosa Villa nightclub

Dimebag Darrell was killed on the 24th anniversary of John Lennon's murder. Personally, I feel that the greater loss to the musical community is that of Darrell - I think he was a better musician. My apologies to Beatles fans.

The killer, Nathan Gale, was a former Marine based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He was discharged about two years earlier than the typical four years, but the reason why was not released for privacy reasons (source). Gale was killed by a police officer after he also killed three others.

The reasons? Gale seemed to blame Darrell for breaking up Pantera, a band he was obsessed with. Just two weeks ago, the former vocalist for Pantera Phil Anselmo commented in an interview that Darrell should be "severely beaten" (source). I don't know much about the breakup of the band, but it is clear that Darrell and Anselmo didn't part on the best of terms. Still, I was almost as big a fan of Anselmo's vocals on The Great Southern Trendkill as I was of the guitar work.

Photo of DimeBag Darrell

Another possible motive is that Gale claimed Pantera stole some of his lyrics (source). He had previously copied lyrics out of a Pantera CD booklet and claimed them as his own to a friend, saying he planned to sue the band. So maybe he was a little off his rocker - not that it makes the loss any less tragic.

master slave hard drive ban

2004-12-04T21:40:00.000-08:00

Banning (Electronic) Slavery

Hide your hard drives - or better yet, let's call them the "parent" and the "child" hard drive. Apparently the master/slave drive label is offensive.

Or so the Los Angeles County Department of Affirmative Action thinks - they wanted to replace that label on packaging of hard drives bought by the county. The purchasing department said the "term was offensive and violated the region's cultural diversity".

Their reasoning obviously has something to do with the fact that there was once black slavery in the United States - I'm not sure exactly what, though. Recognizing that slavery once existed here is acceptable, even encouraged so we can have a more realistic understanding of our history. I don't see how merely mentioning slavery in general could be a problem, though perhaps some people in Los Angeles county think otherwise.

And aren't we forgetting that slavery didn't only exist in the United States? We didn't even come up with the idea. In fact, isn't it more culturally insensitive to pretend to take offense because of our history as if slavery wasn't a practice that affected millions of people in other countries throughout history as well?

race exclusive dating racist racism

2004-11-29T16:37:00.000-08:00

Is Race-Exclusive Dating Racist?

Abstract: Is it racist to refuse to date a person because of his or her race? What about only dating people of a certain race? I'm going to take a look at these issues and how they tie into the bigger question: when, if ever, is race an acceptable criterion by which to select or exclude a person?

Eddie Enygma asked the following question in discussion of my post Can Racial Minorities be Racists?:

If an availably single caucasian woman makes the conscious choice to not date a man of a particular minority race does it make her a racist?

Answer:

Not necessarily. In general, finding a person attractive is an important part of deciding whether or not to date them. It may be the case that this woman (let's call her Sue) is just not attracted to men of a particular race. We wouldn't call Sue sexist because she isn't attracted to women and therefore doesn't date them - it's simply a matter of taste.

The same could be true if Sue will only date those of her same race (or of a single other race). But the key point here is that her choice must be based on attraction. If she adamantly refused that she would ever consider dating a person of a race other than the one she prefers, it would likely be a sign that something other than attraction was motivating her.

The same is often said about people who get very worked up when asked if they would ever have a homosexual relationship. It is said that people who are really completely (or near to it as a person can be) straight don't feel threatened by such questions; they are secure in their sexuality and a simple "Nope, I've never been attracted to women/men" will suffice. But those who have had homosexual urges that they are uncomfortable with will sometimes become agitated, feeling as though they must defend their sexuality from attack. Is this true? I have no idea when it comes to sexuality. I suspect that it is in at least some cases.

But when it comes to race, I think it is more likely to be true. It is fairly improbable that Sue would not be attracted to anyone outside of her own race at all. Let's say Sue is white (caucasian) and will only date whites. There are a significant number of individuals who look almost or exactly like someone of all-white descent but are partly of another race. It is reasonable to say that Sue will find at least some of these individuals attractive. If she would still refuse to date them because of their partly non-white ancestry even though she did find them attractive, racism would probably be a motivating factor.

Friends

A question one might ask Sue would be this: Though you will only date white men, would you refuse to befriend a person because of his or her race? If Sue is not racially exclusive when it comes to friendships, it is likely that her motivations for only dating white men are purely based on attraction. Since attraction is a matter of taste that is relevant to dating, that is a legitimate reason for exclusion.

An Argument:

Based on my response to this question, someone (we'll call him Joe) might make the following argument:

You said that it isn't racist for a person not to date someone because of his or her race if that person isn't attracted to individuals of that race, because attraction is a matter of personal taste and is relevant to dating. Fine; I accept that argument.

I own a small business - we custom design sunglasses. I usually employ about eight people, and we all work together at the offices. And I don't hire black people. Now, it's not that I have anything against them. I don't think they are less intelligent, harder to get along with, or less able to do the work. In my eyes they are in every sense just as good as white people or people of any other race - nothing wrong with them at all.

But for some reason, I just feel a little funny around them. I have no idea what it is, and I know there's no reason for me to feel that way. But I do, and I can't change that. So because of that, it's just my personal preference not to hire any black people. That way I don't feel funny and I can better manage my business. I don't mean to make it harder for anyone just because he or she is black, but it is my business and I don't want to hurt productivity.

Is This Racism?

I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb on this one, realizing that many people might not share my intuition. But I have to say, assuming Joe is being completely honest, this isn't (or shouldn't be considered) racism. If he truly has nothing against black people, believes they are as a race just as good as any other, honestly doesn't know why he feels funny around them, feels bad about excluding them but really can't help how he feels, I can't bring myself to call him racist.

Why? I imagine it's because of the negative connations of "racist" and "racism". In Can Racial Minorities be Racists? I mentioned the following dictionary definition of racisms:

(A) Racist - Noun: "A person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others"

(B) Racist - Adjective: (1) "Based on racial intolerance" (2)"Discriminatory especially on the basis of race or religion"

(C) Racism - Noun: (1)The prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races (2)Discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race

Assuming that Joe is honest, he's clearly okay on (A), (B-1), and (C-1). It's not so clear that he is not racist by (B-2) and (C-2) however, as it does seem that his behavior is discriminatory.

Discrimination

But as people often point out in discussions on racism, discrimination isn't always a bad thing. In fact, we discriminate all the time. We pick out the differences between good fruit and bad fruit so we only buy and eat the good fruit. When hiring employees, people generally discriminate between those who are qualified and those who are not.

What is it about discrimination based on race that is problematic? Well, in most cases, race isn't really relevant. We don't like racial discrimination because people are excluded for no good reason. It's not that they are unqualified or undeserving - some people have simply decided to exclude them for a truly irrelevant and silly reason. And that's bad. No one wants to be excluded for no good reason, so we feel uneasy when we see people making judgments on irrelevant factors - especially when those factors are beyond our control.

But what if someone is making a realistic movie about a black/white/whatever family - for the movie to be realistic, this person will have to racially discriminate in hiring actors and actresses. His or her choice of cast will not be based on attraction or anything that is only incidentally related to race; it will be explicitly because a particular actor/actress is not of that race that he or she will not be hired.

Racial discrimination, yes. But racism? I think a "no" on this one will be easier to buy. There seems to be a legitimate reason to exclude people of certain races from the cast - and the legitimacy of this reason is what saves the act from being racist. Discrimination is not enough for racism - it must be unjustified racial discrimination.

Back to Joe and Sue

This criterion of unjustified discrimination is what I think saves Joe from charges of racism. It is his business after all, and if hiring black people would truly hurt that business because black people make him feel funny (not because he thinks less of them than members of other races), I think he has a legitimate reason for not hiring them.

Same goes for Sue - if she isn't attracted to members of certain races, that is a legitimate reason for not dating them. As long as Sue would consider dating someone of another race if she found that she was attracted to them, and as long as Joe would consider hiring a black person who didn't make him feel funny, they and their actions are not racist.

Do situations like these ever actually come up? Maybe. I think Sue's situation is more likely than Joe's. In either kind of case, I would tend to doubt the honesty of the claims made by the Sues and Joes - it's likely that they would be using excuses to mask racist feelings. But I can't exclude the possibility that they aren't.

Further Problems?

I realize that this line of argument might be extended to allow for exclusions that it seems should be considered racism. What if Joe does have a bias against black people and that is the reason he feels funny around them? Maybe he can't really change that bias - not in the short term, anyway. It is still the case that hiring a black person would make him feel funny (which he can't help, we are supposing), which would hurt productivity. Does that make his not hiring black people legitimate? I think the right answer to that is no. But I'll pause for some discussion and reflection before I try to find a good explanation of why that is.

is racism part human nature

2004-11-21T13:50:00.000-08:00

Is Racism Part of Human Nature?

For whatever reason, some people really love speculating about human nature. Human nature was a pretty popular topic amongst philosophers in the past (not so much in the modern era). But despite all the thought that has been directed at figuring at what exactly human nature is, there isn't much agreement. What does it take for a particular trait or quality to qualify as 'human nature'? It can't be specific to a group of people, no matter how large that group. It can't be specific to a particular time period either - if it's human nature, it is shared by all humans every where and at every time. That's simply what 'human nature' means: that which is common to all humans.

One of my commentors, Franklin Henry Paine, made the following argument that racism is part of human nature:

Racism does exist today among all classes and races of people in all countries. It is intrinsically human nature to think of oneself as superior, and to think of one's group, as superior to all others. It is not necessarily right, it is just a characteristic of human nature. Therefore, the fight against racism is really a fight against human nature and must be fought individually as a battle of will versus nature. Food for thought.

from the discussion on my post "Can Racial Minorities be Racists?".

To begin my response, there is an important distinction that needs to be made:

Formed Groups and Imposed Groups

Another commenter, gman, made the following claim:

Why else are groups formed, other than to further the shared cause and beliefs of the individuals within said group. Isn't that how the human race works? Racism, with regard to the human race, is universal. And that's because groups run the world, not individuals. And groups always will vie for dominance on this planet.

This claim fails to take into account the fact that there are different kinds of groups. Some groups are actually formed by people. There are groups that people in general choose to join - political groups, religious groups, etc. When these groups are established for the purpose of bringing together people of particular beliefs or for particular causes, it usually okay to claim that people of those groups believe/want certain things - those on which and for which the group was founded.

But racial groups don't work this way. You don't sign up for whichever race looks most appealing to you - you are a member by birth. These are imposed groups - groups that exist because people have decided to classify others according by whatever criteria. There is nothing intrinsically important about race. It just happens that race has been used as a criterion by which to classify people in the past, and that continues today. But any number of other features could be used - (natural) eye color or hair color, face shape, etc.

Group Association

For the moment, let's grant that it is human nature to think of oneself as superior to others (more on this later). And let's also grant that it is human nature to think of the formed groups one belongs to as superior to others. There is still the question of whether or not it is human nature to think of imposed groups you belong to as superior to others.

It is a fact of the matter that many people have and at least some still do think of their racial groups as superior to other racial groups. But is this part of human nature? If it was true that people think of the groups they belong to as superior to others, they would have to think that all groups they belong to were superior - any group they had ever thought of, at least.

So if you have brown eyes, you would have to believe that the group Brown-Eyed-People is superior to the Blue-Eyed-People group, and all others. Groups differentiated by eye color are just as real as groups differentiated by race. And we do in fact sometimes consider people as grouped by eye color. Same goes for any other quality you could think of - hair color, face shape, height, shoe size, etc.

Now ask yourself - Do I really think that the Oval-Faced-People group is superior to the Square-Faced-People group? Chances are, you probably don't. You might have a personal preference about which face shape you would prefer to have if you had your pick, and you might find a certain facial shape more attractive than others. But that doesn't mean that you think one is superior to others - especially when you recognize that your favorite is just a matter of personal taste. It doesn't mean that you will necessarily discriminate against people with face shapes other than your favorite, or that you will have some prejudice against them.

Another reason the claim that it is human nature to see "your group" as superior is untenable: You may have noticed that you belong to lots of groups. You potentially belong to as many groups as any person decides to come up with based on whatever criteria they choose. So which one is "your group"? You could make it a combination of other groups you're in: you could belong to the Fair-Skinned-Big-Eared Blonde-Haired-Blue-Eyed 5'8"-Tall-Size-9-Shoed People-Who-Like-Snickers-Over-KitKats Group. If you kept extending that to include every classification you can think of, eventually you will be the only person who fits into that group. So that can't work out with this claim - then the claim would simply be that everyone thinks themselves superior to others, no talk of groups needed.

If this claim was true, it would require a backing argument about which group or groups counted as "your group". But how would such an argument work? Not everyone identifies with every (or most) of the groups they belong to. Simply belonging to a certain race doesn't mean you have to identify with that racial group any more than belonging to the People-Who-Like-Snickers-Over-KitKats Group would make you identify with that group. If the argument used whatever groups people were most often classified into, the same problem would arise - just because you are often classified in a certain way doesn't mean you consider that group as being part of your identity. And in any case, it isn't clear how people are most often classified. Race might be used frequently, but so is gender, national origin, educational level, occupational level, etc.

I think I've given some compelling reasons to reject the claim that people always think that "their group" is superior to other groups simply put. This doesn't work, I've shown, for imposed groups. But maybe it does for formed groups:

Formed Groups

There are somewhat better arguments for the position that it is human nature to think that groups you are a member of by choice are superior to other similar groups. If you didn't think one group (religion, political party, etc.) was better than the others, why would you join it instead of another one?

But even this claim is, I think, pretty clearly false. Let's look at a less serious example to begin with: recreational sports teams. You join up with the local recreational soccer league. You're a bit late and everyone has already formed even teams, so you get to pick which team you want to be on. Now at first, you'll likely think the one you pick is the best. Four months and eighteen losses (out of nineteen games) later, the season ends. Do you still think your team (group) is superior? Probably not, even though it is a legitimate group that you yourself decided to join.

And now for something a bit more serious: religion. Your decision to be a member of whatever religious group (assuming you join one) has much more to do with your core values and beliefs than the soccer team example does. And in the case of religion, it is true that many people do in fact believe their religious group to be superior to all others.

But if it's human nature to see your chosen formed group as superior to all others, every member of every religious group must think this. But this just isn't the case. There are a considerable number of people out there who respect other religions (most or all other religions in some cases) and do not see theirs as superior. A common sentiment of such individuals is that all religions are "just different ways of getting at the divine" - something like that. For some people the focus is narrower - they might think that within Protestant Christianity, all sects are equally good and it's just a matter of what style you prefer. In all cases, it is not true that people think their own group superior to all others. Some don't think their group is superior to any others at all.

Individual Superiority

Okay, so it isn't human nature to think of your group (whichever group that might be) as superior because not everyone thinks that, as they would if it was really human nature. So how about individual superiority?

Well, I'd have to reject this claim as well. The easiest way to reject it is this: do you know anyone who truly believes that another person is better than they are? I'm sure everyone knows someone like this. I'd be willing to bet that most people believe that there exists (or did exist) some person who is superior to (or equal to) themselves. If you don't think there has ever been someone who is at least your equal, you must either be a narcissist or a really, really cool person. Congratulations.

And let's not forget depressed people who think that everyone is superior to them because they are the worst person in the history of the world. Most of us have probably come across someone who thought something like this at one point or another. This also shows that it can't be human nature to think yourself superior to everyone else - otherwise, everyone would think that.

Conclusion

It might be objected either that exceptions to these alleged rules (everyone thinks their group is superior, and everyone thinks themselves superior) only occur in people who aren't functioning normally or that exceptions only occur when people have "overcome" their human nature.

As to the first objection, I should point out that 'human nature' is not normative. It isn't about what 'normal' people should be like - claims about human nature are descriptive claims about what people are like. So if you find an apparent exception, you either have to give up the claim about human nature you're working with, re-work it in a more complicated fashion that accounts for these exceptions, or deny that the person who doesn't have that quality/trait is human.

The last option isn't going to be very convincing ("If you don't think yourself superior, you aren't human!"). The second probably won't work - you'll just end up with an extremely complicated description of part of "human nature" that looks very much like an ad hoc theory (one you just keep modifying to fit the facts that didn't originally fit it), which doesn't then seem like a real theory/description. So you have the first option left: just give up the claim and recognize that whatever trait/quality you thought was part of human nature is in fact not a part of human nature. Maybe it's prevalent in the modern era in a certain culture, or in all cultures - but not everyone shares is, and it may not be the case the most people in the past have.

And the second objection - exceptions to human nature only occur when individuals overcome human nature. This one is a stretch to. To begin with, you will have to re-formulate what it is you're calling human nature. You can't say that it's human nature to think yourself superior to everyone else if that can be "overcome". You'd have to say something like: "Unless they get the idea that they should change, people will think themselves superior to others." But to get such an idea, some human must have come up with it. And if a human can come up with the idea to change on their own and then enact that change, it severely weakens your claim about human nature.

To talk about human nature as it is "without interference", you'd probably have to study a group of people who were born out in the woods somewhere, completed isolated from society, its language, and its ideas. Then you might be able to see what people would be like without external influences that might make them "overcome" certain aspects of their human nature. Even then, it is unlikely that you would find much that is the same across the board in every environment for every individual.

Conclusions:

Making claims about human nature is bad news. 'Human nature' doesn't mean what most people in any particular society happen to be like. Human nature transcends individuals, societies, and eras. If you find an exception to 'human nature', your idea of human nature is probably wrong. If people can "overcome" certain aspects of human nature, those probably aren't really aspects of human nature.

Beliefs of individual superiority are not part of human nature. Neither are beliefs that "your group" is superior. Racism is clearly not part of human nature.

can racial minorities be racists

2004-11-20T11:07:00.000-08:00

Can Racial Minorities be Racists?

This issue has come up a few times for me in recent days. Apparently, there has been an argument advanced saying that only those in a majority group can be racist/sexist/etc. because these -isms require power. Someone in the audience brought it up when I saw Keith Boykin (Keith Boykin's Site/Blog) speak last week. And one of my readers, Simoney, made the following comment:

Any -ism only works one way: the majority or the stronger party someone downing on the minority or weaker party.

This is why I can tell 'racist' and 'sexist' jokes; I'm a black female. So it's not >really< racism if I say "those crazy white guys, always tryin' to dance with their DDR. aren't they so goofy and funny?!" And that's why Wanda Sykes is successful. ...But if Jeff Foxworthy started telling jokes about black women, it would be on like Donkey Kong.

Our society is retarded like that. :)

There might have been some sarcasm in that comment - I'm not always the best at noticing. But it's the position I'm interested in, so I'll consider this as an example the attitude some people have that I'm dealing with.

The Argument?

In simple form, it goes something like this:

(1a) To be a racist, a person must be in a racial group with power over other groups.

(2a) Person-Y is a racial minority,

(3a) So Person-Y is not in a racial group with power.

(4a) Therefore, Person-Y cannot be a racist.

If we accept (1a), the rest does indeed follow. So the question is whether or not we should accept the claim that for a person to be racist, they must be in a racial group with power over other groups (the groups they are racist against, at least).

Another Shot at the Argument?

It doesn't seem that being racist has this requirement. After all, isn't racism just about having a prejudice against members of a certain racial group because of their race?

But let's be generous to this argument and try to make it as plausible as possible. There is, I think, a missing premise in the argument as I gave it before. So let's give it another shot:

(1b)Racism has two parts: racist attitudes and particular racist actions

(2b)The particular racist actions required for racism are oppression

(3b)In general, members of less powerful groups cannot oppress members of more powerful groups

(4b)Racial minority groups are less powerful than the racial majority

(5b)Person-Y is a racial minority

(6b)Person-Y, then, cannot oppress members of the racial majority

(7b)Therefore, Person-Y is not a racist.

This argument seems to better explain the position I'm interested in. So now the question is this: are racist actions (oppression) required for a person to be a racist?

Do Racists have to Oppress?

I think the answer to this is clearly no - racism is the having of racist attitudes simply, regardless of whether or not this leads to actions that actually oppress a racial group. But for those who are inclined to disagree, I'll motivate it with a thought experiment:

The Back-Water "Racists"?
There is a very small and very isolated town deep in the woods. The region in which this town is located has an almost entirely caucasian population - no racial minorities. This particular town has a completely white population. The few hundred people who live there rarely leave town - there are occasional ventures into the next town for farming supplies and other goods, but other than that the townspeople keep to themselves.

No one in the town has ever encountered a black person (or any racial minority). There is no way in which their actions could be said to affect, directly or indirectly, any racial minority - aside from the people in the next town, no one even really knows or thinks about them.

But the townspeople do have televisions and radios, so they know black people exist. And they don't like black people because of the skin color difference. They dislike them so much that hold anti-black rallies, burning effigies of black people and chanting racist slogans. Of course, no one knows about this but them, and since they never come into contact with any black people, it doesn't cause any oppression or harm.

Are they racist?

If anyone doesn't think so, feel free to tell me why. But I find it hard to imagine how a person wouldn't consider the people in this town to be racists. And if they are, since they do not actually oppress any racial minorities, that means that racism does not require racist action in the form of oppression.

So What Does 'Racist' Mean?

Another way to support the view that racism only requires racist attitudes is simply to look at how the word 'racist' is used. Wordweb says:

Racist - Noun: "A person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others"

Racist - Adjective: (1) "Based on racial intolerance" (2)"Discriminatory especially on the basis of race or religion"

Racism - Noun: (1)The prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races (2)Discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race

The second definition of "racism" does mention behavior. But the behavior it mentions is not necessarily oppression - a person of any racial group might discriminate against people of other races by refuses to talk to them or associate with them, and might abuse them through words or actions. But if we accept the claim that oppression can only be carried out, in general, by those in power, this type of behavior is not oppression when carried out by minority groups. But you would be hard pressed to argue that certain actions are not discrimination or abuse even when done by a minority.

Conclusion

Nothing in the meaning of "racist" or "racism" requires that the person who is a racist is in a majority group with power over minority groups. While this might be necessary in general for a person to oppress another, I've shown that racism does not require oppressive actions. The question of whether or not racism requires any racist actions in the form of discriminatory or abusive behavior is open for debate - I would consider an individual with prejudiced attitudes toward another race to be racist even if she did not engage in discriminatory or abusive action based on those beliefs. But regardless of whether or not this sort of action is required, it still is not necessary that a racist be in a majority group with the power.

Racial minorities can be racists too. And there are in fact racial minorities who are racist - probably a good many. Racial minorities who hate white people for being white are racists too, and the fact that particular white people have in the past oppressed people of other races is not a justification for this racism. That is the same sort of 'justification' many white racists use - some racial minorities hurt society by rape, robbery, and murder, and white racists make judgments about entire groups of people based on those few examples. That's no different than racial minorities judging all whites based on actions that not all whites performed.

abercrombie lawsuit fubu

2004-11-17T23:41:00.000-08:00

Abercrombie Sued for Discrimination. FUBU Going Strong.

(note: I'm going to assume that all of us here have a sense of humor and have some idea of the tongue-in-cheek nature of the 'Hot Abercrombie Chick' name - right? Good.)

Some people sued Abercrombie and Fitch last June on charges that the company "hires a disproportionately white sales force, puts minorities in less-visible jobs and cultivates a virtually all-white image in its catalogues and elsewhere." Recently, Abercrombie settled the lawsuit for $40 million and agreed to put some diversity into its marketing materials. Now, what I really want to know is this: if this is such a problem from Abercrombie, what about FUBU?

Let's not even go into the question of whether or not the government ought to be regulating corporate hiring practices. I don't think they should, no matter who a company does or doesn't hire and however silly the reasons. I think the government ought to be concerned with protecting negative rights (my right to not be killed, stolen from, etc.). But the fact of the matter is that the government is involved in telling companies the reasons they can hire or refuse to hire people. One of the (admittedly, not very good) 'reasons' not to hire someone that we have decided to prohibit is their race.

So Abercrombie markets an all or mostly white image, and hiring mostly white models and salespeople is the sensible thing to do (not that this makes it right) in line with that marketing strategy. Many people don't think that's okay - but not only is it not okay, but it is the sort of practice that the government can justifiably interfere with. It's illegal. I can't say exactly how the court case would have come out since this particular lawsuit was settled, but I'm inclined to think that Abercrombie would have lost (assuming they didn't find some technicality to win on).

So really, what about FUBU? I don't hear people complaining that the FUBU corporations has racist hiring practices, or that they employ only (or mostly) black models and market an "all-black" image. But in fact, FUBU is even more straightforward about this than Abercrombie. I remember seeing the founders of the company on Oprah some years back. They explained that FUBU stands for "For us, by us." As far as I know, the company has never tried to change that meaning of FUBU.

So what's the difference here? Other than different groups being discriminated against by each company, I don't see any. So please, someone, tell me - why is FUBU (so far, at least) in the clear while Abercrombie has to drop $40 million on the issue? Is it okay for a company to discriminate, even to be straightforwardly all-black or all-(insert minority group here), just because minorities are the ones doing the discrimination? I don't see how such a position would be justified. If one form of discrimination is not permissible, neither is the other.

human intelligence tests

2004-11-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

Can Human Intelligence be Measured by Artificial Tests?
(this is a follow up to Bush Supporters Dumber than Kerry Supporters?)

In short, the answer is yes. For a variety of reasons, including (perhaps most prominently) the unsavory fact that a variety of minority groups tend to have lower scores on average on IQ tests, many people don't like this idea. But the fact of the matter is that there is little doubt within the scientific/psychological community that intelligence (preferably referred to as general cognitive ability, or g, to avoid the controversy that comes with the "intelligence" label) is measurable in humans, and further, that IQ tests are a reasonable indicator of that measure.

Here are some relevant quotes from a widely used book on behavioral genetics (Behavioral Genetics - Robert Plomin, John C. DeFries, Gerald E. McClearn, and Peter McGuffin):

General cognitive ability is one of the most well studied domains in behavioral genetics. Nearly all this genetic research is based on a model, called the psychometric model. According to this model, cognitive abilities are organized heirarchically (Carroll, 1993, 1997), from specific tests to broad factors to general cognitive ability...

These broad factors intercorrelate modestly. That is, in general, people who do well on tests of verbal ability tend to do well on tests of spatial ability. g, that which is in common among these broad factors, was discovered by Charles Spearman over 90 years ago...

Most people are familiar with intelligence tests, often called IQ tests (intelligence quotient tests). These tests typically assess several cognitive abilities and yield total scores that are reasonable indices of g...

Despite the massive data pointing to g, considerable controversy continues to surround g and IQ tests, especially in the media. There is a wide gap between what lay people (including scientists in other fields) believe and what experts believe. Most notably, lay people often hear in the popular press that the assessment of intelligence is circular--intelligence is what intelligence tests assess. To the contrary, g is one of the most reliable and valid measures in the behavioral domain. Its long-term stability after childhood is greater than the stability of any other behavioral trait. And it predicts important social outcomes such as education and occupational levels far better than any other trait (Gottfredson, 1997)... (pages 156-158)

Of course, I'm certainly not one to claim that the mere fact that experts agree means that they must be right. Particular intelligence tests, and to a lesser extend the idea of intelligence testing and general cognitive ability, are all open to criticism.

But the kind of criticism they are open to is not the knee-jerk reactions of armchair "psychologists" who get angry at the thought of intelligence being something that can be measured. This isn't the sort of thing that will simply cease to be the case because we don't like it, because it doesn't seem politically correct.

The heated reaction to The Bell Curve, a book putting forward the claim that certain ethnic groups have a lower average intelligence than other groups, demonstrates this clearly. I'm not overly familiar with this book or its claims - for all I know, it might well be deeply flawed and incorrect in its assertions. A great many people believe this to be the case. Unfortunately, this belief is not motivated by any understanding of the book or of the subject it addresses; they believe the book must be false because it is simply unacceptable to say that certain ethnic groups have lower average intelligences than other groups (even if, as I recall, the differences aren't really that much).

Some people seem to think that such a claim is racist, though it is worth nothing that Caucasians did not have the highest average intelligence according to The Bell Curve's data - Asians did. This feeling is understandable, as in the past there has been a fair amount of questionable "science" used to fuel ideologies of racial superiority. I can't say whether or not this was the case in this particular book, though nothing I've seen has given me any reason to believe that the research was at all motivated by racism.

At some point, we need to gather ourselves and become willing to accept the possibility that such a claim might be true, even if we don't like it. IQ really does provide a reasonable measure of a real measurable trait, general cognitive ability - and it is possible that we will find that some groups have, on average, a higher general cognitive ability than others.

We will never know whether or not such claims are really true if we are already bent on having the answer come out our way. With such a mindset, no matter how much evidence we have, we will find something to discredit it by (even if we must do so illegitimately) if it doesn't come out the right way. And we will embrace any findings that fit the outcome we prefer, even if the science behind it is deeply flawed. This is the mindset that previously allowed bad "science" to confer legitimacy on ideas of racial superiority, and we should rid ourselves of it.

Closing Thoughts

I don't think the idea of people having a measurable intelligence is that hard to swallow. It certainly isn't counter-intuitive - most everyone recognizes that some people are much smarter, and others much dumber, than others. And these smarter people just happen to be the ones who tend to score well on intelligence tests (as well as on tests like the SAT that are reasonably correlated with IQ scores), and the less intelligent ones happen to be the same ones who score poorly.

If the labels offend, you can always change them (thats why psychologists use g instead of "intelligence"). This might take some of the bite out of unpleasant results, but the meaning doesn't change.

Intelligence is also something that doesn't change much - that is, common environment doesn't have a whole lot to do with it. Many people think that people of low intelligence have low intelligence because they came from bad homes and bad school systems. But scientific study simply hasn't supported this - not exactly, anyway.

There have been adoption studies in which low-IQ children (around 85-90 on average) were adopted into homes of families whose biological children had reasonably high IQs (usually between 115-125 on average). And, for a time, these adoptees generally did show a 5-10 point increase in scores on IQ tests. They didn't come up to the levels of the biological children, but the scores did show significant improvement.

But the most notable result of this study is that after these adopted children grew up and/or left the home, their performance on IQ tests fell back down to right around what it had been before. Even among children who were adopted when they were very young, a growing up in a home with intelligent parents/siblings and attending good schools did not cause any permanent increase in IQ test. They got the boost while they were in that environment, but the effect ended when they were no longer in it.

These tests suggest that an environment conducive to learning helps individuals express more of their intellectual potential, but it does not raise actual intelligence.

bush voters low iq

2004-11-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

Bush Supporters Dumber than Kerry Supporters?

If you couldn't tell from my Wow, Even I Beat Ralph Nader post, I tend to enjoy an amusing spoof. Sokal? Wonderful. So I was amused when I came across (later than most, I suppose) this chart that allegedly demonstrates the inferior IQ of people in states that went for Bush in the past election.

And then there is IQ by State in 2004, which is supposed to give a more accurate (that is, not faked) presentation of actual IQ averages for the states.

Something that captured my interest on this page:

(I would like to point out at this early stage that I personally give no credence to the concept of an "intelligence quotient," and believe that human intelligence cannot be measured with artificial tests. I only discuss IQ here in order to rebut the false claims made by others who use IQ as their only weapon.)

Having done a bit of general study on intelligence (specifically its genetic component), I found this too-often expressed sentiment to be rather unfortunate and mistaken. So I wanted to follow up on it in my next post: Can Human Intelligence be Measured by Artificial Tests?.

science textbook evolution stickers

2004-11-08T14:35:00.000-08:00

What's Wrong with "Evolution Warning" Stickers?

A group of parents and the American Civil Liberties Union then filed a lawsuit over the stickers. "It's like saying everything that follows this sticker isn't true," said Jeffrey Selman, a parent who filed the lawsuit.

The sticker reads, "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

from Trial Begins Over Ga. Evolution Disclaimer

Oftentimes, I'm fond the ACLU and what it does. But, being what it is, the ACLU is prone to the occasional bout of silliness.

So what's wrong with this pro-critical thinking sticker? Okay, so we all know the purpose behind it: some Bible Belt folk for whatever reason think (wrongly, no doubt) that that the theory of evolution poses some kind of threat to Christian beliefs. So of course they don't want their children being indoctrinated with such views. They'd rather their children grow up thinking God waved a magic wand 6,000 years ago and made the world pretty much the way it is now (if we're being less than generous), or they simply want their children to approach the material with an open mind and decide for themselves (slightly more generous version).

But, as a lawyer for the school district said of the sticker: "It doesn't say anything about faith. It doesn't say anything about religion," which is of course true. So U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper wants to know why the sticker is necessary, since evolution is already presented as a theory in the book. And that's a fair enough question.

Teacher Wes McCoy thinks the sticker "diminishes the status of evolution among all other theories". And this, I think, illustrates the really important issue here: many people, students in this school and their parents included, don't exactly understand what it is for something to be a theory.

I went to a not-so-great public school, and I know the kind of science education you get at many schools like these. You might memorize the steps to the idiots-version of the scientific method enough to copy it down on the test, or to select the right multiple choice answer about what a theory is. And you might understand that all the other fun science stuff you're learning is, almost without exception, no more than theory. But you never do any serious thinking about what this means - you just want to learn what you need for the test.

The teachers are often mostly concerned about preparing you for these tests, so their interest in teaching often only reaches the point where they prepare students to put down the correct answers. Fuller understanding of what the science is about? Critical evaluation of theories? Not in my high school.

Because of this lack of emphasis on any real understanding of the material in text books, it often is the case that scientific theories are simply presented as fact. It's easier that way - the teacher gets to feed students the content of the theory without explaining how someone came up with it, and how their hypothesis might be false even if it seems to explain the relevant data.

That is bad news indeed. Not just because the theories may eventually be replaced by newer, apparently better ones (if the history of science is any guide), but because this leaves out the really scientific part of science education. The method and reasoning involved are far more important than particular theories - most anyone can memorize those. But shouldn't we be teaching students how to do science?

If the sticker makes some people over in Georgia feel better, I say let them have it. It isn't hurting anything. If it does indeed cause some students to realize that evolution is "just a theory" (even if it is probably a true theory), then all the better for them. If it motivates their teachers to give a bit more explanation about what exactly scientific theory is and this helps them to understand that most of science is "just theories", then all the better. If it leads them to the mistaken belief that only evolution is "just a theory" but we can take the other theories as facts, then the problem is more their poor scientific education than the sticker.

even i beat ralph nader

2004-11-04T15:34:00.000-08:00

Wow, Even I Beat Ralph Nader!

I guess I have my Hot Abercrombie Chick for President site to thanks. Check out this screenshot - 14,331 for Badnarik, 11,614 for yours truly, and Nader not even listed.

click to enlarge

eleven states ban gay marriage

2004-11-03T19:58:00.000-08:00

Eleven States Ban Gay Marriage

Elated by an 11-for-11 rejection of gay marriage in state elections, [rednecks and backwater hicks] Wednesday urged Congress to follow suit by approving a federal constitutional amendment that would extend the prohibition nationwide.

from Voters pass all 11 bans on gay marriage

So Kerry lost the election - that's good news. The bad news: Bush won it.

More bad news: We're still doing the whole democracy thing. Not much of a new development, but no good all the same. Anyone who thinks democracy and freedom have much to do with each other needs to be beaten over the head with a stick. Our fellow countrypersons like the one in this picture need to be shot.

Shot? Well, I could be generous and qualify that: ...with a rubber bullet. Or ten. But really, I'm not that picky. We have a real problem here in America - a lot of people like to pretend at being good patriotic Americans, but they're neglecting that whole American ideal of freedom.

Freedom means you get to do what you want, even if I don't like it, as long as it doesn't hurt me. And I mean hurt me - really hurt me - which does not include "injury" from my knowing that you're doing something I don't like. Sorry Patrick Devlin.

But don't think that I'm only recognizing culprits like these people who want to legislate religion opinion. I'm not exactly fond of Democrats like Kerry who want to forcibly redistribute property just because they think it would be nice. That doesn't jive too well with the freedom concept either. One of the biggest reasons I was (slightly) hoping that Kerry would lose is because he was so unapologetic about wanting to raise taxes for the rich. No justification other than something like "Hey 98% of voters who aren't rich - this helps you out. Vote for me!"

election 2004 bush wins

2004-11-02T17:21:00.000-08:00

Election 2004: And the Winner Is...

George Bush. Or so I'm betting, based on absolutely no factual evidence and no real preference of mine. Did you vote? I sure didn't. But I'm still watching the results to see what happens. We only have one of these things every four years, after all.

I think I've realized that I want Bush to win. Not enough to have voted for him, of course; I also realize that this (slight) wish has nothing at all to do with my agreeing with him more than Kerry or thinking he would do a better job. No - I want to see him win because I'm at a generally liberal-leaning college and for the past three months I've heard so much anti-Bush rhetoric that I want to vomit, and I want all those ridiculous Kerry supporters to have their come-uppance.

Of course, if I was at a conservative-leaning college I'd want to see Kerry win just to spite Bush supporters. And that's no good reason to vote. But then, I don't know that there is a good reason to vote - at least not for one of these two.

For now, I'm back to occasionally refreshing the Yahoo main page to see which buffoon happens to be ahead at the moment. Long live democracy.

leave more children behind

2004-11-01T15:46:00.000-08:00

Please, Leave More Children Behind

Maybe memories of his mediocre Yale performance keep Dubya's sympathies for under-performing students at public schools alive - but when it comes to the No Child Left Behind Act, he needs to put the jacket and tie back on and start acting a little more like a cold-hearted blue-blooded elitist Republican. Stupid and lazy kids are ruining the public schools, and keeping them in school is the problem.

I say this from my own K-12 experience at a sub-par school system. Not the worst one out there by any means, but we weren't exactly sending kids to the Ivies. Or much of anywhere but community college and the nearest state universities.

The teachers weren't all unqualified. Like many students, I did have a few who were pretty good and helped me immensely. I will always be grateful for these few, though in retrospect I realize that they were only doing what I should have expected from all of my instructors - the others just didn't measure up.

Part of this was because I lived in a somewhat rural area and the school system didn't have the money to attract many good teachers. Of course, this lack of funds could have had far less effect than it did if the money they did have was better spent. Far too much (isn't any too much?) money went to sports. A significant portion of the budget went to the "alternative school" for kids who had missed so much school that they were going to be kicked out. They got "mini-lessons" in basic math for a small part of the day, and did some sort of factory-type work for the rest of the day. The vocational school was similar, giving career training generally meant to prepare students for entering the work force immediately after high school.

Why, I always wondered, does so much money go to programs for students at the low end of the academic scale? I'm not suggesting that schools should kick out students who don't make the grade - but should we really be giving them special programs and making entire special schools with standards low enough for them to meet? The emphasis seems to be on getting every kid a diploma. If doing so requires lowering standards, then so be it. If lowering standards requires money for special schools, then that's fine with them too. But the better students, those who could really benefit from more funding to the upper end of the academic spectrum, suffer for it.

Another part of the problem was laziness. It's one thing to have slow students who sit in class and try their best to understand the teacher (this is still a problem of course, as teachers end up dumbing down lessons to suit the slower students). It's quite another when students, some slower, some not, decide that they don't care about school and cause disruptions in and out of class.

My high school, even in the most advanced classes offered (which weren't really very advanced), had ridiculously low standards. Anyone of even average intelligent could make the honor role (if not straight A's) if she was willing to do homework, assigned reading, and put in a few hours of study every night. That's not the case in all schools, but it was in mine and is in many others. Of course, most of these students don't read the book, don't study, often don't do homework, and don't make the grades they could. Many talk in class, don't help in group projects, and cheat when possible. This lessens the academic quality of the student body, makes it harder for teachers to teach, and makes the school system a less desirable place for well-qualified teachers.

So what is Bush doing with this No Child Left Behind Act, punishing school systems whose students aren't academically up to par? Sure, there are lazy teachers who need to be kept on their toes too. But there are an awful lot of lazy and stupid students out there. Putting the focus on them by threatening to pull funding and fire teachers isn't the best way to fix the problem.

So what do I suggest? I'm sure you've already guessed that I'm in favor of cutting out any special programs or schools that offer diplomas based on reduced academic standards. At the very least, standards need to be maintained. Preferably, in many schools they should be raised. If students habitually cut class, do them a favor and tell them not to come back. If they are disruptive or obviously don't do their work, tell them the same. Stop catering to the low end, and stop putting up with students who purposefully drag everyone else down.

That gives us a better learning environment for students who do care to try and makes for a more attractive teaching environment - better students, more money for teacher salaries and real academic use. That's a start. If U.S. citizens are going to be forced to finance public schools and that isn't going to change anytime soon, we ought to at least make the public schools more productive.

best scary halloween movies

2004-10-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

Best Scary Movies for Halloween?

I'm trying to find some scary movies to watch for Halloween, and because my movie knowledge isn't the best I'm asking for recommendations. I enjoy the cheesy B-movie horror flick every now and again, but what I'd really like are some legitimately frightening movies - unfortunately, I don't find many "scary" movies that scary.

I enjoyed Wrong Turn and found it mildly frightening. Signs scared me, possibly because years of watching the television show Sightings when I was younger has given me a slight alien-phobia. Dawn of the Dead was fun, but not scary. The recent movie The Grudge was mildly frightening as well (Sightings might have given me a mild ghost-phobia as well). I loved The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (you know, with Johnny Depp) - so it's probably on the Halloween list even though it isn't really a scary movie. Creepy is good too, of course.

Any suggestions?

slap powell taiwan china

2004-10-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

Someone, Please Slap Colin Powell

Secretary of State Colin Powell told Phoenix Television in Hong-King: "There is only one China. Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm policy," (from Powell's China Comments Anger Taiwanese ).

Considering our origins, it's funny how the United States doesn't have a great track record for supporting people who want to come out from under other-government rule to form their own nation. Think back to the Civil War. While warring with any nation with the intention of stopping the practice of slavery might be justified, military action for the sake of forcing a government's control on people who don't accept it is not.

And China is a communist country too - what happened to our intense aversion of communism? It may have gone overboard at times, but communism is just as despicable as ever (not that democracy is all that great, but I'd pick it over communism).

I realize, of course, that being buddies with China is good for the U.S. - the economy, anyway. Hordes of factory workers willing to accept low wages help keep our prices down. But if we have to support China to the point of supporting their forcible subjugation of people who don't want a communist government and don't want to be part of China, there's a problem.

amusing comments reviews one

2004-10-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

Amusing Comments and Reviews Series - Part One

I've gotten my fair share of angry comments (especially in the guest book) and reviews. Some of them contain reasonable criticisms, but others are laughably ridiculous. I thought it would be worthwhile to share a few of the most amusing ones - and so, the Amusing Comments and Reviews Series begins.

Meesh, from Seattle
(from the guestbook)

"you are a self-centered, idiot. you give our generation a bad name and will lead to the uprising of more republican, selfish, greedy *******s. i don't give a **** about the fact that tanning is illegal in california for minors and you'll probably find skin cancer underneath your fake vintage abercrombie t-shirt that was made by slave labor in china. you disgust me and it makes me want to vomit when i think about people like you holding any role of power in our society. i wouldn't know where to begin if i were to argue against any of your points mentioned in your blog, but first off we live in america and any ******* person should be able to get married, gay or not. i hope your daughter is a huge ******* lesbo! good luck to finding some brainless republican husband to knock you up by 25 and make you his trophy wife to take along to country club dinners and republican party events. peace out ******"

I'm a Republican? That's news to me. And I'm against gay marriage? Wow, that's really news to me - I could've swore that I had something like ten posts on the issue in which I argued for either the legalization of gay marriage or for the end of government involvement in marriage altogether. You hope my daughter (assuming I ever have children) is a "lesbo"? That wouldn't bother me - though if I do ever have a homosexual daughter, I imagine she would prefer the term "lesbian".

Funny that someone who is apparently so concerned about personal liberties - like the right to marry whoever you want - doesn't give a **** about personal liberty when it comes to deciding whether or not you want to put yourself at risk for cancer by going tanning. (Okay, so the issue was about minors, so it might be a little different - but still.) I think I'm safe in assuming that this person is a Democrat with Republican-phobie (s/he probably saw that I'd written something critical of Kerry and decided I must be a Republic who owned a third-world sweatshop - though isn't Arnold a Republican?). So what about my right to keep the money I will someday earn on a meager academic salary without having big, big government tax it all away for social programs?

Anyway, I found the guestbook entry amusing and hope that others will get a chuckle out of it as well.

Repeal Hate Crimes Laws

2004-10-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

Repeal Hate Crimes Laws?

I've been considering the question of whether or not we should repeal hate crimes laws -- laws that can add years to a criminal's sentence if he or she is convicted of a crime motivated by the victim's race, religion, gender, national origin or sexual orientation. At first, it may seem that 'hate crimes' are especially reprehensible since the motivation for them comes from ideologies that most of us have been taught to despise: irrational, unfounded beliefs of racial/gender/etc. superiority. And their intent is not only to do harm, but to put the other in his/her/their place, to intimidate other members of the target group.

But some of this apparent extra-reprehensibility might be due to the kind of crimes we are comparing hate crimes to, especially if we are thinking of them only in the context of general crime. But to be fair, we need to compare hate crimes to similar, non-hate crimes that have many of the same elements. So let's go for two hypothetical cases:

(A) - The Hate Crime.
Some white-trash Nazi-wannabe punks break into the home of a Black family. They savagely beat the teenage son who had fallen asleep while reading a book and then wreck the house, writing racial slurs, insults, threats, and the like all over the walls.

(B) - The Non-Hate Crime
Two brothers break into the home of the Smith family, whose financial success and high social standing they are very jealous of (the Smiths have never met them or harmed them in any way). They savagely beat the teenage son who had fallen asleep while reading a book and then wreck the house, writing insults and threats directed at the Smith family all over the walls.

The only real difference in these two cases is that A would count as a hate crime, and the perpetrators could be sentenced to extra prison-time for their crimes. The crimes themselves were almost identical. The additional component of intimidation of a group is present in both (in A, a racial group, in B, a family group). The motivation is similar - in A, irrational, unfounded hate for a racial group, and in B, irrational, unfounded hate for a family group.

When considering hate crimes in this way, I learn toward the position that those who commit hate crimes do not deserve more punishment than those who commit similar non-hate crimes. Another way to put this is to say that individuals who commit equivalent non-hate crimes ought to get just as much jail time. There doesn't seem to be any clear reason why a crime is morally worse because it was motivated by hate for a certain group (classified by race, religion, gender, national origin or sexual orientation) rather than hate for some other group or an individual.

This is not to say, of course, that someone who commits a hate-crime assault might not warrant more punishment than someone who commits a normal assault. But the reason should have to do with the crime itself. Intimidation and the making of a threat to others not directly affected is usually an element of a hate crime but not of a personally-motivated assault. The intimidation itself could justify a tougher sentence - but because it is intimidation simply, not because it is intimidation of a certain, specially-considered group. Considering cases in this light rather than from the hate-crimes stance should lead to perpetrators of otherwise equivalent cases (like A and B) to be given the same degree of punishment.

Reasons for Hate-Crimes Laws?
One possible justification of hate-crimes laws is one of prevention. Since there is a specially poignant problem with intimidation and crimes against certain groups in society, hate-crimes laws may be beneficial in helping us reduce these problems.

Following the thought behind this view, it seems that special laws making tougher sentences could be justified for most any crime that because a special problem for society at any given time. If there was a car-jacking epidemic, special laws making the penalties for car-jacking tougher could be warranted, for example.

But I am hesitant to support this view that allows variable penalties to be used as tools for specific social change. On the one hand, this seems prudent and possibly effective. On the other hand, it does not seem that a criminal who happens to commit a crime during a period in which that crime has been targeted for tougher sentencing is any more deserving of punishment than if he had committed the exact same crime at a time during which it was not being given any special consideration.

One might argue that if the criminal is aware that his crime is part of an epidemic (perhaps a car-jacking epidemic), he deserves extra punishment because he is contributing to a trend that causes a great deal of total damage. If lots of people are jacking cars, many cities will have to hire more police or keep them on for extra hours, and both cities and individuals will often take other preventative measures. All of this costs extra money, money that wouldn't be spent if the car-jacking rate was relatively low. So the damage of a single crime in a time during which there is a high rate of that crime (enough to possibly warrant tougher sentencing for it) is higher than the exact same crime during any other time. That seems like a reasonable justification for tougher sentencing.

Still, the amount of additional harm done by car-jackings during a high car-jacking time may not be that great. If the average damage per car-jacking during low times was, let's say, $8,000, that average during high times might only be $8,500. A significant increase - but if the increased sentence was proportional to this increase, that would only mean raising an eight-year sentence to an eight and a half year sentence (or a sixteen year sentence to seventeen). Going by the increased monetary damages caused by such crimes might not warrant any significant increase in sentencing.

There is, of course, the factor of fear and feelings of lost security, which don't necessarily have any easily-evaluated monetary value. Perhaps if increased police patrols during a car-jacking epidemic completely restored everyone's feelings of security, we could go by the cost of those extra patrols. But it is unlikely that anything could fully restore feelings of security until the epidemic ended.

The fear/security "cost" might be especially high for violent hate-crimes directed at specific groups, and this cost might justify significantly tougher penalties. Still, crimes aimed at intimidating groups not specially protected (like in example B) might have equivalent fear/security costs for that group. There would be less people affected, but impact on individuals in smaller groups might be quite a bit higher because of the small group size.

Conclusion?
I don't have one, for now at least. I am more comfortable with hate-crime legislation if it is considered for the purpose of giving additional punishment for the additional harms that certain crimes might have during times in which that crime is especially problematic. If the impact of a crime was truly no different during a high-crime time than in a low-crime time, I would have to say that additional punishments during high-crime time would be unjustified. If hate-crime laws are only aimed to give extra punishment because we really don't like racism and such, they probably aren't justified. But as it seems possible that a hate-crime does more damage than an equivalent non-hate crime, I'm not ruling their justification out just yet.

As always, I welcome opinions and discussion from readers.

hac blogroll update october 22

2004-10-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

Blogroll Update

I (finally) got around to updating my Blogroll, and the 'Other Blogs' section at the top showing the last ten people who have blogrolled me. If you've blogrolled me and aren't on my blogroll yet, leave a comment here if you'd like on. I may be a bit slow, but you'll get on there - and you'll stay on as long as you keep me on yours. Here's the list of the last ten:

shab00ty's madness...

Hot Money Girl

Spiker Blog

Anonymous Sports Freak

kerry lies supreme court appointment

2004-10-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

Kerry Lies About Who He Would Appoint to the Supreme Court

The other day I came across an article that quoted Sen. John Kerry as saying that he would not appoint anyone to the Supreme Court if that person would overturn Roe. V. Wade. I forgot to bookmark the article, and I welcome any correction if this is a factual error - though I'm fairly certain he did say this outrightly.

When I read the article, I remembered the claim Kerry made during the Second Presidential Debate at Washington University in St. Louis. When asked about who he would appoint to fill Supreme Court vacancies, he went on an ideological spiel about how he believed in appointing good judges - those whose opinions did not betray the fact of whether they were black or white, conservative or liberal, etc. and so on.

Kerry tried to claim that he had no requirements for the positions other than that the person would be a "good judge" by the standards he mentioned. Unfortunately for him, he seemed to forget making this statement when he contradicted it by admitting that potential Justices would have to pass the pro-choice test.

arnold act like republican

2004-10-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

Arnold Can't Even Act Like a Republican

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to "manage" casino growth in the state.

from the article:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a warning for state voters: "The Indians are ripping us off."

Schwarzenegger has taken up the line to convince them to reject a tribe-backed initiative on the Nov. 2 ballot that would allow rapid expansion of American Indian casinos in the nation's most populous state and derail the governor's own effort to manage casino growth.

Message to Arnold: Stop with the regulation. What ever happened to that smaller government ideal that I was always told the Republican party was about? I thought we were supposed to minimize interference with businesses...

halloween bible belt backwater hicks

2004-10-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

It's Not Halloween Yet...
but some are already pretending to be backwater hicks

Halloween falls on a Sunday this year, which creates a problem for some people. Not a serious problem, of course - though they seem to think so.

from Sunday Halloween Irks Some in Bible Belt:

"It's a day for the good Lord, not for the devil," said Barbara Braswell, who plans to send her 4-year-old granddaughter Maliyah out trick-or-treating in a princess costume on Saturday instead.

...

It is an especially sensitive issue for authorities in the Bible Belt across the South.

"You just don't do it on Sunday," said Sandra Hulsey of Greenville, Ga. "That's Christ's day. You go to church on Sunday, you don't go out and celebrate the devil. That'll confuse a child."

1: If it's a day "for the devil," isn't it almost as bad to celebrate it on a Saturday? It doesn't seem that celebration in general would violate the common understanding of how to keep the Sabbath since it isn't working - I don't think many people even in the Bible Belt find it unacceptable to celebrate a birthday on Sunday. If the problem is solely in the fact that Halloween is "a day for the devil," it doesn't make much sense to say it's fine to do it Saturday night as long as you show up to church on Sunday. The devil is bad every day of the week, right?

2: Halloween isn't a day for the devil. It's a day for kids to dress up to go trick-or-treating. I'm no expert on the origins of Halloween, but I always thought it had something to do with Puritans dressing up in scary costumes to infiltrate meetings of the real devil worshippers, who supposedly gathered together that day, or at least to protect themselves from them. If that's right (I can't guarantee that it is), it would seem that Halloween is an anti-devil holiday if anything. The Wiccan religion, as I understand it, celebrates the time around Halloween according to their own understanding. But they aren't devil-worshippers either.

And whatever the origins of Halloween, its current institution has little to do with them. It's a fun time for young children, even more fun for gothy-type kids who can really go all out and actually get compliments for it, and yet another excuse for teenagers and college students to throw parties.

3: Sandra Hulsey seems to think that celebrating the devil (I'm sure I couldn't possibly sway her opinion on this) on the Lord's day would confuse a child. So that's why we have to celebrate Halloween a day early - worshipping the devil Saturday and then the Lord on Sunday certainly won't confuse children. In fact, it will teach them a valuable lesson: you get the rest of the week to yourself, just make sure to go tell God you feel bad about it on Sunday and you can still go to heaven.

Kerry Loses Second Debate

2004-10-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

Kerry Loses the second debate at Washington University

I'm sure everyone on the Internet(s?) who saw the debate has an opinion on who did better, so I might as well give mine. I'd like to think that as a non-voter who dislikes both candidates pretty much equally and disagrees with most views of both, my opinion is a bit more impartial than people who were already biased on way or not. I spoke informally with a few other people after seeing it, and they seemed to think that Kerry had "won" this one as well as the last - though the people who thought so already supported Kerry.

I may take some time to further discuss certain parts of the debate later on. Some brief observations for now: The Iraq war section was awful. Exactly the kind of thing you would expect if you're cynical about politics - Kerry criticizes the war, says (again and again) that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Bush points out that Kerry himself thought there were weapons and that the war was a good idea. Neither gives any real solid statement on their plan for the future of Iraq. Kerry says we acted unilaterally, Bush reminds him that we didn't, Kerry doesn't care because the allies we did have were mostly small countries that don't really count. Kerry says he would have gotten a real coalition for the war, though doesn't explain exactly how that would have happened, etc. and so on. Pointless.

My cynicism wore off a bit when they started talking about stem cell research and abortion - a bit less of the "he said that" and "no I didn't, but he said this" stuff going on. Both Bush and Kerry gave decent answers (for politicians) to the stem cell questions. Bush seemed more straightforward on the abortion issue. I thought Kerry really flopped when he tried to pull the pro-life (maybe? I gathered it from the Catholic comment) who supports choice politically stunt. He tried to argue that he couldn't oppose abortion based on his own personal beliefs, despite his willingness to support whatever else he does on personal beliefs. I guess it's the apparent religious connection, even though abortion is not necessarily or even primarily a religious issue. I suppose Kerry must think he has some reason to oppose murder or torture or genocide that isn't a personal belief, which is ridiculous. Facts don't instruct you on right or wrong.

Bush made a similar error when he talked about appointing judges who would strictly interpret the law in a way that implied they would or could be fully impartial. I'm sure some judges are capable of keeping their personal biases out of decisions to some extent, but certainly not fully. It is interpretation of the law, after all - if laws were clear cut and the question of how to apply them was an objective one, we wouldn't have the kind of judicial system we do. Of course, Kerry made pretty much the same mistake yet again, saying that he supported the idea that good judges are ones whose personal biases don't show up in the opinions accompanying their decisions. What, there are judges who can interpret the law without letting their own views influence the decisions? I'll believe that when I see it - of course, when that happens, we won't ever have a conflicted court because all of these unopinionated judges would come to the same decision.

But anyway, with the stem cell research and abortion talk, I'll go to bed with the feeling that it wasn't completely word-wrangling. My verdict for now would be that Bush presented himself and his views better than Kerry by a moderate margin. I still wouldn't vote for him or support him over Kerry, though, so neither performance could have been that great.

Second Debate Tonight

2004-10-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

Second Debate Tonight at Washington University in St. Louis

As some clever individuals with too much time on their hands have noted, it may be the case that I have some connection with Washington University in St. Louis. Good for them. It also happens to be the case that the second Presidential debate is occuring there tonight, and I may just put aside the generally more pressing issues of Newton's thoughts on occult qualities to check out the festivities.

What's going on so far? Some CNN and MSNB shows being filmed on campus, which I've done my best to avoid. People selling and wearing some significantly awful pink-colored "Give Bush the Pink Slip" t-shirts, along with the somewhat more clever shirts reading "White House" with the 'W' crossed out - the idea being "Get 'W' out of the White House."

Ah, politics. The subject seems to make even relatively intelligent people stupid with surprising frequency. Politics may, I think, be even more dogmatic than religion for the masses. Few people seem to be able to step back from the "issues" long enough to realize that there is very little legitimate debate going on. I don't plan on seeing any tonight, though I didn't watch the first debate and will be willing to change my opinion if I see anything more than the melange of rhetoric I'm expecting.

Examples - the abortion issue. Pro-choicers yelling "My body, my choice!" and Pro-lifers yelling "It's a baby, not a choice!" and the like. The first seem oblivious to the fact that the debate is (largely) dependent on when a fetus should be counted as a person, which is incredibly complicated by our total lack of any solid metaphysical criteria of personhood. There are theories out there of course - some good ones even. But not theories that people are aware of or really think about. And even if they were well known, it is unlikely that one would be convincing enough above the others to gain widespread acceptance. The other side, Pro-lifers, tend to not recognize that the question of whether or not a fetus counts as a person is up for debate, and their reasoning generally doesn't extend to considerations of why exactly they do count fetuses as persons.

That was somewhat of a digression, but the same holds for most any other political issue you can think of. People stick to slogans, to rhetoric, instead of thought. Not a new observation of course, but one that bears repeating many, many times. But more later, after the circus.

california tan ban again

2004-09-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

The California Tan-Ban Signed

Back in May, I came across a story about some legislation in California that banned people under 18 from tanning salons. I wrote a brief commentary, When Will It End? - California Tan Ban.

Today, I noticed a report saying that good 'ol Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill on Friday. And again, I wanted to say: shame on you. We don't need two sets of parents.

hobbes pretenders social contract

2004-09-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

Pretenders to the Social Contract
Hobbes, the State of Nature, and Contract-Troublemakers

In Leviathan, Hobbes speculates about the "natural condition" of man. All men (and women as well, if we wish to modernize our discussion a bit) are roughly equal - that is, there is no one endowed with such superior strength or intellect that he or she will necessarily dominate others. Some are stronger and/or brighter, of course, but as the saying goes: "even the strongest must sleep."

Since everyone is roughly equal in the Hobbesian state of nature, there is competition for food, land, mates, and everything else a person might desire to possess. There is no morality, no restriction on the means employed in competing for resources. It is the war of all against all, and all are in "continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

In the state of nature, everyone has a right to everything since there is no morality of injustice. For the sake of safety and peace, it is necessary that all people give up some of these rights. This, Hobbes thinks, is the legitimate basis for government. Individuals agree to give up their rights to a sovereign, which could be an individual, a group, a government, etc. Hobbes says this of giving up rights:

Right is laid aside, either by simply renouncing it, or by transferring it to another. . . By transferring, when he intendeth the benefit thereof to some certain person or persons. And when a man hath in either manner abandoned or granted away his right, then is he said to be obliged, or bound, not to hinder those to whom such right is granted, or abandoned, from the benefit of it: and that he ought, and it is duty, not to make void that voluntary act of his own: and that such hindrance is injustice. . . So that injury or injustice, in the controversies of the world, is somewhat like to that which in the disputations of scholars is called absurdity. For as it is there called an absurdity to contradict what one maintained in the beginning; so in the world it is called injustice, and injury voluntarily to undo that which from the beginning he had voluntarily done. The way by which a man either simply renounceth or transferreth his right is a declaration, or signification, by some voluntary and sufficient sign, or signs, that he doth so renounce or transfer, or hath so renounced or transferred the same, to him that accepteth it. And these signs are either words only, or actions only; or, as it happeneth most often, both words and actions. And the same are the bonds, by which men are bound and obliged: bonds that have their strength, not from their own nature (for nothing is more easily broken than a man's word), but from fear of some evil consequence upon the rupture. Whensoever a man transferreth his right, or renounceth it, it is either in consideration of some right reciprocally transferred to himself, or for some other good he hopeth for thereby. For it is a voluntary act: and of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself.

Pretenders?

There being no morality, duty, or injustice in the state of nature, the idea of an individual in that state creating a contract that he or she is legitimately bound to seems problematic. After all, you can do anything you please, including actions like saying "I transfer ___ rights to ___." But what about such a state would actually create an obligation? As Hobbes says, "nothing is more easily broken than a man's word." It would surely not be absurd to "break" a contract that you never sincerely made in the first place, and in the state of nature with unlimited rights you undoubtedly have the right to deceive others if you so wish. Hobbes tries to overcome such an objection to his theory by claiming that individuals receive something in return for sincerely agreeing to give up their rights: security, among other benefits. It has nothing to do with integrity or a choice to be truthful; people form the social contract for their own good. And it is absurd to contradict yourself by going back on such a choice later on.

It is important to note that this is a contradiction of an individual's own will. It is not absurd merely to contradict your own statements - after all, in the state of nature there is no prohibition against lying, and lying might benefit you. In such a case, lying would make perfect sense. The absurdity comes in when you sincerely agree to something, sincerely willing that you come under an obligation, and then later acting otherwise; in this case, it is as if you are willing a contradiction. You will yourself to be bound by the social contract so that you might benefit it, yet you also will that you be outside of it if you choose to break it by murdering, stealing, or doing something else it prohibits. In this lies injustice, and the arrangement is the beginning of morality for Hobbes.

It's probably evident by now where I'm going with this. Individuals enter into the social contract because it benefits them to be a member of the society bound by that contract. But what if an individual could benefit from the social contract without sincerely agreeing to it? If everyone else simply believed that this individual had accepted the contract and entered into society with them, that individual would gain all of the benefits of the contract even if he or she had not actually willed him or herself to be bound by the contract. There is no restriction of deceit in the state of nature, and this individual is doing no more than wide-scale deception; she wills that she remain in the state of nature secretly, deceiving the others with whom she is still "at war" with.

Our pretender to the social contract cannot, of course, openly violate the contract. If she steals and kills in public, it will be no defense to say "Ha! I lied when I told you I gave up my rights - in fact, I have retained them, and thus have done no injustice to you." Once the cat is out of the bag, everyone else is at liberty to do whatever they please with our pretender. Though she has not actually done any injustice, she is not protected by the social contract - she is "at war" with the society, so its members are allowed to do what they will to her without violating their contract or engaging in any injustice.

But we have no reason to assume that the pretender will be so foolish. She will, for the most part, go along with society just like everyone else. But there will be two differences, the second following from the first. She will not really be bound to the contract or obligated to follow the rules of society, though doing so will generally be in her best interest, and she will know it. And since she knows this, any time she has a chance to break the rules without getting caught, there is absolutely no restriction to her doing so if it will benefit her. When no one is looking she can acquire less-than-legal copies of music, pocket a candy bar or Rolex, drive above the speed limit, etc. Her only real restriction will be practical concerns of what she can get away with, and what risks are worth taking - she has no reason at all to feel obliged to adhere to the law for the sake of the law. It simply doesn't apply to her (in Hobbes conception, remember).

Conclusion

Does this made-up scenario present any substantial problems to the social contract theory as promoted by Hobbes? It has no real effect on the administration of law through punishments and the like - "pretenders" like the one I mentioned are technically "at war" with everyone else, even if this is unknown, so there is no reason that they couldn't be thrown in jail, fined, executed, etc. Everyone else did really commit to the contract, so punishing them for violations is warranted as well.

When it comes to issues of morality and personal motivation, however, the possibility is a real problem. Those who argue that morality somehow arises from Hobbesian social contracts will have to admit that the moral code/law does not truly apply to such pretenders. And individuals who feel themselves to be "pretenders to the social contract," those who generally follow the rules only out of fear of punishment rather than any sincere commitment to them, have no internalized motivation to follow the rules when no one is looking. If a great number of people only followed the rules when a police officer was watching over them, the rules would be vastly ineffective. For the most part, people in a society need to feel a true duty to adhere to societal rules. Or, lacking that, society must at least be mainly composed of people who adhere to some set of morals or internal guidelines that is not too far removed from the rules of society. Individuals might not choose to refrain from murdering simply because of the laws against it, but as long as they don't commit murder because they think it is wrong, society could still get by. But those like our pretender are not motivated by the rules, nor are they motivated by morality; they know they are in the state of nature, where everything is permitted.

Are there practical implications? Maybe, maybe not. It could be said that there really are such pretenders; perhaps the intentionally criminal who care nothing for the law could accurately be described in this way by the Hobbesian picture. Hobbes justifies the punishment of criminals by arguing that they have themselves agreed to be bound by the social contract, so their punishment for breaking it is in a way self-willed. Now, if confronted with the possibility (or actuality) of these pretenders, he couldn't make such an argument - though he could of course say that since pretenders are not protected by the contract, they can be punished just like anyone else.

But it is not just that they could be punished like everyone else - they could, in fact, be punished in any way we chose to punish them. Pretenders are "at war" with society, and if morality emerges from the social contract, pretenders are not true moral agents and must not be treated according to either the social contract or to moral rules. Unlike criminals who remain within the social contract and are perhaps less likely to break it, as they still presumably feel at least some obligation to the rules they have sincerely accepted, pretenders are more dangerous. They can be expected to break the rules when they have the chance and it benefits them. So not only would it be permissible to punish them severely, even to kill them, within a Hobbesian framework - it might be wise to do so.

I'm not recommending that all frequent criminals be killed, of course. Even if we accepted the Hobbesian framework, and I'm not suggesting we do, we would still have the problem of figuring out when an individual was really a pretender to the social contract. If we had a policy of killing these renegades, few would likely admit their positions. But for those who do accept something like the Hobbesian framework, it is a possibility that could be considered.

Upcoming Hobbes Social Contract

2004-09-19T16:28:00.000-07:00

Upcoming: Hobbes and the Social Contract

Just so everyone knows, I haven't abandoned the blog, and I do plan on updating more frequently than I have over the past few weeks. Classes started back up, and I've had to adjust to waking up early again.

The summer was mostly a vacation from studying philosophy, so now that I'm back at it my posts will often reflect things I've been reading. I'll do my best to keep clear of completely esoteric topics and write about things that (I think, at least) will hold some general appeal. I can't promise that all of my observations, comments, arguments, and whatever else will never have been given before (who could?), but I think there will still be room for productive and informative discussions. And it won't be all philosophy of course.

So in the very near future, expect a post on the Hobbesian view of the "social contract" (which, you may remember, is an idea I'm not fond of) and some potential problems I find with it.

pope gay marriage canada

2004-09-04T08:01:00.000-07:00

Pope Denounces Canadian Gay Marriage
and wants Canada to legally impose a Catholic definition of the institution

Okay, maybe he doesn't exactly want Canada to allow only marriages in full accordance with Church doctrine, but the Pope seems to think that Canada ought to at least partially impose his view of marriage on its citizens. In Pope Denounces Gay Marriage in Canada from AP via Yahoo, it is reported that the Pope wants the three provinces in Canada that allow gay marriages (in which 70% of the Canadian population live) to stop.

Why? Because gay marriages "degrade the true sense of marriage." Apparently it isn't enough that the Church opposes gay marriages, won't perform or recognize them, and for the most part tries its best to encourage similar beliefs in its members. No, the Pope wants his and his Church's idea of marriage, as much as can be at least, to be everyone else's idea of marriage as well, Catholic or non-Catholic. Not only that, but he wants to enlist the Canadian government (and others, I'm sure) in making sure that happens.

The American idea of separation of church and state, despite the sometimes questionable degree of that separation (and perhaps, sometimes, the excessive nature of its 'enforcement'), is a beautiful one, and one that has served fairly well in protecting a variety of freedoms. I understand that the Pope doesn't think gay marriages are "real" marriages. Most of his Church seems to share in that belief, and they behave in accordance with their views. But what gives this guy the idea that he should use whatever authority he has to tell non-Catholics what they ought to do, or to tell a people and a nation that it needs to keep its version of marriage in line with his?

When in comes to euthanasia and abortion, I can see where he's coming from when he tries to persuade governments to create legislation in accordance with his views. Whether they are right or wrong, his beliefs in this matter deal with (or he believes them to deal with) the unacceptable taking of lives, basically murder as he sees it. People are, if he is right, actually being directly physically harmed by certain practices, and that is generally the kind of thing that most people would agree that governments must necessarily become involved in - especially governments based on some notion of individual freedom. People generally agree that the taking of innocent life is a pretty serious violation of rights, and one that makes it permissible for other people to become involved, even if force is necessary.

Marriage, on the other hand, has no such clear and direct relation to such obvious violation of individual rights. Sure, there are arguments out there (none terribly convincing) that allowing gay marriage does cause some sort of "harm" - but whatever damage this allegedly causes is pretty much limited to the "rightful" institution of marriage. There arguments generally beg the question pretty heavily, requiring you to assume that the "traditional" view of marriage is right and good to begin with, and that any change to the way people view it is "harmful." There are other arguments trying to link gay marriage to actual, clear-cut harms, but if there is any such connection it is so weak and distant that no one has been able to adequately demonstrate it yet. So whereas I might be more charitable in my view of the Pope trying to impose his views in cases where those views involve clear-cut, serious harms (assuming, of course, that he is correct), I find him greatly out of line in trying to get countries to legislate according to his beliefs about marriage. If Canadians want to have gay marriages, that's their business. No one will force him to recognize them as legitimate marriages, but he certainly doesn't have the power to define the institution however he wishes for everyone else in the world.

winning war on terrorism

2004-08-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

Winning the 'War' on Terrorism
Can it be done? Of course not

Bush decided to say something honest for once, admitting that the war on terror cannot be won, and some people apparently think that is a good reason to attack him:

"After months of listening to the Republicans base their campaign on their singular ability to win the war on terror, the president now says we can't win the war on terrorism," said Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards. "This is no time to declare defeat."

"The war on terrorism is absolutely winnable," Edwards said later on ABC's "Nightline."

...

"To suggest that the war on terror can't be won is absolutely unacceptable," said Sen. Joseph Biden...

So what exactly did Bush mean in saying that the war on terrorism cannot be won? Well, if we're trying to be impartial we're obligated to grant him at least a little bit of intelligence, which would lead me to think that he probably meant that we will never be able to totally eliminate terrorism. This is taking the "War on Terror" in the broad sense, including not just the terrorists responsible for 9/11 but all others, including the home-grown variety like Timothy McVeigh.

In that context, of course the 'war' isn't winnable. Acts of terrorism potentially require no more than a sole gunman, one person with an agenda who knows how to make explosives, one bus driver or pilot who decides to crash into a skyscraper. And even more organized terrorism isn't likely to disappear - until the Psychic Thought Police come around (and let's hope they never do), groups of like-minded individuals convinced of the necessity of extreme acts will always come into existence some time, some where, no matter how nice and happy a place the world might become.

That's not to say that there is no disparity in the way Bush talked about winning the War on Terror before and this admission. Anyone implying that terrorism in the broad sense can be eliminated (rather than the ending of the capacity of certain groups to do harm) is plainly wrong. That includes Bush and Kerry. Kerry claiming that Bush is "declaring defeat" is off-base, and would be ignorant if it wasn't such obvious Political Talk. No wonder so many people are apathetic toward politics - these politicians aren't even putting out the effort to appear to be engaging in honest and open discussion.

munch's the scream stolen

2004-08-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' Stolen by Armed Thieves

According to Armed Robbers Steal Munch's 'The Scream' in Oslo and Munch's Famous 'Scream,' 'Madonna' stolen, two thieves threatened museum staff at the Munch Museum in Oslo with guns, ordered one women to take down the two paintings, and then got away in a dark car driven by a third man. The thieves cut the paintings out of their frames, which were later found somewhere in the city.

john kerry royal blood

2004-08-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

John Kerry Wins because of Royal Lineage
or he will, according to some British researchers

Burke's Peerage, a group of experts on British aristocracy, have determined that John Kerry has more royal blood in him than President Bush. Because of that, they predict he will win the election. Sound a bit far-fetched of a reason? Well, consider this: Bush's family tree had more royal connection that his opponent in the 2000 election, Al Gore. Not only that - every winner of the November presidential election in U.S. history has been the candidate with the most royal lineage.

from this article:

After months of research into Kerry's ancestry, Burke's Peerage, experts on British aristocracy, reported Monday that the Vietnam war veteran is related to all the royal houses of Europe and can claim kinship with Czar Ivan "The Terrible," a previous Emperor of Byzantium and the Shahs of Persia.

...

Kerry is a descendant of the former Kings of England, Henry III and Henry II and is distantly related to Richard the Lionheart, who led the third Crusade in 1189, according to Burke's.

Interesting fact, isn't it? I can only hope that the prediction turns out to be wrong this time - I don't care much for Kerry. But come to think of it, I don't care much for Bush either...

jesus was a democrat

2004-08-18T10:10:00.000-07:00

Jesus was a Democrat
say James C. Moore and Rev. Timothy Tutt

The article Religion Experts Ask How Jesus Would Vote quotes author James C. Moore as saying "If ever there were a bleeding-heart liberal, it was Jesus Christ... I think the carpenter from Galilee was the original Democrat." It also quotes Rec. Timothy Tutt: "As I read the Scriptures and as I understand faith, God's side is the group that's feeding the poor, caring about children, making sure that people have enough food to eat - not killing others."

It makes you wonder about the intelligence of some of these people, doesn't it? Tutt seems to think that Republicans and Democrats are two different social clubs - the Republicans make up reasons to send people to war, and the Democrats are out on the street giving blankets to the homeless and working in soup kitchens.

Well Tutt, Jesus supported going out and doing these good deeds. He wanted individuals to go out and help the poor and such because it was the right thing to do. But I must have missed that part of the Bible where Jesus told his followers: "Thou shalt go to the houses of the wealthy and the well-fed, demanding ten silver pieces to finance our Help the Poor Operation. Those who refuse, you shall bind by the feet and hands and cast them into the prison." Anyone remember which book that was in?

If the Democratic party was really focused "feeding the poor, caring about children, making sure that people have enough food to eat," they wouldn't be wasting time with all these silly elections. They would be out there doing it, using their own time and money to help. But no, their policy is about forcing people to pay up, so government employees (for the most part, rather than unpaid volunteers) can do the work for them.

They don't mind giving their part of course - as long as everyone is taxed so that part isn't an especially large one. And there's little need to actually become physically involved, since their taxes go to pay people to do it for them.

No, Jesus wouldn't be a Democrat. He wasn't very fond of force and violence - and if you don't think that either party, Democrat or Republican, wants to use force and violence to make America the way they want it, just try refusing to pay part or all of your taxes so as not to support programs you disagree with, or breaking a law you believe unjust. They aren't going to get down on their knees and beg you to do what they want because it's right; you're going to be forcibly imprisoned. I don't see Jesus as the type who kicks down the door and sticks a gun in your face.

other blogs:

Allah is in the House

WizBang

ted rall liberal ann coulter

2004-08-18T01:00:00.000-07:00

Ted Rall: The Liberal Ann Coulter?

I'm not overly familiar with many Op/Ed writers, so I was amused when I stumbled across this piece by Ted Rall, in which he writes:

Well aware that it is barren soil for their party's anti-urban, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, overtly racist ideology, Republican leaders have wisely avoided New York City as a convention site for the past 150 years.

The red-hot rhetoric reminded me of Ann Coulter, who is occasionally good for a laugh or two. What's the point of it? If there are any Republicans out there who just read that and were convinced to vote Democrat, please let me know.

I suppose the main thrust behind Rall's "anti-feminist" claim (unless there is some real anti-female ideology unique to Republican thought) is the general anti-abortion stance of Republicans. It's ridiculous enough that the abortion issue has gotten so tangled up in politics the way it is; what a person thinks about abortion, which should be considered a moral issue, shouldn't have much at all to do with their political affiliation. Republicans who oppose abortion don't oppose abortion because they want to interfere with women's rights to their own bodies - they probably oppose abortion because they think a fetus is its own person, and they don't think a woman has a right to harm another person. Whether they are right or not, there's nothing anti-feminist about it (considering feminism as support for either equal women's rights or equality in some other sense).

"Anti-urban"? I don't even really know what Rall means by that. Republicans ideology is somehow opposed to the city perhaps? "Overtly racist" was really amusing. Oh, that's right, Bush laid out his plan for WASP-domination of America in that speech yesterday... But I suppose even "Covertly racist" is a tough sell. Maybe he doesn't like it that not enough Republicans support slavery reparations or affirmative action (though they don't seem to be in much of a hurry to eliminate AA). But here again, not supporting reparations for slavery or affirmative action doesn't make a person/group racist - being a racist (noun: A person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others) makes you a racist. Not favoring racial preferences in hiring/admissions/etc doesn't make you a racist any more than not thinking reparations are justified/practical makes you one.

I'm no Republican of course, and am completely open to any legitimate criticisms of the party. I'm always glad to add to my list of reasons I don't support the Republican party (same goes for the Democrats, of course). But Rall isn't giving me much to work with here.

yu zhenhuan ear hair removed

2004-08-17T07:21:00.000-07:00

Yu Zhenhuan, World's Hairiest Man (and Rock Star)
has ear hair removed

. .

Another oddly interesting bit of news I came across: World' s Hairiest Man has Ear Hair Removed to Hear. Pictures found at Yu Zhenhuan photo.

from the Yahoo article:

The world's hairiest man, Chinese rock singer Yu Zhenhuan, underwent ear surgery in Shanghai on Friday to remove hair that was impairing his hearing, the Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

...

Yu was recognized in 2002 as the world's hairiest man by the Guinness Book of Records, Xinhua said.

Rather frightening looking guy, isn't he? He's like a hairier, Chinese version of Lemmy from Motorhead.

08/18/2004 Update:

I just found this article on Yahoo News: China's "hairboy" aspires to be rock star. Apparently Yu is not (or is no longer) the world's hairiest man - a pair of brothers from Mexico now hold that record. But he is still China's hairiest man, which isn't bad considering the number of people in the running there.

I also found a link to his website: http://www.maohai.com/. You can listen to a few of his songs as well:

Track 1

Track 2

Track 3

Additional photos (in which he doesn't look quite as frightful as the others I've posted):

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other blogs:

A Welsch View

Dowbrigade News

american anarchist convergence vote

2004-08-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

Who Gets the Anarchist Vote?

Trick question, right? An anarchist wouldn't vote. Some anarchists, however, are planning on casting a vote against Bush according to Anarchists' Convention Debates Voting from Yahoo News via AP.

from the article:

"Ultimately, those who are voting are either bad anarchists or not anarchists at all," said Lawrence, a "Californian in his mid-40s" who declined to give his last name. "No one can represent my interests. We reject political professionals."

An anarchist deciding to vote isn't necessarily a contradiction. Though it is unlikely that any political candidate could present a perfect (or even good) fit for someone who rejects an official government, a practically-minded anarchist might cast a vote for a candidate who he or she thought would move in the right direction.

It could make sense for an anarchist to vote for someone like Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party's Presidential candidate. Smaller government and less government control of our finances and our private lives is certainly closer to no government than one under either Bush or Kerry.

But the article doesn't mention anything about about Libertarian candidates - the article lists Ralph Nader or John Kerry as possibilities for these anarchists' votes. John Kerry? I can't say that a Democrat-led government would necessarily be any more antithetical to anarchist than a Republican-led one, but it surely isn't any closer; and I don't see how anyone could possibly think that having Kerry as a president would bring the U.S. any closer to abolishing its government.

gail grinds 480 pound woman couch

2004-08-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

Gail Grinds, a 480 Pound Woman, Passes Away
after spending six years on a couch

Emergency workers trying to remove Gail Grinds from the couch she had been stuck on for six years

I occasionally browse the net for strange and interesting news stories (Oddly Enough on Yahoo News is a good place to look). I found the Fat Cat Story that way, and I've found another I thought I would post to keep up the variety on here. So here we have a story about Gail Grinds.

Thanks to blogs Sigma7.net and A Visible Hum for directing me to the news story at WFTV.com.

On Wednesday, August 11th, rescue workers were called to the home of Gail Laverne Grinds, who was having trouble breathing. Grinds weighed 480 pounds, and had not moved from the same couch in six years - even to use the bathroom. She had been there so long that her skin had grown into the fabric of the couch.

Rescue workers tried to extract her for about six hours. They finally managed to get her to a hospital, couch still attached, but were unable to keep her alive. She had lived with a man who told police that he tried his best to care for her, and neighbors reported that they had seen the man outside with children. Rescue workers said the home was filthy, and everyone entering it had to wear protective gear.

more from other blogs:

Freedom of Thought

Michel Vuijlsteke's Weblog

A Welsch View

The blogging will continue until morale improves...

Clay Whittaker

american cia agent beheaded iraq

2004-08-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

American CIA Agent Beheaded in Iraq?

According to Web Site Shows Apparent Beheading Tape from Yahoo via AP, an Islamic website has released another beheading video - this time of a man it claims to be a CIA agent. An anonymous U.S. official cited in the article said that no CIA employees are missing.

In the first half of the video, which is around four minutes long, the victim is seated with a group of militants/terrorists around him. A large photograph that depicts what looks like a man sitting at a table is hung around his neck, as is an ID card with a photo and the label "Visitor". The terrorists are holding various weapons, including a rocket launcher, and hold up and read from a book that is probably the Koran. In the second half of the video the photograph and ID card have been removed, and the victim is seated alone. One of the terrorists then beheads him by striking his neck multiple times with a wide-bladed sword. In the end, the victim's head is displayed as the other men shout and move around in celebration, one of them seeming to wave at the camera.

Images from the Video:

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More Images
(note: this set of images includes graphic views of the beheading - don't click them if you don't want to see it)

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Image 20

what is an objective moral standard

2004-08-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

What is an Objective Moral Standard?

Because of some confusion in an earlier debate about what exactly an objective moral standard is or would be, I decided to post the most brief and simple explanation that I could. The criteria for a moral standard/rule/law's being objective is very simple: it must always apply, and it must apply to all moral agents. Nothing more.

This means that an objective moral standard need not demand the same actions of all people in the same circumstances - that is, the 'results' you get when applying it to a particular person and situation would not have to be the same that another person in that same general situation would get. The rule itself is what must remain the same if it is to be objective.

This makes sense - there is no logistic reason why "Always act out of love" could not be an objective moral standard, though the 'results' that would occur when people acted according to it would surely be different. The objectivity of a standard does not mean that individuals have no choice or personal preference in how they act upon it, as long as their actions do not violate that standard.

It is also not the case that an objective moral standard must 'cover' all situations. It must always apply, but that does not mean that for any given situation it will demand a specific action. There can be something like moral grey areas: realms of action that are basically morally neutral, neither good nor bad, that the moral standard does not prohibit. Something like "Never kill people" could be an objective moral standard - it would have to apply all the time and to all people. As long as you were not acting in a way that would kill someone, this moral standard wouldn't tell you what to do; it would only serve to limit your range of actions. But it would still apply to all situations all the time, because there would never be a time when you could choose to kill someone without violating it.

Further, it is not the case that there be only one objective moral standard. If such standards are possible and do exist, there is no reason why there could not be more than one. There might be a list, something like "Never kill," "Never steal," etc. and so on. As long as there was no contradiction between the standards, they could all fulfull the criteria of being an objective moral standard: applying all the time and to all moral agents.

A moral standard's being objective does not require anything special except for the fulfillment of the two previously mentioned criteria. How does a standard gain the label of 'objective'? Generally, it is by stipulation. Whoever comes up with the standard simply claims that he or she believes that the standard applies all the time and to all people, rather than them believing that the standard is somehow relative.

Now, saying that a moral standard is objective does not necessarily mean you agree with it, or even that you think there really are objective moral standards (or moral standards at all). To claim that a standard is objective is simply a statement about how that standard is meant to apply, assuming it is the correct standard. People generally recognize that there are many different 'moral codes' out there, some of them very different from the others. But in recognizing another person's beliefs as a 'moral code', a person does not imply that they agree with those beliefs, or that they think the moral rules and standards within that code are correct. The description is based on the form of the beliefs (standards/rules that demand or prohibit actions) and the intention behind them (that they actually apply, as moral rules).

Likewise, to describe something as an 'objective moral standard', you are recognizing its form and intention - that it is something that fits the bill for what a moral rule would be, and that it is intended to (and can) apply at all times to all moral agents. Something like Kant's Categorical Imperative ("Act always so that you can will the maxim by which you act to be universal law") is an objective moral standard simply because that is the correct description for it, because it was intended to apply all the time to all people and that is how it functions in Kant's moral system.

four hac user bios added

2004-07-28T11:42:00.000-07:00

Four User Bios Up and Running

I have (finally, slowly) managed to finish four use bio pages. It doesn't take long when I actually sit down to do it, but well.. you know. The pages currently up are: Ben, Brad, Knight of the Mind, and AngloBaptist. On HAC User Bios you will be able to find a list of all user bios and the dates they were added.

I'll be adding more today, so be on the look out for more. And if you haven't sent me a picture and information for one yet, be sure to send it soon.

arguments flag burning amendment

2004-07-22T03:10:00.000-07:00

Response to Arguments on the Flag-Burning Amendment

From Overreaction Alert by Suburban Sundries Shack:

Far be it from me to spit in the face, blah blah blah, but whether you believe this is a good idea or not, you'd be hard-pressed to make a convincing argument that putting something to the people of America for debate and a vote is a disgrace.

The concept of a democracy is very simple. If you have something you want made into law - even Constitutional Law - you subject it to the rigors of the democratic process. You let people debate the issue and decide for themselves whether or not it ought to be. Squelching the attempt to do so is antithetical to democracy and freedom. It's that simple.

Let's not be so simple-minded as to think that freedom and democracy always go hand in hand. Democracy has allowed laws promoting slavery, segregation, eugenics, and a whole host of other gross violation of individual freedoms because the voting majority was in support of them. If Democracy is such holy and unequivocally good institution, why do we have courts that can strike down majority-approved legislation? Right is right, wrong is wrong, and freedom is freedom no matter what a democratic majority supports. Is preventing people from telling me that I can't burn a flag on risk of imprisonment antithetical to democracy? Sure it is - so was Brown vs. the Board of Education. But to say it is antithetical to freedom is silly. It's that simple.

Ask yourself this: What is more important, popular opinion or freedom and justice? If you blindly support popular opinion no matter what, you might want to take another look at the flag you're talking about - the country it represents does not have a history of supporting your view.

The issue is hardly as black and white as HAC would have us believe. Flags are objects, it is true. But flags are not merely objects, equal to an old t-shirt or a ripped pair of jeans. A flag is also a symbol and that makes the argument much more complex. Symbols embody ideas, often important ones. For evidence of that, remember the debate and eventual legislative action over flying the Confederate battle flag from several state buildings in the south. A national flag is an even more special case. It is a symbol chosen by a nation to represent itself. It is an icon and that merits different consideration as well. If a flag was nothing but an object, you would be hard-pressed to see such popular support for a flag-burning amendment as polls have shown throughout the late 1980s and well into the 1990s. As late as 1999, a USA Today poll shows 63% of the American people in favor of such an Amendment. Obviously, the American flag is far more than an object.

Flags are not merely objects? I must have missed something here... are they somehow magical? Sure, we choose to consider them as symbols that represent something, whatever that may be. People fly them or burn them with the intention of making a statement. But no one seems to be arguing that it should be illegal to make statements that flag-burners might want to make in writing or in speeches. This isn't yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre, lying under oath, threatening bodily harm to anyone, etc. If the statement itself is permissible, and the action by which it is conveyed is not causing any harm, how could it possibly make any sense to outlaw that particular way of conveying the statement?

The example of the Confederate flag in southern states is completely different than flag burning. That issue isn't about individuals expressing their own beliefs on their own time - that is about the government making (or possibly seeming to make) a racist statement. I won't get into the debate about whether or not it was actually doing so - but the problem there has nothing to do with the particular method by which that statement may have been made, the problem was solely with a statement that the government should not be making.

And again, no, flags are not more than objects no matter how much you point out that people also choose to recognize them as symbols with meaning. And in any case, even if they were somehow actually 'embodied' with this meaning, that's certainly no reason to outlaw burning them - since when do we have the right to tell people that they must respect a certain set of beliefs? I don't get to demand that no one burn a book that I love, even if it is generally recognized as representing/embodying/being symbolic of whatever beliefs, qualities, or whatever else. The only thing special about symbols is our view of them as symbols - there's nothing special about the object itself. If it is permissible to speak out against, ridicule, and bash the view, how could it possibly make sense to outlaw the burning of an object that people view as symbolic of that view?

Really? Perhaps she ought to consider another point. A flag-burning amendment wouldn't prevent one single person from expressing their feelings and belief. Not one. It will only prevent them from expressing their opinions about American in one particular manner. An infinite number of other methods are open to them. Restricting one method is hardly a critical impingement on anyone's freedom. I'll quote Justice Stevens' dissent in the 1989 Texas vs Johnson Supreme Court case, "Had he [Johnson] chosen to spray-paint -- or perhaps convey with a motion picture projector -- his message of dissatisfaction on the facade of the Lincoln Memorial, there would be no question about the power of the Government to prohibit his means of expression". Nor is it the only case in which we have seen fit to restrict the methods a person may use to convey their views. We have a plethora of laws that routinely restrict speech for various reasons. Preventing the public desecration of our flag would only be one of them. Perhaps HAC would rathre we remove all laws that prevent us from saying anything we want, wherever we want, in any manner we want, but I rather doubt it.

Yes, that's right - people would still have other methods for expressing their views. So heck, how about we just make it illegal for people to express any anti-American sentiments in any way except by writing their views on toilet paper with crayons? The "they can still express themselves in other ways" argument is weak and ridiculous. Since when do people only have the right to express themselves in government-approved fashion? Restrictions on free speech generally (and should) begin only when that speech is causing harm. Real harm, not just making you feel bad because you don't like what you're hearing. Remember the "Fire!" in the crowded theatre example, that sort of thing?

When you start talking about things like spray-painting a memorial, anyone can see (once again) they you are bringing up something that is completely different. It isn't illegal to express yourself by spray-painting public property because you aren't allowed to express yourselves in certain ways - it's because you don't own that property. Completely different reason there. No one is arguing that a person can do anything they like as long as they are doing it to make a statement. But we are talking about personal, private property here. People who buy their very own flag to burn it. That piece of cloth doesn't belong to anyone else, no matter what others decide to view it as representing.

We aren't talking about restricting people's methods of expressing their views because the method itself is a problem. The call to ban flag-burning is clearly motivated by a problem with the message expressed by flag-burners. It wouldn't matter if you spray-painted "I love America!" across the Lincoln Memorial - it would still be illegal because there is something wrong with the method itself. If there is nothing wrong with burning a flag-shaped piece of cloth that you own, the only complaint that there could be against burning the American flag could be one about the message itself.

Ah, there's that word "merely" again. Burning the American flag is a trifling matter, an inconsequential thing to her, no different than burning any other brightly-colored scrap of cloth. Except that it isn't and no amount of bloviation will change that.

Ah, the straw-man arguments. Don't you just love those? No one could seriously think that I would see burning an American flag as being no different than burning "any other brightly-colored scrap of cloth". If, for example, someone burned the Mexican flag, that would probably mean they had something against Mexico (or the Mexican government, or culture, or...), while burning the Spanish flag would probably have something to do with Spain. And burning a Bible might mean a person had something against Christianity, while burning the Koran might mean they had something against Islam.

What's the point? The only reason a person would see burning the American flag as being something especially offensive would be that they very strongly disagree with whatever views are being (or they see as being) expressed by that burning. Hey, that's great - fly your flag proudly to express your views then. But the fact that you disagree with someone and because you see their expression of their views as much more than a trifling manner does not mean you have a right to throw them in prison. Not everyone thinks like you do - understand that, accept it, grow up and get over it. I wouldn't see the burning of a Bible as an inconsequential matter either (or the burning of Kant, for that matter) - but that doesn't permit me to imprison people who do it. And just like not everyone shares everyone else's religious beliefs, not every one shares your political/cultural beliefs either. Nor does every one share your views of what it means to burn the flag. So who are you to say "This is what it means, and I don't like what it means, so you aren't allowed to do it"?

This last section was, of course, a poor attempt at a personal attack to discredit my views anyway. You know, one of those "Hey everybody, she doesn't think it's any big deal to burn the flag, ignore her arguments even if they make sense!" statements. Intelligent people don't take that kind of thing seriously. And in any case, it was outrightly false and unsupported.

Of course burning the American flag is different than burning something else. It makes a different statement. It makes a statement that most people see as very significant because of how strongly they disagree with it. And if you really believe in America, you believe in tolerating that in return for your freedom to express your views. That's only fair, isn't it?

paul johnson beheading video released

2004-07-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

Paul Johnson Beheading Video Released

About a month after pictures of Paul Johnson's body were released, the video has somehow come out as well. It doesn't seem to have received much media coverage, as it has been available here (direct link) for about four days and I just heard about it today.

Captures from the Video:

Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
Picture 4
Picture 5
Picture 6
Picture 7
Picture 8

An AP report I found on Yahoo News says that Johnson's head was found in a freezer at a suspected Al-Queda hideout during a raid, along with weapons, explosives, and chemicals.

flag burning ban amendment

2004-07-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

Enemies of Freedom Try to Ban Flag-Burning

They're at it again - those politicians who want to spit in the face of America's often-trampled ideal of personal freedom yet again. They really want to mangle the Constitution this year. First the attempt for the same-sex marriage ban amendment, and now an amendment making it illegal for people to express their discontent with the American government, culture, or whatever else by burning the flag. To those who support this, I can only say: you are a disgrace to the name 'patriot' and to every person who has ever fought to preserve the freedoms America should stand for.

Flags are objects; whatever that piece of cloth might be printed with and whatever that might be understood to stand for, that does not change this fact. If you are the owner of such an object, as an American you should be free to do whatever you want with that object as long as you are not causing actual harm to other people. If you want to use it to express your views, that is your right even if other people don't like what you have to say.

Why do they want to ban flag-burning? I can think of no single other reason than to prevent individuals from expressing feelings and beliefs that these legislators don't like. But that's freedom, that's America - we support your right to say what you'd like even if we don't agree. We don't have to look or listen if we don't like it. But we aren't going to prosecute you for it. You can even say that you don't like America, or what America stands for - you can say you don't believe in all of these freedoms that you are granted. But isn't the American way to believe that all people have the rights they do, whether or not they think so, whether or not we like them, even whether or not they're American?

Who is more dangerous to freedom and the American way of life here, people who merely express disagreement by burning a flag or people who want to tell me what I can or can't do with my own property on my own time, on threat of imprisonment if I don't comply? The first group only makes it slightly more obvious that not everyone agrees with things that happen in the country. The second group is the one really burning the American flag.

buried secret night shyamalan village

2004-07-19T23:39:00.000-07:00

The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan

I don't usually see much television, but I happened to catch the last two hours (out of three, with commercials) of the Sci-Fi channel 'documentary' on M. Night Shyamalan filmed during production of The Village. I was probably the last person to know that he'd produced Signs, Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense, and.. maybe others that I don't know about. But I liked all of those fairly well, particularly Signs, and I plan on seeing The Village when it comes out. So when I came across this special, The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, I thought I'd check it out.

If you're planning on watching the special and by chance you haven't seen anything about it on Yahoo news yet, stop reading now so I won't spoil it for you.

Continuing. I found the special enjoyable enough for something on television - a bit strange, in a Blair Witch-y sort of way. It reminded me a lot of The Blair Witch Project, which was probably intended because this too is a hoax. Same general atmosphere, with the addition of the whole movie production bit thrown in. Some interviews with Shyamalan, some stuff around the set. Lots of talk of secrets, strange stuff, etc. and so on, climaxing in what seems to be some almost really paranormal stuff barely captured on camera, followed by a confrontation with M. Night about his 'secret' from which he storms off in a huff.

The secret? He fell under the ice in some pond at ten, drowned, and was revived after 35 minutes. And then he could talk to ghosts, and crows followed him around. It was a bit more subtle of course, not badly done. Oh, and of course the pond he almost died in was the site of scores of other drownings and possible witchcraft-related activities. All a little too interesting and peculiar to be true, which I suspected. And, as it turns out, when I got online I saw this: Network Says Profile of Director Shyamalan Was Hoax.

No surprise there. A bit disappointing though - it would have been far more interesting if it hadn't been a hoax. Or if they had drawn it out long enough for me to see the movie first at least. Still, not knowing enough about film to have a taste for the less mainstream, I'm looking forward to seeing The Village when it comes out.

new airline terror story

2004-07-16T23:51:00.000-07:00

More Airline Terrorism on the Way?

I came across Terror in the Skies -- Again? by chance, and I definately recommend checking it out. Annie Jacobsen believes she may have had a close brush with potential terrorists making a practice run at either an airplane hijacking or something similar. Wizbang linked to a response to the incident on The Spoons Experience. Later, Wizbang posted an article raising some questions about Jacobsen's interpretation of the incident.

I'll do some more looking around and reading on this tomorrow, and post on updates.

200k unique daily visits

2004-07-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

Celebrating 200k Unique Daily Visits, Today!

After a little more than sixth months of blogging, the site has passed the 200,000 unique daily visitors mark according to Sitemeter, with around 380,000 page views.

If I'd had the blog set up in the format it is now from the beginning, with each post on its own page rather than the last six or seven all together, I'd probably have a better idea of how many of my posts were actually being read by visitors. But hopefully now that I'm fairly certain this new format will stick, I'll be able to judge that more accurately.

I'd like to thank everyone who has continued to make this an enjoyable blogging experience for myself and others, including those of you who have linked me, Blogrolled me, quoted/permalinked my posts, told your friends, etc. And especially those of you who contribute to the discussions in the 'Comments' sections - the discussions are by far the best, and my favorite, part of the blog.

I had an idea some time back to make up a 'User Bio' section, with bios, pictures, homepage/blog links, and the like for frequent site visitors/commenters. I got busy with school stuff and abandoned it, but I'd like to give it another try. So if you're interested, you can expect some information on that soon.

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