A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you – including your Internet freedom.
That’s the thought that keeps running through my head as I contemplate the full-scale panic going on right now about SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act”.
It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.
But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder…
Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?
It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.
Yeah, no shit? How…how do they avoid noticing that in reality it’s like this all the time?
The depressing part is how safe a bet it is that they’ll go back to being oblivious the moment their direct interests aren’t threatened. They’ll cheer for the next tax hike, the next round of environmental feel-goodism, the next political “fix” for the next transient market failure – and never notice that by doing so they’re creating the political conditions in which malignant growths like SOPAs inevitably flourish.
So here’s a clue: the only way to keep your freedom – on the Internet or anywhere else – is to defend everyone else’s freedom as well, by keeping your government tiny and starved and rigidly constrained in what it can do. Otherwise, the future you’re begging for is SOPAs without end.
> But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder…
This is exactly what I thought when Jeff Read brought up SOPA on the last thread, daftly wondering where a corporate-backed “Marxist” rock band fell on the issue. This is a special kind of blindness that ought to have a more precise name. It’s difficult to be civil to this mindset, because it is more irrational and contradictory than any bible ever written.
SOPA’s bad enough alright, but to my mind it’s nothing compared with the truly odious NDAA bill that will empower the military to arrest US citizens on US soil and detain them forever without trial. To me that is the end of a free society.
I’m British, so perhaps this might sound condescending (believe me it is not supposed to; we have plenty of these problems here too) but it looks an awful lot like the American Republic is over, and that from its ashes is rising the American Police State.
It’s sad and terrifying to behold.
> keeping your government tiny and starved and rigidly constrained
It is scary. At the risk of stating the obvious: The problem is that, regardless of what they say, almost no one wants even a small, let alone tiny, government. Almost everyone wants other people’s money used to protect them from just about everything bad.
That bit of advice can also go for social conservatives too. If you give the government the power to enter the bedroom, they’ll dip into your wallet on the way out.
@Tom: “I’m British, so perhaps this might sound condescending (believe me it is not supposed to; we have plenty of these problems here too) but it looks an awful lot like the American Republic is over, and that from its ashes is rising the American Police State.”
I’m very American and I don’t find your statement condescending at all. Louder please. In fact, my only criticism of your post would be that you are stating the obvious.
Except that, as Eric points out, there seem to be a lot of people who can’t discern the obvious.
Louder please.
@Tom,
Yes. A thousand times yes. I have been watching the NDAA development with disgust. This is the first time for me though that I have felt my anger begin to tip the scales toward hatred. That feeling kind of scares me…
Most politicians from both ruling parties are behind this too, a sad, sad few are saying “WTF, no way! ” They tried to couch it as part of a bill that would raise military pay and are therefore using that as both the carrot and the stick to push it through.
I said in a comment in a previous post that it seems as if the US is hurtling toward some weird dystopian future that is part Orwellian and part Huxley. Interestingly enough, also British gents like yourself.
After 9/11, there were people saying that “they hate our freedoms”. In a sense, that is true, in that some Muslims want the whole world to operate under Sharia law.
The US isn’t moving towards Sharia law, but the freedoms are sure going. The crazy part is that 9/11 was such a wonderful opportunity to the people in the US government that want to expand their powers. The scary part is that no one seems to mind.
Here in Calgary, a LOT of cameras have been put up at intersections, set up to look in the front windsheild. The scary part is that no one seems to mind.
@Joe Presley: “That bit of advice can also go for social conservatives too. If you give the government the power to enter the bedroom, they’ll dip into your wallet on the way out.”
Very true and too often forgotten.
But it ought to be pointed out that it is the Progressives whose first, last, and *only* answer to every ill whether imagined or real is to run to Daddy Government use it as a chance to take someone’s freedoms away. Social conservatives have a somewhat lesser tendency toward this particular pathology. Progressives know nothing else.
I will also ask you to provide a list from recent times of any attempts by social conservatives to “enter the bedroom”. I can’t think of any but I might have selective memory.
@Michael Hipp:
How recent? And would you view marital legislation in this case as a civil or “bedroom” matter?
@Michael Hipp
Not sure about attempts at a federal level, but Texas sure as hell likes to try to legislate people’s sex lives.
>>>I will also ask you to provide a list from recent times of any attempts by social conservatives to “enter the bedroom”. I can’t think of any but I might have selective memory.<<<
Uh, gosh. Sodomy laws, pornography laws, dictating who can marry who, contraception regulations and bans…
…Oh, or are you trolling? My bad.
Also @Michael Hipp:
Examples of Federal attempts only? Or include state governments (not that the difference isn’t mattering less and less these days…)
Hmm… let’s see, Obamacare and environmental regulations – who is against these?: big business interests. Who is for SOPA: big business interests. So I don’t get your comparison at all.
@WCC: “How recent? And would you view marital legislation in this case as a civil or “bedroom” matter?”
How about since 1990. And no “marriage” is not a bedroom issue. It says nothing about who you can sleep with, only what legal arrangements you are allowed to engage in.
@jsk: Federal is of more interest, as states (e.g. Texas) engaging in various things could arguably be a positive. Laboratory of democracy and all that. What in what way has Texas been trying to legislate people’s sex lives? I used to live near Houston.
@WCC
I know what you mean. I think this is the first time I have caught myself thinking “Jesus Christ, I can actually see myself condoning or taking part in a violent revolution if things continue this way.” And I am one of the most non-violent people you could imagine. It’s a scary and ugly thought, and I try not to think that way, but I am starting to see Thomas Jefferson in a whole new way:
‘From time to time it is necessary to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots.’
Ok, now I am definitely on an NSA watch list…
Ugh.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
And part Alan Moore, if you are familiar with his V for Vendetta series (but NOT the shitty Hollywood adaptation).
BeSlayed: You’ve been brainwashed by the Left that sees big business behind every evil. In reality, some big business is in favor of both, and some big business opposed both. After all, Google is heartily opposed to SOPA, and they certainly qualify as “big business”.
John Silveira
“The Coming American Dictatorship”
It’s actually true that Big Business is behind most of these atrocious laws and regs. But it’s equally true that they can’t use government power that doesn’t exist.
Bruce Yandle’s model is eternally relevant – Bootleggers and Baptists. There’s selfish and missionary interests behind almost every power grab. In this case,
the pro-IP people provide the “mission” and Hollywood and RIAA reap the cash.
@Michael Hipp:
But it ought to be pointed out that it is the Progressives whose first, last, and *only* answer to every ill whether imagined or real is to run to Daddy Government use it as a chance to take someone’s freedoms away. Social conservatives have a somewhat lesser tendency toward this particular pathology. Progressives know nothing else.
I will also ask you to provide a list from recent times of any attempts by social conservatives to “enter the bedroom”. I can’t think of any but I might have selective memory.
I agree with you. That’s why I’ve made the devil’s bargain with the Republican party even though I have a strong libertarian bent. Republicans are less likely to get through their social agendas, except maybe on a local level, than the Democrats will get through their economic agenda. Another trait that acts as a tell that Progressives are little mussolini wannabes is that I have yet to hear of a dictator they don’t like. Maybe Quadaffi but that’s only because a democratic President is in office. Not many people mention that Progressives were specifically and overtly an anti-democratic, with elements of racism, movement around the turn of the 20th century that believed it was best to have a technocratic elite run things. I could see their point when you have Tammany Hall to look at, but we have a century of failures to see where that bureaucratic utopia takes us.
As for your question about the attempts of social conservatives to “enter the bedroom”, I’d have to say it’s a little tougher because by nature conservative means to keep things the same. Here goes with the understanding that “enter the bedroom” was meant as a broad rhetorical device rather than a precise description. Anti-gay marriage, making abortion illegal, keeping drugs illegal, attempts at internet censorship, and attempts teaching creationism in schools are what come to mind.
Personally, I think religious organizations should be able to not recognize gay marriage just like they can choose to not recognize heterosexual marriages performed by different denominations. I’m also personally against abortion except in certain cases, but there’s no way I want back to the days of back alley abortions even though those days are before my time. If you want to teach your children creationism, go right ahead but at least recognize that the reason creationism vs evolution is even an issue is because we have a public education monopoly. And if you’re concerned about the lack of growth of families, then you have to recognize that a person’s economic situation is the single biggest determinant of whether they choose to have children. Ergo the high tax rates to pay for tax credits for children are counterproductive.
Well my attempt to quote Michael Hipp’s comment didn’t work. The first two paragraphs were written by Michael Hipp. How do people get the cool indented italics quote?
@Michael Hipp:
I was thinking of the Texas law against sodomy, which after a quick check I find was declared unconstitutional in 2003 (the last state to fall in this respect), so my facts there are a little behind. I also submit the law about sales of dildos, which is actually enforced. You can’t sell them (at least, AS dildos, they have to be sold as educational models or some claptrap), but you can own them, unless (and this is where it actually gets into the bedroom) you have five or more, at which point it’s considered intent to distribute.
Of course, the Texas Leg is about the goodest of good ol’ boys, and nothing they do surprises me in the least.
@Joe Presley: “I agree with you. That’s why I’ve made the devil’s bargain with the Republican party even though I have a strong libertarian bent…”
And I agree with you also. But I’ve come to realize that a “deal with a the devil” is never going to have a happy ending. Which is why I now view the Republicans with the same disgust due the Democrats. Corrupt Progressive Warmongering Totalitarian Banksters the whole lot of them on both sides of the aisle. And the horse they rode in on.
“Anti-gay marriage, making abortion illegal, keeping drugs illegal, attempts at internet censorship, and attempts teaching creationism in schools are what come to mind.”
We’d probably have some disagreements about how bad some of those items are. The thing that I think shows the stupidity (or is it gullibility) of the social conservatives is the various “War On Everything” boondoggles. Well, we sent the military to attack any country we pleased and now we’re going to send them to attack the USA also.
I always thought “unintended consequences” to be a really simple concept. Evidently not.
@Joe Preseley
if you put “<blockquote>” at the beginning of the quote, and “</blockquote&rt;” at the end, it will end up with that blue bar in the left margin and indented.
In case WordPress mangles my attempts at markup, that is supposed to be
“less than” (the left-pointing angle bracket) “blockquote” “greater than” (the right-pointing angle bracket)
“less than” “slash” (lower left to upper right) “blockquote” “greater than”
HTH….
@Joe Preseley
an example of the stuff in action
jsk: “I also submit the law about sales of dildos, which is actually enforced. You can’t sell them (at least, AS dildos, they have to be sold as educational models or some claptrap), but you can own them, unless (and this is where it actually gets into the bedroom) you have five or more, at which point it’s considered intent to distribute.”
Hehe. If I could stop laughing I’d definitely concede the point on that one. Tho compared to trashing the Bill of Rights that one seems nearly harmless. But what idiot thought the government could or should care about the number of toys in your nightstand?
“Of course, the Texas Leg is about the goodest of good ol’ boys, and nothing they do surprises me in the least.”
I’ll see your Texas and raise you Arkansas.
@Tom RE: This comment
Ok, now I am definitely on an NSA watch list…
Thanks, bro. Now I am too ;-)
And part Alan Moore, if you are familiar with his V for Vendetta series (but NOT the shitty Hollywood adaptation).
Yep, parts of that crossed my mind, but I’ve got Orwell & Huxley on the brain tonight…
@Michael Hipp, RE: This comment
” How about since 1990. And no “marriage” is not a bedroom issue. It says nothing about who you can sleep with, only what legal arrangements you are allowed to engage in.”
Alright, I’ll give it a go. It’ll have to be later though when I’m not doing this on a Kindle Fire…it is not efficient (or I have not gotten proficient with this mechanism anyway) and non-efficiency annoys me to death…
And I was glad to see your distinction on marriage, it is one I agree with. Though it would have made sourcing easy. Then again, I would have been excoriated by many folks on this blog for trying that. And rightly so!
There seems to be a widespread cognitive dissonance when it comes to “big business” and “markets”. They are not the same thing, as many left wing folks seem to assume in debate. Markets dynamically assign prices based on fluctuating information and values, but so-called “big business” in the West is by its nature a rent-seeker of the political class. The current progressive Left is too puerile and revanchist to understand the difference, so they lump them together in the hopes that even a fake fight against some vague Capitalist Evil will alleviate their consciences, personally excuse them from competition, and make them risk-free shareholders of the “too-big-to-fail” financial interests.
But, this fight won’t do any of that. What we’ve seen with GM, Chevy, Fannie and Freddie and Goldman Sachs is crony capitalism, in which only the politically-connected see dividends in a pay-to-play game. These kinds of government sponsored businesses privatize the profit and socialize the loss. What the hard-lefties don’t understand is that they are still losers in this central planning game. They are forced to share the loss with bad bettors, and good information about pricing will always be sacrificed in favor of useful propaganda about pricing.
Tom Says:
>SOPA’s bad enough alright, but to my mind it’s nothing compared with the truly odious NDAA bill that will empower the military to arrest US citizens on US soil and detain them forever without trial. To me that is the end of a free society.
No, not the end of free society. The end of free society is when we go quietly.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much history to support the idea that we won’t however I honestly believe America is different. For sure we’ve got a hell of a lot more guns, and, outside of the blue bubbles, a hell of a lot more spirit than the people in many places.
BTW, on the subject of Britain, I am sure Maggie Thatcher has a few yellow feathers sticking out her mouth. She lost her job because Geoffrey Howe resigned when she wouldn’t commit to a plan to convert to the Euro. Aren’t you Brits glad that that lady wasn’t for turning?
SOPA reminds me a bit about the occasional dovetailing of the extremes when it comes to American politics. Sometimes the convergence is horrifying (the anti-antisemitism of the far left and far right springs to mind), but occasionally the political outliers align to try to prevent the fat, happy parasitic middle from a power grab.
@Jessica Boxer
Sure am! I’ve always been a big Maggie fan; she’s probably the best PM we’ve had since Churchill. It wasn’t just her against the Euro though. It’s never had anywhere near enough political or popular support to make it a viable proposal. Britain has always been rather sceptical of the European project. In fact a lot of people here don’t think of themselves as European in a cultural sense at all (myself included).
I wouldn’t say it’s too crazy at this point to imagine the UK completely renegotiating its position in Europe to something like that of Switzerland within the next few years.
“A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you.”
Right on. A government has to take from one before it can ‘give’ to another. To take is to initiate use of force. And use of force to achieve government-proscribed ends is where every collectivist state converges. Socialism, no matter how pretty, is no different from communism, fascism, etc., in that all enable governments to manage their citizens through threat of force. But no abstraction can initiate force. Only individuals can. This corrupting influence trains individuals to force through proxy.
I don’t understand debates about social issues when the greatest moral failure is in our economic policy. We have condoned a pattern of government control that will lead to more SOPAs, and tinkering around the edges of marrige or sex will solve nothing.
It’s time to start decentralizing the registration system for DNS with Namecoin, made possible by bitcoin technologies, which was only invented in 2009.
(BTW, bitcoin technologies is probably good for creating smart contract, smart properties, etc.)
Bitcoin is not just a technology for creating cyrptocurrencies but socialeconomic systems as well. Namecoin was the first unforeseen use of bitcoin tech, and there will be more on the way.
@kiba
Oh my God. This is genius (I think).
Why haven’t I heard about this before?
Bitcoin will be squashed as soon as it gets big enough to threaten governments’ control of the monetary system. Namecoin will be squashed under similar circumstances.
@Jay Maynard
How?
Well, if Namecoin is used to circumvent governmental control of the DNS, those governments will find a way to squash it.
> Well, if Namecoin is used to circumvent governmental control of the DNS, those governments will find a way to squash it.
Ah, I can imagine it now. Nothing quite like a SWAT or FBI raid because you were detected sending out Namecoin lookup packets after doing so is made illegal. Raids have been conducted for less.
@Jay
It seems to me that the system has been designed from the start to be censorship-proof. That’s the beauty of a distributed system. Every user has a full copy of the database, and transactions are encrypted and anonymous.
I can understand how they might be able to stop bitcoin on the basis that it is effectively tax evasion. They could audit people they suspect of using it, and get access to their computers and find their bitcoin wallets.
However, with namecoin I don’t see how you can write a law that makes using a key-value store illegal, much less enforce such a law.
@John D. Bell
And there I go and forget the closing blockquote tag. :p Hopefully it’s clear where the quotes begin and end.
@Joe Presley
Why not support candidates who are not affiliated with either of the big parties? Seriously, that is the only way, short of a revolution, that the powers-that-be lose their grip on power.
I am continually amazed by the willingness of people in the UK and the US to basically render their democratic systems irrelevant by voting for people who are chosen for them by huge nationwide organisations funded by elites.
They vote for these people and then complain endlessly about how corrupt and ineffective they are. Then they go right on voting for the same people (or people from the same parties) the next time.
Tom:
They can and do ban anything and everything. And the unavailability of sensible/effective enforcement has never been a deterrent to bad laws AFAICT. In any case it wouldn’t stop them from making an example of me or you if they decide we’re doing something that they don’t like.
The consummate example nowadays seems to be to define just about everything as a form of extremism or terrorism. And our neighbors will cheer as we’re taken away in handcuffs or a body bag.
Tom: You could scream that we ought to vote for the right people but if the political game makes or breaks politicians based on appearance and social grace, than it ain’t going to matter.
You combine that with the fact that we’re voting on politicians that will regularly decide on issue that take lifetimes to study each along with the fact that the populace will forever be ill equipped to elect politicians based on their ability to rule.It’s not that we are too stupid. We are pretty intelligent creatures, but we do not have the ability to learn all the specialties that help us decide nor the ability to maintain these skills. That’s why our entire civilization is based on deep specialization, not that men are getting smarter each succeeding generation. Some scientists thought our stone age ancestors are actually brighter than today’s generation.
What you ought to do is design systems that will succeed and doesn’t rely on the population to watch over every move. Specialists can do that in all their little niches. Moreover, the incentive is always to do the right thing. The incentive of bitcoin mining is that for criminals is to mine honestly rather than trying to cheat, in which you expend enormous amount of resource for pitiful gain against an entire network of honest nodes.
BTW, cheating by forging record in the blockchain of namecoin is going to be exceedingly difficult because of merged mining. Merged mining help secure several blockchains at once, using the same mining computational resource. This is because mining can generate solutions for both the bitcoin and namecoin at once. The more miners across blockchain network cooperate, the more that every blockchains in the world benefit. Pretty awesome, eh?
In a democracy, everyone fight each other. In socialeconomic system like bitcoin, even criminal botnets have incentives to cooperate. Not in the sense of stealing computers, but in the sense of securing the network.
Kind of a free-for-all these days, isn’t it? I can’t bring myself to give too much of a damn about SOPA, just because 1) I am in the UK 2) I will never be affected by it (technically savvy enough to work around ways in which the infrastructure being put in place could be abused) 3) I buy my copyrighted stuff legally but mostly 4) I know that the people loudly opposing it would quite happily strip me of every single one of my rights and when I realise that some of them might end up having the very few rights they care about stripped from them….well, fuck ’em. I’ll have a smile on my face when bad shit happens to them.
Maybe I’m part of the problem, but hey, they started it.
SOPA is just the latest attempt by Big Media to protect their antiquated business model.
And in reality, they don’t need it because UMG already has YouTube pulling videos that UMG has no legal claim on.
They are trying to stop disintermediation. They can’t, and won’t. It ends when new artists tell them to go piss up a rope and they have no product left to exploit.
SOPA needs to be stopped, yes. But we also need reforms to DMCA that have REAL penalties for false claims of copyright such that it financially hurts UMG and others to make such claims.
@Michael Hipp
On a local level I usually do that if there is a third party candidate with whom I agree. On the national level since 2000, the races have been so close for the Democrats to win I dared not vote for a third party. I did that with the full knowledge that strategy takes away important information politicians need to understand voter preference. After 9/11 my main concern was the War on Terror and since I disagreed with the Libertarian party on that issue, I’ve been with the Republicans since.
I don’t believe voting for a third party candidate is a wasted vote. Politicians and political parties look at the vote tallies to figure out what they need to do to win a majority. Voting for a third party tells them clearly what they need to do to coopt that party’s vote. OTOH, voting for a secondary preference when I’m convinced my first preference has lost is also a valid strategy. Think of it as my personal implementation of preferential voting.
As I said on a previous threadIt never occurs to the critics of capitalism that a government powerful enough to right the perceived wrongs of the free market is also powerful enough to inflict some wrong of its own, and that the Evil Businessmen™ they hope to constrain with the mighty beast they have conjured have a powerful incentive to capture the regulatory apparatus and turn the beast into the instrument of explotation. Only after the fact do they whine about “co-option”, before they gear up for another round of New Improved Reform™: “THIS time we’ll do it right!”
This is a classic example of capitalism being blamed for problems caused by the very state intervention in the economy that the blame intends to justify. Each time Bad Things™ happen, and legislators Do Something™, it creates the conditions for more Bad Things™ to happen.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
@Tom
Your SE England MEP Daniel Hannan has written and spoken quite eloquently of how sad it is to see the US repeating the same bloody mistakes the UK and the Continent have made, while fighting the good fight against the Eurocrats in Brussels who are mucking up things on your side of the pond.
Tom: It is a simple reality of the US political system that a vote for a third party candidate is a vote wasted, and quite often leads to the election of the candidate of the two major ones that the voter disagrees with more. Ask George H. W. Bush or Al Gore.
Americans have promised us the final dictatorship for two centuries now. Then all we get is Obama as the all powerfull tyrant?
Laughable posturing.
Go have a look abroad how a real dictator looks like. You are all pampered under the protection of the law and democracy.
Joe Presley Says:
> That bit of advice can also go for social conservatives too. If you give the government the power to enter the bedroom
Is social conservatives that are interfering with Julian Assange’s bedroom?
Seems to me that for heterosexual males, the problem since 1830 has been leftists in the bedroom. It is leftists that banned prostitution, raised the age of consent, ended a wife’s duty to be sexually available always to her husband and never to anyone else, endlessly expanded the definition of rape and endless reduce the evidence and due process requirement for rape charges. It is leftists that imposed on men an enforceable legal duty to support their bastards and the sluts that bore them.
Merciful $DEITY, James. Bitter much – or misogynistic much?
I have a question.
“So here’s a clue: the only way to keep your freedom – on the Internet or anywhere else – is to defend everyone else’s freedom as well, by keeping your government tiny and starved and rigidly constrained in what it can do. Otherwise, the future you’re begging for is SOPAs without end.”
The idea here is, of course, that people can – in a sense – do whatever they want. I assume this includes businesses. However, if this is the case, then what is stopping businesses from forming monopolies? In other words, what is stopping businesses from taking away individual freedom?
I’m aware this is probably an important item is anarcho-capitalism, but I haven’t been able to find much about it. Can anyone help me out here?
You people are ridiculous. ESR is describing a problem that is absolutely endemic to the modern political system and its participants … and y’all are (predictably) engaging in a silly tit-for-tat over which of the two major political parties are more deeply responsible.
Yeah, I have an opinion on that too, but I’m going to omit it for the sake of this discussion. Eric hit it out of the park with this blog post. We have to oppose statism no matter what form it takes! If you’re a Libertarian you already know this. Otherwise, you need to work within your own party for true reform. That means if you’re a Democrat you need to push for the party to return to its form from the first half of the 20th century when it was run by Southern “gentlemen” — before the party became the home to socialists who went underground after the Cold War allegedy ended. If you’re a Republican, you need to work as hard as you can to purge your ranks of “fake” conservatives who only fight against statism when it’s politically expedient.
Statists are everywhere; we need to fight them no matter what political affiliation they claim to have.
We also need to fight them when they appear in our own tribe, whether they take the form of ultra-leftists like Bruce Perens, or traditional communists like Richard Stallman, who only seem to think freedom is important when bits and bytes are involved.
Robin: A unfettered market is what stops business from taking away freedom. It’s also what breaks up monopolies.
This is the thing that makes me almost support SOPA: seeing the same people who whine endlessly that we need “net neutrality” (aka government control of the Internet) suddenly complaining that government control of the Internet is bad. (It’s also why I stopped reading Slashdot many years ago: the comments and site owners were somewhere to the left of the Daily Kos).
They can always use the tactic of seizing computers like the UK authorities recently did to one of the AGW skeptic bloggers who broke the ClimateGate 2 email story. I think that was intended to send a message to the Enemies of the State.
Message received.
@Robin
You’ve asked two slightly different questions. The short answer is that without government intervention to fend off potential rivals, the only way a business can form a monopoly is to provide a particular good/service so efficiently that its investors enjoy a reasonable return on their investments at a price level at which no potential competitor could expect to be profitable.
In the history of “antitrust” law, I am aware of only one company that succeeded in doing this: ALCOA. They did such a good job locating and mining Bauxite, processing it into Aluminum, and kept expanding their ability to do so, driving their own per-unit prices down to the point where no one else tried to enter the market. For the crime of providing excellent value to their customers, they simply had to be broken up by the trust-busters.
All of the big monopolies that are able to abuse their position to extract confiscatory prices have laws, regulations, edicts, licensing bureaus, etc. to defend their marketshare against anyone who would threaten it.
Take doctors, for instance. You know those “Minute Clinic” etc. that are springing up inside pharmacies, Walmarts and other retail establishments, staffed by one or two nurse-practitioners, and offering a really cost-effective alternative to traditional GP/Family Med offices (and an insane savings off the typical ER) for most routine medical needs? In several states, the doctors have gotten legislators to introduce bills to make them illegal, or at least severely restrict their scope of practice.
If a monopoly lacks the power to prevent competition, and it’s treating its customers and/or suppliers (including its own employees, who supply labor) so horribly that it would seem like justification to legislate against it, and a majority of the electorate truly feels that they must Do Something™ about it, they could each kick $10 into a share of stock in an ethical competitor (that would be an initial market cap. of $3B) that will be able to make a profit while paying its suppliers “Fair Trade” prices/wages and charge lower prices, thus enticing them away from MegaBadCo. Every time I suggest this to Leftists, they come up with some excuse why they won’t put their own money where there mouths are. So far, all of the excuses have been based on the very government power they’re defending.
Arithmetic fail. I meant to say $20 shares for the We’re Morally Superior Corporation IPO.
“All of the big monopolies that are able to abuse their position to extract confiscatory prices have laws, regulations, edicts, licensing bureaus, etc. to defend their marketshare against anyone who would threaten it. ”
I understand, but what if you don’t have a government at all? Won’t those same monopolies then be able to practically use force against whoever doesn’t agree with ’em? Or another example, what if we’re talking about having to use a specific material to make X, yet monopoly Y has all those materials (and possesses all the land where these materials can be mined)? This doesn’t seem too strange a possibility to me, given that this has happened multiple times in the past. What would we do then?
@kiba
@Jay Maynard
Guys, this is exactly the problem. We have been brainwashed for decades into thinking we must vote for a mainstream candidate because to do otherwise is a ‘wasted voted’. Well, I’m sorry, but it’s not a wasted vote just because the guy you vote for doesn’t win. It’s only a wasted vote if you vote for somebody you don’t really want to see elected.
I’m not saying that you personally voting for an independent will change things. Obviously it won’t. But at least you’ll be a part of the solution and not part of the problem. At least you’ll have some standing to complain when the mainstream guys screw things up.
And as for worrying about “the election of the candidate of the two major ones that the voter disagrees with more” I am amazed you can even tell the difference between the two main candidates. You are never going to get what you want from the Dems or the Republicans because they are financed and co-opted by the same interests.
@Anonymous
I find this to be a remarkably complacent attitude. The internet is global, and what happens in one part of the world, especially in the US, affects us all. And if you think that they are just going to use this SOPA law to shut down pirate sites you’ve missed most of the point. Once they have the power they always do things with it that were not part of the original justification for it.
@Joe Presley
Can you actually tell the difference between the policies of the Democracts and the Republicans on the “War on Terror”? Obama has just continued the polices of Bush.
@The Monster
Yes, Hannan is one of the good guys, and I am proud to say I am one of his constituents.
@James A Donald
Lol. I’m a child of the ’80s but not the 1880s. And I may dress like a vampire but that’s only because I’m a really bad mime. I haven’t been alive long enough to have strong feelings or to have in depth knowledge about the gender fights of the nineteenth century. I’m going to presume that your comment is a joke. Otherwise I’d have to assume that you expect way to much precision from an aphorism. :)
You’re correct though. I remember in the ’80s there were left wing groups that wanted to ban porn and dirty lyrics in music. That was also in the days when you had conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans.
Oh, and I meant to say:
@Joe Presley
I don’t think this can be true. In England we have a ‘public education monopoly’ as well, but creationism vs. evolution isn’t an issue
Tom Says:
> Can you actually tell the difference between the policies of the Democracts and the Republicans on the “War on Terror”? Obama has just continued the polices of Bush.
In some ways, Obama has even stepped on the gas in active theaters, filling the sky with more killer drones and spy planes than the average Terminator flick (a risky strategy, as he’s probably learning from the downed Iranian drone). The key difference between the Republicans and the Democrats in military operations seems to be the marketing; Bush did X because of a Halliburton scheme, Obama does X because he wants to protect us from terrorists and heroically save lives (Or, if it’s Rush Limbaugh describing it, Obama does X to crassly win votes, while Bush did X to bravely yada yada).
But there is a difference in terms of efficacy. There’s no chance, for instance, that Bush could have gotten away with assassinating an American citizen on foreign soil the way that Obama zapped al-Awlaki. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Hollywood industry, DailyKos and every other organ of left wing agitprop would have smelled blood. They would have turned al-Awlaki into a rally point, and called for Bush’s head every day until he resigned.
So it makes sense that Obama plays a riskier game and exercises a freer hand in Pakistan, Iran and Yemen; it’s because he can. He won’t be held accountable for it politically, and he knows that. This is one of the reasons that Democrats are a bit more dangerous than Republicans. Democrats have more useful propaganda outposts in the private sector, willing to either turn a blind eye or lend a hand due to some form of tribal fealty. Rush Limbaugh’s nice and all, but if you wanted to protect and expand your power you’d probably be better off with George Clooney and James Cameron.
Much of the supposed public disagreement is Kabuki theater and gamesmanship, but that probably won’t change any time soon. Ron Paul almost certainly believes what he professes to believe, but that’s just another reason he won’t get elected. Why would a electorate composed mostly of self-deluding liars elect a guy who says exactly what he thinks?
@Robin
Won’t those people use force in self-defense and retaliation?
ESR’s an anarcho-capitalist. I’m a minarchist. I don’t believe it’s possible to have no government at all. There is a minimum amount of force that has to be used against those who refuse to live peaceably with their neighbors. What he calls a non-governmental system to adjudicate disputes I say is a government. So it’s mostly a semantic distinction. Suffice to say that if someone is initiating the use of force against someone else to obtain value from them, it’s equally wrong whether it’s merely an organized crime syndicate or anarchist warlords, or Men with Badges and Guns duly authorized by what everyone agrees is a “Government”.
Multiple times? Name three.
As I said, the only time I know of that anyone came close without government assistance was ALCOA, which never did control the mining rights themselves. They just offered better money to the mineral-rights holders than anyone else whenever they wanted to open a mine. If at any time they had tried to exploit their marketshare by raising the price of Aluminum or refusing to sell to certain people, a competing company could have bid against them on those mineral leases.
Consider what happened to the Hunt Brothers when they tried to corner the Silver market. The more they bought, the higher they drove the price on what they didn’t already own. It’s like trying to reach the speed of light; the faster you go the higher your mass becomes. You can’t ever reach 100% They lost a metric assload of money trying. (Fortunately for them, they had a few assloads left.)
Even if someone were able to buy up every bit of the land producing a crucial component of X, there are almost always other ways to do the job that X does. If pork prices rise, people can eat more beef, poultry, and fish.
@Grantham
Indeed. Only Nixon could go to China.
The Monster Says:
> The short answer is that without government intervention to fend off potential rivals,
In your list you did not mention one of the government tools that is most powerful of all in this regard — the patent. Patents are literally government granted monopolies. AT&T got to do horrible things to consumers because of all its patents that prevented competition (amongst other things.) It is ironic that the self righteous statists brag about breaking up AT&T as a great benefit of big government when in truth it was only a problem of big government in the first place.
I was recently involved in a Facebook discussion with some otherwise bright left-wing friends who insist that “corporations are not people” and “money is not speech,” which are the slogans of the people who hate the Citizens United decision. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get them to 1) explain what wonderful things are supposed to follow from corporations not “being people,” and 2) understand that restricting money spent on speech is the same thing as restricting speech.
I find it especially baffling that the same people who think it’s obvious that burning a flag is speech and that blocking a road for a demonstration is speech, but Citizens United, OMG, they made a DVD about Hillary Clinton before an election! Obviously that sort of speech has to be controlled by the federal government, or all sorts of dangerous things might happen!
# Robin Says:
> I understand, but what if you don’t have a government at all? Won’t those same monopolies then be able to practically use force against whoever doesn’t agree with ‘em?
This depends on how far you go. I do not advocate no government at all, rather I advocate one that serves this specific purpose: the criminalization of unprovoked violence, and the enforcement of contracts. Some people believe in no government, anarcho capitalists. They also propose mechanisms to manage societal violence. Google “Machinery of Freedom” by David Freidmann for an extensive discussion on how.
> Or another example, what if we’re talking about having to use a specific material to make X, yet monopoly Y has all those materials
Then you use alternatives. This goes down the chain. If you can’t get Y, use a different material for X. If no such material exists, use an alternative to X, and so on. Ultimately the final alternative is “do without.” Under those circumstances, Y can’t sell their stuff, so they open up their market, and an equilibrium is formed.
Think about this simple example: next time you go to a sports stadium you will notice that the concession stands have a monopoly on food. So if you want a hot dog you can only buy from “Joe’s Mega Dogs”. They even check your bag when you walk in so you don’t bring in unauthorized hot dogs.
Why does Joe’s Atomic Chilli Dog cost an outrageous $5 not an exorbitant $5,000? That is the only place you can get a hot dog, so why not ramp up the price? Why? Because no-one would buy one. Which is to say, monopolists do not have unconstrained pricing power.
@PapayaSF ask your friends why, if money is not speech, they care so much about banning the donation of money by corporations. :-p
High population density Big government
Low population density Weak government
So, just reduce the USA population to 30 million and you have your small government. Or get your small government and you get the decimation of your population for free.
@PapayaSF:
Obviously, money is not speech. Money is not cars. Money is not houses. But it can buy any of the above, so if some individual wants to spend all his money getting his message out, that should be his business.
But…
Just as obviously, corporations aren’t people. A group of people who act in concert to achieve their economic ends and who are willing to accept responsibility for things done in their names is called a partnership. When people aren’t willing to take personal responsibility for the things done with their capital, they invest in a corporation. There are often extremely good reasons for this (societally as well as personally), but it is ludicrous to assert that an entity that is expressly designed to shield people of any responsibility for their actions should, for some god-given reason, be able to do whatever the fuck it wants.
@PapayaSF
Are you arguing that corporations *are* people?
Isn’t it that if corporations are not people then they do not get protection under the first amendment?
Those things are speech (or ‘expression’ as I believe the amendment is correctly interpreted) because they express an idea. And in the cases you cite it is particularly important because they are *political* ideas. Giving money to a campaign is not expressing an idea, it is giving material support to something. That’s the difference.
Winter:
This, my friends, is Weapons Grade Stupid™
Government is not a requirement for civilization, it is a necessary evil which must be endured and tamed.
Winter says:
> High population density Big government
> Low population density Weak government
This is an odd argument. It doesn’t even seem to understand it’s own premise (population != population density).
The United States has one of the lowest population densities in the world, partially because we have such tremendous land mass. Examples of countries that rank ahead of us in population density include Latvia, Burma, Egypt, France, Switzerland, Uganda and China. In terms of density, we are just slightly ahead of Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Liberia (though, far ahead of Finland). Venezuela has a lower density than ours, but a Big, Strong government. Denmark has a much higher density but a weaker government.
@Grantham ea
Ever been to these countries? There is also a link with wealth.
> Ever been to these countries?
Yes! Several. Sort of the reason I included them among of the many, many countries that rank ahead of us in population density. Do you not understand your own point about density? I assumed you were trying to posit some version of the theory that urbanization necessitating large, powerful governments, relative to inputs, because close-quarters create additional social pressures. Of course, that doesn’t explain any of the failed collectivist experiments in Africa or the Soviet Empire, or the successful libertarianism in crowded Denmark. In the pre-Wilsonian United States, the usual strategy against troubles of density was to sprawl, not to have the federales step in and start planting boots on throats.
> There is also a link with wealth.
Okay. What you do think this link is?
Libertarian Denmark? Small government in Egypt? The mind spins.
But if you can point out regions in the world with a high population density and minimal/weak government. You have disproved my position.
> Libertarian Denmark? Small government in Egypt? The mind spins.
I never said Egypt had a small government. Although, one might argue that Egypt has no government right now (at least, no historically agreed upon one; we will wait and see).
What’s wrong with calling Denmark “libertarian”? It is certainly more laissez-faire than its cousins in the Eurozone, and widely agreed as one of the smallest, least-intrusive governments in the world.
So, I suppose I have disproved your position, unless you have some countervailing evidence.
Another high-density country with laissez faire economics is Switzerland. They have six times the population density of the United States, and minimal regulations and barriers to free trade.
Eric, could you name some of the people who generally want intrusive government but who are opposed to SOPA?
I’ve been bewildered by your hatred of liberals, since what you describe doesn’t seem to resemble what I hear on NPR[1] or at various blogs, but I just met the liberal that meets your specs– random conversation at B&N with a man who believes that everything harmful should be forbidden.Unfortunately, I don’t remember his exact phrasing– it might have been “everything harmful should be illegal” or some other word implying opposition by force. I don’t know how typical he is, but I’ll be keeping an eye out.
[1] The leftists I know don’t consider NPR to be on the left.
>Eric, could you name some of the people who generally want intrusive government but who are opposed to SOPA?
The individual who did the most to trigger this rant is a journalist named Dan Gillmor. But the type is very, very common.
Run this simple test on various people you know who are being alarmed about SOPA: do they think the government should be able to tell ISPs how to run their business when the cause is labeled “net neutrality”? Do they think it’s fine for the government to forbid certain kinds of political organizations to buy campaign ads in the 90 days before an election?
I suggest those because they’re in a policy area close to SOPA. But on principle, “Did they support Obamacare?” would be just as sound a test.
I’ve found a hidden benefit to SOPA.
The next time you see a political ad for a candidate you find odious, make note of the sound track, the background imagery, even the composition of the candidate standing next to a tree in a TV ad.
Then file a SOPA-powered copyright infringement case. Remember, the way this works, is that if you make the claim they have to take it down while it’s resolved. If enough claims are made, they have to shut down the means for those organizations to collect money.
I think strangling every re-election campaign for the people who vote for this festering pile of camel diarrhea would be a good start…
Holy crap, Jay. Supplicating omega bitch much — or outright douchenozzle female-supremacist bigot much?
@Tom, RE: “‘From time to time it is necessary to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots.’ “
“Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious”
@Michael Hipp:
Well sir, I’m not going to bother sourcing bedroom legislation at this point. The whole “dildos” comment just killed it for me. Hilariously made point, ’nuff said.
@WCC
I think Jefferson was using to term to mean something like ‘those who believe in the ideals of the revolution’ or ‘those who defend the people against those who are hostile to the wellbeing of the people’ rather than the aggressive, jingoistic sense Wilde was referring to.
For Jefferson a patriot is somebody who puts the people ahead of government. For Wilde, you are a patriot if you put *your own people* ahead of some other group of people. In this sense the word is closer I think to nationalism.
@Tom, RE: 351756
“Sure am! I’ve always been a big Maggie fan; she’s probably the best PM we’ve had since Churchill. It wasn’t just her against the Euro though. It’s never had anywhere near enough political or popular support to make it a viable proposal. Britain has always been rather sceptical of the European project. In fact a lot of people here don’t think of themselves as European in a cultural sense at all (myself included).
I wouldn’t say it’s too crazy at this point to imagine the UK completely renegotiating its position in Europe to something like that of Switzerland within the next few years.”
A conversation I often engage in with a good friend of mine is theorizing on social evolution. It goes something like “we evolved structurally, generally speaking, from village -> town -> city -> city-state -> state -> nation. We like to play with the thoughts of the next wave being essentially border-less, super-nations aligned on general/semi ideological lines. So we theorize on things like the anglo-centric-democratic super-nation that might include countries such as the US, Australia, Britain (well the UK really), and Israel, an Asian conglomerate – China, the Koreas, Japan, Vietnam, etc or possibly two Asian supers – China, Vietnam, etc. and Japan, South Korea, etc., A western European super, and Eastern Euro and so forth.
Along those lines, and with regard to your quoted comment, I found this quite interesting: <a href="Visit W3Schools “>European Union leaders agree to forge new fiscal pact; Britain the only holdout
lol what, I failed in my hyperlinking @352083
Let this be a lesson as to what happens when you have been up all night, had no coffee, and are attempting to teach your robotics-club daughter the basics of HTML/XML. You just end up looking dumb. Here is the link I wanted:
European Union leaders agree to forge new fiscal pact; Britain the only holdout
Kiba says: You could scream that we ought to vote for the right people but if the political game makes or breaks politicians based on appearance and social grace, than it ain’t going to matter.
People are always going to be people. My favorite example is the 1984 US presidential campaign. The Democrats started with about half a dozen perfectly viable candidates. By the end of the second state primary contest, all the bald-headed candidates had been eliminated.
Well, it’s either that or a popular dictator. Elections are better. You can’t get rid of a dictator when he gets older and uglier….
@LS
Scott Adams once observed that the winner of every presidential election since the war had been the guy with the better hair. I looked into this and the only clear exception I could find was Bush-Kerry in 2004.
@WCC
Yeah, well everybody seems to think that this crisis in Euroland is fundamentally economic in nature. It’s not. It is fundamentally cultural. If the member states in the Eurozone treated each other the way states in the US treated each other the problem could be solved relatively easily. Germany would just send some money over to Greece and Italy, or they would enable the ECB to print enough money to meet requirements.
But they won’t do that because Germans will not spend their own money to help out those they perceive as foreigners. That is fundamentally why super-national currencies won’t work unless it comes from the bottom up.
Britain feels even less ‘European’ than Germany. We feel much closer culturally to Australia, Canada, the US, New Zealand, etc.
Not sure what happened, my last two comments disappeared on the submit, no moderation statement. Resubmitting, I apologize of they result in dup posts.
@Tom, RE: 352082
Agreed. I was being cantankerous. The unspoken point of my crankiness was how often patriotism becomes what it was against. 2011 United States. Republicans view themselves as the patriots and the Democrats as the anti-America bad guys. I say, more and more over history and especially these days, looking at the voting record and legislation, they are both sides of the same coin. Depressing.
@Grantham, RE: 352045
“In the pre-Wilsonian United States, the usual strategy against troubles of density was to sprawl, not to have the federales step in and start planting boots on throats.”
Yeah. Time to ramp up space ops and become space-farers.
@WCC
Yes. I find it very depressing to watch from the other side of the Atlantic how culturally divided America has become. The political parties and the mass media have spent the last half century driving wedges between the American people. Of course differences exist naturally, but they have been magnified a thousand fold by network television and political races that are more about money and advertising than making the country better.
It has poisoned political discourse so deeply that it is impossible to have a discussion about any issue without it descending to red versus blue.
@LS, RE: 352086
“Well, it’s either that or a popular dictator. Elections are better. You can’t get rid of a dictator when he gets older and uglier”
One of the the things the remaining dictators of the world have been learning through UN and US intervention in Libya, et al, is that the best avenue for these sad little kings of these sad little hills to hold on to their hell-holes is to brutally, violently crush opposition even more than they already do, before a “spring” can come round in their country and someone else steps in to foster rebellion.
Older and uglier indeed…
“How…how do they avoid noticing that in reality it’s like this all the time? ”
You presume that they don’t notice. but they do. It’s just that with SOPA they felt a heightened level of alertness and alarm on the part of the electorate and judged it in their interest to profess they are shocked, shocked to find gambling on the premises. Just as they perceived it in their interest to vote for earlier shockingly audacious extensions of federal authority, and even plainly unconstitutional power grabs.
There are three things, and only three things, necessary for a “successful” life in politics (i.e., remaining in office): a burning passion for and devotion to self above all others; a lack of regard for truth; a total absence of any sense of shame, embarrassment or guilt.
Think on these three things, and on how many of our elected criminal class are so richly blessed with these attributes.
@WCC
Getting awful crowded in my sky…
10 points for anybody who gets that reference.
@WCC:
>Yeah. Time to ramp up space ops and become space-farers.
Ha! Well, it’s probably not nearly that desperate just yet. For the Hell of it, I recently took a train ride across the States (from New York to L.A.), and let me say this: you don’t have to look at a density map to see that the national motel has almost total vacancy. Plenty of sprawl space left in the U.S.A.
@Tom, RE:
“Getting awful crowded in my sky…
10 points for anybody who gets that reference.”
Captain Mal, Firefly.
Love that series and the movie. Watch it at least once a year. One of my favorite lines actually, Tom.
Now, what to do with my 10 iterwebz points…or do I get to add these to my geek ledger?
@Grantaham, RE:
“Ha! Well, it’s probably not nearly that desperate just yet. For the Hell of it, I recently took a train ride across the States (from New York to L.A.), and let me say this: you don’t have to look at a density map to see that the national motel has almost total vacancy. Plenty of sprawl space left in the U.S.A.”
True enough, and point well-made. But the Alliance, I mean the US Gov’t has far-reaching tentacles…
I find my self in Alaska for training and sometimes personal pursuits from time to time. I often refer to it as the last American frontier…Anchorage, Juno…in some ways, they are like a cold Tatooine…or Persephone…the pilot trade in Alaska is quite robust…
@WCC
10 nerd points to you sir!
Hold on to ’em. They’ll be exchangeable for nutrition bricks when the revolution comes.
If you ask a progressive if corporations control the government, they will say yes. Later in the same conversation, you can ask them if they want single-payer health care. They will say yes. Then, if you ask them “So that means you want corporations to run your health care?” THEY WILL HAVE NO CLUE WHAT YOU MEAN AND WILL DENY IT UP AND DOWN.
Progressives lack the ordinary tools of logic that the rest of us have. That’s why they’re progressives.
@Russell Nelson
See my previous comment:
This is a classic example.
People need to not take every issue and make it about what political group they are in or don’t like.
@Tom:
> People need to not take every issue and make it about what political group they are in or don’t like.
Both U.S. parties run to their (mostly meaningless) brand identity in elections, because that is what has worked so far. For instance, that is why Obama is currently yammering about “millionaires and billionaires” and private jet subsidies at the moment. I doubt even he is stupid enough to believe that revocation of the corporate jet subsidy is meaningful enough to mention (over and over) in multiple press conference, when the savings only amount to a piddling 3 billion a year. It has nothing to do with the actual challenge at hand (the reform of massive unfunded liabilities), but it’s on-brand for the Democrats… “Those corporate fat cats and their jets! We’ll show ’em!”
In general, the portions of the populace who float leftward do so because they aren’t any good at math, and hate doing it. Whether this is due to a failure of the education system (and I believe a significant part of it is) or because of natural limitations, the result is the same. They are right-brainers trying to participate in a very left brain debate. This is also why most actors and artists tilt leftward, even though they hire math-heads to take care of their personal finances. They would rather not think about how the sausage is made, and feel quite a bit of guilt and class anxiety for having accumulated so much wealth well providing so little “real value” to the system (they are wrong about that too; they do provide value, but they inhabit a world of illusion and aren’t logical enough to see how they add that value).
The math problem at hand really is this: if the so-called 99% taxed the so-called 1% at a rate of 100% of their income (in other, less Orwellian terms, if they held a knife to their throats and mugged them), it still would do nothing to address unfunded liabilities and would barely put the tiniest dent in the national debt. Also, you’d be stuck with the prospect of hoping that the same ignoramuses who couldn’t do that simple math would create the industry and incentives to actually keep society going.
And here’s the real kicker: even if the collection of lazy, ice-cream-fed, faux-communist losers that infested Zucotti dug down deep and discovered the wherewithal to painstakingly recreate a system that added value and created wealth to “share”… that system would inevitably be “capitalism”. The 99% would whittle down to the 1%, and the whole shebang would start all over again.
Most of them will learn this eventually, probably when (if?) they get their first jobs. They will quickly learn that the 21st century world they inhabit isn’t created by a bunch of identical, unskilled worker bees standing on a factory floor pressing a button, and that their colleagues don’t all operate at the same level of competency and perseverance. “Why do John and I get the same amount of pay, when I work so much harder than him?” they will ask.
@WCC:
Uh, no. The Texas dildos example is certainly funny and ridiculous. But it’s only one state and that legislation was passed in 1973 … 4 decades ago. And it certainly isn’t in the same league as the endless stream of totalitarian legislation that has come out of our very Progressive federal government every year since then.
So it doesn’t make much of a point, especially if that’s the best (worst?) anyone can point to. There are doubtless others, but they don’t compare in quantity or “quality” to what the Progressive Left has done to all of us. ’nuff said.
@Michael Hipp:
“Well sir, I’m not going to bother sourcing bedroom legislation at this point. The whole “dildos” comment just killed it for me. Hilariously made point, ’nuff said.”
Nuts. You screwed me out of being lazy. Alright, back to the research mines for me…
Though, I do absolutely agree with your point in the rest of 352135 – No arguments there.
Hey, Eric, this SOPA act comes because the government *is* small. It’s not only small, it is also cheap. Anybody can buy it. It is weaker than the corporations, that’s why the corporations rule.
Look at a country where the government is big and in power, e.g. China. Ok, they do have a DNS blocking system, they even block IP addresses. But, at least, they do it for their own good, to stay in power. They don’t do it, because some industry clowns imagine that this would stop piracy. The Chinese government does not care about piracy. It does nothing to stop it. That’s because the Chinese government is big, strong and powerful. It doesn’t pass legislation as told by the highest bidder.
It is fairly trivial: The strongest player makes the rules. If you want real democracy, the people need to be the strongest player. In an autocracy like China, you have a strong party and government, who sets the rules. In corporatism, the corporations set the rules. They also indoctrinate people like you to believe that the state should be small, because that helps the corporations to stay in power. The american people lost their grip long ago. They are slaves to corporations. And they cheer it. Sometimes, maybe, they realize that a particular corporation is evil. Nope. They are all evil.
The real thing we learn is that corporations should be tiny. They should compete against each others, and not have monopolies on anything (certainly not on music). Instead, America allows corporations to grow big, to form monopolies, and to exercise more control than any government ever could.
“Scott Adams once observed that the winner of every presidential election since the war had been the guy with the better hair. I looked into this and the only clear exception I could find was Bush-Kerry in 2004.”
Yeah, it was an exception, but the thing was this…BOTH of them were actually New England Blue Bloods, Ivy League, etc…but Kerry was so snooty that, when you put them next to each other, Kerry made Bush look like Muddy Waters by comparison.
…gotta run…gotta clear some brush back at the ranch.
Many posts have basically made the same point (with more knowledge and eloquence) that I made in the third post of this blog – at least 99% of the population of the US and Canada don’t want a tiny or even small government.
Some of them may think they do, but they have these particular risks that they think the government should protect against. You take all those people, and take all the risks that each of them want the government to protect against, and you get a huge and always growing government, made up partly of people that love power and want more.
So… many/most of the people on this blog, including esr, the op, want a tiny government. 99% of the population effectively want a large government.
esr said:
But it is way too late to be keeping the government tiny – it is huge and growing.
The posts have been interesting and informative, but isn’t this basically like bitching about the weather?
This one’s a bit trickier. I’m strongly in favor of net-neutrality requirements exactly when the telcos have franchises. It’s absolutely a hack-on-top-of-a-hack solution, but fat monopolies with government protection are even worse. (What I don’t understand is why new developments don’t run fiber from each home to a common drop where any ISP could run a single cable…)
I’m always both amused and astounded by people who argue that corporations have too much power and that government is the solution seemingly without being able to understand that government creates corporations in the first place. Absolutely, corporations (and other businesses) should compete against each other, but in the absence of government-granted monopolies (such as copyrights), even a giant such as Standard Oil doesn’t have “control” over its customers—it can only make them offers which they can accept or reject, and if the offers are sufficiently unappealing, some other company will come along and create a better one.
> Are you arguing that corporations *are* people?
How is it that you and I have free speech rights but they disappear as soon as we get together?
Corporations are aggregations of people.
And, if you’re going to argue that corporations don’t have free speech rights, you get to explain why the NYT, a corporation, has free speech rights that “my” corporation doesn’t.
This brings up something I’d like to see Eric do a post about.
1) What would you say to the argument that, where information is concerned, private property and free markets are mutually exclusive? Justification: Private property rights in information, to be any good as an economic incentive to the production of information, must take the form of a monopoly granted by some authority on the production of copies of that information (copyrights) or uses of that information (patents).
2) Private property and free markets are both cornerstones of capitalism, but if they conflict in certain economic sectors (such as where information is concerned), which is more important?
3) Whether or not the government *should* grant economic privileges or protections to corporations or individuals, would you agree that if it *does* it should hold said corporations and individuals accountable for how they use the privileges or protections granted to them?
4) I am going to make the claim that, without anti-trust intervention, monopolies like that which Microsoft holds over the PC OS market can be stable in the long term under the current body of law because intellectual property law provides enough government backing to stabilize them. I will make the further claim that, as a result, such monopolies can only be reliably disentrenched by A) anti-trust action, or B) abolition of intellectual property. Assuming that my claim is correct and such monopolies are in fact stable, which of the above two methods would you choose for the disentrenchment of such monopolies? Can you think of a viable third solution (keeping in mind the assumption that IP law unfrees the market enough that such monopolies are stable)?
5) I generally favor the abolition of intellectual property as the answer to 4). However, I am concerned about the privacy implications of such a move. If private information about me (my name, my phone number, details of my personal life, etc) is not my property, how am I to prevent my E-mail provider (for example) from selling that information to the highest bidder? What do you have to say on the matter?
@Michael Hipp:
Alright I concede, it’s pretty lengthy activity to find overt recent sex legislation at the federal level and recent attempts to “enter the bedroom” at the federal level from the conservative side.
Doesn’t mean they don’t want to or won’t try if they think they can get away with it, but acknowledged, that wasn’t the statement.
@Andy Freeman
The people who are employed by, and own, a company still have their individual free speech rights (they don’t ‘disappear’), but they don’t get any *extra* free speech rights by virtue of forming a corporation. Nor does the corporation itself, as an abstract entity, get its own rights.
Because the NYT is part of the ‘press’ and they have rights specifically protected by the first amendment (look up the text).
# Bernd Paysan Says:
> The real thing we learn is that corporations should be tiny. They should compete against each others, and not have monopolies on anything (certainly not on music). Instead, America allows corporations to grow big, to form monopolies, and to exercise more control than any government ever could.
I’m confused. You say corporations are massive, and relatively speaking government tiny. You go on to point out that the largeness of corporations is frequently built on the foundation of government granted and enforced monopolies. I agree with the second point. But how can a bully use a wimp to do its bullying? How can big nasty corps beat up on us with weedy week government?
Corporations will right size (which generally means become much smaller) if the Corleone family in DC is less powerful.
And who gets to decide which corporations are part of “the press”?
@ Jon Brase
1. If there were no copyrights, a lot of creative work would not have happened because there would be no way to make a living from it.
2. Which is more important: your right leg or your left?
3. >should hold said corporations and individuals accountable for how they use the privileges or protections granted to them?
What, like “we don’t like that song. Never perform it again”? You want the government deciding… this is nuts.
4. Microsoft holds the position it does because people and corporations either don’t want to change or have too much software that only runs on Microsoft computers that it would cost them a fortune to change. A lot of us would like to see them change to Linux. The fact that they don’t is a function of a free market, whether we like it or not.
5. You don’t own the information about yourself (name, my phone number, details of my personal life, etc), they are facts about the universe.
I said> 2. Which is more important: your right leg or your left?
in response to the question:
>2) Private property and free markets are both cornerstones of capitalism, but if they conflict in certain economic sectors (such as where information is concerned), which is more important?
@Jon Brase
The judiciary.
# Jon Brase Says:
> 1) What would you say to the argument that, where information is concerned, private property and free markets are mutually exclusive?
I’d say it is entirely bogus. Markets do more than sell things. There are gazillions of ways to monetize information without the need for SOPA. Copyright and patents are just the laziest way.
> 2) Private property and free markets are both cornerstones of capitalism, but if they conflict in certain economic sectors (such as where information is concerned), which is more important?
You assume information is property. The two are completely different in so many ways that to attempt to treat them with the same rules is plain silly. Just because slavery (ownership of people) is a dreadful thing does not mean that employment is incompatible with the free market. A corp does not own its employees, but it does take advantages of their labor. Employees can be monetized without owning them.
> 3) Whether or not the government *should* grant economic privileges or protections to corporations or individuals, would you agree that if it *does* it should hold said corporations and individuals accountable for how they use the privileges or protections granted to them?
I’ll answer your question with a question: “whether you agree that slavery is OK or not, do you agree that if you do hold slaves that the government should have laws ensuring their fair treatment?” The answer I suppose is yes, but it is a tiny discussion on top of a dramatically unacceptable premise. To even talk about it seems silly.
@Jon Brase
And, by the way, it’s not so much that one corporation is a member of the club and therefore gets free speech rights and others don’t. It’s that some companies engage in activities that are protected under ‘freedom of the press’, namely journalism.
If Microsoft started publishing a weekly political newsletter then that specific activity is protected. Doesn’t mean the company itself is now a person, or has inherent rights itself.
And who decides what constitutes a protected activity?
See my former answer.
Tom: The problem with your attempt to protect the freedom of the press by giving media corporations rights that other corporations do not have is that it inevitably results in government deciding who does and does not have freedom of speech. Why this does not terrify liberals escapes me, unless it’s because they know that media skews heavily to the left.
> Because the NYT is part of the ‘press’ and they have rights specifically protected by the first amendment (look up the text).
Okay, but that’s a lazy “just so” read of this problem. Leave aside for a moment the inanity of saying “look up the text” on a document whose language everyone already knows by heart. Conferring special rights to anyone who deems themselves to be “The Press” not only overlooks the moneyed interests that back the NYT (or Newscorp, and any other for-sale, corporate “press” organ), it also begs the question. Claiming the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or Fox News or MSNBC has no vested financial interest or political motive in the creation of their news product is ludicrous. First principles need to be revisited, because the line between commerce and news is even fuzzier now than it was in the days of Gutenberg (and it was plenty fuzzy back then, too).
# Jon Brase Says:
> my name, my phone number, details of my personal life, etc) is not my property, how am I to prevent my E-mail provider (for example) from selling that information to the highest bidder? What do you have to say on the matter?
The answer is simple: don’t tell your private information to anyone you don’t want to know it. If you have an ISP, insist that they include in their terms that they don’t sell your email address. This is hardly uncommon. AFAIK, there is not law that requires Amazon not to sell my email address, but they don’t, because they promised not to.
You have a reasonable right to the courts protecting you from extremely intrusive acts: telephoto lens shot of you in the shower. However, if you shower naked on a public beach, don’t be surprised if you in all your glory appears in flickr tomorrow.
@Jay Maynard
It’s not my attempt it’s Madison and Jefferson’s attempt. I’m just telling you what’s in your constitution.
@Grantham
I don’t believe I claimed this.
I don’t think it has ever not been fuzzy. News has always been a business. Also, the first amendment was written more than three hundred years after Gutenberg, so I am not really sure what relevance this has.
Again, it’s not that those people/companies have any extra rights, its that any activity that is a press activity is protected. Any company or person can do these things.
@ Jessica Boxer
> There are gazillions of ways to monetize information without the need for SOPA. Copyright and patents are just the laziest way.
On one hand, I don’t like governments doing stuff like patents and copyrights. I hate patents on computer programming algorithms and patents on (the process to make?) chemical substances make me particularly uneasy.
On the other hand, who would spend a year writing a book if there was no copyright? Or spending $100 million to develop a new drug if it could not be patented? (I realize that in practice, some drug manufacturers engage in some pretty sleazy practices.)
But on the gripping hand, if I personally learn something, I wouldn’t care if it was patented or not in relation to my own personal use of that information. (Using that information to make products to sell might be another matter.)
@Tom
> I don’t believe I claimed this.
You implied that a company that produced and sold lug nuts had less rights of redress than company that produced and sold printed newspapers.
>First principles need to be revisited, because the line between commerce and news is even fuzzier now than it was in the days of Gutenberg
>>I don’t think it has ever not been fuzzy. News has always been a business. Also, the first amendment was written more than three hundred years after Gutenberg, so I am not really sure what relevance this has
Well, the fact that it’s called “press” should give you a hint to the relevance, Tom.
> Again, it’s not that those people/companies have any extra rights, its that any activity that is a press activity is protected. Any company or person can do these things.
That’s why I think you need first principles here. When a spiderweb of political and financial interests fund a press operation, what constitutes the protected “press.” It’s an important enough question that serious people should be prepared to answer, and not simply hand-wave and say “oh, the judiciary will figure that part out.” Even serious-minded people on the left would be prepared to answer it, since they objected to the result of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” case.
I said> if I personally learn something, I wouldn’t care if it was patented or not in relation to my own personal use of that information
I am specifically referring to patents, not copyrights. I have never down-loaded music. Like books, I really like a small amount of what is out there and I pay for what I get.
This was more directed at Eric, but my answer to you is that providing economic incentives for people to do things, no matter how beneficial in non-monetary terms or how much it supercharges the economy, does not constitute capitalism, especially if it makes the market less free.
If there’s truly no way to make money from creative work without copyrights, I say let there be no money made from creative work. I’m not convinced that there isn’t a way, though. Before copyrights, artists made money by producing works under commission, which I find to be more of a free-market solution than copyright. The problem, of course, is that there is a limited supply of people rich enough to commission a work. A solution (in that it would help pool the resources of less wealthy individuals) might be a “commission club”, which would commission projects based on its members’ suggestions and paid for by their dues.
My right, given that, as a right hander, I have finer motor control on that side of my body. Which is not to say that it wouldn’t hurt, and cause lots of problems to lose that leg.
More like “You have abused the limited monopoly we granted to you to gain and maintain a broader monopoly, which you have also abused. You must now make restitution.”. And no, I’d rather not have the government do this, but if it’s going to engage in policies that unfree the market, I expect it to clean up the messes that result, rather than letting them fester.
This is the conclusion I have come to. I just don’t like all the implications.
Where did you get this from? I assume quite the opposite. I also assume that treating information as property is incompatible with a free market for information (and, on the flip side, that establishing a free market for information precludes treating information as property).
I’m not sure where you really disagree with me here.
I’m not saying, “all private property is incompatible with the free market because treating information as property is a dreadful thing”.
I’m saying, “applying the concept of private property to information is incompatible with a free market, and thus *when it comes to information* you have to choose between private property and free markets”.
Tom:
And right before “freedom of the press” is “freedom of speech”. That’s in there too. Do try to keep up.
This is a semantic quibble. It still results in the government deciding who is and is not permitted to speak freely. You still haven’t said why this does not terrify you.
@ Jon Brase
re: copyright versus free markets
>A solution (in that it would help pool the resources of less wealthy individuals) might be a “commission club”, which would commission projects based on its members’ suggestions and paid for by their dues.
Yeah… I like that. The same activity of trying to find a publisher (or club to pay a publisher) would still exist.
This is also the approach to be taken for national parks and parks of all kinds. The single thing I HATE most about governments is when they draw a line around some beautiful area, call it a park and then start making rules about when that park is closed. I realize that a private park might also close at times, but there is a difference.
It is like Human Resource departments in a business. There is a lot of work to do to set all the policies and procedures for having employees. But once this is done, they still have to do something, anything, to justify the size of the HR department. So they start dreaming up rules and procedures and programs and anything they can think of.
Governments do this with parks. They declare an area to be a park for the benefit of everyone. Of course, the parks department wants to continuously grow, so they start putting up signs and paving trails and building interpretive centers and, in many cases, declaring that the park is closed during certain hours or certain months. The most common example of this is in parks in a city that close after dark to deter kids from building fires and partying. I, however, love to walk along the river at night. Government control of parks is evil.
If a park was owned by a group of people, they would have no incentive to try to spend as much money on it as they possibly could (the way governments do).
Brian Marshall Says:
> On the other hand, who would spend a year writing a book if there was no copyright?
Eh, lots of people write stuff with no intention of having it protected by copyright. Heck I’m doing it right now. Having said that I am more sympathetic to the argument on copyright. Plainly the wholesale copying of someone else’s work is pretty sleazy. However, copyright is a pretty brutal solution. But what about this: recently, the author of the Harry Potter series of books sued a guy who produced a Harry Potter encyclopedia. He did not start selling “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, he researched the books and built a bunch of information about them. Is that wrong? I am much less supportive of the copyright case here. What about if I decided to make my own movie of the books? If you have read the books and seen the movies you will know that the movies are large creative works in their own right. Is that acceptable?
> Or spending $100 million to develop a new drug if it could not be patented?
Not sure, however, did you consider all the drugs that don’t get developed because of patents? I have commented on this a million times here before so won’t bore the readers with more of the same, but suffice it to say (again) that a recent GAO study concluded that patents were HARMFUL to innovation in the drug industry.
Jon Brase Says:
>thus *when it comes to information* you have to choose between private property and free markets”.
Well I’ll happily jump on board that train.
Either way, the justification for 100+ year copyrights is very thin. They should be reduced substantially.
“Freedom of the press” does not give “the press” extra rights. It merely extends “freedom of speech” to printed and published matter. Bloggers are as much “the press” under any rational interpretation of the First Amendment as any newspaper or TV station.
@Jay Maynard
Sorry, I think my writing may have been somewhat confused here. I definitely have never intended to say that the government can decide who can or cannot speak freely.
Every citizen has the absolute right to say or write whatever they want.
In addition to that, press organisations have an additional special protection to not have the government interfere in any activities relating to the collection and distribution of news and opinion.
Nothing here means that corporations in themselves have rights to free speech. Again, just to make it clear, that does not mean that their employees and owners don’t have free speech rights (they absolutely do).
Rocks don’t have a right to free speech. Trees don’t. Dogs don’t. Buildings don’t. Bank accounts don’t. Companies don’t. People do.
So, to circle back around to where this all started, corporations are not people, they don’t therefore have rights to free speech, and therefore this stuff about their having a right to contribute to political campaigns doesn’t get out of the gate.
But, even if the first amendment did grant free speech rights to companies that still wouldn’t mean they cannot be prevented from making contributions, because there is the additional problem that money is not speech. It’s just not. It’s not an expression of an idea or information or an opinion. It’s lending material support.
> It merely extends “freedom of speech” to printed and published matter.
Right. That’s what I was trying to get Tom to reckon with (although he never did). The authors we’re including verbiage on media (movable type being the only noteworthy media of the time) so that no one could come back and discount it by saying, “it was written, not spoken aloud, so it’s not protected.” It has nothing to do with the “fourth estate”, as many publishers now think of themselves as.
jsk Says:
> I was thinking of the Texas law against sodomy
And when was anyone charged with sodomy?
When you sodomize a girl, are you worried about being charged with sodomy, or being retroactively charged with rape because she was not sufficiently sober, or sufficiently old, or, as with Julian Assange, she changed her mind midway and neglected to tell you about it?
> Rocks don’t have a right to free speech. Trees don’t. Dogs don’t. Buildings don’t. Bank accounts don’t. Companies don’t. People do.
Rocks are not composed of people. Trees are not composed of people. Buildings are not composed of people. These are all disinterested entities. Comparing inanimate objects to corporations does your point no favors. Corporations are very animate (as are families, political parties and nation states).
Jessica Boxer Says:
>…. recently, the author of the Harry Potter series of books sued a guy who produced a Harry Potter encyclopedia. He did not start selling “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, he researched the books and built a bunch of information about them. Is that wrong?
I would say no. If I want to research something and write about the results of that research, how can that be wrong?
> What about if I decided to make my own movie of the books?
Making a movie OF the books is… I would say a way of copying in the meaning of copyright; the law would say it is a derived work and can only be done with the authors agreement; if I am going to support copyright at all, I would agree with this. But… I don’t know…
Of, course, movies are almost always substantially different from the books and at some point, the author finds out that “net” means “zero”.
> did you consider all the drugs that don’t get developed because of patents?
No, but I can imagine. The original purpose of patents was to stimulate innovation by providing a framework for an invention being an improvement of an existing invention. Drug companies are notorious for their sleazy patent practices. I think software patents are evil. I think “business practice” and store-layout patents ridiculous and evil to the extent that they have any effect.
Clearly, patents are used to stifle innovation – the opposite of there intended purpose.
On the one hand, I feel that if the patent laws were improved, it would help innovation of truly new drugs because they cost so much to develop. But… I don’t like the government telling me what I can’t do (as long as I am not initiating the use of force or fraud). It does seem possible to think of cases where some government involvement is appropriate. Cops would be an example. But copyrights… the more I think about it, the more I remember that I am a small “l” libertarian.
@William B. Swift
@Grantham
I don’t read it that way. To me the ‘freedom of speech’ clause covers speech in all media: speaking, writing, films, tv, radio, art etc.
The ‘freedom of the press’ clause to me seems specifically designed to protect the whole activity of collecting and publishing information and opinion. So as well as actually writing it covers the right not to have the government stop you from trying to interview politicians (for example) or the right not to have the government interfere in the actual process of printing and distributing your material.
Mere writing is covered by the speech clause in my opinion. And, yes, the press clause extends to anybody involved in disseminating information or opinion, whether they are a NYT reporter or a lone blogger.
It seems to me that if the framers of this clause had intended it merely to extend the speech clause to writing they would simply have said something like ‘the freedom of speech and writing’. Instead they specifically mention ‘the freedom of the press’. That implies to me that they have a broader protection in mind.
@Grantham
Neither are companies. Companies are abstract legal entities. Take a company with a thousand employees and one owner. Fire half the employees. The company is still the same company. Fire the rest of the employees. Now it is a company with no employees and one owner. It’s still the same company. Now have the owner sell the whole thing to the government.
None of the people who were associated with the company are anymore. In fact there are no people associated with the company. It’s still the same company.
It’s just a legal concept. It isn’t a person. It’s isn’t made up of people. It’s just an entry on a database somewhere. Something to be bought and sold, or dissolved. The idea that this entity has the right to free speech is as ludicrous as the idea that a rock has free speech.
>The idea that this entity has the right to free speech is as ludicrous as the idea that a rock has free speech.
But your argument that a corporation is a sort of semantic spook cuts in the other direction too – if it doesn’t really exist, then that which you incorrectly think of as its “rights” are in fact the rights of persons – specifically, the rights of persons affiliating themselves with it. In seeking to restrict “corporate personhood”, you inescapably trample on individual rights.
This is easy to illustrate…but, you know, I think I’ll do that in a blog post.
@Grantham
And, also, if you get together a group of people then it doesn’t mean you have a company. Even if they are all working together for some common commercial purpose.
The thing that makes a company is legal status.
@Tom
> It seems to me that if the framers of this clause had intended it merely to extend the speech clause to writing they would simply have said something like ‘the freedom of speech and writing’.
Well, at least you are engaging the material instead of “just telling (us) what’s in (our) constitution.” That’s a step in the right direction. :)
Anyway, what I was trying to get across to you with Gutenberg was the idea that they used “press” in a very different (and indeed a very specific and direct) way than the members of the so-called fourth estate use it today. They were just talking tech, to stop jackasses from lawyering the freedom away from booksellers. For instance, consider what Madison had to say in his Virginia report:
“Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any one who reflects that to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression?”
In this case (“the proper use of every thing), the thing in question is the actual, physical press, not some amorphous “press culture” with a particular ethos and approved credentials. There is no restriction implied on the motives or interests of the person operating the press – it’s about the tool itself. We have many more tools of expression now, and even your own words admit that. They made no proscription against any specific hand operating these tools.
That’s as it should be. It is very strange that anyone would insist otherwise, but we live in strange times.
>>And who gets to decide which corporations are part of “the press”?
> The judiciary.
On what basis? For example, is GE part of the press? They own NBC.
I note that the NYT campaigns for both issues and candidates and IBM puts out far more factual information. Which one gets protected political speech?
> None of the people who were associated with the company are anymore. In fact there are no people associated with the company. It’s still the same company.
Huh?
I “occupy” Justin Herman Plaza in SF. Surely I have free speech rights.
10 other people join me. Do they have free speech rights?
Some other people join us. Some of the those 10 leave. I leave. The rest of those 10 leave.
At what point does the people in that group lose the free speech rights that I had when I showed up by myself?
Damn it. Screwed up the blockquotes.
@Andy Freeman
Of course.
Yes, absolutely. Every one of those people has an individual right to free speech.
Never. Each person has their right to free speech. They have it always and wherever they go. Nothing changes on account of joining your group or moving in and out of the park.
> If Microsoft started publishing a weekly political newsletter then that specific activity is protected.
How is a weekly political newsletter different from political ads?
After all, both can be aimed at convincing people to take specific political action.
What? You think that the NYT has a free speech right to advocate for the causes and candidates that it supports but not Microsoft? On what basis?
@Tom:
> If they had this in mind – if they were attempting to enumerate all the modes of speech just to be sure – then don’t you think it odd that they left out hand-written speech?
Well, no. It’s strange you haven’t figured out why, but I suspect it’s because you are reaching (in our hilarious attempt to teach “us” about our own culture).
Since you seem a little too obtuse to wander upon it on your own, please look up photographic images of the Constitution, study the way they were physically created for a moment or two, and then tell us why it might be a little redundant and bizarre to include protections of “hand-written speech” in the document. You might find the solution to be self-evident.
@esr
I look forward to it.
@Grantham
First of all, it’s possible of course that you are right. It all hinges on the historical usage of the term ‘the press’. I’d like to see some evidence about how it was used at the time if you know of any.
However, I still strongly suspect that you are wrong. For the reasons I gave above in other posts, and also for the following reason.
If the author really meant ‘the press’ to refer to the physical object, then it seems strange to me that he would write ‘freedom … of the press’. That sounds quite poetic, and rather uncharacteristically so for the constitution. It would be like saying ‘the freedom of the pen’ to refer to the freedom to write whatever you want. Obviously the pen or the press cannot literally have any freedoms in and of themselves – they are inanimate objects.
So, either the framers were using uncharacteristically poetic language here, or they are using the term ‘the press’ in the more modern sense of ‘the journalistic enterprise’.
And, what about the freedom of the pen, eh? Are we not allowed to write whatever we like?
>So, either the framers were using uncharacteristically poetic language here, or they are using the term ‘the press’ in the more modern sense of ‘the journalistic enterprise’.
Actually, neither is quite true. Or both were. In the period of the American Revolution, printing presses were expensive capital equipment analogous to…oh, say, mainframe computers in 1960. Being part of “the press” was more closely tied to actual personal ownership of an actual press than it later became. The idea that those two roles could be disaggregated – that you could have book publishers and people running newspapers who were not themselves actual printers, but contracted that job out to specialists – hadn’t really taken hold yet, and would not until printing was industrialized in the mid-1800s.
Indeed, from a modern point of view the business model of people like Peter Zenger looked rather backwards; they hawked newspapers in order to keep their expensive presses printing pay copy more of the time, so they could amortize their capital investment sooner.
So, the idea that there was or could be a “press” distinct from the technology of the press would not naturally have occurred to the framers of the Constitution. It’s completely consistent that they meant by “freedom of the press” the freedom of anyone who owns a press, whether or not that person would be considered a “journalist” – a category which, in fact, did not yet exist. In those days a “journalist” was…a person who kept a journal.
@Tom:
> That’s why I don’t think they were doing that. They assumed ‘speech’ covers all modes of expression. By ‘the press’ I think they must mean the journalistic endeavour as a whole.
I think maybe you should study the subject a bit more before making these assumptions. “Journalistic endeavor” is not a very descriptive term in itself, and is subject to a lot of interpretation. More importantly, why would anyone want distant judiciary bodies to parse what constitutes “journalistic endeavor”, when we all have the innate tools (eyes, ears) to be journalists, and legal tools like FOIA to help us? Why give strangers power to sanctify various propaganda organs, and using such hand-wavy evidence as “journalistic endeavor”, when the men who wrote it specifically were talking about tech?
@Andy Freeman
There is no difference. I am talking about contributions.
@Tom
>If the author really meant ‘the press’ to refer to the physical object, then it seems strange to me that he would write ‘freedom … of the press’. That sounds quite poetic, and rather uncharacteristically so for the constitution.
Oh, you have NO idea how bad it was. The framers practically had to restrain Thomas Jefferson in a strait jacket and a muzzle to stop his poetry from ruining their prose. His original version of the Declaration included the opener “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” He was a right-brained poet, all the way, but was such an important tool of the revolution that they had to let some of his poetry creep in.
In any case, revisit the grammar. “Speech” is not any less of a medium than “press”. They are different mediums, like floppy disks and Blu-rays. But they didn’t have any of that stuff back then: just spoken word, movable type and handwriting. And since the Constitution itself was handwritten, um… yeah that was coverd by default, methinks.
@Grantham
If you mean that the constitution was handwritten, and that this fact in itself implies a legal right to be able to write whatever you want, I think that is extremely weak. Such a right is not implied merely by the nature of the document. And to think that the framers would leave such an important right to be asserted in such a vague and cryptic fashion is absurd.
Laws don’t work by example. We don’t just watch what lawmakers do and assume that the law emanates from their behaviour. This is surely crazy.
And, with that, I really must go to bed.
This sort of thing is already happening now with Kickstarter.
@Tom:
> If you mean that the constitution was handwritten, and that this fact in itself implies a legal right to be able to write whatever you want, I think that is extremely weak.
Oh, but you are very wrong. But, I think the reason you are wrong isn’t so much that you are stupid (you might be, but not for this reason). Rather, I think it’s because you are the product of your times. We live in an age now where stating the obvious (and repeating it ad nauseum; and fetishising it) is considered a virtue. Not so, in the 18th century, during the Age of Reason in the colonies, and certainly not when you stood the chance of looking naive or childish in severing the bonds from a great naval power. Economy of language was the rule, rather than the exception, and Douglas Adams would have been very fond of the framers (except for Jefferson, who he would have blown out the airlock).
Anyway, but away your daggers and think about it for a second (when you wake up, that is): You have a certain problem in your thinking that you need to address, because you say that “speech” includes handwriting and “press” does not. Neither does, explicitly, so you are begging the question when it comes to speech.
But it’s also a problem of scale for you, as far as I can tell (and being kind to your way of thinking); you think that spoken words and letters reach only as far as the intended recipient, whereas the “press” (meaning the printing press) can disseminate ideas on a broader scale. That’s fine in the sense that I agree with your interpretation and with theirs.
But here is the real problem: what is the likelihood that if they had written it in the age of telegraphs that they would have added the words “freedom of the telegraph”, or if they had written in the age of film, “freedom of telegraph; freedom of film”? I think it’s not very likely (and I assume you do too), but the reason I think it’s not very likely is because there was only one kind of medium of wide transmission back then (print), and there’s no reason to think they would have conceived of more. If all of those other mediums had been invented (including TV, blogs, etc), I’m sure that the framers would have just written “media” instead of “press”. The framers had many writings that support my view, but I don’t even need them; if there is a distinction without a elaborate description, Occam insists I’m right and you are reaching.
I don’t know, though. Maybe this isn’t an honest argument, because you say:
And to think that the framers would leave such an important right to be asserted in such a vague and cryptic fashion is absurd.
Why is your definition of “the press” (as “journalistic endeavor”) less vague and cryptic than my definition of a “[fucking] press”, which also happens to be what the framers themselves precisely wrote? It’s hard to take this argument serious, given that my definition of a press as a “press” is considered vague and cryptic, whereas your definition of “journalistic endeavor” is not, when the term “journalism” wouldn’t even be invented until the 19th century (from the French word, “journalisme”).
Ah well. I suppose I will sleep on it as well, but I suspect I will sleep better.
The phrase “freedom … of the press” means the freedom to disseminate ideas using a mass medium of transmission. It explicitly evokes the physical manifestation of the printing press, because when the First Amendment was written, it was the only mass medium of communications. Also, it has to be read in context. I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make its structure clearer
The freedom of the press must be seen as the complement to freedom of speech, together representing all communication, so the combination should be read as
Congress shall make no law
…
abridging the freedom of communication
>Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of communication.
That is correct. That, in modern terms, is what the framers of the Constitution clearly intended in the First Amendment.
Just as clearly, they intended the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to bear arms.
Later in American history, both rights were seriously traduced. It is now generally forgotten that this was true of the First Amendment, except as a footnote in history class about the Alien and Sedition acts – but, in fact, the First Amendment did not reacquire its current broad scope until the early twentieth century. The battle to restore the full breadth and force of the Second Amendment is still underway, though after the Heller ruling victory looks increasingly probable.
Restrictions on political speech during campaigns are actually a huge step backwards. I cannot fathom the thinking of people who advocate them. They would do well to consider Thomas Paine: “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
Tom:
So far, so good.
Here’s where you fall into the hole.
Who decides who is a “press organization”?
Who decides what is “news and opinion”?
Who decides what is “the collection and distribution” of same?
The government!
Presto, you’ve just mandated that the government decide who is to have freedom of speech.
You cannot escape this central fact.
It’s speech just as much as the Occupiers’ tents are: it says “I agree with your message and want to help you spread it”. Further, in today’s environment where the only speech that is effective costs large amounts of money, squelching money must necessarily squelch speech. That is the basis on which it is settled US law that limiting campaign contributions is an infringement on freedom of speech.
@esr
> whether or not that person would be considered a “journalist” – a category which, in fact, did not yet exist. In those days a “journalist” was…a person who kept a journal.
Yeah, I was writing very much the same thing at the same time. Sometimes etymology is a bunch of niggling horseshit, but it does matter in conversations like this, where a critic is trying to fast forward a word they don’t like and make it mean something it didn’t (and couldn’t).
“It seems to me that if the framers of this clause had intended it merely to extend the speech clause to writing they would simply have said something like ‘the freedom of speech and writing’. Instead they specifically mention ‘the freedom of the press’. That implies to me that they have a broader protection in mind.”
Yes, they did. Back in those days, it was certainly important to protect speech, but speech was limited to a small circle of listeners. It was the press that would carry your speech out to the larger community. An informed public is necessary to a democracy, and the press was there to do that. That’s the reason for the special recognition.
We confuse the issue today, because the price of admission to the fourth estate is very low – lower than it’s ever been. If everybody is now part of the news media, then nobody is.
That last line is only half in jest. A few days ago, Instapundit linked to a story about a woman who runs a blog who is now being sued by an ‘investment advisor’ that she has been calling out as a swindler. The judge in the case has refused to recognize her claim to be a member of the press. I don’t know the merits of the case, but it would appear that anyone could publish anything about an enemy in the guise of an opinion piece, and blast it all over the ‘net, if judges were to support her claim.
Again, perverted bullshit. How can you pretend you believe this stuff? The activity that is protected under “freedom of the press” is obviously that of publishing. Publishing anything, whether it’s news, novels, pornography, advertising, advocacy, or sheet music. There is nothing in the term “freedom of the press” to indicate that one particular use of the press is privileged above all others, and there is nothing in the history of the constitution to make us suppose that the framers of the first amendment regarded “journalism” as important or would want to give it any privileges.
So corporations do have freedom of the press? Then how can they not have freedom of speech? Or if you think they don’t have freedom of speech then how can you think they do have freedom of the press? Where in the first amendment are these two freedoms distinguished, so that you can say corporations have one but not the other?
No, computers are “the press”. Bloggers are people who exercise their freedom of the “press”, i.e. the computer.
Only citizens? Where is that in the bill of rights?
Again with this nonsense. How does one kind of organisation get special protection that other organisations don’t?
What have “the collection and distribution of news and opinion” got to do with “the press”?
If they don’t have rights to free speech then how can they have rights to free press?
That is just insane. It’s a contradiction in terms. What is the difference between saying something oneself and helping someone else say it? You might as well say that there is complete freedom of the press but there is no right to buy newsprint or ink! Or that it’s perfectly legal to burn a flag if you happen to own one, and matches and kerosene, but the government can prevent you from buying these items, or from giving someone the money to buy them.
In any case, Citizens United isn’t about monetary contributions to campaigns, it’s about corporations’ right to make political speech themselves. CU was not donating anything to anybody; it made a movie about a political candidate — how anything be more “speech” than that? And by opposing the decision you are claiming that it didn’t have the right to do so. How can that possibly be?
And you know this because you’re psychic? How do you know it isn’t instead specifically designed to protect the whole activity of taking long lunches, or wearing cloth caps, or sniffing duplicator spirit? After all, these are all equally things that printers might do.
@esr
>”He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
This quote always reminds me of one of those historical footnotes that seems so apocryphal that it must be roundly true: that of Hamilton rescuing the loyalist Myles Cooper from the torch-wielding mob in the middle of the night, a ferreting him away to a British warship.
Yes, that is exactly what it means.
That freedom was never in question; there had been no attempt to ban it, and the framers could not conceive of any future attempt to ban it. How would you go about preventing people from writing whatever they liked? There was no need to protect the freedom of the pen, so it never occurred to them to try.
Um, what exactly is your objection to this? How is it even new? What is special about either US citizenship or US soil, that either should protect an enemy soldier from being captured and held prisoner by the US armed forces?
Certainly no such doctrine has ever been conceived of in previous wars. When Herbert Haupt, a German soldier who was a US citizen, was captured in Chicago in 1944, tried by a court martial and sentenced to death, the Supreme Court refused to even look into the case, saying that it was none of their business. As an enemy soldier making war on the USA he was fair game, and no civilian court could tell the military what to do or not to do with him. So how is he different from Jose Padilla? What is different about this war? The only difference is that the courts have recently forgotten their place and have presumed to stick their noses in where they don’t belong, so Congress is now slapping them down.
Excuse me? “Assassinating”?! Since when is killing an enemy called “assassination”? Did George Washington “assassinate” all the redcoats that were shot under his command?
I always find these sorts of discussion mildly amusing. They remind me of those arguments you had in kindergarten where Jenny was saying something bad about Sally and you felt the need to actually put your hand over her mouth, or put your fingers in your ears and say “LALALALALALALA”.
What the heck are people so scared of that they want to muzzle other people from saying things? What does it matter if a corporation is a person, or a union is a person; why would you be so small minded as to want to muzzle them anyway? Is your point of view so weak and ineffectual that you need to prevent the opposition from even speaking? Are you so thin skinned that you can’t bear to hear someone call you a poopy head? Or a nigger, spic, cracker, whore, bitch, or whatever other offensive term some idiot might want to use.
The great get out of jail free card is “Yell fire in a crowded theater”. However, I always smile when I hear that too because this principle of muzzling free speech comes from Oliver Wendel Holmes, in the case Schenck v. United States where the particular speech in question was a group of people who objected to the US participation in the First World War and were disseminating literature to oppose the draft. The eponymous Shenck spend six months in jail for this heinous crime.
Surely if we are to be able to speak we should be able to speak against our government dragging us into a destructive war? Whether the speaker is employed by BigBadMega Corp, or The International Brotherhood of Widget Fitters, or the New York Times, or Pajama Guy blogger, or the KKK, or the New Black Panthers, or the latest Whacky Muslim cleric, just let them speak, and then ignore them or yell back that they are idiots (or something more cogent.) All restrictions are terrible, but restrictions on political speech are the most heinous of all, and we have a whole government agency who’s sole function is to do just that.
Lets not confuse issues though: just because you have the right to say that I’m a damned fool, doesn’t mean you have the right to say it in my living room, or that you have the right to force me to pay for you to say it. And just because you want to object to Wall Street fat cats doing bad things, doesn’t mean you have the right to block roadways, or take over privately owned parks.
Oh, and since I got rambling, something else: anonymous free speech is just as essential (again shame on the FEC.) One of the things I used to say about free speech was “let a thousand flowers bloom.” I don’t say that anymore because I discovered that it is a rough quote from Mao Zedong. He encouraged people to speak opposition to his programs and ideas, supposedly to bring new ideas to the table. Unfortunately, what he actually did was used it to find people who opposed him, who he then had shot. There was considerable noise here in the California about some people who supported anti gay marriage laws being subsequently persecuted, even loosing their job, because their names were published in the public record.
We need the right to anonymous speech for the same reason we need the secret ballot.
@Millhouse:
> Excuse me? “Assassinating”?! Since when is killing an enemy called “assassination”? Did George Washington “assassinate” all the redcoats that were shot under his command?
Don’t be silly. Read about the case. Obama whacked an American citizen via drone attack with zero due process, while simultaneously directing his DOJ to try an alien enemy combatant in open court here in Manhattan. If you can’t see the difference, you have bigger blindspots than Obama himself (and any of his lapdogs on the Left).
@Jessica Boxer
The thing about “yelling fire in a theater” is that sometimes there really seems to be a fire, and you’d be remiss as a theatergoer to not yell about it. Of course, to the statist shepherds, this never seems to be the case. All potential and active fires are subject to strict interpretation by the Bureau of Theater Fire Detections. And if you burn to death before they make the scene, so be it.
Three major differences are that the United States was in a declared war with an identified enemy, Haupt was an unlawful combatant by the Geneva definition (i.e., participating in belligerent acts without wearing a uniform), and that Haupt was still tried. Even if you agree with the Quirin verdict, it’s a long jump from saying that citizens in the actual service of a declared enemy can be tried by court martial to saying that any citizen can be held arbitrarily without charge or trial.
@Christopher Smith
> Haupt was still tried…
Yeah, not sure how this was missed, except to be completely obtuse. The idea of screaming “ENEMY COMBATANT” at the top of your lungs doesn’t constitute an argument, especially when your evidence consists of other citizen-traitors like Haupt getting a trial (and conviction, and death sentence). Al-Awlaki might have earned his fate, but why does Obama and Holder insist that the alien Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserves a trial while al-Awlaki deserves a missile from the heavens?
“Freedom of the press” means mass communication. Freedom of speech means individual communication. Those are the only two divisions of communication that matter, and the federal government is specifically prohibited from interfering with either of them. Any government official presuming to interfere with communication on the premise that it uses a later technology than existed when the constitution was written, is a usurper trying to break the law.
Where exactly does the NDAA say that any citizen can be held arbitrarily without charge or trial? The first of the two sections that everybody is all up in arms over (Section 1031 in one version of the bill I’ve read, 1021 in another version) includes the language:
The section lays out what the military may do with regards to terrorists and does authorize indefinite detention *in general*. However, the above bit basically says “Constitutional and legal protections against detention without trial, etc. still apply to US citizens”.
The other section people are making a flap about (1032 or 1022, depending on which version of the bill you read), has this to say:
The section this is excerpted from lays down a requirement for the detention of terrorists. The above quote, however, is fairly self explanatory: Said requirement does not apply to US citizens.
The CU decision was correct, because we do not lose our first amendment rights if we act in cooperation with others, even if that cooperation is under the auspices of an incorporated organization.
As an enemy soldier making war on the USA he was fair game, and no civilian court could tell the military what to do or not to do with him. So how is he different from Jose Padilla?
The difference is that there has to be a declaration of war before wartime powers apply. Padilla is not a soldier.
>Don’t these people ever learn? Anything?
I wasted a lot of time on Reddit since 2006, and the kind of person I found the hardest to understand was that 20-years old American liberal in 2007 or so who spent his whole coming of age between childhood and adulthood, his most formative years, under a government he absolutely hated – George W. Bush – and yet had a deep trust in the abstract concept of government itself. I asked them, whether W. Bush could have made a lot less damage in the private sphere – as the manager of the family oil business – they said yes, and they still don’t get why government is more dangerous than the market. Because, like, if only the right people were elected, everything would be OK! On Reddit, it seemed like Obama is just the right kind of person for them, they had huge amounts of enthusiasm, trust and hope for him, he was The Right Person for them, who would turn government into a force for good, and now when it became obvious that in many ways he became a traitor for a significant subset of the liberal values, they lost the trust in him – but not in government itself.
This cannot be explained rationally. This IMHO demonstrates that this is a kind of religious faith in the state as a “mortal god” (Hobbes) – because despite all the bad experiences, a lot of people just need to believe in some kind of salvation – either other-wordly (Jesus) or this-wordly (government).
The endless cycle of religious faith in politicians and huge let-downs is familiar for us in Eastern Europe and Latin America – think Evo Morales in Bolivia, same story, just a lot worse. Is America joining us? The problem is, if yes, then there is little hope left for the rest of us.
A friend who is into martial arts quoted his sensei to me once: “Before you take a weapon into combat, visualize that weapon… shoved sideways up your ass. If you are weaker than your weapon, your enemy will take it from you and use it against you.”
And that brings us back to one of the fundamental blind spots of Leftist thinking:
Business is so bad that they have to create a governmental structure to control it.
Would any Evil Mastermind worth the title not try to take this weapon the Do Gooders have forged, and twist it to serve their own malicious purposes?
The Left doesn’t seem to have listened to people like my friend’s sensei.
@Tom
>I wouldn’t say it’s too crazy at this point to imagine the UK completely renegotiating its position in Europe to something like that of Switzerland within the next few years.
That’s reasonable, but most of the “broken society” problems I saw while living there had a lot more to do with Britains position (worship) to Cambridge intellectuals & their impractical ideas…
One of the scariest phenomena these days is that even intelligent people are increasingly blaming problems on foreigners instead of – at least a part of – domestic elites.
Let me get this straight. The EU could not do /could not have done anything to you without the enthusiastic support of certain British elites. Sovereignty – except in the case of war – is something given up, not taken away, and civilizations die by suicide, not murder. To change the EU is not in your power. To boot out certain domestic elites is in your power. Focus on that. Every country should focus on this…
Reminded me of the penultimate paragraph of George H Smith’s essay, My Path to Atheism in Atheism, Ayn Rand, and other Heresies:
Also, if you have read in some “secular humanist” works, for example, many of the essays in Paul Kurtz’s In Defense of Secular Humanism, you will discover that many of them have simply replaced worship of God with worship of the State.
@Grantham, RE: 352359
“@esr
>”He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
This quote always reminds me of one of those historical footnotes that seems so apocryphal that it must be roundly true: that of Hamilton rescuing the loyalist Myles Cooper from the torch-wielding mob in the middle of the night, a ferreting him away to a British warship.”
Yep. I will fight and die for your freedom, for your right to say or write something I find disgusting and repulsive, because it is THAT important.
I am often asked about my military deal, given my views on our government and government in general – why would I fight for them? I’ll grant them the confusion – between these views and my general lack of respect for “authority” – it seems to be a mystery.
But its not really – in my sphere, “authority” is something that is generally meaningless outside of having extra responsibilities. Yeah, orders come down but at the operational level, everyone is an expert at a set of things and takes the lead seamlessly as required – officers have EARNED their authority because they became what they are training right next to you the whole way. No special schools or camps for these guys. Same mud, same blood. Can’t remember the last time I yes-sir’ed anybody…granted this is a bit different than most military areas but its the only one that suits me.
Anyway, the real point here is that I am willing to fight and die, despite my dislike of gov’t because this country is worth it. This isn’t blind patriotism. We are the freest society on the planet overall. And every few years, we have a chance to change things, change gov’t through non-violent means, built right in (well, for the time-being anyway). We have the most opportunity socially and economically. And most of our founding principles are right.
Christopher Hitchens (may he rest easy) said it far more eloquently than I ever could: “the great thing about the United States is that it’s a secular country with a godless Constitution, and the last-best hope for mankind”
For me, its worth fighting and dying to keep it that way.
LS said:
If that’s the same issue I’m recalling, that’s because she’s trying to use press “shield laws”.
it would appear that anyone could publish anything about an enemy in the guise of an opinion piece, and blast it all over the ‘net, if judges were to support her claim.
I’m not a lawyer, but that’s so outrageously incorrect I feel no problem in saying that’s totally wrong. Labelling it opinion does not shield you from libel and slander claims.
that anyone could publish anything… if judges were to support her claim.
Scary stuff that. Not allowing the government to define who’s ‘allowed’ to publish? Horrors. Who knows what kind of villany and chaos that might create. No, we’d best leave it to the “professionals” with their “multiple layers of fact checking” and “years of study”.
(The link I thnk LS was referring to: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397450,00.asp ).
If that’s it, that’s outrageous. Not to be confused with my stance on “press shield laws” – but a useful counter to them is if (almost) everyone is allowed to shelter under them.
Just because you’re a “journalist” (or journolist) doesn’t mean you should be above the law. That means you can publish what you want, but if you have evidence of crimes, you should, when requested by the requisite court order any of the rest of us would be bound to follow, produce them accordingly. Or in civil cases, discovery rules are discovery rules. just like for everybody else.
But the press has carved out a special exception in many people’s minds, and a quite useful place to many in government. To the press, they’re the “effective” arm of government – exposing what they want to expose means abuses/wrongs are corrected, and they “make a difference”. To the government, they’re useful quasi-antagonists to be strategically “leaked” to or guided. But most people until recently have seen the “press” as the “reporter”. But “Watergate” and it’s aftermath caused a shifting from “reporting” to “journalism”. People are getting more aware of that now, and you can see the effect with the crashing of the newspaper companies and staggering health of most “news” companies.
But if you make a exception to some law, then it’s available to any who would meet that _reasonable_ definition.
@esr
The situation you’ve described is the same that happened here in Spain with the so-called “Ley Sinde” or “Sinde Act”. It’s a very similar law to SOPA and it has been opposed by the same internet pundits that were in favor of all other intromisions of the socialist government in the private life, specially the Gender Violence Law that made distintions between the sexes when it comes to punish the crime of hitting your wife, or husband.
WCC Says:
> Christopher Hitchens (may he rest easy) said it far more eloquently than I ever could: “the great thing about the United States is that it’s a secular country with a godless Constitution, and the last-best hope for mankind”
Yes, Hitchens was my favorite converted Marxist :-) Anybody who volunteers to be literally Devil’s advocate for the saintly Mother Teressa is my kind of iconoclast. The world little knows what it lost last week.
> For me, its worth fighting and dying to keep it that way.
I have the deepest respect for our military folks. As best as I can, when I am in a bar and see a military guy in uniform, I always buy them a beer. Nonetheless, let me ask you a question WCC. If the present NDAA gets passed, and you get an order from above to go down to the local Mosque in Memphis, or Atlanta, or wherever you live, to arrest the Imam, then take him off to a secret prison in Cuba, with no right of Habeus Corpus — what are you going to do?
@Shenpen
> This IMHO demonstrates that this is a kind of religious faith in the state as a “mortal god” (Hobbes) – because despite all the bad experiences, a lot of people just need to believe in some kind of salvation – either other-wordly (Jesus) or this-wordly (government).
I think it’s interesting (but not at all surprising) that the same people lending throat to the apocalyptic claims of the IPCC on the Junk Science thread pop up on some of these other threads to argue for a larger, more powerful State. Some, like Jeff Read, are even avowed Marxists and “secular humanists” (in the lefty sort of way, implying all sorts of transnational and multicultural bromides as the solution to the human condition). The pattern is unmistakable; even the godless seem to need a godhead, particularly when they aren’t very thoughtful or self-examined. Up above, we even have a few people twisting themselves into historical and etymological knots in an attempt to convince themselves that they don’t have a certain right, and that the government has the right to tell certain organizations of people to shut up, or to hand other organizations of people a specially-protected megaphone. You only do see that sort of irrationality and purposeful blindness in the devoutly religious.
Personally, I’d prefer these kinds of people chose a heavenly God than try to create a secular one, in the hopes of impose an impossible utopia via government force (and to take matters one step further, I’d prefer they chose Jesus or Buddha instead of the blood lusting political creature Mohammed). That is why even though I think Intelligent Design and Catastrophic AGW are both silly, junk science, the former junk is much more preferable to the latter because it’s not trying to exert power over me via expansion of the state. ID (or something like it) may even be a little useful, all things considered; not everyone is going to be thoughtful enough to live happily without a God, and perhaps living with a heavenly one can give them better tools to live happily with each other. It hasn’t always worked out that way, but on the other hand I have seen it do wonders for alcoholics and drug addicts – whereas the secular state institutions routinely fail them.
@Milhouse:
Best explanation of the DMCA anti-circumvention law I’ve seen in a long time.
@The Monster:
This is a little simplistic. The weapon exists, in that even a “small” American government could easily mess with whoever they wanted to. Plenty of history lessons for that. Yes, some want rules of engagement that require the weapon to be used a lot more often, on a lot more targets simultaneously, and that capability necessitates making the weapon bigger, but unless esr gets his wish, the weapon will always exist in a fairly potent form, so the argument must be a bit more nuanced than this. The argument must also be more nuanced because nobody I know (although I’m sure they exist) views a bigger weapon (government) as a goal; it’s merely a means to an end.
So simply directly arguing for “smaller government” is problematic. If government were slashed in half tomorrow, you can bet that the remaining half would still be captured by special interests. Unfortunately, citizens in general haven’t been paying the price of eternal vigilance for a long time. We hire others to do that on our behalf…
I speak as a lawyer and maybe against the interests of the legal profession, but I sincerely believe that legislation cannot be a fix-all for every social or economic issue.
The current trend of trying to use legislation and enacting laws to fix problems is dangerous and misguided. Hard cases make bad law: True indeed!
James A Donald Says:
>Seems to me that for heterosexual males, the problem since 1830 has been leftists in the bedroom. It is leftists that banned prostitution,
As far as I know prostitution has always been illegal in most of the USA, and continues in the same manner today — a law more ignored than enforced. However, FWIW, I am in favor of the legalization of prostitution, for both men and women.
> raised the age of consent,
Not sure what you are thinking of here. What do you think the age of consent should be? In most of the US it is between 16 and 18, which seems about right to me.
> ended a wife’s duty to be sexually available always to her husband and never to anyone else,
Really? Here is a simple fact, if your wife isn’t having sex with you, it is for one of three reasons: either there is some sort of medical problem, or because you behave like a jerk toward her, or, most likely of all that you aren’t very good in the sack. Women like great sex probably better than men do. The problem is that they like bad sex a lot less than men do.
If she is sleeping around, most likely it is the latter explanation.
So the solution is not a law requiring your wife to put out, it is rather that you pick up a copy of “The Dummies Guide to Sex”.
Of course I am generalizing, but I think this covers most of the cases.
> endlessly expanded the definition of rape and endless reduce the evidence and due process requirement for rape charges.
I think that some of this is an improvement, and some of it is definitely a ridiculous imposition (the Duke Lacrosse team comes immediately to mind.)
> It is leftists that imposed on men an enforceable legal duty to support their bastards and the sluts that bore them.
So who exactly would you have support the “bastards”? Perhaps the state? That doesn’t sound like a conservative solution to me. And if the women you are sleeping with are “sluts”, what does that make you? I’m also not aware of any legal duty to support the “sluts” that bore your babies, just to support the babies themselves.
On the contrary, requiring men to take on responsibilities for their actions and their consequences seems a very conservative approach to me, I certainly isn’t “leftist”. But perhaps your misogyny is clouding your judgement.
@lots of people
I looked up the word ‘press’ in an etymological dictionary, and this is what I found:
So, taking this, and some of the arguments presented here, into account I am changing my position. However, I don’t completely agree with @Grantham when he says the that word press literally refers to the physical object ‘a press’. My considered view is that the framers meant by ‘the press’ the enterprise of printing and distributing written matter, i.e. books, periodicals etc. So, this sense includes not merely the act of printing itself, but also the means of its dissemination.
@Millhouse
What is my objection this? What is my objection to the Government being able to haul anybody they like into prison for the rest of their lives without any due process?
It’s hard to believe I am even being asked this. My objection is that it strikes at the very heart of the freedom of the individual. That’s all.
Enemy soldier? The whole point is that the person arrested doesn’t have to be an ‘enemy soldier’, he can be anybody, because no proof is required. There is no trial. All the Government has to do is ‘suspect’ a person of being a terrorist.
Ok, I can’t respond to everybody’s comments, but I will try to get to the heart of why I think money in political campaigns needs to be addressed.
@Jessica Boxer
I don’t want to muzzle people from saying anything. What I am worried about is the degree to which lawmakers in the US (in the UK too but to a far lesser degree) are completely dependent on money from corporations and rich donors.
The core of a representative democracy is the idea that elected representatives represent the interests of the people. But in the US we have got to a situation where in order to win election to the Congress you have to raise a lot of money. This means that the lawmakers are beholden more to the rich and the big business interests who finance them than they are to the people. Effectively their constituents are no longer the people, but their donors.
This situation completely undermines the purpose of a representative democracy.
And the results should be obvious. The most timely example being this SOPA law, which exists only because the Congress owes its position more to rich donors than to the people. When the laws in a country are made not with the interests of the people, but with the interests of the rich in mind you don’t have a democracy any more. What your have is a plutocracy.
Do you at least admit that this is a problem?
>Specific sense “machine for printing” is from 1530s; extended to publishing houses by 1570s and to publishing generally (in phrases like freedom of the press) c.1680. This gradually shifted c.1800-1820 to “periodical publishing, journalism.”
This is the exact transition I was writing about, all right, but for the sake of scrupulous honesty about my errors I will note that I was three decades off on one bit – I thought the second shift didn’t really get going until about 1850.
Jessica, the thinking is that most people are dim-witted sheep, who will automatically vote for the candidate who spends the most money on advertising. This does not fit with actual election history, of course, but they believe it nonetheless. So they think that only by muzzling the rich corporations will the electorate be able to make the correct (i.e. left-wing) choice in the voting booth. And since the government is elected, they can be trusted to muzzle the voices that need to be muzzled, because democratic governments are “accountable” in a way corporations are not. (I know, I know, but it all seems very logical to them….)
@PapayaSF
It’s not necessarily that the candidate with the most money wins every time (although there is pretty good reason to think that having more money gives a candidate a huge advantage – http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/11/money-wins-white-house-and.html) but rather that they do have to raise a certain amount to even be viable. This makes them dependent on their rich donors, and ….
Well, just read my previous post.
@Jessica Boxer, RE:
“Nonetheless, let me ask you a question WCC. If the present NDAA gets passed, and you get an order from above to go down to the local Mosque in Memphis, or Atlanta, or wherever you live, to arrest the Imam, then take him off to a secret prison in Cuba, with no right of Habeus Corpus — what are you going to do?”
This won’t happen. My path does not lead to and will never deal with internal policing – as they say – “not my department.”. This is a matter that will be dealt with by one of the alphabet soup agencies, or possibly the national guard. I am not looking to be in arresting people, or converting hearts and minds. One guy said it well enough – “if we’re the ones they sent, they didn’t send us to talk or play police.” There are other units for that. The bad guys that show up on these lists that don’t manage to get themselves killed (and therefore “arrested” such as it is), well, the men in black deal with those assholes from that point. And yes, I do realize I will have played a part in that. It is something I continue to wrestle with.
Abu Ghraib was disgusting and pure filth. And Guantanamo is complicated for me.
Okay, now that I’ve dodged the question, I’ll answer it. I’ve thought long and hard about that. The guy may be a dirt bag, and I may want to do him myself, but If that happens, if that order comes, that is the day my death warrant is signed. I get that order, I’m done – I refuse as a conscientious objector – and I assure you the legal protections for refusing an immoral order will be nil at that point. I turn in my weapons, burn my computers, and get arrested for treason and sedition. Because all the things I said are worth fighting and dying for are done – we will have finally stepped over the slippery slope. I want to fight to keep freedom alive, not live in a Brave New World circa 1984. No matter how many of our citizens want that more and more. I am not an “America, Fuck-Yeah” guy – I believe in a set of principles. Our secular society and godless Constitution, our love of freedom and the individual ratify those principles. If my country no longer embodies those principles, and we have no way of returning to them (voting, armed resistance) well…
Hell, there’s a good chance I’m done if NDAA is passed and put into effect. Dying as a conscientious objector after court is still fighting and dying for what you believe in. Not that anyone will know if it happens. I do not believe I’d be going to jail – after all, with these dangerous ideas I may write a book!
Regarding the religion of the state: personally, I don’t buy it. However, the statist attitude comes from the same place as the religious attitude — namely the profound feeling of powerless most people have. Lots of people think they have very little control over their lives, and consequently the promise of a benevolent overseer with their best interests at heart is surely intoxicating. If one is in the position that the benevolent overseer isn’t providing the benefits you expect — whether he is not answering your prayers or getting unemployment below 8% — you don’t actually have anywhere else to turn, so denial is a useful tool.
The Apostle Paul writes that “if the dead be not raised then our faith is in vain and we are still in our sins. Let us eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we will die.” Unfortunately, “eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we will die” isn’t enough for most people. They like to pretend there is some real meaning to their lives, that they matter in the universe. However, objectively it is clear we don’t matter even a tiny bit in the universe, though we might have some significance on a more local sphere.
I think Patrick makes a great point — it is a fact that religious conversion is often the source of great benefits in people’s lives, allowing them to get various demons of their backs, whether drink or drugs or depression. If any of you doubt that you should read the book “Chasing the Dragon” by Jackie Pullinger, about a young girl who went from Britain to the worst drug dens in Hong Kong, and somehow, with her religion alone managed to rescue the lives of many of the people there. It is a compelling read, and a challenge to any atheist who has an honest and open mind.
It makes me wonder if false hope, if properly constituted, is a good thing, if rationality leaves you wise, but barren. Believing that everything is part of God’s plan must surely remove an amazing weight of responsibility for thinking and understanding from ones’ shoulders.
@Jessica Boxer, RE:
“Yes, Hitchens was my favorite converted Marxist :-) Anybody who volunteers to be literally Devil’s advocate for the saintly Mother Teressa is my kind of iconoclast. The world little knows what it lost last week.”
Hear, hear! Mr. Hitchens and I share a love of Johnny Walker Black Label scotch, cut slightly with Perrier. Although myself, I skip the cutting mostly. As he said “Johnny Walker’s amber restorative.” A toast to Mr. Hitchens and a toast to your statement.
Tom Says:
> Do you at least admit that this is a problem?
No, I think you have misidentified the problem. The problem is not the corporations but the electorate. Corporations don’t have a vote, what they have is money to persuade people. If people aren’t wise enough to make good choices then democracy is a disaster, whether BigMegaCorp supports Good Hair guy or not.
Of course, the real truth is that the problem is neither the electorate nor the corporations, it is the system of democracy itself. The great innovation of America was the idea of a government of limited, enumerated powers. America is explicitly not a democracy. Ultimately, it is the evisceration of this core idea that is the root of all these problems.
@Jessica/Papaya
I said:
And the really dangerous thing about having corrupt lawmakers who are working against the public interest is that once you have this situation it doesn’t really matter what the existing laws are, because they can always be changed. That’s why this is so important.
Your argument is something like, let’s not even give the government the slightest hint of a whiff of even being able to get remotely close to being able to interfere with free speech, even it it means allowing the rich to control elections.
But the problem is that once you lose control of the law making process you also endanger the very right you have been fighting to protect, because those in power (who are not answerable to you) can now set about decimating the bill of rights.
@hari
“The current trend of trying to use legislation and enacting laws to fix problems is dangerous and misguided. Hard cases make bad law: True indeed!”
Agreed. Burn the patriot act. We have GOT to stop letting fear and crisis be a tool for legislating our freedoms away.
WCC Says:
>This won’t happen. My path does not lead to and will never deal with internal policing – as they say – “not my department.”.
So, I have to ask — what exactly is you department?
> Abu Ghraib was disgusting and pure filth. And Guantanamo is complicated for me.
In regards to Abu Ghraib, BTW, I think that it is disturbing the way that thing went down. You put some young woman in a position of extreme power, when she had probably not even run a shift at McDonalds prior, and things go wrong? Why would we be surprised. What went wrong was not so much a failure on the part of PFC England, it is a GROSS failure of supervision up the chain to the General in charge. I respect the fact the Rumsfeld asked to resign. I think the President should have accepted.
> Because all the things I said are worth fighting and dying for are done
Something I have never quite understood about our military, and I’d appreciate your perspective. Despite the fact that the people in power and the elite on down have become a bunch of feel good panty waists, for some reason the core of our military indoctrination seems to still convey those basic, traditional American values — liberty, self reliance, charity for the weak, responsibility for the strong. How is it possible as every department of government has rejected these core tenets that the military indoctrination still teaches them, and they still prevail from bottom to (near the) top.
I never understood how the two can live together.
Oh and BTW, your answer provokes my deepest respect. The fact that it is so honorable is not diluted by the fact that it would not be uncommon amongst your fellow soldiers and officers.
@Jessica Boxer:
“As far as I know prostitution has always been illegal in most of the USA, and continues in the same manner today — a law more ignored than enforced. However, FWIW, I am in favor of the legalization of prostitution, for both men and women.”
I’ll second that. Sometimes I think prostitution is the most honest business transaction: Here’s what I do, here’s what I don’t do, and here’s how much it costs…
“Not sure what you are thinking of here. What do you think the age of consent should be? In most of the US it is between 16 and 18, which seems about right to me.”
I don’t know if 16 & 17 is age of consent in most states, and it maybe that it mostly does not matter – statutory rape laws in most states you know.
I have litmus test for consent. If you are going to license someone to get behind the wheel of a 1+ ton fiberglass death trap, then they are old enough to decide whoever they damn well want to sleep with.
@Jessica
I think the mistake you are making is thinking of freedom as a product and not a process. You can’t just set up a small, non-interfering, freedom-respecting Government with a fixed written constitution and then sit back and enjoy the fruits of your liberty. The reason is that people will always try to erode that liberty.
That is why it is important for a free country to have a democratic system of representation, to ensure that the people embowered to change laws are specifically incentivised to represent the interests of the people.
Once you lose that then your ‘government of limited, enumerated powers’ will soon follow.
So, yes, the people are not perfect and they won’t always choose the best people. But let’s at least not have a system that specifically puts the people who are interested in destroying freedom and helping only a few rich members of society in a position to change the laws.
@Jessica Boxer:
From a traditional religious conservative point of view, divorce shouldn’t even be possible, but if it is possible then the disgraced wife should live in the poorhouse with her now bastardized offspring while the husband gets a fresh start with his sweet young thing. But I digress.
Actually, if you look at the history of child support payments, I think you will find that they are a lot higher now than they used to be (relative to inflation) because if the father doesn’t support the kids (and ex) then the state has to ante up welfare payments. In other words, the state got a lot more interested in moving money from fathers to (nominally) the kids once it decided there was a fairly high minimum amount of money everybody needed to have.
I remember reading a case a few years ago, about a guy who married into an “instant family” with around 3 kids. They got divorced less than a year later, but the state still forced him to pay child support, even though the kids weren’t his and weren’t even conceived inside his marriage.
But if you don’t think it’s all about the state spending less money, just google for words like “child support not father” and you’ll find plenty of articles like this:
If you’re against all abortion, it’s perfectly consistent to want to always make the father pay child support, but if you’re for allowing the woman to get an abortion, I think it gets a lot more complicated. An abortion can mitigate the bad effects of a momentary lapse of judgment, but the decision to have one rests in the hands of one party, whose interests may not align at all with the interests of the other party.
Tom says
> Your argument is something like, let’s not even give the government the slightest hint of a whiff of even being able to get remotely close to being able to interfere with free speech, even it it means allowing the rich to control elections.
“Control” elections seems to imply that they are rigging them somehow, in the way that the old political machines would rig them (stuffing ballot boxes, intimidating voters, double-voting, etc) and sometimes still do. I think if you are going to argue your case well, you might want to be a little more careful with your language, as you seemed to slightly confess above regarding your loose interpretation of “press”. “Influence” is different than control, and not only business corporations can wield influence. For instance, Greenpeace is an organization with lots of money that exercises influence, much of which is likely to have a direct and negative impact on my life if their agenda comes to pass. That doesn’t mean I want to outlaw Greenpeace from creating ads, or lobbying and supporting political candidates.
> But the problem is that once you lose control of the law making process you also endanger the very right you have been fighting to protect, because those in power (who are not answerable to you) can now set about decimating the bill of rights.
That sounds eerily like the EPA, the FDA, DHS and other federal regulatory bodies and czars. But bribery is still illegal (though enforcement is sometimes a joke) and influence is still not control. Anyway, corporations are not beholden to “no one”; they have customers, shareholders and market participation. They are interested parties in the policy disputes at hand – in some case far more interested than Joe Average who just wants to drink a beer, watch the game, bang his wife and have the government as out of his hair as possible.
The notion that this is somehow evil – that corporations (and, by extension their shareholders and customers) have deep, direct interests in the outcome of a certain bill, and that this interest always conflicts with the public interest – is something deeply embedded in the left wing psyche, I think, part of a long memetic thread that reaches back to Woodrow Wilson in the West, and Marx in the East.
But corporations aren’t alien invaders trying to rule us. They are an important part of modern public life, embedded in our food, shelter, entertainment, medicine, communications, etc. If the outcome of H.R. Bill 3002 (which Joe Average might not know or care about) will ruin a business, and for what the owners of that business believe is bullshit excuse for a power grab by the “plutocrat” pashas in D.C., why shouldn’t I be able to make my case? Hell, I may even be helping Joe Average without him knowing about it.
A good example might be the “light bulb” madness that was thankfully just crushed with a rider (but not before the threat of it managed to destroy the last remaining incandescent manufacturer in the U.S.) I make a point of straw-polling the light bulb ban wherever I go, sneaking it into casual conversation. It’s inspires a sort of giddy madness to me when I realize how few people even knew this “transition” is dim bulbs filled with bio-hazard mercury was even happening.
Tom, I see “campaign finance reform” as a choice between having many competing interests (rich people, corporations, unions, citizen’s groups, etc.) “controlling elections” (in the sense of whatever results from the cacophony), versus having politicians decide who is allowed to say what about politicians. The downsides of the latter far outweigh the downsides of the former.
Of course people (rich or not) will always try to use the mechanisms of government for their own benefit, but the real solution to that problem is to limit the power of government. As government has gotten more powerful, it’s more of a prize to capture, and thus more money is spent to capture it.
Also, worries about “plutocracy” rest on the concept that masses of voters will vote against their own interests, simply because politicians are getting money from wealthy interests and spending it on campaigns. This happens to some extent (e.g.: urban blacks being reliable Democratic voters, despite the Democratic policies that hurt them in the long run), but it doesn’t always work, and the proposed cures still seem worse than the disease.
Tom Says:
>I think the mistake you are making is thinking of freedom as a product and not a process.
No, it is the product of a process. Most of the US Constitution is about process. And most of that process is designed to hinder the government from doing stuff.
In software development there is a term we use: “technical debt.” What it means basically, is the accumulation of various bad or expedient decisions you have made over time that has compromised the cleanness and quality of your architecture over a period of time. Technical debt accumulates in every piece of software, and wise product planners assign time to clean up the debt, otherwise you descend into chaos.
The US Constitution has accumulated a lot of technical debt. It has got to the point where it is extremely burdensome, and we need a good housecleaning to get rid of a lot of it. If we don’t, a financial collapse will do it for us (or turn us into a tyranny, one or the other.)
Nonetheless, the solution is not restricting speech, it is restricting the capabilities of government. The solution to the sale of legislation is not to put the buyers or sellers in jail, it is to make the legislation impossible.
And as I said, the constitution bristles with anti democratic features — it is one of its strengths.
I said “Abu Ghraib was disgusting and pure filth. And Guantanamo is complicated for me”
Also, extraordinary rendition is filth, as is the whole torture matter. Hypocrisy and evil of the vilest sort.
Look, if you torture someone, you cannot rely on the information and it is not always efficient or possible to fact check everything and keep coming back. For every one time it works (and it has – some “actionable intel” – intel you can act on immediately, has been retrieved doing so) , there are a hundred times it didn’t and the human cost for all involved is too high. There are other, more effective methods. I don’t want to devolve this thread into that discussion again though. I’ll leave it at – what? It is somehow okay to justify water-boarding (I’m no hypocrite – I have been water-boarded and electrocuted), but sodium pentathol is somehow worse?
@Jessica Boxer, RE:
“Something I have never quite understood about our military, and I’d appreciate your perspective. Despite the fact that the people in power and the elite on down have become a bunch of feel good panty waists, for some reason the core of our military indoctrination seems to still convey those basic, traditional American values — liberty, self reliance, charity for the weak, responsibility for the strong. How is it possible as every department of government has rejected these core tenets that the military indoctrination still teaches them, and they still prevail from bottom to (near the) top.
I never understood how the two can live together.”
’tis an interesting question. A good thought exercise. The truth is, there is a wide spectrum of ideology in the military. As for core values, there is something to be said for an all-volunteer force who know the sacrifices they are rogering up for, and usually know why. They tend to believe in what they are doing. There are those that sign for economic reasons too. Amongst the liberals who are in the military, you will find that many of them also hold these core beliefs – think Christopher Hitchens-honesty. Honesty, not always intellect.
I fear it is going to take some time to craft an adequate response to your question – there are a lot of facets to this in my observation.
One thing I wonder though. This isn’t the 60’s. And Ruby Ridge and Waco have left a bad taste in many mouths. If military folks are ordered to arrest US citizens under NDAA for a Guantanamo situation, or fire upon them, this may well be the spark that ignites violent struggle here. Hence the careful use of power words such as “suspected of terrorism” in the legislation (and by the way, take a look at the criteria they are using to determine a suspect). Don’t know for sure, but you will find the majority of the military taking issue with that, and what are you going to do? Court martial them all?
It probably won’t come to that. There are lots of alphabet soup gov’t agency bureaucrats more than willing to do this – the suits know this and know the military outlook, so who knows.
I’ll work on a more adequate description of my perspective.
@Jessica Boxer, RE:
“So, I have to ask — what exactly is you department?”
If you’re comfortable with it and interested enough, ask Mr. Raymond (whose email he has made public) for my email address and I’ll tell you. I think he has it because I post it for comments here. If not, I’ll just post it. I apologize for the inconvenience and imposition, Mr. Raymond. Forgive me if I’ve been presumptuous.
I’m not trying to be an asshole. No one’s ever asked me here and its unimportant to the exchange of ideas – I only mention it on here from time to time to underscore a point and provide experiential perspective.
@WCC:
>Also, extraordinary rendition is filth, as is the whole torture matter. Hypocrisy and evil of the vilest sort.
Something I’ve thought about is that, while there is a ton of vile hypocrisy and maybe even stark evil in many of the CIA’s covert activities, I somehow doubt that all or even most of their agents think about their activities that way, perhaps viewing themselves as anti-heroes who do the wrong things for the right reasons, or maybe even as asymmetrical warriors who are running risky support for the more visible diplomats and the armed troops in a common defense of our shores. Not too thoughtful, maybe but not evil, necessarily, and some of them are probably very brave.
Rendition pisses all over that archetype, though. The spooks who farm out their dirty work to countries filled with nihilists, torturers, mercs and self-professed enemies of free men simply have no souls. They are pure evil. Once you hand your prisoner over to the guys with the hammers and hacksaws, in the service of keeping your own hands clean, you have given up the ghost.
@PapayaSF
I agree that it is a choice between two (both admittedly imperfect) options. We should choose the one with the best outcome. However, I disagree with your characterisation of both options.
I think you have tried to fudge the nature of the people who end up controlling elections. You list rich people, corporations, unions, citizens groups, and then that wonderful ‘etc’. The reality is that there is one factor that I am objecting to here, and it is money. If you have more money than other people you have more power over who gets elected than other people. The richer you are the more power over the legislators you have. As I said this has lead to a situation whereby rich people have their interests represented far better than most of the people.
Now let’s look at the other choice. You characterise it as ‘having politicians decide who is allowed to say what about politicians’. But I think that is disingenuous. Let’s suppose that we come up with a solution to the problem of money in politics (and I think you do agree that it is a problem) that says ‘if you are a candidate for public office, or an elected public official, you may not receive monetary donations from anybody or anything.’ It’s an extreme solution, and I don’t know that it’s the right one., but let’s just go with the thought experiment.
Explain to me how that is ‘having politicians decide who is allowed to say what about politicians’.
On balance I would rather have limits on the money a political candidate can receive than have the entire apparatus of law-making corrupted and in hock to the richest and most powerful members of society.
@Jessica
Okay, but the question is how to do that. You can’t just set up a constitution and then think that everybody is going to follow it. People are not following it. You have to make sure that the ongoing process of making and changing laws is incentivised to advance the interests of the people and not just the most powerful.
And this is not abstract. It is actually happening. DMCA, the patriot act, SOPA, the absurdities of the patent system, bank bailouts. The damage of having a de facto plutocracy is obvious every day.
And I don’t want to restrict speech. I don’t regard giving money as speech. You should be able to say, write, and publish whatever you want, but having legislators controlled by moneyed interests is killing America.
@Grantham, RE:
“Something I’ve thought about is that, while there is a ton of vile hypocrisy and maybe even stark evil in many of the CIA’s covert activities, I somehow doubt that all or even most of their agents think about their activities that way, perhaps viewing themselves as anti-heroes who do the wrong things for the right reasons, or maybe even as asymmetrical warriors who are running risky support for the more visible diplomats and the armed troops in a common defense of our shores. Not too thoughtful, maybe but not evil, necessarily, and some of them are probably very brave.”
In the aggregate, I believe you are right about the fact they they do not view these activities as evil, and that their motivations are righteous. Yet, convenient moralizations (I’ve got to stop making up words…) and justifications does not render evil less evil. Or make it okay.
But, the world is gray. This is where self-analysis and critical thinking is so, so important. For me, one of my tests in thinking through this has been the subject of targeted assassination. But let us say that I am in a situation where a house has been raided and we have a little terror rat by the throat. His phone calls have been tracked, and it is known that he knows the immediate and exact whereabouts of an American hostage whose beheading is imminent, the deadline has past. He won’t talk because he knows his rights and what the military cannot do. But his psychological profile says he’ll sing like a canary under pressure and fear. We don’t have time to do this right, we’ve got to find our citizen.
I have a personal and moral choice between two evils and I have to decide which is greater. I pull my knife, he doesn’t talk. I carve a piece and he does. I did not know if he would talk, but I made the choice to violate my morals and ethics and rules and laws on the chance he would – just the chance. Because saving the life was more important to me in that moment than the rest. Some, perhaps many will say this was justified.
But, I violated the law, my honor, and my moral compass. The fact that it was a conscious choice and I made it knowing full well what I was doing and why does not remove the stain from me, nor assuage my guilt. I deserve court martial and imprisonment – these are the consequences of that choice and I knew and accepted. Saving the life was more important to me than than the stain and the consequences. But I am responsible and I did evil, knowingly.
This situation is hypothetical – but, the world is gray, and the spiral is down. When we shrug off the idea personal responsibility, acceptance of choice and consequence, and institutionalize evil of this nature, with the types of justifications I just gave, whitewashing it with the greater good, we are on so dangerous ground.
@WCC:
> But, I violated the law, my honor, and my moral compass. The fact that it was a conscious choice and I made it knowing full well what I was doing and why does not remove the stain from me, nor assuage my guilt. I deserve court martial and imprisonment – these are the consequences of that choice and I knew and accepted. Saving the life was more important to me than than the stain and the consequences. But I am responsible and I did evil, knowingly.
Right. I think we agree. That’s what I meant in regards to rendition. It’s one thing to violate your own code and except the both consequences (both legal and, for lack of a better word, spiritual). It’s slightly different if you only have to accept the spiritual consequence, because you are operating on blackout, and I think the level of true evil varies somewhat with the personal risk you are assuming, or the motivations leading to it. Both are still kinds of evil, because the actions are evil, but not the worst, lowest kind of evil.
But, it’s quite another thing altogether to toss the little terror rat to a bunch of savages with no honor, no code and no objective law to do your dirty work for you, leaving you to consider yourself “clean” somehow. There are no gray areas or mitigating factors there. That is the worst kind of self-deluding evil, both at the operator level (the guys physically handing him over) and at the command level (the guys ordering him handed over).
@Grantham
Yes, I do believe we agree on these points. There are degrees of evil and shades of gray.
I said > who would spend a year writing a book if there was no copyright?
Jon Brase Says:
One problem with this approach is that the author would be paid once – what the “commission club” agrees to pay – there would be no future royalties (or they would be limited) because once the book is out there, anyone can copy it and sell as many copies as he can.
This would seriously limit the amount of money an author could make. Under our present system, only a tiny proportion of people can earn a living by writing. I suspect that this “commission club” approach would make that proportion even smaller.
Jessica Boxer Says:
It would only be sleazy if an author owns his/her work – if the work is, in some sense, property. I certainly agree that current copyright law needs work.
I first posted in favour of copyrights – not necessarily the existing law but that the product an author produces is property in some sense. Jon’s post and Jessica’s post made me think that maybe I had used my big mouth without sufficient thought (again).
Ignoring the derived works problems, I would like to firm up my position a little and use Jessica’s words:
>I am more sympathetic to the argument on copyright.
This means that I feel that an author owns his/her work in some sense, but the existing law needs work and the whole business is subtle.
Should the government be involved here to defend property rights (in some sense) of the works of authors?
Damnit – I really gotta close italics properly.
If people feel strongly about SOPA and the NDAA then they need to go find their local Occupy movement.
Just being part of “The World is Watching” e.g at http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution from time to time is a bit of toe dipping as you find out that hey are not just a ‘load of homeless hippies’.
If you are not in a position to put your life completely on hold and do the full on living in a tent then giving financial support and just turning up for the numerous demos will give you a great sense that you are doing something rather than just being a helpless victm.
Going on some straw poll stats like number of Facebook groups there seem to be and simply the number of hits that Googling for ‘occupy’ returns indicate that the movement is growing rapidly, in spite of very very great efforts from the government and mainstream media to play it down.
SOPA could be used to crush the very debate that may lead to us finding collective consensus solutions to the problems of the world.
The Internet is the greatest, most powerful tool man has ever created, the elite now recognise its great power and want to smash it.
We absolutely must not let this happen.
Grantham Says: What’s wrong with calling Denmark “libertarian”? It is certainly more laissez-faire than its cousins in the Eurozone, and widely agreed as one of the smallest, least-intrusive governments in the world.
Yeah, and good basketball players are mostly Japanese, Greenland is covered with tropical rainforest, and Brazil is full of Buddhists.
Seriously, that’s how profoundly wrong-headed that statement is.
The Danish government collects 55.3% of GDP in taxes and other revenue – over half. This is the 14th highest ratio in the world, according to the CIA Factbook – nearly double the world average. Of the thirteen higher ranking countries, eight are microstates, such as San Marino, which gets a big share of its GDP from sale of postage stamps to collectors. Four are petrostates where the government collects the oil revenue, such as Kuwait. The other is Cuba.
Excluding micro- and petrostates, the next seven are Sweden, Finland, Belgium, France, Austria, Italy, and Netherlands (#23, 45.6%).
Which is to say that the Danish government is a typical Euroland welfare state: huge and grotesquely intrusive, except even more than the rest.
And no “libertarian” government prosecutes people for “hate speech” (vide the conviction of journalist Lars Hedegaard for daring to speak out about Moslem abuse of women).
>> How is a weekly political newsletter different from political ads?
Okay, microsoft has free-speech rights to have a political newspaper and run political ads, just like me, presumably because it’s a collection of people.
> There is no difference. I am talking about contributions.
Huh?
Suppose that ESR is running political ads that I support. According to the above, he and I could form a corporation to run those ads. As part of forming that corporation, I might put in some money. Why can’t I just give him money to help run those ads without forming a corporation with him?
You know, I opposed all that other stuff too. It doesn’t matter. Most people today wouldn’t know freedom if it bit them in the butt. Their idea of free speech is that it’s fairly easy to get a permit to speak if you’re not too radical, and the same applies everywhere else. The idea that freedom means not having to ask permission… why, that’s just scary and radical. “You didn’t think the First Amendment meant you could just say anything you want”, they’ll say. Or “You didn’t think the Fourth Amendment meant you could get on a plane, train, or bus without being randomly searched, did you?”. Freedom has neither champion (unless you count Ron Paul, which I don’t), nor constituency. A tightly regulated nanny state is what most people want, and they’re getting it, good and hard. Too bad the rest of us are getting it too, but that’s democracy for you.
> > It is leftists that imposed on men an enforceable legal duty to support their bastards and the sluts that bore them.
> So who exactly would you have support the “bastards”? Perhaps the state?
Some might think that the bio-parents of “the bastards” should, absent some agreement otherwise (such as anonymous sperm/ovum donation or adoption).
However, some states, including CA, put husbands on the hook for children that stem from adultery. Some states, again including CA, have demanded child support from men merely because the woman wrote their name on the birth certificate, even though DNA evidence shows that said men’s sperm wasn’t involved.
Tom Says: Let’s suppose that we come up with a solution to the problem of money in politics (and I think you do agree that it is a problem) that says ‘if you are a candidate for public office, or an elected public official, you may not receive monetary donations from anybody or anything.’It’s an extreme solution, and I don’t know that it’s the right one., but let’s just go with the thought experiment.
Explain to me how that is ‘having politicians decide who is allowed to say what about politicians’.
This is a law, right. Written by politicians, and administered by their minions, right?
Then it is politicians deciding what constitutes a “monetary donation” to be prohibited.
Back in 1980, I put together a flyer criticizing Jimmy Carter, and handed it out to people who attended mini-debate.
Was that a “monetary donation” to Ronald Reagan? I spent some money, and I intended to help him win the election. Should there have been a law prohibiting my doing that?
If so, that law would have been written by politicians (Democrats, who then controlled Congress) and enforced by Federal officials subordinate to Carter. Politicians would have decided I was not allowed to say something about a politician.
But let’s say you think that should not have been prohibited.
In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth produced Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, a documentary film attacking presidential candidate John Kerry. The Smith family, who hold a majority interest in Sinclair Broadcast Group, decided that SBG would show Stolen Honor on the 62 TV stations which SBG then owned.
Should that have been prohibited? That is, should politicians have decided whether that act of speech about a politician should be allowed or forbidden?
Is it a “monetary donation” to a political candidate to pay him his regular salary? What if I pay him his fulll salary while allowing him to take time off to campaign? What if I provide child care or maid service for the family of a candidate who is a full-time homemaker?
Is it a “monetary donation” to a politician who is a lawyer to pay him to represent me in a court case? What if I give my legal business to the firm he is a partner in – which is reflected in his partnership payout? If he’s a doctor, can I pay him to treat my illnesses?
Is it a “monetary donation” if a newspaper makes an editorial endorsement of a candidate? Is it a “monetary donation” if a newspaper prints a friendly news story about one candidate while ignoring another?
If some (but not all) of these actions are prohibited – that is politicians deciding what can be said about politicians, and what political activity is permitted.
@Tom:
Tom, I’m going to suggest that you’re on verge of making the same mistake that was called out above: those who discard God but substitute Government in His place. Except you’ve put Democracy there. It won’t work. Someone even wrote a good about that: ‘Democracy: The God That Failed.’
But the point is not to call out your mistake, but to make a broader point: There is no solution. None. Doesn’t exist. Can’t happen.
Democracy won’t fix it. Anarchy won’t fix it. Republicanism won’t fix it. Another tweak to campaign finance laws won’t fix it. etc. etc. etc.
So what I’d like to write now is to expound upon what we should do instead. Except there is no “instead”. There is only varying degrees, timelines and modes of “fail”.
As I am apparently the only reader of this blog counted among the fundamental Christians, I should perhaps gloat that we have know this for at least 40 centuries. There is nothing new under the sun. Man is a fallen creature and there is nothing the leftist world improvers can do about it and giving Goldman-Sachs another bailout won’t help either.
Let me say the main point again: There is no solution.
>>One problem with this approach is that the author would be paid once – what the “commission club” agrees to pay – there would be no future royalties (or they would be limited) because once the book is out there, anyone can copy it and sell as many copies as he can.
>>This would seriously limit the amount of money an author could make. Under our present system, only a tiny proportion of people can earn a living by writing. I suspect that this “commission club” approach would make that proportion even smaller.
You make that sound like a bad thing. Seriously, though, the situation already exists for tons of people. A great example is TV actors. Now, some actors are obviously just puppets of their directors and they don’t really bring any real creativity to what is offered in a show. But, then, there are also plenty of actors who effectively write their characters in a show as they frequently consult with the writer(s) and have a strong say in shaping just who the final character is and what they might say. Yet, not all actors are paid royalties of any sort on syndication of their show. Certainly, it’s not enshrined in law as protected under copyright.
And let’s be honest: acting isn’t stable work. If you’re lucky, you end up being able to go from one TV/movie to the next and you have a steady paycheck. But, lots of actors never rise above one-hit-wonders or never find more work than positions as extras which barely can be said to pay the bills. Does that mean there’s hardly any actors? No, there’s plenty of people who aspire to be well known actors because even if the pay is horrible, it means potential fame, a means of exerting a creativity they have inside themselves, and the general drive that comes from expressing themselves. The same holds true for authors. And I know the major way actors today at least prosper is because of copyright (as well as strong unions).
But, then again, people have been writing music, books, plays, etc for thousands of years, even without copyright and for when things like, say, being an actor was considered a dishonorable profession. Yet, people persevered through this because they wanted to. Yes, this might mean a great novelist will be forced to spend his “working hours” writing plays and have to do the novel as a labor of love instead of his direct financial support. Or perhaps he could be supported but only if he keeps pumping out novels, just like actors who keep having to show up for work on a new play/show/movie because they can’t rely upon royalties/dividends to keep flowing in from previous work. The real issue, then, is making sure that there is that small window at the very beginning to get that first paycheck or two. That speaks of a copyright extending in days, not years, though.
Jessica Boxer Says:
This would be a fine idea if it were not for the fact that 99% of the US population wants a big government to do many, many things.
If the constitution was reopened now, it could end up with a Bill of Rights that includes:
– Right to dignity
– Right to education
– Right to productive work
– Right to adequate housing
– Right to … a lot of stuff that you do not want to be a right
Most folks want lots of legislation, you know, good legislation that will help people. They certainly don’t want to make that kind of legislation impossible.
@Tom:
Given some of our recent exchanges, you (amongst other readers here) might find this rather interesting:
English Warning To Americans: DON’T GIVE UP YOUR GUNS!
I agree with much of the sentiment. But in making government smaller, it would also be wise to consider it not in a vacuum. What would take over those powers, or what evils does the power of government rein in? Should we eliminate the FDA, and it’s testing of food and drugs, and rely solely on businesses to test their products are safe for us? Should we eliminate the military, and rely on other countries to not invade us? Should we ask for donations to build or maintain roads?
Tom, I just don’t believe there is a fix for “the problem of money in politics” beyond getting politicians out of the economy as much as possible. Politics and money will find each other, one way or the other. In any case, you are assuming there is a direct, reliable, causal connection between what donors want and what politicians do. There isn’t. Money can help politicians buy votes, but not necessarily. The candidate who spends more often loses, and politicians often take money and then don’t do what the donor wants.
When I say politicians would determine who says what, I mean that the practical details of any campaign finance reform would be determined by bureaucrats and judges appointed by politicians. Is an editorial in support of a candidate a “contribution”? What about a website put up by a supporter? Whoever makes those calls answers to politicians, one way or the other, and in a stronger and more direct way than a politician answers to a voter or contributor.
@WCC
Yes, this should serve as a cautionary tale for you guys. I’d say we are about 20 or 30 years ahead of where you are in terms of the government taking away freedoms (although in some respects you are more advanced). I don’t know why the description says “The British people have been completely disarmed according to UN resolution” though. It had nothing to do with the UN. It was a gradual domestic process that lasted 50 years.
@Michael Hipp
I agree that we can never have everything perfect. There will always be some corruption. There will always be problems. I am not a utopian. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make things better.
@Tom:
Sure. But understand that whatever improvement is made will be temporary. The U.S. had a pretty good thing going with our constitution but it didn’t even last 80 years* before it began to unravel. And it will also be circumstantial. The transplanted Africans probably didn’t think much of it. And there will be lots of groups who won’t like whatever is coming next here in the US, even if some of should think it represents a vast improvement.
* I mark the death of our experimental republic at Lincoln.
@Michael Hipp
I certainly understand that. That’s why I say that liberty is a process and not a product. You have to continually ‘refresh the tree of liberty’. Not always with blood, but every generation has to win its freedom. There is no law, no constitution, no agreement that can be made that will once and for all guarantee liberty forever.
Jefferson understood this. In fact, he was a proponent of the view that the constitution should be torn up and rewritten periodically. The world belongs in usufruct to the living.
@Tom
Thanks, you taught me a new word. But I don’t know how often I’ll be able to slip ‘usufruct’ into idle conversation around here. :-)
As sound as Jefferson’s understanding is, it seems of no practical utility as there is no reliable way to implement it.
If we could set a cron job to kick off a script every 20 years that would repeal all laws, abolish all agencies of government, dismiss all government employees, and remove all elected officials from office it would be keen. But some entrenched interest or power grabber would always find a way to hack it.
We are just going to have to ride this to the bottom.
@Rich Rostrom:
This is problematic, for the simple reason of the government granted spectrum monopoly, which makes radio and TV way different than print.
Fortunately broadcast TV is not as potent as it once was, because of the internet. But we still have the catv/DSL duopoly in most of the country.
# Andy Freeman Says:
> However, some states, including CA, put husbands on the hook for children that stem from adultery … [etc]
Just to be clear, Andy, I too think this is an outrage. I’m not fully informed about the child support thing, but from what I hear there are lots of pretty nasty abuses. However, if you will excuse the metaphor, lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Tom Says:
> Okay, but the question is how to do that. You can’t just set up a constitution and then think that everybody is going to follow it.
Yes you can, if the constitution is reasonable. Generally people follow the path of least resistance. However, they don’t do it forever, in fact, nothing is forever. I think the appropriate quote here is from JFK: “We must make peaceful revolution possible, or else we will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Which is to say, I think the way it works is you set it up, it starts out good, and slowly over time degrades. Then it hits an inflection point of radical systemic failure, and then you start over again.
Your lawn grows every minute of the day, just a little bit at a time. But you don’t cut it 3600 times a day. No, you cut it once a week, and when you do, you cut it brutally. That seems to be an appropriate analogy.
# Brian Marshall Says:
> This means that I feel that an author owns his/her work in some sense,
“Owns” has a lot of baggage, he has some sort of moral authority over it for sure. But, to be honest Brian, I don’t have a good answer as to what is the right thing to do about copyright. What we have is a disaster, having nothing would be better. But if we had nothing I think some people would certainly be hard done by.
WCC Says:
> But, I violated the law, my honor, and my moral compass.
I’m not you. I sit in my comfortable apartment, do my easy job, enjoy my friends, complain about the potholes. No one is shooting at me. The roads might have potholes, but there are no IEDs. Nobody ever waterboarded me, or electrocuted me. I live under the banner of protection that guys like you provide. Many people have absolutely no appreciation for that. I try my very best to recognize it and appreciate it, because it is so very easy to forget.
Having said that, I think you are wrong. I can’t judge your heart, and I am sure you are right that you would have violated the law. But how can it ever be a stain on your honor to do what is the right thing given the totality of the circumstances? If you moral compass is twitching under these circumstances, frankly I think it is your moral compass that is off.
One of the things I hate most about religion is that they tend to demand a rigid, unyielding set of moral principles. It is certainly a comforting thing to be able to tell wrong from right by looking it up in a book. But the book isn’t long enough to encompass all of the realities of the world.
If it was me who was in the hole, and you saved my life, I’d give you a medal, and I’d use every channel available to me to prevent you from suffering unjust legal consequences. Only an unappreciative fool would do any less for the guy who saved their life.
I guess it comes down to the age old question — do we sacrifice the needs of the one for the greater good of society? Do we let Jessica die in the hole so that America can keep its pristine record of “we don’t torture.” I think the lesson of America is simply this: take care of the individuals in a society, and the society will flourish. Focus on the good of the society and both the individuals and the society will shrivel.
BTW, WCC you can just send me an email at jessica_boxer@mailinator.com It is a public site, so if you don’t want to do so, let me know.
Personally, I’m righteously panicking about this particular bill because it’s the only recent catastrophe that’s in my area of expertise, so it came up in the news I follow and I was able to recognize it for what it is.
I’m not in the States, so the NDAA managed to slip over my head. My condolences to you guys.
I’m still learning, albeit slowly, so I expect to have more outrage in my future. No worries.
# Brian Marshall Says:
>This would be a fine idea if it were not for the fact that 99% of the US population wants a big government to do many, many things.
I think your number of 99% is pretty high, but I’ll grant you, it is a significant majority. But see my comment to Tom above.
> Most folks want lots of legislation, you know, good legislation that will help people. They certainly don’t want to make that kind of legislation impossible.
Yes, the founding fathers were smart enough to disregard this concern. However, I will also grant you that “Vote for it and then you can read it” is indeed the postscript for such a principle.
Surprised you didn’t mention NDAA. You know, that bill that just passed last week and is on its way for Presidential approval … the one that takes away a US citizen’s right to a fair trial if the citizen is considered a threat and allows for unlimited military detainment of the same? I’d prefer to see SOPA before I’d prefer to see NDAA. At least w/ SOPA, darknets will prevail and the gubment won’t really have a clue for a bit. With NDAA I’ve started re-reading the books on the Gulag so I know what’s coming next.
Derb discusses this in conjunction with Stallman’s lecture in Moscow, in which they argued, a little past midpoint of the post.
And for the collapse of public education see the section “All shall have prizes”, near the bottom.
@ Jessica Boxer
I suggested that many people want more laws to fix bad things, leading to a desire for more laws all the time.
I am not sure what you mean in your last sentence:
>I will also grant you that “Vote for it and then you can read it” is indeed the postscript for such a principle.
@William B Swift
Derb is pretty much the only writer at NRO that is worth reading. But part of the reason he is so worth reading is gems like this, from the article you linked: “A liberal is always a totalitarian at heart, though half of them don’t know it.”
So what? Royalties have always been a sore point for me. I have busted my ass on jobs often enough, a lot harder and dirtier than writing, and have never received any “royalties” for any of them. This is the whine of monopolistic, privileged pissants. Go read Jerry Pournelle’s blog if you want to see lots of this over many years.
> I’m not fully informed about the child support thing, but from what I hear there are lots of pretty nasty abuses. However, if you will excuse the metaphor, lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But, what is the “bathwater” at issue?
IIRC, someone was complaining about child support things done by “leftists”. You responded by pointing out reasonable child support laws.
I don’t know what he was referring to, but if he was referring to the things that you and I agree are abuses ….
I have the naive belief that one defends good law in an area by working to defeat bad law in that area.
Brian Marshall Says:
>I am not sure what you mean in your last sentence:
>>I will also grant you that “Vote for it and then you can read it” is indeed the postscript for such a principle.
Sorry, Brian, I forget my parochial self sometimes. It is a reference to something Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the HoR, said about the lastest healthcare bill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU
Andy Freeman Says:
> But, what is the “bathwater” at issue?
Andy, I think we are on the same page. The bathwater was the OP’s contention that leftists had made guys support the “bastards” their “sluts” had borne them. Just because some guys get hit my gross unfairness when it comes to child support, doesn’t mean guys whose little swimmers definitely made the baby beginnings shouldn’t bear some reasonable and fair financial responsibility for the results.
Wait, ESR is a tea partier? So sad…
>Wait, ESR is a tea partier? So sad…
No, I’m a libertarian. Much harder-core about the small-government thing, zero interest in the social-conservative parts of the Tea Party meme.
@Jessica Boxer
Jessica, I don’t think this issue is nearly as settled as you probably think it is. I regard the whole Child Support Enforcement as yet another variant on Military-Industrial complex. It is a scheme to pay women to divorce their husbands, take his assets, take his children, and make him work as a wage slave for 18 years. At best, it is an example of government meddling in something that is none of their business (i.e. the voluntary, private relationship between a husband and wife) similar to the discussion above about the government getting into our bedrooms.
Make no mistake, the existence of CSE does affect women’s willingness to break their marital vows and bust up the home that that should otherwise be the best arrangement for raising those very children. Unintended consequences perhaps, but consequences nonetheless.
@ Jessica Boxer
If the Constitution is to be revamped, aren’t you concerned about who might be doing the revamping? What if it is done by people with the political philosophy of Al Gore? It could get a lot worse rather than better.
@Andy Freeman:
There is a lot of legal activity in this area. Most of the newer state laws are fairly nuanced. But they mostly address the issue of false paternity. Any guy who wants to insure he’s not paying child support still better either (a) find the right girl, or (b) use industrial-strength condoms that he never lets out of his sight, but at least in more and more states he doesn’t need to put a chastity belt on his girlfriend/wife.
@Michael Hipp:
Yes, and when it comes to sending people to prison, it dovetails with other programs like the War On Drugs. Prisons are one area where I think that we shouldn’t privatize, just because we shouldn’t have really big companies with enough of a vested outcome in increasing the number of prisoners to actually make it worthwhile for them to lobby for tougher criminal sentences.
Michael Hipp Says:
> I regard the whole Child Support Enforcement as yet another variant on Military-Industrial complex.
I’ve seen some marriages go badly wrong, however, no F-22s or M1 tanks. I think perhaps a little hyperbole might be in play here.
> It is a scheme to pay women to divorce their husbands, take his assets, take his children, and make him work as a wage slave for 18 years.
No, it is a scheme to ensure the people most responsible for children see to their welfare so they do not fall on the public purse.
> At best, it is an example of government meddling in something that is none of their business (i.e. the voluntary, private relationship between a husband and wife) similar to the discussion above about the government getting into our bedrooms.
It is no such thing. A divorce decree can say anything at all. If husband and wife can agree on an arrangement either in pre-nup or in post-nup without the government’s help, then they can do that. The government gets involved when no such agreement can be reached, or when there is no legal relationship, such as out of wedlock conception. In such cases the there is an implied agreement to abide by the generally accepted principles for resolving these disputes.
Now you might disagree with the principles, and I also think some of them are not good. Nonetheless, there is nothing unjust going on here. If Sally and Sam get together, both know there is a risk of conception. If Sam wants to get Sally to sign off on some different arrangement, then they should do that. But if they don’t do that, the only rule that can prevail is the current custom.
There is no force or fraud here. Sam and Sally both dropped their pants voluntarily and accepted the consequential risks.
However, we went round this loop a million times in another thread, and it wasn’t very pleasant, so I’ll let you refer there if you want to know my views on the matter.
Hey there. Non-libertarian here, but I do greatly respect your worldview, in that I think more leftists should think about government power and constraining it.
Just a suggestion though: is there no better thing to be done here other than crow about how your side had it right all along?
Don’t fall into the typical traps of American politics. Like “value signalling”. This is when, for instance, one uses green products or drives a Prius just to indicate group membership. Or, consoling oneself with cynical fatalism: “well, I’ve been predicting economic collapse for a long time, the American public are too stupid and shallow not to see through capitalism”.
Say what you will about Occupiers and how you think they have it all wrong. But they’re as furious about NDAA and SOPA as you are. Many of them have spent nights in jail recently for their beliefs. And you might be surprised at the range of political opinion that the Occupy movement embraces.
I would suggest that this is not the time for citizens to stay in their own chosen enclaves. But maybe to find common cause with those that you disagree with.
In Texas, at least, the court can overrule any agreement that the parties come to if it’s not “in the best interests of the child”, which is determined essentially at the judge’s discretion.
This assumes, of course, that Sam is actually the father. The status quo in many jurisdictions explicitly states that a man has insanely limited opportunity to contest paternity, and courts can force a man to pay child support even when everyone acknowledges he had no involvement in the conception or, in some cases, upbringing of the children.
Incandescent bulbs are not banned. Instead, new efficiency targets were put out and most incandescent cannot meet them. Doesn’t matter anyhow, around here we upgraded to CFLs a long time ago and look forward to LED lights in the future. Frankly, none of those laws will cause nearly as many problems as SOPA will. What is the problem with that, anyhow? That you won’t be able to make your own EZ Bake oven that uses the waste heat of an incandescent bulb? Horrors!
“Due process”?! What insanity is this? Since when are enemy forces entitled to “due process” before being killed? The law of war is: you see an enemy, you kill him. End of story. And it makes not the slightest difference what passport he holds.
Not true; the plan to hold that trial in NYC was discarded more than a year earlier.
So are we today.
That’s irrelevant to the habeas question. If he were a lawful combatant he wouldn’t have been sentenced to death, he would just have been held prisoner for as long as the military liked.
He was tried by the military. The military, using its own investigative process, determined for itself that he was an enemy, and that was the end of the matter. How is that different from what we’re discussing here?
And nobody is proposing any such thing. The law we’re discussing only authorises the capture of actual enemies. Who decides whether they are enemies? The military does. How do you imagine it does so? By rolling dice?! Of course it holds whatever trials it thinks fit; how else would it operate? The whole point of the controversy, however, is that its determinations are not reviewable by any civilian court; and that’s exactly as the law has been for over 200 years.
Um, because KSM is a prisoner? You can’t take prisoners of war out and execute them without a court martial. But so long as an enemy is free you may kill him wherever you find him. You have no obligation whatsoever to try to capture him first.
First of all, that is bullshit. No declaration is needed for a state of war to exist. That’s law since the Quasi-War in the 1790s, and was solidly settled by the Prize cases in the 1860s. Second of all, there was a declaration of war, so the first point is moot.
Yes he is. How do you distinguish him from any other soldier of al Qaeda?
According to Wikipedia (yeah, not the greatest source), “In the United States, prostitution was originally widely legal. Prostitution was made illegal in almost all states between 1910 and 1915 largely due to the influence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union”. The WCTU was a powerful group within the Progressive movement. In other words, as James Donald said, leftists. However WP gives no source for this claim, so it’s anybody’s guess whether it’s true.
Jessica Boxer Says:
December 18th, 2011 at 11:19 am
You address James Donald’s examples of leftist legislation in the bedroom, and defend most of them. You may be right to do so, but that’s not the point. The point is the claim that it’s the right that wants to legislate in the bedroom. JD simply pointed out that from the point of view of heterosexual males, almost all the laws that (rightly or wrongly) restrict their freedom were made and supported by leftists. Perhaps these laws are wonderful and just and necessary, and the left were right to enact them, but the fact remains that that is where they came from, not from the right (as we define those terms today, of course).
This is a blatant falsehood. The legislation is specifically about capturing enemy soldiers, not random people.
Which is exactly the same as it has always been. Since when do enemy soldiers held by the military get civilian trials? Since when has any civilian court had the right to inquire into why the military is holding someone, or to question its word that the person is a prisoner of war? It is not true that the military must merely “suspect” someone; it must determine that the person is an enemy combatant, but how it makes that determination is its own business, not that of any civilian court. And that’s how it’s been since at least the 18th century.
The point is that judicial review and civil liberties are all well and good in normal circumstances, but they are fatal in war time. You simply cannot have the civilian courts second-guessing the military, and acting as a cannon ball around the military’s ankle as they fight the country’s wars. “Lawfare”, as they’re calling it now, is what has transformed Israel from a formidable force into a paper tiger. Unless the Israelis stand up to their judiciary, Israel is done for. And the USA must not go down that road.
“But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs…”
This can be very simply explained:
The other bills appear to give more to the people (ie: better, cheaper healthcare, and we all want reform, right? Change is what we want… its what we asked for…) whereas this only takes. It gives only to Hollywood and takes directly from the hands of every individual.
Especially the ones who download movies. This group of people is colloquially known as: all Internet users.
That’s not an argument against torturing people, it’s an argument for doing so only rarely and judiciously, in high-value cases where it’s worth spending the resources to fact check everything. Cases such as KSM. This would be why (we are told) only three people were waterboarded.
I suspected that somebody had already summarized my views on libertarianism, and I was right. From username “Evolence” on http://nightly.net/topic/69773-is-a-belief-in-large-scale-libertarianism-naive/:
And from username “The Kurgan”:
Cronyism and evil will always be a part of the human condition. The only answer, insufficient as ever, is “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” — Wendell Phillips, (1811-1884)
@Jessica Boxer
No. None at all. Let’s explain it this way…
Say I proposed a new government program. It will involve a massive bureaucracy starting at the federal level and there will be a large companion organization in every state. And it will stretch into every county and municipality. To do its bidding it will enlist every agent of law enforcement, every court, every judge, every attorney, every social-welfare organization and agent. Even private sector employers will be forced to engage in enforcement activities at the behest of this bureaucracy. Huge consulting and services contracts will be let to eager corporations to provide various systems and services to keep it running, in perpetuity.
Sound like the making of a great government program. This where Progressives have an orgasm. While libertarians and small-government conservatives (assuming one can be found) begin to froth.
Let’s keep going…
The job of this entrenched, permanent bureaucracy will be to force one unfavored group of people to pay money into a fund. The bureaucracy will then distribute that money to another (favored) group of people. If the first group doesn’t want to pay, every available instrument of force will be brought to bear to make them pay. Even their private sector employer will be compelled to use force against them. They will pay, at the point of a gun if necessary.
Great program isn’t it. A Progressive’s dream come true.
Note this this bureaucracy only springs into action *after* certain others have done their duty to strip the unfavored group of most of their assets, their home, their children and even their spouse.
They couldn’t fall to the public purse if there is no public purse to fall to. Once again government creates a problem and then provides the “solution”. And why should a man be responsible for children he will seldom see and have no say in their upbringing? Where exactly do you find the moral absolute that makes this so obviously good and right and true? Which Holy Book did you read that in? Perhaps that book is “incomplete” as you said?
See, you don’t even know what you’re talking about. They can agree to all the prenups they want, but the government will always rule that the woman has no right to sign away the children’s right to their (sometimes) biological father’s wages.
Doesn’t the recent rush of rulings forcing men to support children that aren’t even their own somewhere trigger a “smell test” warning inside you? Or is any enforcement/punishment directed squarely at men to the benefit of women just such an obviously good thing that we shouldn’t even question it?
Dude, that is fucking BRILLIANT. Thank you!
Martin Houston: The Occupiers are exactly the wrong people to join with. The American public’s revulsion for them grows with every day the masses of unwashed, college-educated but unemployable, left-wing kooks demand everyone’s attention and break the law because they think that freedom of speech trumps all laws.
Patrick: The spectrum monopoly came about because there was no practical way to share the resource. Three’s a limited amount of spectrum you can use with vacuum tubes, and you can’t have two broadcasters share the same slice of spectrum in the same footprint. Nowadays, that could probably be ameliorated, at the cost of replacing the entire broadcast infrastructure. Is that worth it? Who’s going to spend all that money?
Former Fan: Eric’s not a tea partier. The Tea Party folks want us to return to a government of limited, enumerated powers. Eric’s an anarchist. He might regard the Tea Party agenda as a good start, but only that.
Neil K: Yes, I’d be extremely surprised to find more than token representation of other than the entitlement-minded, educated, unemployable leftist elites at an Occupation. As for making common cause with them, I’ll think about it as soon as they give up their hatred of capitalism.
Milhouse Says:
>almost all the laws that (rightly or wrongly) restrict their freedom were made and supported by leftists
I understood his point. However, his point was mostly wrong. Many of the laws he mentioned are pet projects of the right, not the left. Lets look at them:
> It is leftists that banned prostitution,
Really? Anti vice is the project of the right, not the left.
> raised the age of consent,
No idea what he is talking about.
> ended a wife’s duty to be sexually available always to her husband and never to anyone else,
I have no idea if this is a project of the left or the right, but either way, it is insane, and hardly about reducing freedom.
> endlessly expanded the definition of rape and endless reduce the
> evidence and due process requirement for rape charges.
Probably correct.
> It is leftists that imposed on men an enforceable legal duty to support their bastards and the sluts that bore them.
Again, I don’t believe this is a project of the left at all. Heck the left are the ones pushing the programs that enable and encourage illegitimacy. One need only look at their core constituency. Black children are born at disturbingly high rates of illegitimacy. And it is, again, utterly insane.
@Millhouse:
> “Due process”?! What insanity is this? Since when are enemy forces entitled to “due process” before being killed? The law of war is: you see an enemy, you kill him. End of story.
> This is a blatant falsehood. The legislation is specifically about capturing enemy soldiers…
No, no, al-Awlaki wasn’t an “enemy soldier” on a “battlefield.” At best, he was the islamic version of Tokyo Rose. He wasn’t operational in the field. That’s why the brass used euphemisms like “senior recruiter” and “motivator” to describe him. Mosques around the world are filled with propagandists chanting “Death to America”. One less chanter doesn’t end that chorus, and the price we paid for killing this idiot was a dangerous precedent. We didn’t run into this guy on the battlefield, waving around an AK-47. We assassinated a U.S. citizen. We don’t assassinate our citizens. We give them trials. I don’t care if it was a criminal trial or a military one: American citizens get a trial, not a bullet to the back of the head. Try him for treason, and then hang him. Even the Rosenbergs got a trial.
@Millhouse:
> That’s not an argument against torturing people, it’s an argument for doing so only rarely and judiciously, in high-value cases where it’s worth spending the resources to fact check everything. Cases such as KSM. This would be why (we are told) only three people were waterboarded.
That’s like saying “these dangerous explosives work perfectly. I tested them three whole times.”
That’s really my main problem with waterboarding. Not all coercion is torture, but we need to draw a line somewhere. Waterboarding falls close enough to that line that it’s only going to be used in rare cases, and that very rarity means you’ll only have a very small test pool for results.
If the argument is that “well, it lead us too Osama Bin Laden,” that’s all well and good. I’m glad he’s dead. But bin Laden wasn’t operational anymore either, and wasn’t involved in command and control (and he couldn’t be; if he ever poked his head up, we’d chop it off). This wasn’t the sword of Damacles moment that WCC described above with the terror rat. So, if we use waterboarding to locate defunct leadership for assassination ops, why not also use it to locate battlefield leaders in active warzones, who present an immediate danger to our men? Why stop with KSM’s pinning down of Bin Laden, who was holed up with his pornos? Maybe everyone we catch has actionable intel, that we can only get by, as WCC put it above, “cutting a little piece?”
It’s not moral preening to question our own methods, even in war. Especially in war, actually, because war is when civilizations are tested the most, and there are more ways to lose than being conquered by the enemy force. The conditions of the war effort itself can create dangerous precedents that whittle away rights under the guise of security. And when it’s an asymmetric war against a “nation” with no boundaries, no infrastructure to protect and no stated conditions of victory, that whittling can go a long way. They could hang the alien KSM from a lamppost tomorrow and I would not care one lick. But, as big of a rat as al-Awlaki was, he was a U.S. citizen. He was our rat, and I want him to have a trial so that, if my government ever decides to declare me an enemy, I will also get a trial – even if I’m vacationing in Luxembourg, or something. Hell, we even blew up al-Awakli’s 16-year-old son a couple of weeks later. His son was born in Denver. Don’t just blow that kid up. Give him a trial, too. That way, if the government ever considers my kid to be an enemy, they will give him a trial.
@Everyone:
Ancilliary, but it matters in terms of historical precedent, since someone mentioned Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus (which in itself is a really flawed analogy, but let’s go with it). When have we “won” the war against the Islamists? Don’t say something vague like “when they’ve stopped attacking us.” Assume that they will never stop attacking, because they probably won’t. The liars stand up on their soapboxes and proclaim “Islam is a religion of peace,” but any thinking, literate person knows this is a lie. Islam consists of two Houses: The House of Islam (submission) and the House of War (the house we are all standing in).
There is no such thing as a “moderate Muslim”, just an unfaithful one; like a lapsed Catholic who maybe goes to church once in a while but doesn’t truly believe. There’s no middle ground. They don’t just want us “out of their lands” because, according to them, all countries are “their lands”; they just haven’t gotten around to conquering them yet. If you read the Koran, you’ll quickly notice that Islam is more of a geopolitical strategy than a Semitic faith or philosophy. This is a religion that instructs its followers to lie, enslave and conquer, and kill anyone who won’t submit, and the only limit is reality itself (closing distance, winning battles, etc).
Given the world of viral communication we live in, spreading the cause of Islam will only become easier over time, not harder, and the “terror recruits” are just as likely to be middle class college students radicalized in a London mosque as they are to be “motivated” by supposed terror superstars like al-Awlaki. And if Iran goes nuclear, we may be sitting in a nuclear theater where M.A.D. goes out the window, because if we bomb them, they all go to heaven to have sex with 72 angels whereas we get to play cleanup for the next century or two (if we even survive). Even if the Persian theocrats don’t do something dumb like trigger world war III, they will have incredibly strong card to play. I wonder if it might not change our relationship with China overnight. But in that new environment, the U.S. government will almost certainly start “discovering” new powers. This is my biggest problem with Ron Paul, and I think his biggest blind spot. If you thought the fear-mongering and power-grabbing was bad during the Iraq war, imagine what an Iranian Cold War would look like.
> Prisons are one area where I think that we shouldn’t privatize, just because we shouldn’t have really big companies with enough of a vested outcome in increasing the number of prisoners to actually
Guess what policies CA’s prison guards union supports? I assume that comparable unions in other states do the same.
In other words, as is often the case, “big companies” aren’t the big problem.
> Look, if you torture someone, you cannot rely on the information and it is not always efficient or possible to fact check everything and keep coming back.
People keep writing this as if “cannot rely” distinguishes torture from other means of getting information.
It doesn’t. All information sources are subject to error and usually deception as well.
And I think we’re done here.
@Everyone
One other thought I had recently was that we are still waging wars quite stupidly. We’re better at it in terms of battlefield weapons and tactics, but we still haven’t learned how to wage mimetic warfare very well. It’s probably necessary to kill the Islamists in trouble spots and borderlands, but it’s not sufficient if the goal is really to win. It’s a lot like the lesson the Greeks were trying to teach with Heracles and the Hydra: cutting off the head removes the immediate danger, but to win you have to burn the stump.
So how do you burn the stump? Take Osama bin Laden, for example. Yeah, it’s all fine and well that we shot him and dumped his body in the ocean (or maybe he’s stuffed and on display in the CIA’s Vault of Curiosities, who knows). But his death really served no strategic purpose, because he’s still a martyr, so he even wins by losing. We have to wage mimetic war against the heroic idea of Islamic martyrdom as well, and turn their heroes into cowards, letches and crooks. So, sure, kill him. But don’t tell anyone about it. Have Spielberg team up with the Lord of the Rings guy to create a hyper-realistic gay porno starring Osama and Zawahiri, or create false versions of those tapes that de-legitimize him somehow. That might have done more damage to the enemy than just capping him in Pakistan.
Also, parody and satire work well as mimetic weapons. Why not design a television sitcom based around bumbling, idiotic terrorists, a sort of “The Office” with mad mullahs? Sure, the censoring countries would try their best to stamp this stuff out, but it would still make it out there, and it would reduce the chances of growing these sorts of radicals in the backyards of the West. Sure it might fill many of them with “rage” initially but everything fills them with rage, and the constant slathering on of propaganda that calls them shameful fools and hypocrites will eventually wear down their resolve. That’s more or less how we got the modern Left in America, for example; the Soviets wore them down with fifth column mimetic attacks from the entertainment industry.
Not saying these weapons are replacements for battlefield violence, but they would be good support mechanisms if the goal is to truly win (instead of to grab power, and some suspect). The government seems to use propaganda on us very well, since crap like SOPA, NDAA and Net Neutrality are buried in the back pages, and are never mentioned on TV.
@Millhouse
Excuse me? When did the Congress declare war? And who did they declare it against? “Terror”?
In a declared war you have a specific enemy and you are justified in killing uniformed members of that enemy’s military on the battlefield. When you have defeated that enemy the war is over.
It is impossible for an abstract concept to have uniformed soldiers.
What’s more there is no end to this supposed war. Who are you fighting against? The people who attacked you on 9/11? Well guess what? They’re almost all dead.
The war never ends because the threat is imaginary. Road traffic is a greater threat to America that Islamic terrorism.
And because the war is so vaguely defined we end up in a situation where the government is justified in killing anybody anywhere it likes, because the enemy is vague, the battlefield is vague, and the duration of the war is vague.
Answer me this: what is to stop the military that it doesn’t like what you are saying and picking you up, throwing you in jail, and never giving you a trial? Under the NDAA law the answer is absolutely nothing at all.
It doesn’t matter what the law is designed to do. What matters is what powers it gives to the government.
I meant to say ‘what is to stop the military deciding that it doesn’t…
You compare the incandescent bulbs and “Obamacare”* with SOPA?! It’s no wonder that nobody pays attention to you anymore.
* Which I place in quotes because it’s really a code word that says “don’t listen to me because I’m an extremist without sense to think on my own and instead spout off buzzwords I heard on Fox News.” A sane person would call it health care reform or single payer health care.
@Andy Freeman:
You say that like private prison guards wouldn’t also support such legislation.
> the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder…
I think you’ve got the categorization wrong. SOPA isn’t a government power grab. SOPA is a corporate power grab. SOPA was written, funded, and sponsored by tools of the RIAA and MPAA.
Should I always oppose government power grabs? Should I oppose the FCC trying to establish rules of net neutrality? Can’t we all agree that’s a good “government power grab”?
Why would you put SOPA under the same category as cap and trade? The government shouldn’t be able to limit pollutants? I can understand if you don’t like the implementation, but I don’t see how anyone could be against limiting pollutants, unless you don’t believe scientists. And if you don’t believe scientists, you’re beyond reason.
I also don’t understand why someone would be against the concept of campaign finance reform. The people with money have way too much power over the government right now. This is EXACTLY why laws like SOPA get written and sponsored and passed!
Light bulb efficiency standards? cmon.
Obamacare includes a long list of “government power grabs” like forcing insurance companies to cover children with preexisting conditions. These are actually great! But I can agree that the individual mandate and no public competition is terrible. But once again, I would categorize that as a corporate power grab and it just shows how much influence the insurance companies have over the legislation being passed.
>I think you’ve got the categorization wrong. SOPA isn’t a government power grab. SOPA is a corporate power grab.
Oh? So, who will be fining, arresting, and jailing people? The corporation(s)? I don’t think so. That will be a government policeman who comes to your door and shoots you if you resist arrest. A government prosecutor will decide whether to bring a case. And the guards who keep you in prison will be paid by the government.
If you were mugged on the street, it is unlikely you would care for whom the mugger was stealing money. It doesn’t actually matter at that moment what special-interest group he represents, you’re being mugged. Similarly, when governments use violence on behalf of a special-interest group, the composition of the interest group (whether it’s “corporate” or not) is next to irrelevant; the point is still that you’re being mugged.
>Can’t we all agree that’s a good “government power grab”?
No. That’s the point. If we all agreed, it wouldn’t be a power grab in the first place.
>Why would you put SOPA under the same category as cap and trade?
Because cap-and-trade, while masquerading as help for the environment, is in reality a market-rigging device for the sale of carbon indulgences. The results of such legislation in Europe have been massive corruption and no decrease in carbon emissions. It would be foolish to expect any other outcome in the U.S.
>I don’t see how anyone could be against limiting pollutants
CO2 is not a pollutant – plants eat it and like it, fixing the carbon and releasing the oxygen you breathe. Other byproducts of hydrocarbon combustion are pollutants. Your confusion about this establishes that you are too ignorant about environmental issues to make judgments that are enforced on other people. You have plenty of company in this, including almost all voters and politicians.
>I also don’t understand why someone would be against the concept of campaign finance reform.
Because it puts government bureaucrats in charge of who can speak about politics when. The result is to protect incumbents and powerful special interests.
Of course, the powerful special interests sold you campaign finance reform as a protection against powerful special interests. They were lying. Almost all government action is founded on similar lies.
>Light bulb efficiency standards? cmon.
Do you not understand how small assaults on your liberty precede and enable larger ones? No, of course you don’t….
>it just shows how much influence the insurance companies have over the legislation being passed.
Your error is your belief that any such legislation can pass without being captured by special interests. If it hadn’t been the insurance companies, it would be some other organized gang of rent-seekers.
@Grantham
Right, exactly.
And you know who else we tried? The god damn Nazis for Christ’s sake. And we were right to do so. People seem to forget that when blustering about these terrorists, who by comparison are about as threatening as a gnat.
> A sane person would call it health care reform or single payer health care.
“Reform” is one of those meaningless, idiot-words that Orwell always hated (because idiots like you or Newt Gingrich would use them to try to appear smart to a crowd of dummies).
A person who wanted to be specific and not a dim-witted, feel-good propagandist would maybe call it the Affordable Health Care for America Act or AHCAA, or perhaps H.R.3962 (which I’m sure a little troll like ‘Nobody’ read ever read of), or even better by it’s Senate name (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act).
Eric’s calling it “Obamacare” because he sees it as a power-grab that he despises. You call it “health care reform” because you support a bill you haven’t even read. Orwell probably wouldn’t have approved of either, but at least esr is being intellectually honest.
@Tom
> And you know who else we tried? The god damn Nazis for Christ’s sake. And we were right to do so.
Yes and no. We (the Allies) assassinated many Nazis and their agents during the war, and rightfully so. What you are talking about is what happened after the cessation of military action, the signing of treaties, etc. Once an enemy has been arrested and is at your mercy, the right thing to do is have a trial (or a tribunal, or what have you). Sometimes these turn out to be kangaroo courts, sometimes not, but they are still important, because what you do when you have someone at your mercy not only directly addresses the content of your soul, it’s an example of your civilization’s worth.
And this all goes back to the main point of how to conduct a war against an transnational enemy with whom a treaty cannot be reached (because the snake has many heads, and is constantly growing new ones), and I think the assassination of the (scumbag) al-Awlaki opened up dangerous new territory. Here is where the howls of the loony Left could have actually come in useful for once, but alas they didn’t show up, because the op was ordered by their loverboy, President Obama. That’s why the Left is more dangerously stupid than the Right. Most of the Left’s stated premises are fake; they’re trapped in some Yungian world of symbols and delusions, and don’t have any principle that they won’t quickly discard if someone powerful inside their cult of personality directs them to.
Brain Says:
>I also don’t understand why someone would be against the concept of campaign finance reform. The people with money have way too much power over the government right now. This is EXACTLY why laws like SOPA get written and sponsored and passed!
So let me ask you this Brian: your concern is that corporations have way too much power and skew legislation to be favorable to them. Why do you think that campaign finance law will be excluded from that type of corruption?
Campaign finance law is particularly powerful, because it is not law, it is meta law, and consequentially has much more leverage.
@Grantham
Right, and that is really my point. We (or rather ‘you’ in this case) did have this Al-Awlaki guy at your mercy. The government evidently knew where he was, and he wasn’t an imminent threat. And you were not at war with him or his organisation in any meaningful sense of the word.
He could have, and should have, been picked up, tried, and subjected to whatever fate your judicial system deems suitable.
The really scary thing is, where does Obama think he gets the authority to do this? As far as I can tell he doesn’t have the authority, but nobody in the congress or any other part of the state seems to do or say anything about it. It seems like the president can do more or less what he likes with impunity.
It’s baffling to me why the congress seems so eager to completely give up any power they once had. It seems like they just cannot be bothered to do their jobs.
@Tom:
> It’s baffling to me why the congress seems so eager to completely give up any power they once had. It seems like they just cannot be bothered to do their jobs.
I figured this one out a long time ago. You see, Congress doesn’t really lust for power. Some of it’s individual members and factions do, but the key corruption of the institution has to do with rent-seeking, and very personal, venal interests at the individual level. The typical D.C. parasite doesn’t want any trouble; he or she is a “go-along, get-along” sort of opportunist, who wants to do the least amount of work for the maximum personal profit. They grease wheels in return for favors, and – much like rats in a warren – they would prefer to have lots of escape routes while engaged in this activity, so it is much more difficult to pin down when they have cheated, shrugged off their responsibilities, or simply lied their asses off for job security and financial gain. This is where things like the War Powers Act comes into play. It’s a good deal for the average congressmen, because they still get to do what they want (play Pasha), but there’s one less potential catastrophe that they have to sign off on, and therefore have their feet held to the political fires by their opponents when they are up for reelection.
So, in a sense, the main corruption of Congress is that they don’t want to do the precise thing they were sent there to do: vote on important, mission-critical stuff that effects the whole nation, because the more they vote, the more chances they could turn out to be wrong and consequently be fired for it. They have become the craven opposite of the brave folks who pledged “their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.” They are also those weasily middle managers you sometimes see in corporate structures, obfuscating as much as possible so they can slip the blame for failure. The big difference is, when the congressman’s career is over, he is positioned to peddle influence, like Newt Gingrich did in his role as “historian” consultant for Fannie and Freddie.
It’s been entirely downhill since Samuel Chase’s lawyer convinced the Senate that in contrast to hundreds of years of English precedent, the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanours” in the Constitution did not mean incompetence in executing an office.
@Tom:
> Right, and that is really my point. We (or rather ‘you’ in this case) did have this Al-Awlaki guy at your mercy.
Well, again, yes and no. The op details (at least, those that have been revealed) tend to support the idea that, while it was perfectly do-able to nail him from the air with a drone strike, it would have been much tougher (and politically messier) to scoop him up with an extraction team. It was an assassination, but if al-Awlaki wasn’t an American citizen, my opinion about the matter changes quite a bit. Frankly, it might also change if he was the citizen of an allied country too.
“At your mercy” means that the guy is physically restrained, unarmed and right in front of me (that’s why WCC’s analogy works so well; it boils it all down to the basics). The folks at Nuremberg were “at our mercy”. Al-Awlaki was merely “at large” and within range. But he was also a citizen, not remotely an enemy combatant. He wasn’t even a spy, like the Rosenbergs, and even they got a trial.
This is where the loony Left and the neo-con Right intersect (ironically, they don’t even realize that they do, and bicker about these issues constantly). Neither truly believe in rules or laws; merely outcomes. They don’t even understand the need for such things. As far as they’re concerned, laws and codes are simply means to ends. It’s caprice; if the immediate end satisfies the needs (or whims) of the moment, then it was a good method.
> Light bulb efficiency standards? cmon.
You’re assuming that there’s one definition of “efficiency” and that govt got it correct. You’re wrong on both counts.
There are several costs and benefits involved and there’s no one correct way to combine them.
For example, heat is a bad output in some cases, but in others, it’s a good output. (And no, it’s not just easy bake ovens.) Also, some use-cases don’t involve many hours on, so long-life time is irrelevant – those folks never will recover the initial price premium.
Here’s where you retreat to “but on average” and then “I don’t care about those cases”. You’re correct about the latter but you’re wrong about the former.
BTW – That battle isn’t actually over. The standards are temporarily derailed by a funding stop, but that can easily be restore. All of the regulations are still in place.
The word “reform” is govt speak for “it’s time for us to get another cut”.
Disagree? Feel free to show that “reforms” are more likely to produce an improvement than a random walk.
>> Guess what policies CA’s prison guards union supports? I assume that comparable unions in other states do the same.
> You say that like private prison guards wouldn’t also support such legislation.
I didn’t suggest otherwise. I’m merely pointing out that worrying about big biz on this issue is worrying way too late.
“You compare the incandescent bulbs and “Obamacare”* with SOPA?! It’s no wonder that nobody pays attention to you anymore.”
Except, apparently, Mr. Raymond, people who come here, read your posts, and inform you that nobody pays attention to you anymore…
@esr:
I’ll try to give short constructive responses. I don’t like long winded internet arguments.
> Oh? So, who will be fining, arresting, and jailing people? The corporation(s)? I don’t think so. That will be a government policeman
You’re right, but I don’t think the problem is that we have people enforcing laws. I think it’s more important to focus on the root of the problem of how those laws are coming into existence.
On cap-and-trade, campaign finance reform, and healthcare legislation: These things are hard to debate. It’s hard to differentiate supporting the concept from supporting the implementation. On all of these things, I am extremely supportive of the concept. I would be supportive of anything that would help people and accomplish the stated goals. But yes, it’s sad that any attempt to do anything always seems to turn into a law written by the same people it’s intended to regulate. I just don’t see this as “government is bad”. The way I look at it, it’s just sad that the government isn’t working for the people, it’s working for the people with money. That’s the root of the problem.
On global warming: I used to think there was an actual debate over climate change. But what really changed my mind was this wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
It really is almost to the level of the debate on evolution. On one side, you have 99% of scientists, and on the other side, you have people who don’t like the truth (and people paid by them). Once you believe the science, then it doesn’t really matter if we call it a “pollutant” or whatever. It’s causing climate change and we need to deal with it. And like I said, if you don’t believe the science, then there really is no point in debating it.
>I think it’s more important to focus on the root of the problem of how those laws are coming into existence.
Very good. These laws come into existence because we let government do too much and, utterly inevitably, its power is abused for the benefit of the politically connected. There’s your root problem.
>But what really changed my mind was this wikipedia page:
And you don’t know that Wikipedia pages are subject to political capture too? They’ve simply defined any dissenting opinion as non-serious. In any case, scientific truth is not a popularity contest. It is measured by the ability of theory to predict what actually happens. Evolutionary theory meets that test; AGW fails it. All the supposed consensus in the world cannot redeem that.
> But what really changed my mind was this wikipedia page.
Just so we are all clear: a “wikipedia page” was what changed Brain’s mind.
Eric Raymond: I am not pretentious at all, and I certainly don’t agree with everything you say, but how does the author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” manage to attract such people? I realize I am fairly new here, but I can’t wrap my head around it. Does not compute.
>I realize I am fairly new here, but I can’t wrap my head around it. Does not compute.
Don’t be nasty. I think “Brain” means well, it’s just that his critical-thinking skills are weak. This can be remedied.
> A sane person would call it health care reform or single payer health care.
Not at all.
Sane people know that both “health care reform” and “single payer health care” are extremely ambiguous. Reasonable people might well favor some things that could be called “health care reform” and not others. Same for “single payer”.
Obamacare is unambiguous.
Moreover, Obamacare is a fair name. After all, Obama claims that it is one of his best achievements and even if he doesn’t, he worked very hard to get it so it is surely predictive of his plans.
So, why is it wrong for Obama and Obamacare to be associated with one another?
> I’m an extremist without sense to think on my own and instead spout off buzzwords I heard on Fox News
sayeth someone who is parotting DNC talking points.
Which reminds me – ObamaCare isn’t “single payer”, so no honest&informed person would call Obamacare “single player”. What’s “Nobody”‘s reason for getting this wrong?
> Don’t be nasty. I think “Brain” means well, it’s just that his critical-thinking skills are weak. This can be remedied.
Point taken, but I wasn’t really trying to be nasty. I’m sincerely wondering why someone who cites wikipedia pages would be interested in your stuff, or in participating in a debate with you (but the “such people” sounded pretty bad, and I apologize).
Anyway, just curious if you know have any idea why your material attracts so many people who don’t seem to ever examine their own premises, when you spend so much time examining your premises. For instance, I disagree with you and many others on the desirability and feasibility of anarcho-capitalism (I think it would be more of a reset button, with competing contract enforcers gradually turning into strong kingdoms or nation-states). I think you’re wrong (and you think I’m wrong), but I wouldn’t cite wikipedia or any other encyclopedia to try to support it. I’m just not sure what “Brain” (or, on a different article, “Will”) gains from the exchange, especially since there are so many other venues where he could argue about ideas this way.
>Anyway, just curious if you know have any idea why your material attracts so many people who don’t seem to ever examine their own premises, when you spend so much time examining your premises.
I, in turn, do not understand why you find this mysterious. Half of all people are below average. That means some of them are not bright enough to recognize what I’m doing as examining my premises, some who can pass that test aren’t bright enough to emulate the behavior even though they recognize it, and some who pass both previous tests have never internalized critical-thinking skills like killing the Buddha.
People like “Brain” or the laconic Will are actually far from the worst debris to show up here. They’re not stupid; what they suffer from is a combination of (a) socially approved but deeply mistaken models of reality, and (b) limited ability to skeptically self-correct, especially in the face of social pressure to believe things that happen not to be true.
Sometimes I get people showing up here who have a sense that something is not right with conventional wisdom and, in effect, want the example of “ESR” as permission to think differently. That’s OK, which is why I try to be relatively gentle with people who seem well-intentioned but clueless and flabby-minded (“Brain” is a good recent example). Sometimes they’re actually trying to exercise their critical-thinking capability. That should be encouraged.
> It’s hard to differentiate supporting the concept from supporting the implementation.
Not only is it hard to differentiate, it’s foolish to do so.
You don’t get credit for good intentions, especially when said good intentions go wrong consistently.
Seriously – how much worse would things have been if those things had been done with bad intentions? Since the result is the same….
> The way I look at it, it’s just sad that the government isn’t working for the people, it’s working for the people with money. That’s the root of the problem.
So, how about you stop trying to push govt into more things until after you fix said problem.
We’ll wait.
@Andy Freeman
I don’t support it or, not being an American, care particularly much about it, but I do think that “Obamacare” is a coinage that is deliberately designed to taint the issue with a flavour of socialism, arrogance and nanny-statism, and also to stress that it was a Democratic president that was behind it.
Now, all those charges may well stick after a reasoned debate, but I think it would be better to have the debate rather than trying to influence people using language tricks before they have had a chance to hear the facts.
It is catchy though…
>“Obamacare” is a coinage that is deliberately designed to taint the issue with a flavour of socialism, arrogance and nanny-statism
Quite right. I think that piece of legislation is indeed “socialism, arrogance and nanny-statism”, which is why I’m willing to use that coinage. I don’t consider it particularly material that the persons behind it were Democrats, though.
The problem with libertarians is that they see everything in black and white. If you don’t support their dream of dismantling all social programs, environmental laws, tax collection, public funding of education and healthcare, etc., then you must be a supporter of every bad government bill, law, department, and program. Smaller government is not always the answer. I want BETTER government, not smaller government. The way to achieve better government is not to stick your fingers in your ears and scream “NO” like a toddler. A better government can be achieved by an informed electorate engaging in substantive debate about our democracy. Comparing SOPA to Obama’s health care bill is silly; they are nothing alike. Corrupt politicians rely on this type of simplemindedness to thwart public discussion. The world is a complicated place, and the libertarian solution of “no government” is not a viable option.
@Arthur Dent
How exactly do you expect to get this ” informed electorate engaging in substantive debate…”? Thus far all your Progressive efforts have resulted in an increasingly ignorant, unthinking, gullible, and apathetic electorate.
Let me guess … we need more funding for public schools … or NPR … or shut down Fox News … or (other DNC talking point).
Furthermore, my family is finding that CFL’s don’t seem to have lifetimes anywhere near as long as advertised, so even the average use case may not recover the price premium.
Arthur Dent Says:
> The world is a complicated place, and the libertarian solution of “no government” is not a viable option.
Nah, come on. This from someone who just criticized libertarians for “see(ing) everything in black and white?” Most libertarians don’t want “no government.” Anarchists like esr want no government. Libertarians, in general, want “weaker” government, and there are a lot of shades of gray regarding how weak, and it which areas. This is not a new debate; it’s a long and lively one that precedes The Federalist Papers.
This is one of those instances where I think Freud hit it on the head with his theory of projection. “X thinks about everything in Manichean, black and white terms; now here is my Manichean, black-and-white explanation of X, which also happens to be factually incorrect.”
Barney Frank supports marijuana legalization, under two minutes, has good answer to slippery slope arguments.
> I, in turn, do not understand why you find this mysterious. Half of all people are below average.
I believe Grantham expects a difference between the average reader of your blog and the average member of society, either because he believes that your blog will not attract certain parts of society, or because he believes it will influence its readers’ beliefs and thought processes to where they are significantly different from the societal average. Half of all your readers will be below average for your readership, but that doesn’t mean that half of all your readers will be below the societal average.
To rephrase his question: Why is the readership of your blog closer to being a general cross section of society than Grantham expects?
>To rephrase his question: Why is the readership of your blog closer to being a general cross section of society than Grantham expects?
Um, maybe my blog is more popular than he guesses? I don’t know; I don’t really have a theory about this.
@Jon Brase:
> To rephrase his question: Why is the readership of your blog closer to being a general cross section of society than Grantham expects?
Yes, that is a better way of phrasing it. Thank you. It’s just a little odd because I’m not connecting the dots from the poster to the blog (or not all of them, at least). I’m not saying that Raymond is a complete “niche”, but he’s not “Lady Gaga” either.
@esr
> Um, maybe my blog is more popular than he guesses? I don’t know; I don’t really have a theory about this.
Ha! Okay, touche. I know it’s a popular blog, I was just trying to sort out what struck me as a few weird psychographic profiles. Forget I mentioned it.
@Grantham
I don’t know if you include me in your group of people who “don’t seem to ever examine their own premises”, but I can tell you that the reason I read this blog in spite of disagreeing with Eric on many issues, is that I deliberately seek out intelligent opinions that are different from my own.
That, and Eric happens to actually be a good writer.
@Tom
> I don’t know if you include me in your group of people who “don’t seem to ever examine their own premises”
Actually, no I don’t. I think you are wrong in several areas, but I also think you are a thinker. It’s the only reason I bothered arguing with you. Why argue with someone who doesn’t appear to have the capacity to think?
>”I, in turn, do not understand why you find this mysterious. Half of all people are below average.”
“To rephrase his question: Why is the readership of your blog closer to being a general cross section of society than Grantham expects?”
“The average guy is pretty stupid. That means that half the population is even stupider than that!”
– George Carlin
Miles off topic, but Eric you might be interested in this: http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/19/2647362/apple-wins-ban-of-htc-devices-itc
>>“Obamacare” is a coinage that is deliberately designed to taint the issue with a flavour of socialism,
>>arrogance and nanny-statism
>Quite right. I think that piece of legislation is indeed “socialism, arrogance and nanny-statism”,
>which is why I’m willing to use that coinage. I don’t consider it particularly material that the
>persons behind it were Democrats, though.
I tend to prefer the term .govcare because it more accurately reflects the overall objection (that is, an objection to a massive government overreach and control of the health care market). It also avoids some of the knee jerk “You’re just opposed because its’ Obama/Obama is black/Obama is a democrat” etc reactions.
Now THAT’s a line made for a signature! :-)
/delurk
Tom wrote “I do think that ‘Obamacare’ is a coinage that is deliberately designed to taint the issue with a flavour of socialism, arrogance and nanny-statism.”
ESR wrote “Quite right. I think that piece of legislation is indeed ‘socialism, arrogance and nanny-statism’, which is why I’m willing to use that coinage.”
I loathe the bill, and am having trouble thinking of anything good about Obama, so a negative term would tend to be OK with me. But it doesn’t seem to me that this is one. Compare “Star Wars”, “Reaganomics”, and “the Bush tax cuts”. It seems to me that if you don’t have a catchier formal name than SDI or PPACA for a controversial policy, an informal replacement will rather naturally tend to come into use. And as such informal replacements go, “Obamacare” seems pretty neutral — it certainly doesn’t seem to be an obviously political coinage like “death panels” or “pro-life” or “pro-choice” or “favorable balance of trade”.
Arthur Dent: I, too, want better government…but I believe that Thomas Jefferson was completely, profoundly right when he said “That government governs best which governs least.” The answer to improving government is almost always to shrink it, and return it to the government of limited, enumerated powers that the Founding Fathers defined in the Constitution.
I really hate software patents.
I would like to suggest that the usefulness of a data structure or the usefulness of a processes for analyzing a data structure are discoveries about the nature of the universe. I would say that they are inventions as well, but…
What about recipes? Should a person be able to patent a great chilli recipe?
Actually, I might be OK with software patents if they were for, say two or three years – that might achieve the original goal of encouraging innovation. But 17 years? (All patents are for 17 years, aren’t they?)
17 years might make sense (if a person supports patents at all) for clever mechanical inventions. But clever inventions are almost always implemented in software now – it is so easy that the amount of cleverness required is about an order of magnitude lower.
As it stands, my position is, keep it secret if you want, but if I can figure out what is happening, I should be able to do the same thing. And if I am working on the same problem and discover a great way of doing it and some guy has a patent on that “way”, he can go fuck himself (or, to put it in legal terms, enjoin himself).
Oh, I just realized that Rick Rostrum said this:
> Yeah, and good basketball players are mostly Japanese, Greenland is covered with tropical rainforest, and Brazil is full of Buddhists.
> Seriously, that’s how profoundly wrong-headed that statement is.
Seriously, Rick Rostrum needs to look into it again, or re-examine what he thinks of as “economic freedom”.
> The Danish government collects 55.3% of GDP in taxes and other revenue – over half.
What’s their top corporate tax rate, though? What is their rate of inflation? What are their property laws? What about their regulatory bodies. Does Denmark have any regulatory bodies of note? What’s their position on trade barriers? What is their stance on the drug war? Where do they stand on prostitution?
Unlike many right wingers assume, taxes and the development of the welfare state don’t constitute the whole of the libertarian idea. Denmark has large taxes, but far fewer regulation and less expensive government. Denmark has a welfare state, but is better equipped to pay for it. This illustrate what’s wrong with so-called “Republicans”: the perfect is the enemy of the good, and they don’t understand how value is added into a system much better than their Democrat counterparts. They have a slightly better sense of it, but they become thick-headed when you diverge from specific dogma.
@Brian Marshall
Can you fathom what the patent actually covers? I tried reading the text but it seems hopelessly vague and obscure to me.
Sorry, I don’t want to hijack the thread for the purposes of talking about this news, but I knew there would be people here who might have an insight.
re: software patents
Of course, the fact that I hate software patents doesn’t change the fact that the law is the law.
I think that it is ironic that the first software patent I heard of was the patent on the setuid bit, invented by Dennis Richie.
> “Obamacare” is a coinage that is deliberately designed to taint the issue with a flavour of socialism, arrogance and nanny-statism,
Which word, “Obama” or “care”, comes with that baggage? If Obama, why this association inappropriate?
Why shouldn’t we associate him with his signature achievement?
> and also to stress that it was a Democratic president that was behind it.
Huh? How do you get “a Democrat president” from “Obama”? Obama is a very specific Dem president.
And, why are you assuming that “a Democrat president” and/or Obama is a bad thing? Both he and the Democrat party are very popular.
> tend to prefer the term .govcare
That may be, but “the people” have spoken, so if you’d rather communicate about than explain your usage, it’s Obamacare.
> Denmark has a welfare state, but is better equipped to pay for it.
Denmark is mostly Danes. Danes, like the other northern Europeans (and Mormons) can make any political system work. Plus there are only 5.5M of them. (The SF bay area is 6.7M and Wisconsin is less than 5.7M)
From what I can glean the patent describes a method for detecting patterns in text and then displaying options to the user based on the pattern detected. So, for example, detecting a phone number in text and making it into a ‘link’ so that the user can tap it and make a phone call to that number.
However, I think it is a specific *method* for doing that, not just the idea of doing it in general. So, I imagine Google will be able to find a way to achieve the same functionality but without infringing the specific method described in the patent.
OK, I will say no more about it.
> Denmark is mostly Danes.
> Danes, like the other northern Europeans (and Mormons) can make any political system work.
Yeah, because transnational, multicultural socialism has worked out for them so well, so far. Stay tuned for that, by the way. The end game is in progress.
> Plus there are only 5.5M of them.
The idea on the table was population density, not population size. There are other factors that I think are important enough to dwell on (like replacement rate, or market participation), but not the population size. Economies don’t scale perfectly, but they do scale, and the results matter. Denmark can be better than it is in many ways, but it is still very good, and even better than the U.S. when it comes to economic freedom. If each of the United States was a Denmark or a Switzerland, with a federal government that was internally weak but externally (militarily) strong, we would be in good shape.
(keep trying to post this, but no luck so far)
> Denmark is mostly Danes.
Okay, what about Switzerland?
> Danes, like the other northern Europeans (and Mormons) can make any political system work.
Yeah, because transnational, multicultural socialism has worked out for them so well, so far. Stay tuned for that, by the way. The end game is in progress.
> Plus there are only 5.5M of them.
The (nonsensical) idea on the table had to do with population density, not population size. There are other factors that I think are important enough to dwell on (like replacement rate, or market participation), but not the population size. Economies don’t scale perfectly, but elements of them do scale very well, and the results matter. Denmark could be better than it is in many ways, but it is still very good, and even better than the U.S. when it comes to economic freedom, despite its tax setup. If each of the United States was a Denmark or a Switzerland, with a federal government that was internally weak but externally (militarily) strong, we would be in good shape.
From Book Reviews: Stanovich:
At least half of the population isn’t bright enough to use type 2 thinking and at least half of the remainder isn’t bright enough for type 3.
Eric, there is a real problem with your comments. At least a third of my comments are just disappearing when I try to post them.
The last was one pointing out that an earlier poster was wrong, that the economic perspective of libertarianism was actually the best established. Which is why so many leftists, including some that are out-and-out socialists, have taken to calling themselves left-libertarians recently.
>Eric, there is a real problem with your comments. At least a third of my comments are just disappearing when I try to post them.
Akismet seems to be having one of its episodes of randomly binning stuff. I don’t know how to fix this.
“The God Delusion” and other Dawkins productions disagree with you.
He specifically claims a rising number of public funded schools that specifically teach creationism as the only explanation of why we’re here.
@JonCB
I’ve read The God Delusion, and you’re right that there a very few schools that have done this, but it is an extreme minority. I have personally never met a single person who did not accept the theory of evolution.
Here’s a source for you if you don’t believe me: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9786-why-doesnt-america-believe-in-evolution.html
And even if you don’t believe that survey I can tell you absolutely that state schools are required by law to teach evolution, and they do so almost without exception or controversy. In England we have a ‘national curriculum’ which sets out minimum standards for all schools funded by the state, and this curriculum includes evolution.
Am I being filtered? Not sure what I said to be banned.
@Andy Freeman
> Danes, like the other northern Europeans (and Mormons) can make any political system work.
Yeah, because transnational, multicultural socialism has worked out for them so well, so far. Stay tuned for that, by the way. The end game is currently in progress.
> Plus there are only 5.5M of them.
The slim idea on the table was population density, not population size. There are other factors that I think are important enough to dwell on (like replacement rate, or market participation), but not the population size. Economies don’t scale perfectly, but they do scale, and the results matter. Denmark can be better than it is in many ways, but it is still very good, and even better than the U.S. when it comes to economic freedom. If each of the United States was a Denmark or a Switzerland, held strung together by a federal government that was internally weak but externally (militarily) strong, I think we would be in good shape. As it stands right now, we are headed for rough chop.
@Tom
> I have personally never met a single person who did not accept the theory of evolution.
I have on many occasions, but the closest contact I’ve had with them is down in Florida, among my wife’s kin. For the most part, they were of the fiery “We were not descended from apes” sort, which struck me as a somewhat sensible foundation. After all, even though we are descended from the great apes, one might as well say we “ascended” from them without controversy, and our ancestral link isn’t prescriptive in any way I can see. Even though we are related, we were far more successful than them, and it’s reasonable to say that we have become something else entirely during the course of that success. The fact we are closely related to apes isn’t much more interesting to me than the fact that we aren’t closely related to octopuses, or that we share DNA in common with pigs and earthworms.
But, more to your point, even the Catholic Church accepts evolution these days (probably because scholarship is part of their institutional DNA). The Intelligent Design movement is more of a cult of religious academics that won favor regionally because it sounded “science-y”… much like Carbon Apocalypse picked up devotees on the coasts.
Yeah, i remember RD talking about that in one of this TV things. Can’t remember if the accusation was that the body is being actively corrupted from within or just turning a blind eye. Not saying that England is at the “50/50” point that the US is (allegedly) but saying the problem doesn’t exist isn’t true either.
@Andy Freeman
> Danes, like the other northern Europeans (and Mormons) can make any political system work.
Yeah, because transnational, multicultural socialism has worked out for them so well, so far. Stay tuned for that, by the way. The end game is currently in progress.
> Plus there are only 5.5M of them.
The slim idea on the table was population density, not population size. There are other factors that I think are important enough to dwell on (like replacement rate, or market participation), but not the population size. Economies don’t scale perfectly, but they do scale, and the results matter. Denmark can be better than it is in many ways, but it is still very good, and even better than the U.S. when it comes to economic freedom. If each of the United States was a Denmark or a Switzerland, held strung together by a federal government that was internally weak but externally (militarily) strong, I think we would be in good shape. As it stands right now, we are headed for rough chop.
@Tom
> I have personally never met a single person who did not accept the theory of evolution.
I have on a few occasions, but the closest contact I’ve had with them is down in Florida, among my wife’s kin. For the most part, they were of the fiery “We were not descended from apes” religious sort, which struck me as a somewhat sensible foundation. After all, even though we are descended from the great apes, one might as well say we “ascended” from them without controversy, and our ancestral link isn’t prescriptive in any way I can see. Even though we are related, we were far more successful than them, and it’s reasonable to say that we have become something else entirely during the course of that success. The fact we are closely related to apes isn’t much more interesting to me than the fact that we aren’t closely related to octopuses, or that we share DNA in common with pigs and earthworms.
But, more to your point, even the Catholic Church accepts evolution these days (probably because scholarship is part of their institutional DNA). The Intelligent Design movement is more of a cult of religious academics that won favor regionally because it sounded “science-y”… much like Carbon Apocalypse picked up devotees on the coasts.
(hoping this one gets through the filter)
>(hoping this one gets through the filter)
Something in my spam filter seems to have taken a dislike to you. I don’t know why.
Grantham wrote: Denmark … is certainly more laissez-faire than its cousins in the Eurozone, and widely agreed as one of the smallest, least-intrusive governments in the world.
He can’t understand why anyone would disagree with that.
He wrote Seriously, Rick Rostrum needs to look into it again, or re-examine what he thinks of as “economic freedom”.
(BTW, my name is Rostrom.)
Well, let’s start with taxation.
A Dane pays the following taxes on income
8% gross tax (“labor tax” or “social contribution”)
8% regional health tax (RHT)
22.8% to 27.8% local government tax (LGT)
3.76% base national tax (BNT)
15% high income national tax (HINT) – on income over 389,900 kroner ($68,130) / year.
0.4% to 1.5 church tax (on Lutherans)
RHT + LGT + BNT + HINT are capped at 51.5% total.
In addition, there is a 25% VAT on all purchases of goods and services.
I would say that taking half what I earn and making me pay a substantial extra amount for everything I buy is pretty intrusive, and a grave infringement of economic liberty.
What about the size of government? 38% of working Danes are employed by government. That’s not small, much less “one of the smallest … governments in the world.”
What about their regulatory bodies Denmark is a member of the European Union. So every nanny-state ukase out of Brussels is law in Denmark.
What about civil liberties? I’ve already cited the “hate speech” conviction of Lars Hedegaard.
What is their stance on the drug war? Drugs are illegal in Denmark. Users are fined, dealers go to prison. There are gang fights over the dope trade.
Unlike many right wingers assume, taxes and the development of the welfare state don’t constitute the whole of the libertarian idea.
ITYM “no taxes and no welfare state”… but let that go. Rates of taxation and spending are not the sole measure of a society’s freedom. But they do matter. When a country has the highest such rates of any developed country (*), that matters a lot. Body fat is not the only measure of physical fitness. Many people are generally fit despite having excessive fat, and many skinny people are unfit. But someone who is 160 cm tall and weighs 150 kilos is not fit, much less “widely agreed to be one of the fittest people…”
(* excluding micro- and petro- states)
What I find interesting in these threads is that most of them are either the choir or reiterating the standard NYTimes fare. So let me ask this. Libertarian ideals imply no public health care. You need to pay for the private health care. Therefore, if you’re an unhealthy kid born in a wrong family, you’re done for (and no, saying a charity would save these kids is not convincing). The claim people would be better off on the average anyhow, so these unlucky cases can be sacrificed, is (as the health care bill shows) not going to go well with quite a few people in the population, not to mention that not being hurt too much by your initial random starting conditions does seem like a nice thing to have. So how do you argue it’s still the correct position to take? The answer seems to be “leftist societies are doomed to fail”, but then why argue at all?
>Therefore, if you’re an unhealthy kid born in a wrong family, you’re done for
You’re missing a premise. This logic only works if health care is more expensive than, say, owning a car. Most “poor” people in the U.S. own cars (the quotes are because we don’t have actual poverty in the U.S., just relative poverty that would count as moderate wealth in much of the rest of even the developed world).
The libertarian solution to this problem is to get the government out of the health-care subsidy business and abolish the provider monopolies created by the AMA and other medical guilds. Without this market-rigging, prices would fall drastically.
This is going to happen, if not by choice but because governments will go bankrupt and be unable to pay the subsidies anymore – in significant part due to medical cost inflation brought on by those subsidies. The parasite will have killed its host.
> The claim people would be better off on the average anyhow, so these unlucky cases can be sacrificed, is (as the health care bill shows)
I am not a scholar on economics, but I am guessing that the argument to that would be that in a free market economy healthcare would be cheap because of the competition. Too many government taxes raise healthcare costs.
> You’re missing a premise. This logic only works if health care is more expensive than, say, owning a car.
Good point, I didn’t think of that. Thank you.
>and no, saying a charity would save these kids is not convincing
Why not? Anecdotes aren’t data and all that, but my experiences with private charities have been vastly more positive than my experiences with the government. As a for instance, my wife has a neurological issue. The medication her doctor prescribed is (without insurance) > $1,000 / month. I currently work at a pharmacy where I am allowed to buy drugs for cost if it’s cheaper than my insurance co-pay. Even at cost, her medication would cost me > $500 / month. Before we had insurance and more money, she used to go to a local clinic sponsored by a local church. For $7 for the visit, and $10 for the medication (based on a sliding scale that was dependent on current ability to pay), she had everything she needed, courtesy of a charity.
For comparison, during that same time period, we briefly entertained the idea of getting her on SSI or other assistance since as a result of her condition, she was unable to hold a steady job. She would be able to work for a few months, then as the condition started acting up, she would have to call out, they would cut her hours and eventually she would be fired or quit because she couldn’t get any hours. A visit to the local government office and we were told that the application process for this aid would be a 6 month process, during which time she would not be allowed to work (even if able) more than 10 hours / week. If she was approved for the aid, she would be given benefits that would be reduced for every hour over 10 hours that she worked / week being completely eliminated at 20 hours / week. If she worked more than 20 hours / week for longer than two weeks, she would lose the benefits entirely, and the process would have to start all over.
The lesson we took from this was that local charities can provide a lot of assistance, and need little more than a few pay stubs, and the generosity of local doctors and companies to provide for the needy. The government on the other hand requires that the needy keep themselves in poverty and even harm their position in life to prove their worthiness for assistance.
@esr:
I’d like to amplify this with one data point…
In spring 2010 my hernia began to hurt. Bad. We had no insurance, but a bit of cash on hand. So I got into the phone book and started searching on the Internet for a surgeon. Price for the procedure typically runs about $10k when government or insurance pays.
Every clinic and hospital I called I asked them one question: “What is your bottom dollar price to do repair of a left inguinal hernia if I will pay Green Cash Up Front.” I eventually found a clinic that did the procedure for $1800 – less than 20% of the “government” price.
The winning “bidder” happened to be the outpatient center at Baptist Health in Little Rock, AR. One of the biggest and arguably best providers within 300 miles of here.
Note this before really applying any significant amount of the libertarian solution as ESR mentioned. Imagine how far the price could yet fall if real competition and price pressure existed.
Rich Rostrom Says:
> He can’t understand why anyone would disagree with that.
Sure I can. I said why someone would disagree with it; taxes and the welfare state. And you just itemized it. So what? I never claimed that they had lower taxes, just a freer economy.
> I would say that taking half what I earn and making me pay a substantial extra amount for everything I buy is pretty intrusive, and a grave infringement of economic liberty.
You would be wrong. What you are talking about is “fiscal” freedom (relative tax burden), not “economic” freedom (financial freedom, relative government interference in trade and investment). I know you are just trying to score points now, but the meaning of words matter. Denmark has a great deal of the latter (more than the U.S.), and not much of the former. Taxes are much easier to change than deeply embedded government “programs”, powerful bureaucracies, regulatory bodies and other organs of state control.
> Denmark is a member of the European Union. So every nanny-state ukase out of Brussels is law in Denmark.
Then, why is it so much easier to start a business in Denmark than it is in France? Or to close one, for that matter? Why isn’t there a blizzard of red tape and fees and permits and licenses I have to battle my way through before I get the permission to sell something to someone else?
> What about civil liberties? I’ve already cited the “hate speech” conviction of Lars Hedegaard.
“Hate speech” is a problem endemic throughout Europe, and part of their suicidal culture dive. Hell, in Italy they dragged Oriana Fallaci off her death bed to charge her with “Islamophobia”. I see no end in sight to this, unfortunately. Has nothing to do with what I was talking about, which was laissez-faire economics.
> Drugs are illegal in Denmark. Users are fined, dealers go to prison. There are gang fights over the dope trade.
Yeah, of course they are, but I was talking about the “drug war.” But what they spend relative to enforcement is quite small. Compared to the U.S.A, with are draconian ATF and DEA and international narco-cops, they are practically the Netherlands.
> Taxation and spending are not the sole measure of a society’s freedom.
No, they aren’t.
> But they do matter. When a country has the highest such rates of any developed country (*), that matters a lot.
They matter, but if value is being added into the system, and the economy is growing, they don’t necessarily matter “a lot”. You are leaving out a lot of other factors, like how relatively cheap it is to hire someone over there (or fire them, for that matter). Their labor laws matter a lot, too, because these are the kinds of social organs that help the state leverage their power. In terms of their ability for Denmark to throw off their remaining, mostly fiscal, shackles after the EU finishes collapsing, I think they are better poised than almost any other country in the Eurozone.
If only the U.S.’s problems were as simple as high taxes and a welfare state. We are in better fiscal shape than the Danes (of course), but the massive buildup of debt has created an illusion regarding what kind of economic shape we are actually in, and we have created an anti-business culture that is so deep and virulent that I don’t see any easy way to change it, and the regulatory creep is gaining speed. We currently have an executive who has never created a business, never participated in markets in any meaningful way, shouting about 3 billion dollars per year tax subsidies on corporate jets, and almost half of our dim-witted population smiles and nods along.
I’ve been to Denmark. They are no libertarian paradise. But they have economic freedom, a sense of proportion and a weak enough government that I think can help them become one, someday. Sadly, I don’t think the U.S. has the same tools.
@JonCB
I went back to the Dawkins book to get the exact facts he cites. As far as I can tell he only mentions a single school, Emmanuel College in Gateshead, and notes that it teaches creationism ‘almost uniquely in Britain’. There was a huge controversy about this school some years ago, but since that time it seems to have reformed its ways. I looked up the most recent Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) inspection report and it noted that “The courses provided cover the requirements of the National Curriculum” so I can only assume that whatever creationist influence once existed has since been purged.
None of this is to say that we should let our guard down or become complacent. However, I don’t think it is reasonable to claim that creationism vs. evolution is an issue in public education in the UK. I suppose its always possible that there are one or two kooky teachers slipping things in under the radar, but in general the subject just doesn’t come up.
tmoney Says:
>Why not? Anecdotes aren’t data and all that, but my experiences with private charities have been vastly more positive than my experiences with the government.
Tmoney, your experience is such a perfect illustration of what is wrong with these programs, and why government is an absolute poison to those they claim to help. I’m sorry to hear of your wife’s problems, I hope the wonders of modern medicine can offer her some relief. Nonetheless, thanks for sharing your compelling anecdote.
Michael Hipp Says:
> In spring 2010 my hernia began to hurt. Bad…. Price for the procedure typically runs about $10k … found a clinic that did the procedure for $1800 – less than 20% of the “government” price.
Another absolutely fabulous anecdote. FWIW from what I have seen, when private prices are compared to the non competitive prices in healthcare, this difference is typical, in fact, it is low. I have seen numerous examples where the price difference is between one and two orders of magnitude.
When libertarians say government adds to the cost of healthcare, I think the assumption is 5%, or 10%, or maybe even 15%. The truth is it is more like 500% or 5,000%. If we used Michael’s experience as typical, that would mean that the typical health insurance premium for top notch care would be more like $300 per month for a family, rather than the typical $1500. And if that is the case, it completely changes the equation.
And, you know what? Although Michael went for the bargain basement pricing on his operation, I’m going to bet the surgeon’s still washed their hands before operating, and I’ll bet they gave him anesthetic drugs rather than a bottle of whiskey. There are plenty of corners to cut before quality of care is an issue.
@Jessica Boxer
Quite right. The overall experience was one of the best I have ever had with a hospital. I had a squad-strength group of nurses and technicians looking after me and the surgeon and anesthesiologist were excellent and seemed wonderfully competent and caring.
I’ve always believed in “you get what you pay for” but what we’re really paying for in US healthcare is something else besides quality and affordable care. Someone needs to find a phrase that describes what we’re paying for, but I’m pretty sure it will include the word “Soviet”.
Jessica Boxer wrote “Although Michael went for the bargain basement pricing on his operation, I’m going to bet the surgeon’s still washed their hands before operating, and I’ll bet they gave him anesthetic drugs rather than a bottle of whiskey. There are plenty of corners to cut before quality of care is an issue.”
I think in some ways you’re being too sanguine: some of the corners that people will naturally be tempted to cut do indeed provide value. E.g., some cutting edge niche medicines are naturally very expensive to develop. (The cutting-edge-ness boundary might be pushed back quite a ways in the absence of FDA friction, but work at the new boundary would still tend to be very expensive.) Quite possibly the result for someone at 10th percentile of income could still be considerably better than the current situation, but to the usual (non-internationalist) socialist ethos that dominates a lot of medical politics, that some people wouldn’t be able to afford the same treatment as others (even though they had inherited the same passport) would be treated as a serious argument for abolishing the market.
In other ways, though, maybe you’re not sanguine enough. E.g., nosocomial infections are one area where substantial cost-effective improvements look very practical, and some of the current shortcomings (and current restrictions on providing customers with information about current shortcomings) are clearly not free market problems. I’d expect free market institutions (including the freedom for quality-based brands to compete, innovate, advertise, and expand without limit) would improve the nosocomial infection situation rapidly. I’d also expect — admittedly without knowing quite how to measure it — that exceedingly long shifts for physicians are seriously bad for quality, and if I recall correctly the AMA requires them routinely at some stage of being allowed to reach the full privilege set of MDs. That seems more perverse than what we tend to see from free markets.
Check out surgerycenterok.com for a great example of market driven healthcare. Dr Keith Smith has taken on the mainstream healthcare model and posted prices online which are far below what is charged by the local hospitals. The hospitals have been forced to respond and the patients benefit. I did my residency with Keith and he was one of the best. Knowing him, I’m sure his colleagues at his surgery center are also of high quality. Be sure to read his blog. It explains a lot about how healthcare prices got so outrageous.
ESR says: I turned that into a live link.
@Grantham
I always find it strange when people say ‘we are descended from apes’. I mean, it’s true, but we *are* apes, so it almost seems too trivial a statement to make.
As for the word ‘descended’, it’s not supposed to imply that we are not as good as the lifeforms that came before us. It’s the same sense as in ‘you are descended from your parents’. I’m sure you know this however.
I don’t really like ‘ascended’ because it implies that we are somehow ‘more evolved’ than other forms. Obviously in some cases that is literally true. We have evolved more than, for example, homo habilis. But there are a lot of forms from which we are descended that are still extant today and are no less evolved or successful than we are. I also find it annoying when people say that we are ‘more evolved’ than modern-day monkeys, or that we evolved from them, which is false.
Huh. You must’ve missed it then. Try walking through downtown Boston. Keep an eye out for bedrolls and blankets, under overhangs and in or near building lobbies. People sleep here, through the dead of winter. Actual poverty. Not exactly hard to find.
>> Denmark is mostly Danes. Danes, like the other northern Europeans (and Mormons) can make any political system work.
I should have included the swiss in that list.
> Yeah, because transnational, multicultural socialism has worked out for them so well, so far. Stay tuned for that, by the way. The end game is in progress.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark , Denmark is over 90% ethnic Danes. If they’re sane, that should be survivable.
FWIW, the Netherlands is 80% ethnic Dutch.
Those numbers are interesting. European countries lecture the US on “ethnic diversity” yet have far less experience with it, even on their scale.
>> Plus there are only 5.5M of them.
>The idea on the table was population density, not population size.
The US has larger areas with more population density.
Size does matter – these countries have more independence than US states.
Size does matter – it’s as reasonable for the typical Dane to contact the PM as it is for the typical Coloradan to contact the governor, but CO is a medium size state.
@Tom
> I have personally never met a single person who did not accept the theory of evolution.
Which tells us:
(1) Your experience is atypical.
(2) Your “intuition” about how such people think has no relationship with reality.
I know some folks who “disagree” with evolution. They’re quite functional. (This shouldn’t be a surprise as evolution doesn’t have much impact on most people’s day to day lives. And, if you’re going to argue that it’s a signal wrt belief in science, other folks will be happy to point out how the “evolution believers” aren’t actually all that keen on science.) Any theory which predicts otherwise is wrong.
> Try walking through downtown Boston. Keep an eye out for bedrolls and blankets, under overhangs and in or near building lobbies. People sleep here, through the dead of winter. Actual poverty.
Yup, and every single one of them is eligible for Medicaid. Boston also has free clinics.
And, if Boston is anything like SF, Boston also has homeless shelters with empty beds.
Really? How do you know?
I’m not sure that I’ve said anything about how such people think. Don’t know what you’re getting at here.
Again, I’m not sure what your point is. I am simply trying to point out that here in the UK we have a ‘monopoly on public education’ and that evolution vs. creationism isn’t much of an issue in public discourse, and not an issue at all in education.
This isn’t meant as a bragging session out how great England is and how stupid you Americans are. I’m just providing a counterexample to Joe Presley’s claim that:
I probably could have cited almost any developed European country as such an example, but I happen to know more about the UK.
>> Danes, like the other northern Europeans (and Mormons) can make any political system work.
I should have included the Swiss in that list, but they’re odd in that they’ve managed diversity.
>Yeah, because transnational, multicultural socialism has worked out for them so well, so far. Stay tuned for that, by the way. The end game is currently in progress.
Actually, with the possible exception of Germany and France, none of the northern European countries are at all “multicultural”. They’re all 80-90% “ethnically pure”. There are strip-malls in San Jose (CA) with more diversity.
Which means that they have no idea what they’re talking about when they lecture the US on diversity, multiculturalism, etc.
>> Plus there are only 5.5M of them.
> The slim idea on the table was population density, not population size.
If density helped, the big US metroplexes would be better run than Denmark.
The typical dane has roughly the same access to the PM as the typical coloradan does to the governor. However, CO is a middle-size state, and there’s a whole level of govt above the state level.
The following is on-topic in the sense that it deals with an issue that could lead to a much smaller Federal Government…
One thing I find ironic and sort of puzzling is that the US formed after rebelling against, and declaring their independence from, Britain (for good cause). But the US Constitution definitely frowns on any rebellion in the US.
Section 9 of the Constitution includes:
I don’t know a lot about this, but wasn’t the US civil war a result of the South wanting to secede from the Union, which they were willing to do peacefully if the Union would let them do so?
I am not aware of any substantial desire, in modern times, for parts of the US to secede from the Union, but if the financial system goes berserk and the Federal government runs out of money, this could change.
Here in Canada, Quebec has made motions to secede from Canada; the last time, they came very close to having enough votes in a referendum to actually try to do so. I recall a previous indecent when Prime Minister Trudeau mentioned something about the possibility of sending the army in, but I believe he was making an off hand comment – in modern times, at least, I don’t believe that there has ever been any serious suggestion that military force would be used to stop Quebec from leaving.
The US doesn’t seem to feel the same way about the issue, or, at least it didn’t in 1860. Does the US continue to take the position that no states may secede from the Union?
>>(1) Your experience is atypical.
> Really? How do you know?
>> (2) Your “intuition” about how such people think has no relationship with reality.
> I’m not sure that I’ve said anything about how such people think. Don’t know what you’re getting at here.
My mistake – I thought that you were someone else.
Jeff Read:
How many of those people are there because they have *no* other choice. I assert the number is essentially zero. Even in Boston I can’t imagine there aren’t plenty of charities, churches, and private individuals that would step in to help them get a warm bed to sleep in and 3 hot meals a day. Jeff, things are not always as they appear.
@Brian Marshall
I am not aware of any mechanism by which a state can secede from the Union. I seem to remember that there was a supreme court case – some years ago now – about this subject involving Texas, and the decision was that there existed no basis for a right to secession.
And of course there was no legal right for America to declare independence from Britain, but they did it anyway. The legitimacy of any rebellion or revolution is largely a function of how successful it is. If the rebellion succeeds in establishing an independent polity then eventually it will be recognised as having legal authority. Otherwise those involved will be subject to the law of the state from which they were trying to secede.
Tom:
> As for the word ‘descended’, it’s not supposed to imply that we are not as good as the lifeforms that came before us. It’s the same sense as in ‘you are descended from your parents’. I’m sure you know this however.
Ha! Thanks for that. As I was reading the sentence I thought, “does he really think I don’t know this?”
I guess the point I was really trying to make was about language itself, and how gnostics and theologians use it differently (or maybe you that, and the point of your post was just to elaborate it).
Anyway, I don’t much mind if someone says, “we ascended from apes”, or maybe even “transcended” (even though I think that muddles the matter even more). Everyone should be introduced to science, but not everyone is going to have an aptitude for it, or a desire to use to to explain themselves and the world. That’s as right as it should be, in my view. I am not a member of any sort of religion, and not a believer in any kind of non-abstract God (although I don’t discount out of hand the idea of an abstract one). But, so what? If believing in gray beards and winged cherubs makes a person happier and easier to live with, so much the better. Not all products of religion are bad ones. We’ve gotten some stellar art out of it (and I highly recommend anyone who has yet to visit the Sistine Chapel, or contemplate the Pieta, to seek them out), and also things like charity and neighborly gatherings, etc.
The problem (and I bet you and I agree on it) is when these religions become powerful institutions that try to force their way into our lives, or start banning other forms of knowledge and exploration. Europeans I’ve spoken to think this goes on far more in America than it actually does, but I always keep an eye out for it.
> But there are a lot of forms from which we are descended that are still extant today and are no less evolved or successful than we are.
Absolutely (at least in terms of demographics), and many of those forms bear almost no resemblance to ourselves from a morphological standpoint. But it does seem as though many of our closer cousins live at our pleasure, either domesticated or shielded within preserves and zoos. And there are a few things about us that seem to be unique. I know that there is a small degree of basic tool-use outside of the sapien tent, and a few examples of symbiotic relationships and cross-species “cooperation”, but nothing that approaches intentional domestication or preservation.
But I largely agree with your point that there are all sorts of indices of success and we aren’t at the top of all of them. Crocodiles, for instance, have been doing their thing for a very long time without having to change their game much, even though the creatures around them changed quite a bit. We seem to be their biggest problem, absent the occasional angry hippo.
>Every clinic and hospital I called I asked them one question: “What is your bottom dollar price to
>do repair of a left inguinal hernia if I will pay Green Cash Up Front.” I eventually found a clinic
>that did the procedure for $1800 – less than 20% of the “government” price.
I’m absolutely amazed you were able to find anyone willing to answer that question. Heck, I can barely get a cash quote for an office visit these days (“well, it all depends, you should come in and we’ll let you know”). I’ve never really understood how people don’t see how much insurance as we use it now drives up the cost of health care. I always like to highlight two examples. First is LASIK eye surgery, which has for the past 20 years been decreasing in price. It used to be about $10k for both eyes, then $5K, then $2.5K. These days with a bit of luck and some phone calls, you can get both eyes, and the follow up care for <$1K. The reason for this is obvious: No insurance plan will cover LASIK (or didn't, I think recently they've started negotiating discount rates). As a result, LASIK doctors had to continue to walk their way down the price curve to continue to grow.
In another example, I can call my vet and ask for a quote for knee surgery, overnight boarding and follow up care for my dog including all the hardware, after surgery medicines etc etc. That quote is valid for 30 days and is the cost I will pay out the door provided my dog doesn't decide to flatline on the operating table. And the total cost, including putting the dog under for the surgery is less than the physician charge alone for my wife's ankle surgery. A surgery for which we could never get any price quotes / estimates, for which it took 2 years to finally get an itemized bill from the hospital and for which we are still receiving new bills or modifications to old bills. Now I will admit that my wife is larger than my dog, and thus I would expect some costs to be more (such as the amount of anesthesia used) but the prices are insanely out of line.
I should also note that about 1 year ago, my vet started seriously hyping one of the many new "pet insurance" policies. Coincidentally, since they have, the prices for their services have started climbing after being the same for almost 5 years.
You know I was thinking about Michael Hipp’s anecdote again, and something struck me. It was that Michael cared about how much his operation cost. Most people, those with health insurance anyway, don’t care at all, in fact they care so little they probably have no idea how much it costs, whether $1000 or $100,000. Of course, that means prices go way up.
It is just a plain fact that when people pay for stuff, even medical stuff, prices go down, and quality goes up. That goes for aspirin to laser surgery. It is also why insurance is a terrible way to pay for most medical procedures.
@Jesssica Boxer
Nailed it.
Grantham Says:
One bad aspect of religion is “faith” – believing in things because you are told to, or because that is how you were brought up.
Believing in an omnipotent god provides “answers” to a great many questions that would otherwise… let me give you an example….
A member of my family is a heavy-duty Christian. Recently, I said “OK, fish invented spines, right? Or, at least they are the oldest living form with spines.”
Now, I am not an expert on this issue – I may be wrong. But the family member said something like “I don’t know if evolution is the most likely explanation.” I thought but didn’t say “Well, sure, once you believe in an omnipotent god, that god is a much simpler answer than the theory of evolution.”
On the other hand, Christianity has had a profound and great effect on the philosophical and legal development of Europe and Western Civilization. It provided an alternate authority and value system, separate from the feudal civil authorities. It made possible the concept of “This aspect of society is bad.”
In the far east, under Confucianism and Buddhism, there isn’t an omnipotent god. There is the idea that civilization is a great thing and any dissent in relation to existing power arrangement is an attack on the great civilization we all have – therefore, any dissent is morally wrong. I am, of course, generalizing and probably grossly over-simplifying, but the end result is: dissent is bad.
@Brian Marshall:
Brian, I was brought up in church, my dad was a pastor. I questioned it heavily in my early adult years, but what you speak of is utterly alien to me. I’m sure somewhere there can be found people who do that, but I don’t think I’ve ever met any of them. And it astounds me that this seems to be the view of Christians – have you actually met people like that or is it just a repetition of a popular atheist talking point?
I stuck with (or came back to) fundamental, evangelical Christianity because it best fit *all* the available evidence. And it has been an utterly reliable predictor of human behavior and world events. I have followed where the evidence led and will continue to do so.
I realize you’re speaking of religion in general, and I can speak only of the E-F Christianity of my experience.
I said >One bad aspect of religion is “faith” – believing in things because you are told to, or because that is how you were brought up.
Michael Hipp Says:
> what you speak of is utterly alien to me. I’m sure somewhere there can be found people who do that, but I don’t think I’ve ever met any of them.
Your father is a pastor. You were brought up as a Christian. You did question it as a young adult, but you are a Christian. To me, this looks just like what I said. I guess, from your point of view, it doesn’t.
Normally, I would say: “Faith” is the belief in something without evidence; the “Bible Circle”: if questioned, a Christian will say: “I believe in God because it says so in the Bible” and “I believe the Bible because it is the word of God”. Again I over-simplify, but I have personally run Christians around this circle.
You are saying that you are a Christian
So, you are a Christian for scientific reasons? That is, as a result of applying the scientific method? No faith involved?
How about evolution? How life with hard-parts that show up as fossils starting about one billion years ago?
I said:
and I think it makes sense, although I am not certain it is true.
But that was the past. Just because Christianity may have had some good influence in the past, this in no way justifies having faith in it now.
Brian Marshall:
I don’t really follow your train of thought. Even when I was a kid, my Dad didn’t tell me I had to believe anything. As an adult I questioned and temporarily abandoned a lot of the the things I had been taught.
But I made a conscious considered decision to return to (most) of them. If you want to assert that it’s only because I was brought up that way, go head. Can you prove it? What if I show you someone who was brought up in the opposite way, what would be the explanation for that? Is someone forcing them to believe?
I didn’t say that or anything like it. You are making the mistake of the typical mal-educated atheist in thinking that the only kind of evidence is scientific evidence. Hint: there’s also testimonial and documentary evidence that are generally considered more reliable that the scientific fad of the day. Go into a court room, what are the primary kinds of evidence they seek?
I didn’t say I had no faith. I increasingly have more and more of it because of what my eyes, ears and mind have observed. Lives changed. Illnesses and injuries healed. Predictions coming true. Extremely low probability events taking place after people prayed and fasted.
Have you done enough self analysis to ask yourself why you find “faith” so undesirable or evil? (I sense you’d make it a crime if you could.) Really, what is it about it? The faith that I have (it was tiny to begin with) as been extremely beneficial to me. And I’ve seen the consistent results of not having faith. No thanks.
@michael hipp
Faith just means belief without evidence. That’s bad because it leads to beliefs that are wrong.
The vast vast vast majority of believers believe in the religion of their parents. Do you think that is a coincidence? It’s a statistical fact that if you had been brought up a Muslim you would most likely be a Muslim right now rather than a Christian.
@ Michael Hipp
I have to back off – we view the world from such different points of view that there is no real way to argue about it. I would just like to make two points…
Science is not a matter of fads – it is about the scientific method as a way of learning about how the universe works. There can be fads for just about anything, but that has nothing to do with what science is.
I am a libertarian. I certainly don’t want to make any beliefs a crime regardless of what I think of them.
Tom:
Both sentences are in varying proportions wrong.
Faith can also mean belief in things that can be neither seen or touched. I have lots of evidence to back up my faith. Which came first could be debated, but I have no lack of evidence.
You said “it leads to beliefs that are wrong”. No, a correct statement would be “it can lead to beliefs that are wrong”. Can you assert (scientifically, of course) that it leads to beliefs that are wrong any more frequently than than the alternatives? In the 300+ comments above there are lots of wrongheaded beliefs. AGW anyone?
Conversely, many of the beliefs that came to me via my faith are very correct.
True enough, but what of it? You do understand that statistics have no applicability or bearing on individual cases don’t you? Statistics is a very limited and unreliable tool. You’re essentially wanting to believe I had no choice in the matter. I presume you can prove that. Scientifically.
Brian Marshall:
I didn’t realize we were arguing, I thought we were discussing. :-)
I really, really wish you were correct. Such is what I was taught of science and certainly is how it should be. But fads abound in science. AGW is a fad, it will pass. The whole eat-low-fat era was a scientific fad. We’ve seen fads come and go quickly in trying to find a gene to explain every human behavior the Progressives want to turn into a voting bloc.
The scientific method is useful. The wrong conclusions and socio-political agendas that frequently come from it aren’t.
Brian, most Canadians I have talked to have the same response to the idea of Quebec seceding: “Hey, can I help pack their bags?”
@ Michael Hipp
> I didn’t realize we were arguing, I thought we were discussing. :-)
I meant “argument” in the scientific sense; it means “discussion from different points of view”. However, in this case, our points of view are so different that discussion can’t resolve the difference. Science is about repeatable results (among other things). You prayed and fasted and some event happened. There is no way of testing this scientifically – the results are not repeatable.
re: fads
Of course there are fads in beliefs. This is not science. It can masquerade as science, like AGW.
Brian Marshall Says:
@Brian Marshall:
This is the thing atheists seem to have such a hard time grasping … the results aren’t repeatable … because they aren’t results. The thing that took place didn’t happen because I prayed. Yes, you read that right. It happened because a powerful and very intelligent actor decided to intervene.
It if were possible to subject my faith or beliefs to scientific inquiry, I’d be the first to volunteer. (How much is the stipend?) But the simple fact is that the most interesting questions in this universe are not subject to the scientific method. It is N/A. It is of no use. None. Which is why so many of us find the idolatry of science so amusing. To place such confidence in something so, so … limited.
I’m pretty sure the AGW proponents, many of whom are credentialed and practicing scientists would disagree. We both recognize it as bad science. But it is still science. Or do we make a “No True Scotsman” argument?
@ SPQR
The truth is, I pay little attention to Canadian politics, partly because when I do, it makes me angry and partly because I can’t change the stuff that makes me angry. I pay little attention to US politics per se, but a fair bit of attention to what the US is up to – the financial situation and the power exercised outside the US makes the US important to a lot of folks.
I live in Alberta; Quebec is a long way off and has little to do with me.
Generally, the only way Quebec does affect me is federal government attempts to pacify Quebec – passing laws that affect the whole country to please Quebec, like almost all product packaging having to be in English and French. Of the languages spoken in Alberta, French is well down the list. A lot of people, including me, really don’t like this kind of crap. Then, when you hear of Quebec passing laws that make it illegal for commercial signs to be in English…. That doesn’t go down well in the rest of Canada. But as far as I know, this sort of thing hasn’t really been in the news for many years.
There is the fact that it would be an exciting thing to have happen. This doesn’t mean it would be a good idea. It would affect Alberta little, directly. It could have a large effect on the Maritime provinces that would be geographically cut off from the rest of Canada. It could lead to Alberta separating, which would be exciting but might not be a good idea. It could lead to BC, Washington and Oregon trying to form their own country. In the long run, I think this sort of thing will probably happen, but… today, I don’t see this as a good idea. If the Canadian Federal government tries to lean to heavily on Alberta, Alberta might seperate – this could be good, could be bad, could be some of both.
From the limited amount I pay attention to such things, I don’t think any part of Canada except a good-sized minority in Quebec want to seperate at this time.
If they Quebec did start the process of separating, I think you are basically right – a lot of Canadians would say “You call yourselves a separate nation. You have been a pain in the butt for a long time. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Oh, but take your proportion of the Federal debt with you.” It would be interesting.
@ Michael Hipp
I am glad you are happy. If science amuses you… there is no common ground between your view and mine.
There is science, bad science (ie. careless science), junk science (ie. people who think that they are doing science but are not) and there are liars. AGW is hovering over junk science with extensions in both directions. Many of the “scientists” that support AGW are sociologists and organic chemists and such, while others them make a living supporting AGW and if they stop supporting it, they lose that source of income.
Tom:
“A rebellion is always legal in the first person, such as “our rebellion.” It is only in the third person – “their rebellion” – that it becomes illegal. ” — Ben Franklin, 1776
@ Michael Hipp
Yeah, basically. No true good scientist puts his/her name on something, specifically as a qualified scientist, if it is totally outside their field of study. And, or course, no true scientist publishes theories and results that they know are not true for the money.
These activities are not science.
> AGW proponents, many of whom are credentialed and practicing scientists
You do know that credentials have nothing to do with science, right?
As to what they’re practicing, is not sharing data consistent with good scientific practice? How about trying to get people fired for suggesting other explanations for the data? How about about “hide the decline”?
I’d argue that it isn’t science, good or bad. Bad science is bad measurements, measuring the wrong thing, etc. AGW proponents are monkeys in lab coats.
What you say is basically true, although the kings and queens had to watch themselves in relation to the church, too. The power flowed both ways.
I am also referring more to the dark ages, an earlier time than you are describing. The fact that the church and its moral code existed outside the power of the sovereign made it at least theoretically possible to say some aspect of what the sovereign is doing is wrong.
I contrast this with countries in which ethics is based on the idea that “good means what is good for society” which is interpreted as “good is what is good for the current power structure”. Given this approach to ethics, there is no way to say that some aspect of what the current power structure is doing is wrong.
> Faith just means belief without evidence.
Faith means belief without *empirical* evidence. But not everybody is an empiricist. And even the purest form of empiricism needs faith to function: You have to take it on faith that your senses and memory are at least halfways sound, for instance that you’re not a brain in a vat hooked up to a computer.
>But not everybody is an empiricist.
That is correct. Many people are insane.
@ Jon Brase
Hey, maybe I am just a computer, with the delusion that I am sitting here typing into a computer.
Any specific thought rests on assumptions. A rational person tries to use rational assumptions. We all assume that we are awake and this isn’t just a dream.
Faith is not the same as assumptions. Faith is belief for non-rational reasons. I am always willing to change an assumption if it appears to be wrong or I can find a better assumption. Sometimes I know I am using an assumption that is wrong but useful – if I am making a map of a city lot, I assume that the world is flat, whereas if I am making a map of Canada, I, or my mapping software, assumes that the Earth is an oblate spheroid. I know that both assumptions are wrong but that, each in a different context, are useful.
The point is, faith doesn’t work that way – it isn’t used that way.
@Michael Hipp
What is the difference between belief without evidence and belief in things that cannot be seen or touched?
Religious faith certainly isn’t the *only* thing that can lead to false beliefs, but it certainly is one thing.
I was very careful to say that if you had been brought up a muslim you would *most likely* be a muslim. I’m making no claim to knowledge in your specific case, I’m just asserting that in the case of the vast majority of believers this is true.
You have said that you have knowledge, but that it is not scientific. Science is nothing more than a method to prevent ourselves from fooling ourselves, or getting fooled by others. Humans aren’t good at being rational. We see something that is highly unlikely and we call it a miracle, even though incredibly unlikely things happen every day for no other reason than in a huge universe even the most improbable events become commonplace. We put more stock than we should in eyewitness testimony. People’s memories are easily fooled. We have an incredibly poor grasp of probability and statistics.
In order to counter these flaws we invented science to make sure that whatever knowledge we have is as certain as it can be. When you say you have knowledge that is not scientific all you are really saying is that you have a belief that has not been rigorously tested.
@Brian Marshall:
Bruce, I’m pretty sure you can’t defend those statements.
I made a conscious choice to raise my 4 children in a certain kind of church and in a certain manner. I did this because I looked around and saw that these had a consistently good record of turning out kids who grow up to be good people and have a good, happy, and productive life. How, exactly, is that non-rational? You may question the things that I value in how my kids turn out. There is always the possibility that things won’t turn out how I planned. But none of that makes it non-rational.
BTW, you are aware of the many studies that show people of faith tend to be happier than those without?
>It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.
The best example of this was all the Democrat shills who screamed to high heaven over Korans flushed down the toilet as a VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS!!!–when those same shills had been on board with the Clinton anti-gun agenda less than two years prior. It’s a violation to offend your enemies in time of war, but not to set 80 Americans, many of them babies, on fire because of an unpaid firearms tax.
@Jon Brase
That’s true, but a rational person tries to have as few unsupported assumptions as possible. Then, based on those premises we build up the rest of knowledge as securely and carefully as possible. We should be careful not to admit any beliefs not based on good rigorous evidence. A belief in a supernatural deity, not to mention any of the many human creation myths, is not supported and not necessary.
There is absolutely no good rigorous (that is to say, scientific) evidence for a magic sky god. Therefore I do not admit that belief.
What’s more there is a good logical reason to think that it is impossible for an omnipotent and benevolent being to exist. Just go to your local hospital and take a trip to the children’s cancer ward.
“You are making the mistake of the typical mal-educated atheist in thinking that the only kind of evidence is scientific evidence. Hint: there’s also testimonial and documentary evidence that are generally considered more reliable that the scientific fad of the day. Go into a court room, what are the primary kinds of evidence they seek?”
@Michael Hipp
Scientific evidence is the best type. There are too many completely worthless testimonials around. Do you believe in Astrology? It’s got lots of proponents that loudly proclaim that, “Astrology works! It changed by life!”. Or “Laetril cured my cancer!”. Or…you get the idea.
I’m sure that you believe that Christianity is right, and has helped you in your life, but you should consider the fact that all those Atheists, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Wiccans, Hindus and None-of-the-Aboves (all-in-all, more than five billion people) have looked at your ‘evidence’ and don”t believe it.
Have you read the Book of Mormon? It’s got the notarized statements of witnesses right up there in front. That’s real documentary evidence, isn’t it?
“Ah, the One True Religion – all 10,000 of them.”
– Mark Twain
@Michael Hipp
This has nothing whatever to do with the truth of the religion.
Putting aside questions about how to reliably test happiness, and what happiness is, I for one find it morally unacceptable to deliberately mislead children (and I’m not accusing you of that, because you are a true believer) in order to make them ‘happy’.
I would rather have my eyes open and experience the universe in as real a way as possible and not be ‘happy’ than be a mindless drone made content by a mind-numbing drug.
About people who go to church being happier:
I don’t share Eric’s dislike of religion, but I have to wonder how much of that is because of the uplifting qualities of religion, versus how much is the fact that most atheists are leftists who buy into the postmodern crap, not to mention radical environmentalist gloom. I suspect that most commercial space enthusiasts, for instance, are both non-religious and relatively happy. Probably happier than most religious people, who have nothing to look forward to other than Paradise , and that only after all their accomplishments have been flushed down the toilet by the Antichrist.
Reading Golden Age sf, I see no sign of unhappiness among the writers of the time–this in spite of the fact that most of the stuff was written during the Great Depression or WWII, and most of the writers were nerds when that practically guaranteed persecution. Also, while the average churchgoer who is a bit hazy on scripture may be happy, I don’t see much happiness among the biblical scholars, who seem rather dour on the whole. The key to happiness, from where I’m sitting, seems to be less about religion and more about an optimistic view of the future.
@Tom:
Because I have evidence to support my belief in the things that I cannot see or touch.
Actually we invented science so we could turn lead into gold, lob big rocks over fortified walls with more accuracy, and generally have more complete dominion over the world around us.
The knowledge I have has most assuredly been rigorously tested. My millions of people over very long periods of time and in very varied and challenging circumstances. It has held up. Marvelously. Its demise has been predicted and attempted many times by people far more powerful and capable than either you or I. But yet it stands. Doesn’t that make you even just a little bit curious about it?
Now if you want to say it has not been rigorously subjected to the scientific method, we are certainly in agreement. But why would you want to apply such a wonderful tool to an area where it is completely inapplicable. Is a fondue fork of any help in building a bridge? Will knee surgery cure my migraine?
I value both kinds of knowledge and both kinds of tools. I don’t want to get caught in the “hammer” syndrome. I prefer my thinking not be quite so limited.
@Michael Hipp
Yeah, and the hindu and the muslim and the jew, the roman pagan, the worshipper of Thor, and followers of Athena all say the same thing (not to mention astrologers, homeopaths and acupuncturists). But I guess they are all wrong and you are right.
I have no hope that its demise is at hand. People have been believing all sorts of crazy things since the dawn of the human species. It’s not going away.
Why is it inapplicable?
> It’s a violation to offend your enemies in time of war, but not to set 80 Americans, many of them babies, on fire because of an unpaid firearms tax.
IIRC, that’s not quite right.
IIRC, the initial raid occurred because Clinton/Reno needed “evidence” for a press conference. Koresh et al didn’t follow the script and the result was some dead folks.
The feds then lost control and TV cameras got into position.
The rest of it looked like a combination of micromanaging by folks with no specific knowledge or relevant skills and “everyone in the chain of command ran away to maintain plausible deniability”.
@Tom:
Sure, but can we agree we both believe things we cannot prove. I believe in God. I cannot prove that to the satisfaction of many people. You believe there is a naturalistic explanation for everything and nothing exists outside the natural universe. Can you prove it?
Tom, you’re starting to sound like an atheist tape player. There is nothing to be observed in a children’s cancer ward that supports a disbelief in God. The old “why would a loving God …” line is worn out and not at all convincing.
@LS:
Best for what? We’ve seen its successes and its failures. Why not just value it for what it is rather than try to force into a place it doesn’t work very well.
I’m not aware of anyone asserting that all documentary or testimonial evidence is reliable, true, and useful. Is science somehow exempt from charlatans, incompetents, or those that would use it for their own ends? Judging something by its worst examples would seem unfortunate.
@Tom:
Not quite sure how you meant this, but hopefully not in the very offensive way it reads. Assuming you didn’t, you are making a false dichotomy. One does not preclude the other. And it certainly need not turn you into a “mindless drone”.
@Tom:
I will note that you are apparently completely convinced that I am totally wrong and you are right. Correct? How is your stance more defensible than mine?
Because you can’t test the behavior of an intelligent, cognizant subject when the subject knows he is being tested. Especially when you have reason to suspect he is of a mind to do everything possible to thward the test. And there exists no way to keep the subject in the dark about the test. The test is neither single nor double blind. The subject chooses not to cooperate. What tool will apply here that will constitute a meaningful test with useful results? Answer: there isn’t one. It is unavailable. The scientific method simply is of no use.
Michael Hipp Says:
> This is the thing atheists seem to have such a hard time grasping
If you promise to not make broad brush statements about atheists, I’ll promise not to do it about Christians. Does that seem fair? I am an atheist, and I fully grasp what you are saying.
> It if were possible to subject my faith or beliefs to scientific inquiry,
I wouldn’t ask you to subject your faith to scientific inquiry. I agree, it would not be appropriate. However, I would suggest that rational reflection would be appropriate, a sentiment which I am sure you agree with.
you tell us that through prayer and fasting you have seen many remarkable and unlikely benefits. Yet, I am sure you will agree that many good prayers from the faithfully devout do not get answered. All around the world, Christians suffer persecution and no doubt cry out to their God for relief, and find none. Innocent children are molested by evil adults, and pray with all their hearts that God would intervene, but he does not. And yet a Christian who has a medical condition, avails himself of modern medical technology, along with his prayer, and when he finds relief gives glory to God rather than the skill of the surgeon, or the effectiveness of the drug.
Imagine, if you will, that I sold a product to you, “JB’s Super Cure All.” This potion works in concert with your mind and mental discipline to bring about healing and wholeness in your life.
Many people who took it, along with medical treatment, and were cured of their ills. Many of them in financial distress found new jobs. Many of them reconciled with their spouses, or quit smoking. Of course not everyone did, in fact, the majority of them followed the same trajectory as those foolish people who did not take my potion. But those fortunate souls who did, gave credit to my potion for their deliverance. The ones who didn’t? Clearly they didn’t have the mental discipline.
Of course my potion was just sugar water, but, still it gets the credit.
The plain fact is that Christians, even “committed” Christians are not, on average, healthier, wealthier, happier, or less prone to suicide than similar groups. They probably are a little bit more so for various reasons, such as having a solid social environment, a hope and an ethical framework, but none of this is anything to do with the intervention of the divine. Muslims have this too, as do the Boy Scouts. So, by any rational analysis, prayer is at best an unreliable help, and more likely a placebo, It is even occasionally dangerous(such as when a person fails to seek medical assistance because they are going to “pray it out”.
If I were going to put my faith in a divine being, I’d prefer to choose one who I could rely on. One who I could depend on to answer my most desperate prayers, assuming these prayers were ethical and reasonable. One who had sufficient compassion to save all the tortured and abused children that beg for his help and mercy, and find instead their prayers were in vain.
But perhaps you are OK with this, the Caprice Des Dieux.
@ Michael Hipp
Sorry, man. Arguing about faith versus science can be entertaining for a bit, but there isn’t the slightest chance that either of us are going to change the other’s point of view.
@Jessica Boxer:
Yes. And where I am guilty, let me be guilty.
Understood … I shall home in on one point, but it seems important.
The fact that Christians suffer and sometimes do not see the answer they wanted may not make us happy, but it is neither unexpected nor unpredicted. In fact if that didn’t happen, it would call into question most everything we believe.
But the point that seems to get missed is this: Christianity is not primarily about our earthly comfort. (Doesn’t mean such isn’t occasionally important, it is just not *the* priority). The divine has made an iron clad unbreakable promise about the end game. The time we mill about on this spinning wet rock is so short as to be inconsequential. The belief is that our efforts and experiences serve a great good and a high purpose. Such has been promised. And based on past history, we have no reason to doubt it.
This explanation is too short, but I hope it sheds some light on the thought process.
Interesting waters this conversation has drifted into. Tying somewhat back to the OP, I’m wondering if this supposedly inexplicable “obliviousness” esr is talking about might be similar to the faith required for religious participation. In other words, maybe there is an inherently irrational part of the mind that needs sprawl into the world somewhere, or else we’ll go completely nuts.
Without launching into some long stemwinder on the damages done by Derrida or postmodernism, I’m curious if whether some of these “bizarre and entertaining” hypocrisies (seemingly rational SOPA opponents like Jeff Read who are nevertheless irrational zealots of Carbon Armageddon) can be explained somewhat by the phrase, “A man needs a little madness.” I would be surprised if the group that opposed SOPA and NDAA but defend Cap and Trade and the millennial junk science that backs it wasn’t mostly composed of athiests. Atheists can’t do the God thing, but they can sprawl their irrational mind into transnationalism, communism and other more mundane but no less irrational faith-based stuff.
It might be a useful model, because then I can see a non-institutional basis for religion: it (might) offer non-harmful outlet for allowing humans to be irrational, which is necessary for our survival. Not any specific kind of religion, mind you: just a sphere of life where it’s okay to think about things irrationally every once in a while. Some people can use art as a similar outlet, and as a painter I’m guessing (hoping?) that this is my version of coping with it.
Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if that isn’t a bit of what esr’s Wiccan practice is about (though I won’t presume).
@Michael Hipp
Well, if it’s so worn out and unconvincing you shouldn’t have any trouble rebutting it.
Actually think about this for a second. Your god, who is perfectly benevolent, and all-powerful could have designed the universe any way he wanted. He chose, deliberately, to create a universe where children die every single day of horrible diseases they can do nothing about. He could have made a universe where this wouldn’t happen. He didn’t.
But, we are told, God is loving, he is perfectly good, and he has a special plan for you. It’s just that in the case of some children the plan is to have them die pointlessly and in pain before they have ever had a chance to live.
A thinking person cannot believe this.
Because I am not making the claim. You are. I’m an atheist, that means I do not have a belief in god. I also don’t have beliefs in vampires, fairies, and the Loch Ness Monster. I don’t need to provide proof to defend my non-belief in those entities, and I don’t need to provide proof for the non-existence of a supernatural space god.
It is possible to construct an infinite number of entities that it is impossible to disprove. What if I have a belief that there is an elephant in my room, but he is very powerful and he does’t want to be found. He can turn himself invisible, he can pass straight through solid matter. He is undetectable by any form of electro-magnetic sensing equipment. We can come up with no test to see if such an elephant really exists. That doesn’t mean we should believe in him!
You can construct an infinite number of those sorts of entities. Yours is called Yahweh. He lives in a magical place called heaven that nobody can see or touch. He speaks to people but we can never hear the conversations. He answers prayers, but every time we try to test for that he knows we are trying to test him and so he stops doing it.
This is called special pleading.
It is only evidence of how ridiculous the theist position is.
>What’s more there is a good logical reason to think that it is impossible for an omnipotent and benevolent being to exist. Just go to your local
>hospital and take a trip to the children’s cancer ward.
To be fair, if you do accept the existence of a greater being with a master plan, then there’s nothing inconsistent about suffering existing, even with a benevolent supreme being. Consider the child who’s parents take away a toy, or ground the child, or tell them that “no, they can’t have a pony”. These sufferings are massive to the child, and very often lead the child to believe their parent indeed hates them (as I’m sure we all said to our parents at one point in our lives), yet older and wiser we know that the suffering served a greater purpose, especially in light of what happens if you shelter your child from all negative consequences (see the OWS movement).
> So, by any rational analysis, prayer is at best an unreliable help, and more likely a placebo, It is even occasionally dangerous(such as when a
>person fails to seek medical assistance because they are going to “pray it out”.
I’ve never understood the people who do this. Let us assume for a moment that there really is a kind and benevolent supreme being who has a master plan for us all. Then it would appear to me that said supreme being placed doctors and modern medicine upon this earth for us to avail ourselves of. Deciding to simply “pray it out” seems to me to be akin to the starving man ignoring all the uncooked and unprocessed food about him, instead begging for someone to buy him a meal from McDonalds (I’m on a roll for the OWS allusions tonight).
@Grantham
I think part of it is that being rational is really hard. It takes a lot of effort to constantly be on guard to possible deception and delusion. Sometimes even the best of us let that guard down.
@tmoney
It’s a flawed analogy.
First of all the parents aren’t omnipotent or omniscient. They didn’t have control over exactly how their child was made. In fact they had no control. If they were all powerful and all-knowing they could have easily created a child who would behave well without being grounded or having toys confiscated.
Second, the parents aren’t raping their children (not the good ones anyway), or giving their children cancer or any of the other untold and unspeakable things that happen to children every day. But God IS. What good is that doing them? Getting raped isn’t a good teaching experience. That’s not going to lead to a better life. And dying of cancer at age 2 isn’t serving a greater purpose. It’s just stupid and cruel.
Michael Hipp Says:
> The time we mill about on this spinning wet rock is so short as to be inconsequential.
Inconsequential? Let me ask you this: had you seen a priest sexually assaulting a ten year old boy in the choir room, would you have intervened? Would you have done everything in your power to help that little boy?
I’ll assume your answer is a very loud YES. So, then, are you a better person than God? Are you more moral, a more reliable defender of children than God?
I don’t think that abused kid’s experience is inconsequential no matter what time horizon you use.
> The belief is that our efforts and experiences serve a great good and a high purpose.
Could you postulate a possible higher good that might have come out of this situation?
Now let me meet you on your own terms. You described yourself as an evangelical fundamentalist. My understanding of the latter term is, one who believes in the plain meaning of the Bible as written, who believes that it is the word or God, *theopnuestos* to use the Paul’s Greek terminology.
As you know, Saul was cast down from his kingship over Israel, the final straw being that he did not carry out the instructions of Samuel against the Amalekites. The instruction was as follows:
Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.(1Samuel 15:3)
Saul failed to carry this out entirely and consequently lost his kingship. So, apparently God was pretty committed to this command. I want you to notice that the instruction was to ensure he killed the children. To make sure it is clear, he used two different Hebrew words for children *olel* and *yanaq*, the latter referring specifically to a sucking child, a baby we would say.
Are you OK with that instruction? Are you sure you want to commit to follow the commands of a God who got really mad when someone didn’t follow through on killing babies at his instruction?
I don’t ask this question out of malice at all. You seem like a rational, moral person. I just don’t see how you can deal the the dissonance between the morals and promises of the Bible, and the reality, readily observable in the world around you.
@ Grantham
I don’t believe individuals have a need to be irrational.
I have pointed out before that experimenting with new ideas by sustenance-level societies can result in everyone starving. Geeks (or hackers or passionate engineers, or whatever you want to call them) have to be a very small proportion of such societies or have very little credibility or the society risks killing itself. So, I am suggesting that sustenance-level societies have a need for “faith” in the received wisdom and a desire to kill or marginalize geeks.
In our society, we have lots of room for experimentation. Geeks are valuable to our society. Irrationality is not.
To people barely scratching out a living in East Africa, geeks are not valuable and faith is.
@Jessica Boxer
Nailed it again.
The belief that our time on Earth doesn’t really matter is one of the most dangerous consequences of religion. It leads people to do extremely immoral things because they are safe in the knowledge that all that matters is the next life.
@ Jessica Boxer
Let’s not forget about hell. Many Christians don’t believe in it but I believe evangelical fundamentalists do. Torture for all of eternity. This is what happens to people who don’t follow the rules – eternal torture is the punishment for being a bad person. God has pretty much made it clear that physical punishment is the way to punish wrong-doing. Many hard-core Christians believe this and beat their children as punishment. You mentioned in one post that you come from Georgia. I spent some time in Alabama. In many cases, what they call “spanking” down there, we call “beating”. A person could even make the argument that beating a child is the best possible favour you can do for them – they need to understand what the penalty for wrong-doing is so they realize how serious the issue of going to hell is.
The Bible is not the best guide to raising a child IMHO.
@Tom:
See response to Jessica Boxer above. If you’d like more I’ll try to oblige.
I’m struggling to remember who might have claimed God to be perfectly benevolent. I don’t think that has been said here or anywhere else.
How, exactly, do you know he chose deliberately to create the universe how it is now? The written record indicates he created it rather differently but it became despoiled by those with selfish or malevolent intent. If I shoot myself up with toxic drugs is that God’s design or did he just provide a universe where I have the option or not to do that?
God has never claimed to be or evidenced Himself to be a puppet master. He allows us to make our own choices and mistakes. Most of humanity’s choices have been, frankly, rather poor.
You do understand that this world is not actually under God’s rule? In his dealing with this ball of rock he has primarily taken the pose of a libertarian – do what you want, accept the consequences.
But I should make one point here: You obviously don’t think much of my God. Fair enough. But the fact that you object to Him does not affect his existence. So is it really that you believe he doesn’t exist or just that you really, really don’t want Him to exist.
You are making a very hate-filled and deragatory comment about a great many people. There are many accomplished, intelligent, educated and fine people who believed in similar fashion. Are you sure you want to say that about all of them?
What claim, precisely, did I make. I claim I believe in God. I didn’t claim you will be convinced.
But you *must* claim there is a naturalistic explanation for *everything*. Correct? It’s a positive assertion. Can you provide proof for that?
You asked why the scientific method was of no use. I answered it. The answer is perfectly in line with the understood problem of attempting to observe behavior when the subject knows he is being observed.
The fact that you don’t like that is it is inapplicable doesn’t change the fact. Did you really believe the scientific method to be applicable to everything? Everything? That nothing could or would ever be found for which it simply didn’t work? Such … uh … faith.
@Brian Marshall
Or even for just not being a Christian! I guess the thousands of people who lived before Christ, or who lived in parts of the world where the news never got through, just never had a chance.
So God deliberately created thousands of people who he knew in advance would end up burning in hell for eternity, and that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.
But don’t forget: he loves us all.
> If I were going to put my faith in a divine being, I’d prefer to choose one who I could rely on.
Unless your preferences have some impact on what kind of divine beings exist….
> But, we are told, God is loving, he is perfectly good, and he has a special plan for you. It’s just that in the case of some children the plan is to have them die pointlessly and in pain before they have ever had a chance to live.
> A thinking person cannot believe this.
Why not? (If you’d written “compassionate” maybe but even that assumes something about the alternatives to “some children get a crappy deal”.)
If you’re going to argue against religion as irrational, your arguments do have to be rational.
Tom:
> The belief that our time on Earth doesn’t really matter is one of the most dangerous consequences of religion.
I partially agree, this is only true with certain kinds of faiths, and also with certain kinds of atheism (like the atheism of Karl Marx).
The problem, as far as I see it, is that radical atheists and radical religious people aren’t that different in terms of their danger, even though the origin of that danger is opposite. The radical religious folk are dangerous because they don’t think that this world matters enough. The radical atheists are dangerous because they think this world matters too much, and therefore go about trying to build utopias here on Earth. After all, if this is all that matters, and all there is, what’s the big deal about starving a few million Ukrainian farmers? If someone sure – one hundred percent positive – there is no God, no afterlife, and no moral structure to the universe, than a certain kind of person can also claim there should be no limits to power. Not every kind of person, mind you; but as I said before, not everyone has an aptitude for science. This already happened a few times with humans. It’s not conjecture; it’s part of our history and (I suspect) part of our nature.
Anyway, the point is that there are lots of happy mediums in between “God is everything, and you must obey” and “God is an cage, and you must free yourself.” I’ve seen many God-fearing people who are perfectly rational in most matters outside of their faith. The main practice of this faith usually coincides with a holiday from the working world (either Friday-Saturday for Jews or Sunday for Christians). It’s interesting to note that these people recognize that, while faith is important, it is not the only important part of life, and that they ought to exercise worldly wisdom as well. They aren’t in church every day. Meanwhile the more radical “faiths” (including the slavish, geopolitical death cult of Islam) seem to want you prostrated on your knees five times a day, or perhaps living in a bunker, or not talking to outsiders, or all of the above. There are degrees and shades of gray in religion, as there are in everything.
@Michael Hipp
Okay. So let’s get this straight. He’s not all-loving. He’s not omnipotent or omniscient. He doesn’t rule the world. He tried to make a good world, but didn’t really do a very good job.
How exactly is this a god?
Does he have *any* good qualities?
So far there is no evidence for anything non-natural beyond the Universe. If such evidence comes to light I will change my mind.
I know that there are intelligent theists. I believe that you are one of them. However, when it comes to their belief in religion I believe that this can only be explained by a lack of rigorous critical thinking. It is possible for intelligent people to compartmentalise their thinking very skilfully so that in some areas they are exceptional rationalists but in others they have a complete failure of reason.
In the specific area of religion they are not thinking. Sorry, but I think that is true. We all have our blind spots, but we should attempt to eliminate them as best we can.
So, what is the difference between my elephant and your Yahweh?
“Hint: there’s also testimonial and documentary evidence that are generally considered more reliable that the scientific fad of the day.”
“I’m not aware of anyone asserting that all documentary or testimonial evidence is reliable, true, and useful.”
@Michael Hipp: Those are both your statements. So…the Christian Bible is reliable, but the Quran isn’t? There are more than a billion people that disagree with you. Maybe *your* documentary evidence isn’t reliable, true or useful. Apparently what’s true is what you believe. (That’s generally how religions work.) That’s OK for you, but the more scientifically minded would like to see repeatable results that always work, no matter who does the experiment.
@ Jessica Boxer
I really shouldn’t have directed my last post at you – I should have directed the points at Michael Hipp. But then it would have made sense to ask him whether he beats his children or spanks them severely with sticks or what. Frankly, I don’t want to know. But I shouldn’t have laid the issue on you. Sorry.
@Grantham
I’m not really sure what you mean by a ‘radical’ atheist. All I mean by an atheist is somebody who lacks a belief in a god. An ‘a-theist’, just like an ‘a-fairyist’. I don’t see how there can be a radical version of that.
There may be some people who want to build utopias and they may by chance be atheists. But there are also plenty of atheists who aren’t utopians (me for example). There really doesn’t seem to be much of a connection. We all want to make our lives on Earth good, but some people (utopians) have a flawed view of how to do that. This flawed view is not a consequence of not having a belief in God. It’s a consequence of having a poor sense of history, politics, humans, and rationality.
Meanwhile there is a *direct* connection between a belief in a religion and not valuing life on earth. If you believe you have a place in heaven forever, and that you have a direct line to God and know what he wants from you, it tends to encourage a dismissive attitude to earthly concerns.
@Michael Hipp
So, God cannot intervene in the world (or just refuses to)?
I take it then that you don’t believe in miracles? And you accept that God never answers prayers?
And I assume that you don’t believe that Jesus performed miracles by healing the sick and all the other stuff he was supposed to have done?
Because that would have been intervening in the world. Right?
@Jessica Boxer:
You seem to be making the mistake of thinking that what happens in this life is the end-all, be-all. We know better. Like you I would do everything in my power to rescue the child and see the “priest” brought to justice. Otherwise, see below…
You are postulating that there is some moral code that is higher than God. Is that not a necessity for your question? Who exactly is to tell God what he must do in any particular situation or that he is wrong or obligated to act. Am I his judge? Shall we report him to the UN? The answers to these questions is that morality is whatever God defines it to be. His game, his rules.
Sure. Easy. Trivially easy. Since you are obviously focused on what happens in this mortal life, I’ll keep it there…
What exactly will the child do with this horrid experience? Perhaps his misfortune will be the one that shines the light on the corrupt organiztion that houses this “priest”. Maybe his misfortune will save countless others. Maybe he will grow up to found a charity for abused children of all types. Perhaps he will start a movement that will sweep through the entire world and become a force to root out corruption and evil in all kinds of places.
Or perhaps the child will die of his injuries shortly afterwards … but his sister will do all these things in his memory.
You’ve never seen good things to come out of horrible things? Really?
And I haven’t even touched on the eternal, which is the more important point.
Yes. A proper label might be something like Literal Biblicist or somesuch.
The first answer is: what does it matter whether I am “OK” with it or not. He’s God, shall I argue with him? I’m just really, really glad I’m not the one to have to carry it out.
Saul’s failing here was just one of many so the decison didn’t really come about because of this one incident, but that’s not particularly material to your question.
A couple of things: 1) That command was given to a specific person at a specific place and time and there is no reason to expect it will ever be repeated in the future, the point being that God evidently had a specific purpose for it. 2) Again, it doesn’t matter what I think. 3) God does what he does for his own reasons and he is never obligated to explain himself to us. That he occasionally does so is icing.
Let’s look at it from God’s perspecive (to the best we can) and try to suppose why he might have given this command. He is trying to lead Israel to be a model nation of people that will be a shining and fearful example to the entire world and that they will be able to evangelize that entire world. The Amalekites are standing in the way of that. And God, with perfect knowledge of the future, knows what they will do. Those precious baby Amalekites will turn into violent, warlike, pagan, idol worshiping full-grown Amalekites (if Tom and Brian’s statistics are correct). So the best Saul can do is eliminate them before they get any worse. Also, by killing them as babies, where do they go: like David’s infant child, they go to be with the father. It’s the best that can be done for them under the circumstances.
Am I thrilled with that solution? Hardly. Is that waht God really wanted. Nope, he told us otherwise many times. Unfortunately, in this world sometimes the best solution still isn’t anything any of us would wish for.
Thank you for the complement. I have tried to answer fully but briefly.
I don’t see the dissonance you speak of. I mean that sincerely and it is not a trite or off-the-cuff answer. I’ve had to think about it many times. Everything we see around us is predicted and predictable. (Read Proverbs.) It’s not how God would have it for us, but we have made our bed. That “priest” above does not do what he does because God told him to or because he read it in the Bible. He does it because he is a selfish, violent, hateful person who is serving the will of his true father (Satan). It’s not what God wants, but he allows us to make our own choices. Sometimes I wish he didn’t.
@Michael Hipp
Okaaaay…
@Michael Hipp
And here’s another horrible thing about belief in God: complete abdication of responsibility for thinking about morality. God says it I do it. No questions asked. Just following orders. If it’s in this old book I found from the bronze age then it is beyond question.
See, when you take moral orders that aren’t open to question we tend to run into a few teeny-weeny little problems.
@Tom:
@Michael Hipp
So why doesn’t he intervene to help a five year old child being gang-raped to death?
He loves that child dearly. He has the power to prevent its suffering. He knows it’s happening. He’s watching it.
And he does nothing.
And this happens every day.
Really. I’m serious. How can you worship such a creature?
@LS:
The Bible, yes. The Quran/Koran I dunno and I’m not particularly motivated to learn Arabic so I can read it.
They also disagree with you. Are you swayed by it?
But’s that’s the deal: it has proven itself to be all those things, time and time again.
We’re in solid agreement, I think, on the utility of science. I just don’t understand why someone would want to limit themselves to one tool when there are others available that give good results in their own space.
It’s a tribute to the quality of these blog posters that this hasn’t turned into more of a food fight than it has. One side posits a non disprovable belief and the other side tries to shoot it down with reason.
@Tom:
This is becoming surreal. But I guess I’ll keep playing along for a while.
I worship him because he is neither the rapist, nor does he condone the rape.
In short, the rape of the child has nothing to do with God so why should it affect my opinion of him. Even if I wish he would always intervene in such things (I do), who am I to tell him what is best? That knowledge isn’t available to me.
Please note also that God has an infallible plan to deal justice to the rapist.
Do you really find it mysterious that he allows us to mostly do whatever we want? Really? It seems perfectly logical to me, even if the result isn’t always pleasant.
Nothing to do with God? Everything is to do with God according to your metaphysics.
He is omnipotent and omniscient. That means he knew to an absolute certainty that this would happen when he created the world. He had the power (he’s omnipotent) to create a world in which this did not happen, but he chose not to. He specifically chose the world with the child rape and the cancer. Specifically and deliberately. This point is inescapable.
I’m sure that’s a great comfort to the child who has just gone through one of the most horrifying experiences imaginable and is now dead. And if he didn’t believe in Yahweh he’s now burning in hell for eternity just to top things off for him.
# Michael Hipp Says:
> You seem to be making the mistake of thinking that what happens in this life is the end-all, be-all.
I do, but I also understand that you don’t.
> You are postulating that there is some moral code that is higher than God.
I’m postulating nothing. I’m saying that any person who can watch a child be molested without taking action is a bad person. You are correct that I do not have a book to tell me that, but what I do have are mirror neurons that allow me to feel the pain of the little boy, and what I do have is a belief that no man has the right to force his penis up the anus of a little boy, again and again and again, until he relieves himself. And what I do have is a visceral reaction when I think of that same priest promising the kid eternal damnation should he speak of the matter. And what I do have is a retching feeling in my stomach when I think of that little boy staggering out the choir room, blood and semen dripping from his anus into his underpants, especially when I consider that that physical injury is the least of his trauma.
And what I do have is a memetically derived belief system, based on all these reactions that tell me that any person empowered to prevent such an outrage who does not act is reprehensible, utterly contemptible. The idea of worshiping such a being, or looking to him for moral guidance, or relying on him for help, or placing my eternal future in his hands is just absolutely ridiculous.
I have no book against which to judge God and his actions in this and many similar matters. Sometimes you don’t need a book.
>It’s a flawed analogy.
More likely I allowed myself to go off on a tangent to get in a jab at OWS rather than make my point correctly. The point wasn’t to say that cancer is a teaching method so much as that if you assume the existence of an all powerful higher being with a plan for everyone, it is the absolute height of arrogance to assume that your particular set of morals and view of the way the world should work is correct and should be applied to that higher being. My point was less about the idea that a god might be teaching us anything so much as if you accept the concept of a higher power, then applying your view of the world on top of the “master plan” and asking why things aren’t going the way you think they should is akin to the child asking why they can’t have another cookie.
>Okay. So let’s get this straight. He’s not all-loving. He’s not omnipotent or omniscient. He doesn’t rule the world. He tried to make a
>good world, but didn’t really do a very good job.
>How exactly is this a god?
Up until roughly 2000 years ago, it was the very definition of most gods. All of the Greek, Roman, Norse, Japanese etc gods were very very flawed creatures. It really wasn’t until the Jewish god (if I’m remembering my religious histories correctly, feel free to correct) that the concept of a benevolent all knowing all powerful singular god came into being.
@Tom:
This point is wrong.
He chose to create us and give us freedom to act. For whatever reason, that suited his purposes. What’s happened after that has been our doing. That he could foresee it and could prevent it is obvious. That such is the better choice isn’t.
What’s inescapable is that you don’t want us to have freedom of choice. So why are you reading a libertarian blog?
If it’s God’s fault that the child got raped, then why would you put the rapist in jail? Surely he is not to blame for God’s failings.
So do you want to be a mere automaton being pushed around by a cosmic puppetmaster or would you rather be somewhat more self-directed? You can’t have it both ways.
Are you familiar with the word ‘hubris’? That’s what comes to mind in reading a guy who thinks he has a better plan for the world than God himself.
@Tom
> I’m not really sure what you mean by a ‘radical’ atheist.
I’m not surprised, because you kind of sound like one. For instance, why is it so important that you ridicule Michael Hipp’s beliefs, or try to convince him to not believe in God? If atheism is simply lack of faith, it shouldn’t matter much to you whether he believes or doesn’t.
But you are correct that not all atheists participate in utopian political movements (and not all religious people don’t). However, they are more likely to, these days, because atheism has spread beyond just a small group of self-examined, philosophical people and those with scientific minds. “Radical atheists” (meaning, for lack of a better word, atheists who feel the need to “prosthelytize” their atheism) are usually also scientific, but probably more likely to gravitate towards the Left, because I think they still want the objective meanings that religious folks get from reading the bible. They don’t just want to be “right” they want to be “good.” And if they are effective propagandists, they will get unscientific people to lose their religious faith, and lots of illogical people who don’t believe in God will want to believe in something. During the 20th century, that something was totalitarianism – The All Powerful State.
Again, it’s not every atheist who becomes a totalitarian (or a tool of one), and you probably won’t. But when I look at some of the most effective viral transmitters of atheism (Hitchens, Dawkins), they were/are hard leftists, as was their philosophical mentor Marx. As was Mussolini. As was Lenin. As was Stalin. Correlation is not causation, but I think that its a stretch to say there is no connection, here. The connection seems quite clear to me, and I am a non-believer myself.
I guess the counter argument might be that the connection between the 20th century villains and atheism was an incremental or evolutionary change, and that “it won’t happen again like that.” On the other hand, how often are the lessons of history given only once?
@Michael Hipp
God can do anything. Anything. That means he could have created a world with free will that did not involve child rape. Couldn’t he? If he can’t then he’s not all-powerful. He’s limited by something.
Whatever the end goal of his cosmic plan is, he could have achieved it without all the crazy shit that happens every day on this planet. Because he can do absolutely anything.
I actually don’t think we have free will. In fact I am fairly confident about it. The universe appears to obey a fixed set of rules. There is randomness at the quantum level, but there is no evidence to suggest that human brains somehow have the power to change the course of events in the universe any more than a rock does.
I don’t believe in god, remember?
The real question is why you would interfere in child rape when you think it is part of God’s brilliant plan.
Tom:
> God can do anything. Anything. That means he could have created a world with free will that did not involve child rape. Couldn’t he? If he can’t then he’s not all-powerful. He’s limited by something.
I am no theologian, I think the common religious answer for that “something” is (or used to be), “the Devil.” In other words, the notion that the metaphysical world is a struggle between two Gods: one Heroic and one Anti-Heroic one. One of the contradictions of Christianity (and of Catholicism specifically) is that notion that the Earth is supposed to be the Devil’s turf – filled with child rapists and murderers and sadists, as well as with the danger that we will all become them if we are not careful. The Devil supposedly has real power here, even bringing about the Apocalypse (presumably not by carbon emissions, but who knows).
Anyway, I think the point was supposed to be that what was being saved by being faithful to God was not the body, but the soul. Something along those lines. God doesn’t save bodies; fireman, cops, Samaritans and other kinds of human heroes do that. God saves souls.
(Or, something along those lines; It’s been a long time since I’ve been to church)
@Tom:
Yes, glad you asked. As best I can tell he is limited by his own word. The Bible also says he cannot lie.
And if you say there is a way for someone to have free choice but not the ability to choose to rape then I’ll take your word for it. I just don’t see how it is possible. If we only have the ability to choose good things, do we really have the ability to choose?
You’re now contradicting yourself. If the rapist has no choice but to rape, why would you consider it a crime. All you have done is posited a material universe that directs every minute detail in place of a god that does same. How is this really different? BTW, can you prove that belief? Is it possibly un-rational? How could a thinking person believe such a thing?
That’s twice in this thread where I’ve observed you seemingly searching for the god that you don’t have.
You’re putting words in my mouth again, down boy.
Again, real slow this time… *people* do bad things. God would prefer they didn’t. It was never his intent that they do so. But he allows them to make their own choices. For better or worse. But even when people do *really* bad things, God can take that evil and turn it into something good. If the people are willing. Sometimes they’re not. It’s their choice.
> If the rapist has no choice but to rape, why would you consider it a crime.
This one is easy. For the same reason you put down a vicious dog, to prevent further commission of the crime. Of course, that presumes your penal system is effective in accomplishing that goal.
@tmoney:
But why do you want to prevent further commission of this? How can it be wrong if it is what the universe ordered? Obviously it must be a good thing if the universe ordered it.
All of you arguing with Michael Hipp are wasting your time. He is insane, in precisely the same way a paranoid schizophrenic is insane.
You can’t talk a paranoid schizophrenic out of being insane, because his mechanisms for belief formation are overridden by his delusional system. That delusional system is anchored deeper in the brain than the parts that do planning and rational thought.
Religious faith is like that, too. You can’t talk people out of it; like paranoid schizophrenics they are infinitely resourceful at defending their delusional systems. The most you can do is take precautions lest they become violent.
@Michael Hipp
Example: yourself.
I assume you have never raped or murdered anybody. And yet you have free will (or you think you do anyway).
So, it’s possible on your account to create people with free will who don’t rape children.
Seems to me like it might have been a good idea for god to have created a few more people like that, and a few less people who rape children.
However, even if I were to accept the free will argument that still does not explain things like cancer. Why would God create a world with cancer? Doesn’t provide free will does it? So what is the purpose here?
Again, God is all powerful, he can do anything, so no matter what his goals are he could have achieved them without cancer.
Exactly. The purpose of a criminal justice system is not moral retribution. It is to ensure a safe and orderly society.
The universe is indifferent. It’s not god. It doesn’t give orders. It just is. Just because a thing happens in the universe doesn’t mean it is good.
@esr
I’m not so sure. I have to believe that it is possible to change minds on this subject. If we have a world full of people who think that anything a supernatural being commands is morally acceptable, even ordering mass murder of children, then we are in trouble.
>If we have a world full of people who think that anything a supernatural being commands is morally acceptable, even ordering mass murder of children, then we are in trouble.
Yes, we are in exactly that kind of trouble. People with minds broken exactly the way Michael Hipp’s is have flown airlines into skyscrapers and are trying to get nuclear weapons. None of this is breaking news. Welcome to reality.
@esr
Oh.
…
Crap.
esr Says:
>All of you arguing with Michael Hipp are wasting your time. He is insane, in precisely the same way a paranoid schizophrenic is insane.
FWIW, I don’t agree. I don’t think it is insanity in the sense of a non functional reasoning system. It is obvious to me that Michael is perfectly capable of rational thought.
The problem really is a tribal thing, it is something that is built into our survival mechanisms. We, social animals that we are, need to have an agreed upon framework of understanding for us to function together as a social group. Michael no doubt has just such a social group. Even were someone to make a case that was utterly compelling to him, the social cost of abandoning his religious belief is gigantic, it involves loosing all of his social relationships, his whole social system, his friends, his beliefs and rationality, possibly his wife and family.
Being rational is useful, but that is a heck of a trade off.
The human mind is a remarkable thing, it can compartmentalize so that one can be an amazing genius in one area, and entirely irrational in another. Our minds can hold both quite well.
Consequently you are right, arguing is futile for changing minds, but it does serve the purpose of exercising our analytical muscles, and give an opportunity to air a discussion on atheism, and I think that is interesting and fun intrinsically.
@esr: No, he is not insane. There are too many people like him to consider them abnormal. What he is is a flat-earther. He has canned arguments against all the common objections to his point of view, and trots them out without really thinking about other people’s points. He deals with the most serious ones by waving them away. I’m rather surprised, though, that none of the house atheists have challenged his main claim that Christianity has proven itself to be a force for good over and over, while its actual record has been rather dismal over the last two millennia. If it really was as good as he says it is, it would have seven billion adherents, not just one – and Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. would be nowhere.
>There are too many people like him to consider them abnormal.
High incidence of smallpox doesn’t make it not-smallpox. High incidence of delusional insanity doesn’t make it other than it is either. Actually, when insanity is common it’s more important to be able to recognize it for what it is – otherwise you may end up enabling it.
@Jessica
>It is obvious to me that Michael is perfectly capable of rational thought.
So is a paranoid schizophrenic, in matters far enough removed from his delusional system.
> People with minds broken exactly the way Michael Hipp’s is have flown airlines into skyscrapers and are trying to get nuclear weapons.
Yeah. From his comments, I’m not sure if Michael Hipp is a dangerous sort of person, or that all religions are dangerous (or equally dangerous), but if homo sapiens are snuffed out, it will probably be due to religious psychos. Either that, or the world’s most powerful and lucid nihilists.
esr Says:
>So is a paranoid schizophrenic, in matters far enough removed from his delusional system.
Hmmh, perhaps I didn’t explain myself well. My point was that there is a special type of rationality here, perhaps one might call it meta-rationality. For this guy, due to his personal circumstances, the net cost of being rational in this area of religious belief is much higher than the net cost of being irrational. And so, in a meta sense, being irrational is the rational choice.
>My point was that there is a special type of rationality here, perhaps one might call it meta-rationality.
The trouble with calling it “meta-rationality” is those creatures who flew jetliners into the World Trade Center. Religious faith, is, as you pointed out, socially supported – but it has extremely dangerous failure modes. That’s why it’s important to recognize it as insanity and call it insanity.
> If it really was as good as he says it is, it would have seven billion adherents, not just one – and Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.
Eh. Islam is plainly worse than Christianity, by every single metric except for size. Not all demographic increases are signals of strength or “goodness”; think of cancers and viruses for examples in nature. Buddhism should yield good results (and has yielded a few in the past), but lately it’s existed in close quarters with the kind of tyranny and crushing of dissent that makes it hard to self-correct, making disaster much more likely. Christianity didn’t do too badly, considering how many of its core premises should make its adherents easy prey for warlords. Luckily for them, the Euro pagans who inherited the faith were fairly warlike themselves at the time, and found a happy middle between Jesus Christ and their more bellicose forest spirits. Onward Christian soldiers, and all that.
Anyway, I tend to think that the fact the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason arose from Christian Europe was a feature, not a bug, though enumerating all the reasons why would take all night (and this ain’t my blog). Yes, there is a lot of irrationality in religion. Faith is by it’s nature irrational. So, you keep your eye on it and try to corral it when you can. Probably best not to outlaw it though. That will just make it more popular, as the commies learned.
On the other hand we have Iran. Holy shit.
>So is a paranoid schizophrenic, in matters far enough removed from his delusional system.
They called it compartmentalization, I suppose. We can be selectively insane and selectively rational.
@Jessica Boxer
> the net cost of being rational in this area of religious belief is much higher than the net cost of being irrational. And so, in a meta sense, being irrational is the rational choice.
Yeah, I get this. It’s a good way of describing it, too: meta-rationality. In other words, he is actually getting the better deal by ignoring certain contradictions and fallacies, even though he has to be irrational to get it. Actually, maybe that would more precisely be described as meta-logic. Hipp gets nothing tangible from Tom by yielding to his (fairly belligerent) arguments, but he gets plenty by sticking to his beliefs. If it’s a form a self-delusion (which I assume), then I’ve seen far more destructive forms in schizoid cases. The crazy guy who plays the invisible guitar near my bus stop doesn’t get anything from his delusions except dirtier, lonelier, sicklier, and closer to death every time I see him. Meanwhile Hipp gets friends, a low cost support system and an easy answer to problems the rest of us sometimes grapple with.
Not saying it’s not “crazy”, but maybe a more logical kind of crazy than the paranoid schizophrenics, who are often completed alienated.
I agree with esr. As I said, no amount of argument using reason is going to affect faith. Once you have been around the loop a few times, and then been drawn into makeing a few more comments, the whole thing gets tedius.
@Jessica
“And what I do have is a memetically derived belief system, based on all these reactions that tell me that any person empowered to prevent such an outrage who does not act is reprehensible, utterly contemptible.”
While I do think your conversation with Michael is the most interesting one, I don’t find this line of argumentation convincing. This is the old problem of evil in the world and the analogy to children being taken their toys away does provide a consistent answer. The answer coincidentally agrees with utilitarian ethics – if you care about the total sum of happiness, then assuming afterlife, clearly whatever happens here is of no significance whatsoever. And, using Eric’s definition if I recall it correctly, nothing can even be perceived as torture, given there are no permanent effects (the assumption that trauma would disappear in afterlife seems only reasonable). So I doubt you can derive a contradiction from the belief in eternal afterlife, an omnipotent benevolent being and suffering on Earth, assuming no hell.
Note also that the belief in the supremacy of the literal truth of the Bible is actually free from the problem organized religions have, which is that your church’s leaders can ask for a new crusade or two.
>The trouble with calling it “meta-rationality” is those creatures who flew jetliners into the
>World Trade Center. Religious faith, is, as you pointed out, socially supported – but it has
>extremely dangerous failure modes. That’s why it’s important to recognize it as insanity and
>call it insanity.
Any social tribe with enough desperation / frustration and the right instigators has extremely dangerous failure modes. Religion happens to be a common historical one (owing largely I would guess to it’s natural tendency to require leaders and followers) but it certainly isn’t the only. The political left of the US would argue that national pride is another such thing, and offer the Iraq wars as such an example. You could also point to any of the communist purges of the last century. At an even smaller level, you could look at the LA riots after both King and just about every sporting event. Or the riots in Greece. Religion is simply a vector for those who would instigate to do their work, and I think even with out religion, we as a social species would find a similar structure to replace it.
>Religion happens to be a common historical one (owing largely I would guess to it’s natural tendency to require leaders and followers) but it certainly isn’t the only.
Paranoid schizophrenia isn’t the only form of clinical insanity, either. That doesn’t make it sane.
I’m no fan of religion, but I am not sure it deserves, in this thread or in society at large, the criticism that attacks on civilian targets as characteristically religious. It smacks of “it can’t happen here” — finding comfort in somehow dehumanizing perpetrators of an atrocity by drawing a line that they lie outside of, the better to avoid uncomfortable thoughts about whether the groups we are more closely aligned with could do such things. As I read the history, just thinking of things as war is a sufficient condition for bringing groups of people to enthusiasm for attacks on civilians; no religion is necessarily involved unless you define religion so broadly that it includes not just modern strains of nationalism but stuff like the animating culture of the Romans, the Vikings, and various tribes in North America, New Guinea, and elsewhere. And being in a desperate underdog position can naturally make it worse (and conversely being in some kinds of overwhelmingly superior position can also make it worse): various pragmatic reasons to limit atrocities apply only if you anticipate being in a repeated game where your opponents in future rounds will react to your conduct in previous rounds.
There was and still is considerable popular and intellectual support for huge attacks on civilians whose sin was to be ruled by Hitler or Hirohito. And many of the attacks in Japan were after any reasonable existential fear that the rise of the Axis could doom the USA or its allies; they were intended to hasten the Japanese transition from “can’t we negotiate some settlement” to complete unconditional surrender. I don’t see the need to invoke characteristic properties of religion (either all religion, or a religion) to explain blowing up skyscrapers when secular war priorities are such a widely accepted reason for blowing up entire cities.
In particular, when ESR writes “religious faith, is, as you pointed out, socially supported – but it has extremely dangerous failure modes,” I’d patch that with s/religious faith/’this is war’/.
>I’m no fan of religion, but I am not sure it deserves, in this thread or in society at large, the criticism that attacks on civilian targets as characteristically religious.
They aren’t “characteristically religious”, no. But I don’t think that observation is responsive to anything on this thread. The fact that secular wars generate attacks on civilian targets is not relevant to whether or not religion should be considered a form of delusional insanity. And your observation does little to challenge my risk assessment either – you can’t argue that because atropine (war) is poisonous, strychnine (religion) is less poisonous.
The argument isn’t that because one is poisonous, that the other one is, but rather the poison is as of yet unidentified. If one eats raw hamburger and gets sick and one eats raw chicken and gets sick, you don’t say “Just because you get sick from chicken doesn’t make hamburger any less of a poison, because the hamburger (even raw) is not the actual cause of the sickness.
>The argument isn’t that because one is poisonous, that the other one is, but rather the poison is as of yet unidentified.
But we’re not starting from that position of symmetrical ignorance. The poison (or a poison) has been identified. We already know from observing insanity of kinds no one thinks of as religious that (as Goethe put it) the sleep of reason begets monsters. We don’t have to guess that when religion puts reason to sleep it will beget more, or find that mysterious when that happens. The fact that there are other ways to beget monsters doesn’t affect the logic.
Now, if you want, you can say it’s the insanity that’s the problem, not the religion. But that’s just arguing about the labels on the map, not the territory. To the extent that religion causes insanity, saying “insanity is the problem” is actually a maneuver for evading the truth.
And one of the things we know about Abrahamic religions is that they don’t merely cause insanity, they actively want to cause insanity. That is, they want to induce in human beings a state in which questioning the faith premises is impossible, and reason sleeps.
Adding on, that isn’t to say you couldn’t make a good argument that you should avoid religion for the same reason you avoid raw meats, because while they aren’t the cause, they go hand in hand with the sickness quite often, but that’s a much different claim from the raw meat itself is what causes you to get sick.
“They called it compartmentalization, I suppose. We can be selectively insane and selectively rational.”
It’s just another case of Ponella’s Law: ‘People are smart and stupid at the same time.’
No, idiot! God made the world absolutely perfect in every way. YOU screwed it up. You and me and… everybody. The second law of thermodynamics exists because of Adam’s original sin, in which you are complicit and of which you are therefore partly culpable. Oh, and that’s why you will eventually die, too; and when you do you will suffer your share of the eternal torment that God demands as payment for breaking His world. The only way out — the ONLY way — is to join OUR cult and form a pact with OUR godman and obey OUR laws.
It would be funny if it weren’t so poisonous.
In defense of god as a concept (i’m and atheist leaning agnostic if it matters), would you consider me to be omnipotent with regards to the electrons in a ball I hold in my hands? I can reliably move the ball as a whole around any way I like, which will move that atom as well. I can push on it easily, and with the proper tools, I can even manipulate individual molecules, but the truly fine grain is beyond me.
Omnipotent and omniscient are not well defined terms. It seems plausible to me that if there is a creator, it may be able to set a universe in motion with defined constraints, but it can’t eliminate all chance and can’t reliably manipulate individual people, nor observe them without affecting the setting in unforseen ways. Perhaps without the possiblity of child cancer, there is no way to create self replicating conscious beings at all. JC could have been an attempt to use the metaphorical equivalent of nanotech with unintended consequences.
@phlinn
You’re making the mistake of trying to imagine an omnipotent entity within the bounds of our contingent universe. The whole point of God is that he is outside the universe, unbound by its laws or by any laws. Chance, the heisenberg uncertainty principle, logic itself; all these mean nothing to an omnipotent being outside of time and space.
A truly omnipotent entity could simply conjure self-relicating conscious beings out of thin air, fully realised at inception (and, actually, that is almost exactly what the bible tells us God did, except he didn’t use thin air, he used dust – just because he could, I suppose). If the entity cannot do that then it is not omnipotent.
>We already know from observing insanity of kinds no one thinks of as religious that (as Goethe
>put it) the sleep of reason begets monsters. We don’t have to guess that when religion puts
>reason to sleep it will beget more, or find that mysterious when that happens.
And yet there are millions of people the world over who are or claim to be religious and beget no monsters at all. Thus my argument that religion is the conduit, not the cause. Saying that getting rid of religion in people would put an end to these monsters seems very much akin to the argument gun control proponents make about guns.
>And yet there are millions of people the world over who are or claim to be religious and beget no monsters at all.
That’s false. The obvious nutcases don’t come out of nowhere; the “good” Muslims beget the violent jihadis; the “good” Christians beget our violent fundamentalists too. They’re the transmission belt, the culture medium, the precondition. Their quiet insanity nurtures the violent insanity.
“High incidence of smallpox doesn’t make it not-smallpox. High incidence of delusional insanity doesn’t make it other than it is either. Actually, when insanity is common it’s more important to be able to recognize it for what it is – otherwise you may end up enabling it.”
No, there are symptoms that can rather objectively diagnose smallpox. Delusional insanity is much harder. You have to be much more cautious about that one, lest you end up abusing psychiatry like the Soviets did with their dissidents.
There are so many closed belief systems in the world, where people find comfort in the thought that all is known, and they just have to ‘follow the script’ and stay inside the ‘system’ to do good (Marxism is one), that you cannot call their billions of adherents ‘insane’. There definately seems to be a ‘god ghost’ in our genome. It’s unfortunate that it’s inevitable that there will always be some outliers in the tail of the distribution that think they should blow other people up in the service of their god.
>Delusional insanity is much harder.
But not that hard. Not when you’ve got jihadis telling us they’re willing to blow up a streetful of strangers for Allah. It’s not even very difficult to diagnose in the Michael Hipps of the world. Not when you can actually see by their own representations of their thinking that their belief-maintainance mechanisms are horribly broken – they’re not only stuck in an irrationalist mode, they actually trumpet it as a virtue.
Have you ever actually dealt or talked with someone who is committably insane? I have. The behavioral differences from a Michael Hipp talking about religion are not large. There’s the same creepy aura that the words are a thin mask over something tumorous and fixated and pre-verbal, and ultimately don’t matter at all.
After almost 500 comments, back to the OP! Instapundit linked to this:
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/sopa-an-architecture-for-censorship/
…pretty much covers it…
@esr
Exactly. It’s the taboo against directly criticising religion that enables the real crackpots, the ones who actually take religion seriously. The less seriously you take your religion the less dangerous you are personally, but you’re still making the world safe for jihadis because you are stopping public discourse from ridiculing the insanity of religion the way it needs to be ridiculed.
> if homo sapiens are snuffed out, it will probably be due to religious psychos.
Based on what evidence?
If we count bodies, communism has lapped the field.
It’s interesting that the self-proclaimed rationalists are arguing that religion is bad because of certain outcomes while ignoring other mental artifacts that are even worse by those criteria, artifacts that don’t seem to share religions benefits.
So much for “rationality”.
>If we count bodies, communism has lapped the field.
That is true. Why do you consider it not to be a religion, though? Merely because it says so?
>That’s false. The obvious nutcases don’t come out of nowhere; the “good” Muslims beget the
>violent jihadis; the “good” Christians beget our violent fundamentalists too. They’re the
>transmission belt, the culture medium, the precondition. Their quiet insanity nurtures the
>violent insanity.
This sounds and awful lot like saying Palin’s rhetoric contributed to the Giffords shooting to me.
It also seems to ignore that (at least from what I have gleaned over the years, though I readily admit I’ve not done any specific research into it) the “obvious nutcases” are usually very far from the ideal prescribed by their claimed religion, similar to suicide bombers who go get themselves drunk and hang out in strip clubs. Again, it seems to me religion is the conduit, not the cause.
>This sounds and awful lot like saying Palin’s rhetoric contributed to the Giffords shooting to me.
So? The claim about Palin’s rhetoric was wrong, but it was contingently so rather than essentially so.
Religions – the faith-centered Abrahamic kind – aren’t just any random belief systems. They have important structural features that make people bugfuck crazy. “Credo quia absurdum” – that may be the most important one, the elevation of irrational belief fixation as a virtue.
esr Says:
>That is true. Why do you consider it not to be a religion, though? Merely because it says so?
That sounds like the opposite of the true Scotsman fallacy.
Only true Scotsman wear kilts!
But Billy, he’s from Alabama, and he wears a kilt!
Ah, but that is because, despite the accent, Billy is really a Scotsman.
I have to disagree about Communism being a religion. Both the Communists in the USSR (and its knockoffs) and those in the West are not operating out of true belief. They are just selfish, evil people. When you call them a “religion” you’re letting them off the hook.
That also causes people to misdiagnose the problem. We spent roughly three decades of the Cold War acting as if the Soviets were misguided idealists and trying to prove that we were almost as nice as they were. It was only when the Reagan administration said “Fuck that” and started treating them as the monsters they were that we managed to halt their advance and bring them down.
The same goes for leftists in America. When Al Gore and Arianna Huffington fly in private jets to Kyoto conferences, Republicans always assume that they are politically tone-deaf. They are most emphatically not. They are deliberately shoving their wealth in people’s faces, saying, “Look at what you can’t have, punk.” We need to stop acting as if they are good people and start treating them as the low-life street trash they are.
>Both the Communists in the USSR (and its knockoffs) and those in the West are not operating out of true belief. They are just selfish, evil people. When you call them a “religion” you’re letting them off the hook.
You’ve, perhaps inadvertently, smuggled in a premise that these two models (“selfish, evil people” and “true belief”) are somehow mutually exclusive. Question that premise.
You can call communism a religion, or not, depending on your definition of religion.
The real point is that it is based on a dogma. Its believers are not permitted to question certain central articles of faith. This is what leads to bad outcomes, whether they are articles of faith from a God or from a political ideology.
Supernatural dogmas like Christianity are just one species of dogma, but in my view they are especially pernicious for a several reasons.
First of all they are beyond refutation because their central metaphysical claims are inherently non-natural. They form a closed belief system. In contrast it eventually becomes obvious to everybody that communism is a flawed idea.
Second, they enjoy a special sacrosanct place in society. It’s not considered polite to criticise a religion even if you completely disagree with it. You’re supposed to ‘respect’ these crazy beliefs.
Finally religion strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a responsible full-realised moral and autonomous human being. It enslaves its believers to an eternal celestial dictatorship (in Hitchens’ words) that does not even end with death. There is always a sky god watching and judging everything you do, and you are not allowed to make moral choices for yourself.
>The real point is that it is based on a dogma. Its believers are not permitted to question certain central articles of faith. This is what leads to bad outcomes, whether they are articles of faith from a God or from a political ideology.
Exactly. This is what I mean by the mechanism of belief maintainance being broken or deranged. This is the insanity.
It is perfectly possible to have the epistemological derangement characteristic of faith-based religions without the “religious” belief content. Communism (more generally, Marxism) is the genocidal existence proof of this. Arguing over whether it’s a “religion” or not actually misses the point – it’s another scrap over map labels rather than territory.
“We spent roughly three decades of the Cold War acting as if the Soviets were misguided idealists and trying to prove that we were almost as nice as they were. It was only when the Reagan administration said “Fuck that” and started treating them as the monsters they were that we managed to halt their advance and bring them down.”
False. We maintained a containment policy for those decades that allowed communism to eventually fall due to its own internal contradictions. Reagan just happened to be in office when it happened. He simply harvested the fruits of a lot of hard work by a lot of dedicated people over 30 years. It’s still not over. We are still experiencing blow-back from things we did in that struggle, notably in Afghanistan and Iran.
The strategy is the same against Islamic fundamentalism; “Hold on, hold on, this too, will pass.”
It is my belief that the root of many evils is the predilection for humans to label folks as “other”. Whether it is esr labeling Michael as “insane” or Ken labeling people leftist and low life street trash (who travel in private jets no less. Nifty, where do I sign up?) or nazis labeling jews as Untermensch or jihadists labeling people as infidels it all results in the same thing. Those people are Other. They are insane. They are dangerous. They are evil and therefore deserve of anything bad that may happen.
So religion, nationalism, conservatism, communism or whatever isn’t the root cause of pain and death inflicted by humans on humans. The root cause is our ability and even eagerness to label people as Other. This is hardly a profound or original thought but it’s interesting that even among a group of mostly intelligent folks we run around and happily label folks we disagree with as Other even in this topic.
Both hilarious and sad. Tragic when that instinctual labeling of people being in my tribe vs being in another tribe results in the truly insane or truly evil believing they have the moral imperative to revel in their insane compulsion to harm be directed toward those Others and can convince everyone else to go along with it. Then you end up with the inquisition, genocide, mass rape and torture and other atrocities.
>It is my belief that the root of many evils is the predilection for humans to label folks as “other”.
Not only does this fail to be a profound or original thought, it fails to be even a meaningful one. It’s pure pablum, a soothing feel-good noise with no content.
>You’ve, perhaps inadvertently, smuggled in a premise that these two models (“selfish, evil people” and “true belief”) are somehow mutually exclusive. Question that premise.
I’m well aware that many religious people are selfish and evil. It is not the religion that drives their evil, however. It is their own selfishness. People don’t murder people because some invisible spirit tells them to.
It may sound like I’m defending religion, but actually I’m defending apathy about religion. Frankly, the premise I question the most is the idea that there’s some “God gene” at all, or at least that it’s particularly strong if it exists. Do you think Lavrentiy Beria was acting from religious fervor when he drove down the streets of Moscow and picked up young women to rape and murder? For that matter, do you think the self-proclaimed socialists in the streets of Wisconsin are acting out of belief, as opposed to the desire to keep the gravy train flowing?
For every fundamentalist Christian who wants to execute all gays, there are probably ten Bill Maher supporters who want to ban handguns because only Christofascist rednecks with small cocks have them. No, it isn’t rational, but it’s not because of religious belief either.
> If we count bodies, communism has lapped the field.
I wasn’t counting bodies, I was talking about the big wipeout, where we go the way of the dodo and the dinos. Part of the reason we were able to stalemate the Soviets with M.A.D. despite the fact we were collectively sitting on enough nukes to blow the world to smitherens was because, as Ken noted above, the communists were “evil” but not totally irrational or insane. They didn’t want to get blown up; we didn’t want to get blown up. Therefore, we didn’t blow up.
I don’t trust religious zealots (and particularly Muslim zealots). Pakistan is sometimes bandied about as a Muslim counterexample with nukes, but there are certain other rational cultural institutions that make them slightly less likely to commit mass suicide/homocide by starting a nuke war. I hope those other factors hold up.
The bigger threat is Iran, and we are all in serious trouble if they can weaponize nukes, even without ICBMs or second strike. There might be a few semi-rational actors and opportunist scattered through the middle ranks, but at the very top, they are stone-cold religious psychos who glorify violent death, including their own
Other types of monsters loom on the horizon as well. That’s why I mentioned “powerful and lucid nihilists”. I’m not thinking of crackpots and cranks like Derrida or Paul de Man. I’m thinking of what comes after all the premises have vanished that allows us to realize they are crackpots and cranks (i.e. after the Left has finished its project of obliterating meaning). You might get another type of animal altogether; small stage actors who try, for instance, might to manipulate human biology in ways that are hard to see until its too late. I recall reading about a radical environmental group a few years back that was calling for forced chemical sterilization to rid the world of the “scourge” of humanity. Talk about Nietzche’s “Last Man!” Sheesh.
Anyway, both kind of loons are terrifying prospects, but for right now the most terrifying loons are religious in nature, and are trying to get nukes. It needs to be addressed, but I have a feeling if we don’t act, the Israelis will.
@Grantham
The whole Iranian nuke thing makes no sense to me at all. Why would they want a nuke? They must know that before they would be allowed to use it the US and Israel would destroy their capacity to do so and then completely annihilate the existing regime.
To me an Iranian nuke would be suicide.
What does make sense to me is that the Iranian regime is looking for respect, both internally and externally. We’re paying a lot of attention to them because it looks like they are going through the motions of developing nuclear weapons technology. However, for them to actually build one seems crazy to me.
>The whole Iranian nuke thing makes no sense to me at all. Why would they want a nuke?
To wipe Israel off the map with, of course. Well, that’s what the Iranian leadership says it’s for, and I don’t see any reason to suppose they don’t mean it.
Tom Says:
> To me an Iranian nuke would be suicide…
> However, for them to actually build one seems crazy to me.
And your point is?…
@esr
I know that’s what they say, but do you think they’ll ever be allowed to get to the point where they would be able to do that?
It seems obvious to me that if they ever get close to the point of realising a bomb they will be stopped, with existential consequences to the regime.
Why would they invite such certain doom?
> The most you can do is take precautions lest they become violent.
I disagree.
Even if Jessica is not able to change Michael’s mind (which I agree is highly unlikely) her very well written arguments (and yours, and Christopher Hitchen’s, and Sam Harris’s…) are exactly what some people need to read. Everyone is not as set as Michael seems to be. Many are on the fence or are in the process of un-indoctrinating themselves after being taught by everyone that they trusted growing up that these stories are true. Even if she is not able to make a dent in his thinking, her debating with him, in public, has the potential to prevent others from falling so far.
Tom:
> To me an Iranian nuke would be suicide.
To you. Or to me, or to esr, or to all (most?) of the people on this thread. But to the Ayotollahs? It is holy flame for the infidels. More people in the West need to read the Koran, and discover what all this business is really about.
> They must know that before they would be allowed to use it US and Israel would destroy their capacity to do so and then completely annihilate the existing regime.
Why must they know that? Because they are rational actors? I think that’s partially what this conversation is about. Also, I suspect that they suspect (in whatever tiny portion of their mind is rational) that we won’t wipe them out. They look upon the West with scorn and contempt for the absurd deference we show their viral slave cult, and see us as sniveling weaklings who God would never let win even if we could muster the will to wipe them out.
Also, if the attitude is “nothing bad will happen if we don’t intervene”, we all know form history that this is rarely true. Even the setting off of one nuke in the Middle East will drag the entire world into a hellacious new world war.
Tom:
> Why would they invite such certain doom?
Because they are crazy.
@Grantham
Yeah, that’s definitely one possibility.
@esr Your religion is open source. Mine perhaps is Apple. :) I joke but your hostile response to my assertion that humans desire to classify, specifically to classify as being in my tribe/family or not as being mere plabum is amusing given the daily examples of such all over the internet. Over clearly ridiculous things as software licenses as a defining characteristic of Good and Evil.
Do you not believe that there are open source zealots that would cherish the notion of someone killing Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer? Over the belief that Free is the one true path and Closed is Evil? No guts to do it themselves but would rave and cheer on internet forums if it happened? Because, of course, they are Evil.
Every aspect of human interaction is overlaid by these classifications of race, gender, caste, religion, tribe, social group etc. It is seldom that we systematically inflict atrocities on those we classify as the same as ourselves even as result of dogma gone wild.
Your vehement lashing out at folks you consider “other” in this forum is every bit as rational as a belief in some otherworldly entity. I guess I’m off your Christmas list for pointing that out. :)
>@esr Your religion is open source.
Since someone else has quoted this, I’m going to have to point out that it is not true. I have, on a few occasions, advised people not to open-source their software. The economic circumstances in which this advice makes sense are rare, but they do exist – and the fact that I recognize this not only in theory but in actual practice pretty much disposes of the notion that open source is my religion.
We know what someone with a religious/moralistic attachment to open source looks like. Don’t confuse me with RMS; it would only amuse me, but it would annoy him considerably.
>>If we count bodies, communism has lapped the field.
>That is true. Why do you consider it not to be a religion, though? Merely because it says so?
The cheap answer is that communism lacks a supreme being and/or otherworld.
The expensive answer is that “communism is a religion” is (usually) a discussion blackhole. (The exceptions consist of “yes it is”.) Since the meaningful consequences of “communism is a religion” can be arrived at by other means, there’s no point in getting sucked into it.
> >You’ve, perhaps inadvertently, smuggled in a premise that these two models (“selfish, evil people” and “true belief”) are somehow mutually exclusive. Question that premise.
> I’m well aware that many religious people are selfish and evil.
You missed the point – there are lots of true believers who aren’t religious at all (unless you define “religious” as “true believer”) and many of them manage to be evil as well. (Some are also selfish, but that’s the least of their sins.)
>People don’t murder people because some invisible spirit tells them to.
Actually, they do. They also murder people because said people wear glasses, looked at the wrong girl, didn’t want to hand over crops, didn’t support the supreme leader, and so on.
People murder for a large number of reasons.
That said, it’s the true believers who rack up the bodies.
> > If we count bodies, communism has lapped the field.
> I wasn’t counting bodies, I was talking about the big wipeout, where we go the way of the dodo and the dinos.
You’re ignoring the “humans are a disease” folk.
The Iranians have said “we’re willing let a lot of Muslims die to wipe out the Jews”, but they do want to have Muslims around after the Jews are gone. The “humans are a disease” folk want a world without people.
s/ignoring/underestimating/
> We maintained a containment policy for those decades that allowed communism to eventually fall due to its own internal contradictions. Reagan just happened to be in office when it happened.
Not at all. Yes, there was a containment policy but “everyone” knew that the Soviets were still “sound as a dollar”.
> He simply harvested the fruits of a lot of hard work by a lot of dedicated people over 30 years.
Yes, lots of folks worked hard but the standard theory said that the Soviets would be around for decades more, that it was folly to push them in the 80s.
In hindsight, you can argue that someone could have pushed the USSR over the cliff during the Carter years, but Carter couldn’t have even tried.
@ BPSouther
The problem is faith. A person is told what to believe, and they… believe it. It almost always starts when the person is a child, possibly with some serious suffering to help the child internalise faith at a sub-verbal level. In any case, if a person’s brain does put faith over reason, the person is (as esr points out) insane. One result is that, no matter what the argument, it is impossible to use reason to change the faith.
The people that just casually believe in a god, maybe go to church, maybe not, but just casually accept a religion without really even learning much about it, are, like so many people, mental sheep, going along with the program. For a human to think like a sheep is insane.
I have little patience with agnostics. What is the problem? You are being asked to believe something on faith, which is nuts. Whether a god exists is an extremely important question, deserving some thought. If you are not insane, you should reject anything that is offered on the basis of faith.
I remember sitting in Sunday School when I was about 10. I asked the teacher, in all good faith (different meaning of the word) approximately “Why do you believe this? How do you know that it’s true?” She said “When you are older, you will understand.” I was a little sceptical, but thought “OK, fine, we’ll see.”
I remember walking around a (church) parking lot one evening when I was 11 or 12, waiting for my buddy to come out of a Scouts meeting, and it all of a sudden hit me. Each of the people that believe in god believes it because their parents do! That explains it – why so many people believe in god! THERE IS NO GOD!!! It was a great feeling.
Two problem with politely arguing with a truly religous person about faith is that argument will never change their minds and, if you pursue it long enough and say what you feel, you have to be very rude. Eventually you have to say::
and
> You’re ignoring the “humans are a disease” folk.
No I’m not. You’re ignoring what I wrote about “powerful and lucid nihilists,” where I specifically wrote about the “humans are a disease” folk. But they are neither particularly powerful or lucid enough yet to be a threat, and there’s a chance they are just indulging in a little Weltschmerz, anyway. They have the same kind of shattered glass mindsets as the nihilists though; nothing we do is any good, we might as well die.
> Eventually you have to say::
>>You are nuts! (as did esr)
Actually, I’m pretty sure that was esr’s opener. :)
> Actually, I’m pretty sure that was esr’s opener. :)
That is true. :)
In my case, I had one polite round with Michael, and my second reply, at 3:25 yesterday afternoon, began:
But I went on to make a couple of points, and was drawn into making a few more posts until 6:39 pm when I posted:
It just ain’t no use.
Andy Freeman writes “You’re ignoring the ‘humans are a disease’ folk.”
Maybe those folk, or at least that particular claim, should be ignored. Hasn’t ignoring claims that “the state will wither away’ been a pretty good policy? I don’t know much about Communism in the West before the 1930s, but by the 1930s it seems to have strongly coalesced around the idea that a lot of levers of power, including ghastly new ones created for the purpose (like controls on exit), explicitly should be controlled by party faithful, and that control should be used to grossly favor the other party faithful. It seems to me that this idea had much more of an impact on the party faithful than anticipating that the state would wither away. Looking at the drive for such levers of power, and the weird apologetics for them, seems to me much more useful than looking at rhetoric about how it’s all really in pursuit of a self-denying end state.
Granted, the two themes aren’t entirely analogous: ‘humans are a disease’ could make a catchy rationale for selective application in the here and now to exterminate one’s enemies, while I don’t think ‘the state will wither away’ has any such tactical use in pursuit of the usual goals of ambitious humans. But to me both themes seem to be mostly windy rhetoric about the safely unverifiable far-off outcome which justifies seizing (and introducing new) levers of power now.
Short answer: a person uses reason. A person has faith.
My last line should have said: There just ain’t no use.
One problem with (the insane idea) that “Humans are a disease” is that it leads to “roads into wilderness are damage that has to be repaired”, which I consider to be a particularly evil idea.
> The Iranians have said “we’re willing let a lot of Muslims die to wipe out the Jews”, but they do want to have Muslims around after the Jews are gone.
This is not correct. I think this is the kind of dangerous illusion that makes me want the Qu’ran to be required reading in high school. They are an eschatology, just like Christianity, but their apocalypse scenario has even less escape hatches than the Book of Revelations. For instance there’s not a large number of signs and signals and events to be divined forecasting it’s arrival, and there’s no archenemy like the Antichrist to make the first moves and set the game into motion (which I suspect might have been added, either consciously or unconsciously, as a subtle safeguard in Revelations, so that whoever starts the endgame is the bad guy).
In the Islamic version, there are no signs or breakifs. The Twelfth Imam (the Madhi) emerges from hiding, Jesus parachutes down from heaven, and they just start kicking ass all over the place at a time of God’s choosing, unknowable to man. Whoever declares himself to be the Mahdi and starts the chain of events leading to Apocalypse is the hero of the story, not the villain. The more Muslims who die in this final battle the better, because death in this battle gets them their 72 chicks and their special Allah boy scout badges and whatnot, and everyone must die first anyway so that the Day of Resurrection can take place.
It’s hard to believe that sensible atheists are still engaged in uselessly critiquing Christianity, when virulent, theocratic Christianity has been defanged for a few hundred years now, and there aren’t any fundie Christian regimes with their hands on nukes. Hitchens finally realized this late in life, and his buddies on the Left pilloried him for it and turned him into an outcast, because they have all either become mindless nihilists or part of a growing, suicidal Kool Aid Cult of the West.
Here’s the big danger: Lots of crackpots have jumped up claiming to be the Madhi throughout history, but those guys did not have the tools at their
disposal to actually kick-start Armageddon. In our lifetimes, we might see one who does.
“Yes, lots of folks worked hard but the standard theory said that the Soviets would be around for decades more, that it was folly to push them in the 80s.”
I don’t remember any ‘standard theories’ like that at the time (“Vas you dere, Charlie?”). What I do remember was an increase in military spending that put some pressure on the Soviets, but mostly, the decision to abandon communism was THEIRS. Brezniev wasn’t man enough to it, but Gorbachev was. We’ve been talking about religious fanatics; this is no time for Ronald Reagan cultists.
@Tom All the persians I’ve met have been intelligent and really nice folks. Do not assume that folks we classify as “evil” to be idiots.
Neither Ahmadinejad nor Khamenei nor the Supreme National Security Council are fools, crazy or suicidal. They have no more desire to die (or their people to die) from nuclear fire than anyone else which would be the result of nuking Tel Aviv. Any rhetoric is simply that and directed toward a specific audience. To assume that the country of Iran is not a rational actor is idiocy based on an unsupported prejudice of “other”.
Fatwa or not against nuclear weapons everyone (including Iranians) understands that nations with nuclear weapons (or even the suspicion of) enjoy a certain status that those without do not. Pakistan would be inconsequential without it. North Korea plays that card incessantly to their advantage.
To ask why Iran would want nuclear weapons is stupid. To respond with “to nuke Israel” even more so.
Iran wants to have it’s cake and eat it too just like Israel with it’s “suspected nuclear capability”. Hence the Fatwa against nuclear weapons and why everyone still thinks they have an active nuclear weapon program. Whether they have any sort of operational capability is debatable but everyone seems to think they are close if not quite there yet. Having nuclear weapons is a big “don’t fuck with me” card that Iran would love to have in it’s hand all the while denying its existence. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
Personally, I think they’re playing the external game a little poorly. It’s inevitable that they get the bomb but a lot more livable with someone like Khatami as President than Ahmadinejad. But internal politics often forces sub-optimal play. It’s allowing someone to get a few punches in they otherwise might not have. Letting the mob storm the British embassy is an interesting move. It’s not like the UK is going to do anything substantive to Iran and internally it offsets the rather obvious point that someone is blowing up some of their most secure facilities and their most senior generals.
> It’s hard to believe that sensible atheists are still engaged in uselessly critiquing Christianity, when virulent, theocratic Christianity has been defanged for a few hundred years now, and there aren’t any fundie Christian regimes with their hands on nukes.
I wouldn’t be so quick to make that claim.
“Defanged” implies a permanent change. A lot of others see it [the virulence] more as a disease in remission.
Right wing fundamentalist Christianity in the US looks a lot different, to me, than it did 25 years ago. It’s become much more outspoken and demanding. It’s also become much more involved in our political system.
I think a constant, and public critique is far from useless.
@LS Reagan’s play of increasing Saudi oil production to tank Soviet income was masterful regardless of what you thought of the man. As many folks tend to underestimate the guy as idolize him. The deals to Israel and the Saudis were fantastic deals for everyone involved even though it didn’t cost us much and really put the hurt on the Soviets.
@ BPSouther
I agree – fundamentalist Christians are dangerous, and the more powerful they are, the more dangerous they are.
Re Reagan: he didn’t cause the fall of the Soviet Union but he played the endgame very well for the US.
Re Defanged Christianity: to many we are Christians Crusaders with hands on nukes…
> To assume that the country of Iran is not a rational actor is idiocy based on an unsupported prejudice of “other”.
It’s not an assumption, it’s a prediction. Acting strategically doesn’t require rational thought about religious matters (which is impossible, anyway). Iran is very strategic – Islam’s greatest prophet Muhammad was a warlord and general, after all, and rules for a geopolitical strategy of domination comprise a goodly portion of the Qu’ran, which is a marriage between Sun Tzu and Moses. They have followed these rules very closely ever since the revolution succeeded.
There is a dangerous confusion right now about who the actual players are in the game, because of this stupid “other” assumption that has traction in a crowd who is totally ignorant of history, yet still hung up on Voltaire and wanting to pontificate. Sunni is not Shia, Arab is not Persian. That “weapons of mass destruction” nonsense never fooled me for a second, and in any case, Iraq was a place where it did not really bother me (too much) if they did get a nuke.
Same thing with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other little “liar” regimes, who really are the bullshitting, opportunistic, self-interested royals that Nigel is talking about, who keep up Islamic appearances to keep their place on top. The only trouble I have with those guys having bombs is someone else getting their hands on them. It would mainly be a containment issue with Iraq, too; Hussein was never going bomb to Israel, let along Europe or the U.S. Hussein was our little, lying counterweight over there for the longest time, the way to keep the real threat (who Nigel doesn’t thinks doesn’t exist) from dominating the region and creating the necessary conditions to become rebuild the caliphate as a nuclear and economic superpower.
Does Iran have polities that can be reasoned with? Yes, of course. Every nation-state does. But when you take a look the pyramid of power in Iran; the higher up you go, the crazier it gets. One day, if you decide to practice multiculturism rather than simply preach it, try reading a translation of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s book, “A Clarification of Questions”, and you will see directly into the bugshagging mind of madness that was able to so quickly transform the relatively urbane and sophisticated Iran into the medieval nightmare it is today.
Unlike many of the OPEC states and perhaps even the average Iranian in the street, the nerve bundle at the center of Iranian theocracy is composed of 100% “true believers”, hindered for the moment only by reality. In the rest of the Middle East; the rulers are mostly sane and the ruled mostly aren’t. Ahmadinejad is just a little bloodless puppet intended to provoke exactly the kind of reaction that Nigel has, and even he is a fairly crazy who sometimes doesn’t seem to know how powerless he really is. In Iran, the ruled are mostly sane and the rulers aren’t. Barring a bloody revolution or some kind of intervention, we are in for rough chop.
The amount of heads buried under sand should be shocking, but I guess Foucault and all the rest did their damage.
Sorry, for typos. Bloody phone.
> Re Defanged Christianity: to many we are Christians Crusaders with hands on nukes
Those “many” are very dumb. If the U.S. was going to blow up the world, we’d have already done it several times over, and we have enough non-crazy redundancy in are system to stop one lunatic from doing it. Saying that a religious psycho bent on Armageddon could fly under the radar through his entire political career, build the kind of non-suicidal financial support he needs to win the primary, sneak into the White House and launch a nuclear strike by invoking God’s Will is a very, very remote danger. It’s not reality, it’s the plot for a Stephen King novel, and even that didn’t work out.
Put it this way, if a sociopath of the kind I described was able to position himself to start nuclear Armageddon without the institutional antibodies of the West stopping him, he doesn’t even need to be Fundamentalist, or Christian, or even religious at all. He’s just as likely to operate under some other irrational mode, because he is a schizophrenic who fooled everyone well enough to win, and his mind is completely opaque. Despite the evocation of “values” in various political planks, explicit religious nutjobs don’t make the final mile in the U.S.A. They haven’t gotten the football yet, and probably never will. Can’t say the same thing about Iran.
Iran’s mullahs keep up the hard line religious propaganda to justify their jobs. In reality, their hold on their positions of power is more tenuous than they want the world (and Iran) to know. They stay on top only with the support of the Revolutionary Guard, which they got by handing over a goodly portion of the country’s wealth to them. They also have an alliance with most of Iran’s wealthy. Both of these sources of support can be withdrawn at any time. (There’s nothing to stop the Guard from instituting a dictatorship; the wealthy would just follow along.)
No one outside of Iran truly, fully, understands all the nuances of Iranian politics. I don’t claim to…I’m just stating a few things that I’ve learned here. The takeaway: No, they are not crazy; they just think differently than you expect.
And yes, the Iranians are definately going for The Bomb. There’s a script you have to follow if you want to develop nuclear weapons, dictated by the physics of nuclear bombmaking. Iran has been following it line by line.
If I am not mistaken, it is unfortunate that atheists cannot win elections – it sets a very low bar that all participants have to go under.
Again, if I am not mistaken, one scary time was late in the Watergate mess when Nixon was getting cornered. Apparently (source: HST), there was some concern that Nixon might order a nuclear strike on some place – wouldn’t matter where – just to get the “We must support the President” business going.
@LS
> (There’s nothing to stop the Guard from instituting a dictatorship; the wealthy would just follow along.)
Yes, absolutely, they could do it. The problem is, they could have done it for a long time. The fact that they haven’t done it yet should trouble you, though. There are likely a few semi-sane heads in the upper ranks of the Revolutionary Guard, but not enough in the middle or the very top that those sane heads wouldn’t be chopped off in the midst of one of esr’s “failure modes”. There are fissures in the power structure, but most of the men at the top (including the guard) is very, insanely religious.
Consider what one of the Guard’s most outspoken defectors (Reza Kahlili) said in an interview back in June:
Q. What’s the current political situation in Iran, I realize that’s a big question. Does Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still call the shots?
A. “Khamenei still calls the shots but it is much more complicated…there are several divisions within the leadership….the cracks are wider than they have ever been since the revolution…Khamenei is trying to undermine the capability of Ahmadinejad…the hard liners want Ahmadinejad out…it has become a very complex situation…there are many divisions within the Guard, there are some sympathizers with the Green Movement…Khamenei lacks…[the]…authority [of Khomeini]…nonetheless all of those running the country right now…are messianic people…this is a messianic regime..[which believes]…that the 12th Imam appears and kills all the infidels and establishes an Islamic caliphate worldwide…and pursues a nuclear bomb…you must differentiate between the Iranian people and the regime. Because the Iranian people are even more Westernized than when the Shah was there…right now they don’t respect Islam anymore, they resent it…they now are truly of the opinion that Islam is a vicious religion, intolerant…I believe that when this regime is gone, the religion will be gone for many years to come…”
Q. So the theological precepts of Shia Islam, especially those concerning the 12th or the Hidden Imam, are driving this administration?
A. “Yes, absolutely…”
Q. Are they so devoted to this, to the point of being suicidal?
A. “…I have no doubt about that…these people are truly messianic they are suicidal…they believe with every cell in their body…[that]…the 12th Imam will appear…”
I hope that the deliberate blindness of the West clears up, and quickly, when it comes to nuclear Iran. They aren’t capable of imagining the structure, and they refuse to really examine it because they’ve been taught to just shrug and say, “Well, that just their culture, and its equally valid, and who are we to criticize it, anyway?” or some other such postmodern bromide.
My god. It’s worse than I thought.
@Brian Marshall
I recently found out that there is one open atheist in your congress (Pete Stark in California) and I bet there are others who don’t admit to it. In the UK it is quite common.
> I don’t remember any ‘standard theories’ like that at the time (“Vas you dere, Charlie?”).
Yes, I was. And the conventional wisdom was that Reagan’s efforts were counter-productive, etc.
> What I do remember was an increase in military spending that put some pressure on the Soviets, but mostly, the decision to abandon communism was THEIRS.
Are you really suggesting that the USSR “just decided”, that they could have kept communism for 10-20 years?
If so, you’ve got an extreme version of what I called “conventional wisdom” above. Most folks who thought that Reagan was wrong went from “it can’t be done” to “the fall of the USSR was inevitable, Reagan had nothing to do with it” after it happened. There aren’t a lot of folks who went with “the USSR fell on an internal whim”.
> this is no time for Ronald Reagan cultists.
It is really “cult” to credit Reagan with figuring out that the USSR could be toppled and playing the end-game?
Tom:
> My god. It’s worse than I thought.
This is what I’m saying, Tom. Compare the flippant way that Nigel described the situation to the way the insider at the Revolutionary Guard describes it. Nigel is obviously self-deluding. Not saying he’s stupid (he’s probably not), but he is going for facile, cozy explanations not based on reality. In Iran you have a cult of very dangerously insane religious people who happen to have all the guns and a monopoly on violence.
Nigel and LS prefer to think that I’m a racist or cultural bigot of some sort because that makes it easier to sleep at night, but nothing could be further from the truth. What’s happening in Iran right now is more dangerous than anything we saw during the Cold War, because the “power struggle” at the top seems to be more about who gets to claim to be the Mahdi and his favored army once the instruments of Armageddon (nukes) are ready to be deployed. It’s not the Iranian people at large – as Reza Kahlili notes they are mainly powerless serfs. It’s about the top. The top is crazy, because there was no self-correction after the revolution. The regime selected for religious mania in the Guard, and therefore recruited them all too well. I would not be surprised if there was a coup at some point after they develop a nuke… with a bigwig in the Guard declaring himself the 12th Imam and then doing something stupid.
@ Tom
> I recently found out that there is one open atheist in your congress (Pete Stark in California) and I bet there are others who don’t admit to it. In the UK it is quite common.
Actually, I am Canadian. I am not sure what the situation is here.
I am not surprised about the UK. In an interview with Douglas Adams, he said that the whole issue of whether a person is an atheist or not is just not much of an issue at all in the UK.
@ Grantham
> …think that I’m a racist or cultural bigot of some sort
Judging people on the basis of race is stupid. Judging cultures is using your mind to do something important. The idea that it is wrong to be a “cultural bigot” is stupid and very dangerous.
> Judging cultures is using your mind to do something important.
No kidding.
> The idea that it is wrong to be a “cultural bigot” is stupid and very dangerous.
The idea behind “bigots” is that they don’t weigh evidence, they just have an irrational aversion to differences. I know exactly why I think that Islam is a dangerous death cult that runs on slavery and insanity. I know that because I read the Qu’ran and studied history. So, not really sure what your point is.
@ Grantham
I said > The idea that it is wrong to be a “cultural bigot” is stupid and very dangerous.
I expressed myself poorly. Let me try again:
The idea that it is wrong to judge one culture as being better than another is stupid and dangerous.
@Brian Marshall
Yeah, it doesn’t tend to come up that much. It wouldn’t occur to most voters to worry about the religion of a candidate.
People are actually a bit embarrassed to talk about religion. I think a lot of people who are religious are quite embarrassed to express any strong conviction. They don’t want to look stupid.
@Tom:
You have to remember that most of the true zealots were severely persecuted and emigrated to America…
@ Tom
In the same interview (which I can’t find) Douglas Adams (author of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) said that in the UK, expressing strong opinions and coming across as knowing a lot isn’t… I can’t remember what he said… basically that people in the UK don’t really like that sort of thing, and that visiting Americans should keep that in mind.
I note that where an American or Canadian would say “Man, it’s hot out there!”, a person in the UK might say “It’s hot out there, isn’t it?”
> Right wing fundamentalist Christianity in the US looks a lot different, to me, than it did 25 years ago. It’s become much more outspoken and demanding. It’s also become much more involved in our political system.
I’m pretty sure that that’s more your perception than reality.
There has been significant realigment over the past 50 years and it has mostly reduced the influence of religion on US politics.
More to the point, if you think that fundamentalist Christians are the big problem, you’re deluded. That delusion, while common, has led to horrible politics, akin to “Kerensky is horrible, let’s go with Lenin”. Kerensky was horrible, but that’s no reason to pick a worse alternative.
>I’m pretty sure that [Christianity being more threatening than 25 years ago is] more your perception than reality.
I agree the threat level has decreased – and it’s worth bearing in mind than as a Wiccan I have reason to be a bit extra sensitive on this score. In retrospect I think the political influence of the fundies peaked in the late ’80s.
One important reason for this is that they became so wedded to the Republicans that the GOP has never since had to pay more than lip service and the occasional token gesture to keep them on side. When it came to a choice between the gesture and playing for swing voters, the fundies almost always lost.
What’s happened, since, though, is that the Republicans have mastered a subtle art: making their gestures as symbolically pleasing to the fundies as they are meaningless. The symbolism alarms secular leftists out of proportion to reality, leading to exagerrated perceptions from the left of the fundies’ influence. This suits the Republicans fine; they’re never going to get secular-left votes anyway, and every decibel of screaming from the secularists helps keep the fundies a nice tame captive bloc.
@esr:
I think they’re losing some wheat with the chaff with this strategy.
Fundy Christians, not a powerful or influential voting bloc? Ha! They are nearly half the country — it’s hard to get a more powerful voting bloc in your corner!
If you have particular reason to be worried about this sort of thing, might I recommend Australia or New Zealand, where a majority or plurality of the population is irreligious?
(I’m backing down from my earlier, stronger “over half” claim; a couple years ago I read about some Gallup polls that alleged 51% of Americans were Creationists. Apparently that’s diminished somewhat.
So, like, you gotta be careful with a strong claim like that? Because like a lot of American dialects are pretty well known for their, um, tendency to like, make a statement seem more tentative? Thereby making the speaker kind of like, seem friendlier? You know?
>Because like a lot of American dialects are pretty well known for their, um, tendency to like, make a statement seem more tentative?
Indeed. Irritates the crap out of me. Never met anyone who talked like that who was worth listening to for more than 15 seconds.
@ Jeff Read, @Tom
Please understand that I am not trying to be offensive or rude – I am just interested in what Douglas Adams (an English writer that lives in England, writing about English people (all over the galaxy)) described as a cultural difference between people in the UK and people in the US.
I can’t find the book – it is The Salmon of Doubt, published posthumously that has the interview I am trying to remember. I found an
interview on the web that says basically the same thing:
except in the interview in the book, Adams also says that coming across as knowing a lot and expressing strong views is not really appreciated in England (a generalization, obviously) and that visiting Americans should keep this in mind.
If anyone has a copy of “The Salmon of Doubt”, they can find this quote in the interview.
I just find this to be interesting and I was wondering if Tom had any views he would like to share on the matter.
@grantham Depending on “Reza Kahlili” for your intel and calling me self-deluded is interesting. I’d put him about the same as Chalabi in terms of reliability. Probably less. He plays well though to some audiences. And if you believe his analysis on the power structure you also should believe his claims that Iran already has developed operational nuclear capability and that the coup should be any time now.
Too bad one of the more likely IRGC bigwigs just got blown to pieces. Jafari doesn’t strike me as the one who might claim to be the “12 Imam”.
As to whether the level of control of the IRGC within the power structure, it is true that they do wag the dog from time to time and that Khamenei lacks the control that Khomeini he’s not an idiot and has been playing the balancing one fraction against the other game fairly well. You can characterize the suppression of the election results as a military coup and some do.
The primary reason why I disbelieve that the IRGC leadership are largely populated by insanely dangerous messianic cultists is because they are filthy rich. Money tends to corrupt in ways that doesn’t lead to guys needing to usher in the new age in their lifetimes. Given these guys already control the rocket forces and, if you believe “Kahili” already have the bomb they can pull the trigger any time now.
Perhaps they’ll do it December 23, 2012.
“And the conventional wisdom was that Reagan’s efforts were counter-productive, etc.”
“Are you really suggesting that the USSR “just decided”, that they could have kept communism for 10-20 years?”
“If so, you’ve got an extreme version of what I called “conventional wisdom” above.”
Sometimes, the conventional wisdom is right. Yes, it took a long time for consensus to percolate up to the top leadership, but it happened in the USSR. The Russians did not ‘just decide’. It started long before Reagan was elected, and there was nothing he (or anyone) could do to speed it up appreciably. Telling Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down that wall!” was sheer grandstanding. Fortunately, Mr. Gorbachev was mature enough to see it as it was. A lesser man would have got his back up and blustered back at him.
You have to be *very* careful what you say to other countries. You might tell the North Koreans that their system stinks, that they are poor and could do better without the Kim family. Every word you say would be true. The North Koreans would take it as an insult and defend the Kims out of patriotic fervor.
BTW: We know that the Iranians do not have the bomb – yet. If they did, they would have tested it. We would have detected the test, but it woudn’t matter, since the Iranians would have announced it to the world, and there would have been dancing in the streets of Teheran. The regime would be riding high. (Another reason we should do all we can to prevent it.)
@Nigel Depending on “Reza Kahlili” for your intel and calling me self-deluded is interesting.
I suppose I should depend on you for my intel instead?
What you said about the “other” signals that you might be beyond reach. I also don’t think the people who aren’t beyond reach shouldn’t freak out and run off to start shooting wars with Iran, but the current strategy (if there even is one) doesn’t seem to be working. Ron Paul’s stance of dealing with Iran by “ignoring them” is not the only reason he’s an unelectable fool, but it’s the biggest one. Iran and their proxies will continue to grow like a cancer if we don’t at start arming the Iranian citizenry to help get out from under the thumb of the theocrats. I’d rather not pay to load the guns of others, but I’d prefer it to being vapor in a mushroom cloud. We could call it “Iran -Contra II” except now instead of stupidly selling guns to the masters, we could give them to the slaves.
> The primary reason why I disbelieve that the IRGC leadership are largely populated by insanely dangerous messianic cultists is because they are filthy rich.
You know who else was “filthy rich”? Osama bin Laden. He was a pampered scion. Mohammed Atta and his hijackers weren’t exactly “The Wretched of the Earth”, either. The fact is that, outside of the Palestinian kamikazes, most of these suicidal religious psychos are educated and wealthy. They can even enjoy tastes of the good life from time to time… just as long as when the Mahdi appears, they fall into line and start massacring everyone.
It’s sometimes tough for Western atheists to accept the fact zealots who can function and behave rationally and perform competently in many kinds of endeavors, while still wanting to trigger Armageddon. The thinking is, “if they are intelligent and wealthy enough to build a nuclear bomb, they can’t possibly be dumb enough to use one.” It’s a dangerous self-delusion born of the fact that rational people keep trying to apply rules of logic to illogical minds. The Saudi royalty is mostly filled with rational liars living high on the hog. The Iranian Revolution Guard is mostly filled with irrational zealots living high on the hog.
> I also don’t think the people who aren’t beyond reach shouldn’t freak out and run off to start shooting wars with Iran,
Err, rather, they “I also don’t think the people who aren’t beyond reach should freak out and run off to start shooting wars with Iran” That would be a stupid thing to do, and it’s not like we could afford it anyway.
“It’s sometimes tough for Western atheists to accept the fact zealots who can function and behave rationally and perform competently in many kinds of endeavors, while still wanting to trigger Armageddon. The thinking is, “if they are intelligent and wealthy enough to build a nuclear bomb, they can’t possibly be dumb enough to use one.” It’s a dangerous self-delusion born of the fact that rational people keep trying to apply rules of logic to illogical minds.”
Grantham, you have it *almost* right. The thing is, esr calls other-thinkers insane. No, Michael Hipp is not schizophrenic, and neither are the Iranians. A schizophrenic’s brain is miswired; the hardware is faulty; all those Iranians can’t have defective brains. Nor are these people illogical, as you claim. Their conclusions are perfectly logical in accord with the premises that they start with and the rules of inference that they use to reach their conclusions. Their ‘logic’ is different from yours and mine. It is not only different in its axioms and methods of proof, but it differs from ours in that it is a completely closed system that claims to be complete in itself, and resists any input from outside it.
If you really believe that Allah will send you to Paradise if you blow those infidels up, it’s perfectly logical to conclude that you should don that suicide vest and martyr yourself.
We’re in for a rough ride until Islam mellows out. It happened to Christianity, but it took centuries. In the meanwhile, Iran must not be allowed to have The Bomb, if we can help it. (It may not be possible to stop them. They are very determined, and just as smart as any of us.)
>it is a completely closed system that claims to be complete in itself, and resists any input from outside it.
Right. That’s insane. As I keep pointing out, the mechanism of belief maintainence is broken.
I’m no expert, but my understanding is that the USSR fell because of vodka, or, more precisely, the lack thereof.
In regards to Iran, I mostly think it is not a matter of if, but when they get the bomb. However, my certainty is moderated by the fact that they plainly don’t currently have one. I have to ask — why the heck not? If a bunch of idiots like the North Koreans can do it, why can’t Iran — a country with vastly more resources, vastly more technical capabilities, and vastly more access to international markets. To put it another way, I can only think that their program is run but a bunch of idiots. And, how, please explain, do you manage to get a virus onto your industrial machine control systems? You mean these idiots hooked their bomb making machine up to the internet?
I find it baffling. The only explanations I can come up with is a) they are a bunch of freaking idiots, b) their program is being constantly hamstrung by agents of foreign governments.
@LS
> The thing is, esr calls other-thinkers insane. No, Michael Hipp is not schizophrenic, and neither are the Iranians.
I believe that esr’s point is that if a person believes in god as a matter of faith, their brain is wired wrong; if it wasn’t, by the time the person became an adult, they would have realized that it is not reasonable to believe in a god on faith.
I would like to suggest a few aspects:
The problem might be in the software rather than the hardware, particularly in the case of children that have been chronically physically punished to the point of terror.
The are a lot of people that believe in a god for the same reason they believe in everything else – they have been told to. It could be argued that these people don’t think with enough rigour about anything to form independent opinions so their belief in god is equivalent to their belief that the Earth orbits the sun. Is being a mental sheep insanity? I would say yes, but when you add this group with the people who have put some thought into their faith in god, you end including a LOT of people – not that this means they aren’t all insane.
A lot of people believe in god because there are things in the world that they don’t understand. Evolution is most common, but I know a person who used ocean waves as an example. To me, this is the most extreme form of conceit I have ever heard – in effect “I don’t understand it, so it must be a god doing it”. Of course, people who think like this don’t actually put it into words like that.
In a sufficiently primitive society, a god might be the most reasonable explanation for many things. But, as Douglas Adams pointed out, in our society, a god is not needed for explanation, and, in fact, would require a great deal of explanation itself.
@ Jessica
I apologise if you already know this, but…
Building an atomic bomb is easy – I could do it in my apartment. The problem is getting enough weapons-grade uranium – as I recall, it has to be 99% U235 whereas reactor-grade uranium only has to be 90%.
They may have had problems getting weapons-grade uranium or they may be having trouble upgrading it – the uranium-hexafloride gas-diffusion approach is conceptually simple but the engineering is something of a bitch (the gas is corrosive) and the process is time-consuming. There are other ways – I am too lazy to look it up but there must be an approach that works like a mass-spectrometer: make a stream of uranium ions and bend the stream with magnets – the U235 will bend a tiny bit more than the slightly heavier U238. Any approach tends to be very time-consuming because you have to keep doing it over and over.
From some fiction book I read, I believe that if you want your bomb to really work (and I imagine that Iran doesn’t want to get caught testing a lousy, inferior bomb), you want a disk of some odd-ball metal between the two hemispheres of uranium – neutrons from the uranium cause this metal to just fizz neutrons, making a good nuclear explosion; without it, the bomb can blow itself apart before much of the uranium has had a chance to enjoy the benefits of fission.
esr Says:
>it is a completely closed system that claims to be complete in itself, and resists any input from outside it.
Right. That’s insane. As I keep pointing out, the mechanism of belief maintainence is broken.
@esr: Wrong. As I keep pointing out, people that do not think the way you do are not insane. There are too many of them for you to classify as ‘abnormal’. They function well in their societies. If one of them comes into our society and acts according to their logic, you might be justified in jailing them, or even executing them, but you would be wrong to commit them to a psychiatric facility.
My exposure to this sort of thing came early. I grew up in a Jewish family, and was exposed to the Orthodox. They live in their own little world, according to their own logic. They believe that God wants them to live that way. They are not insane. Neither are the Amish. Neither were the Shakers.
Cultural memes are very powerful, and can be dangerous. You must learn to see them for what they are. You are great at writing software, no doubt a fine swordsman and unarmed fighter, but please leave psychiatry to the pros.
>As I keep pointing out, people that do not think the way you do are not insane.
Not thinking the way I do isn’t the point. Recall that I once defined sanity as the process by which you continually adjust your beliefs so they are predictively sound. This is a better definition than “do his neighbors think he’s not crazy” for reasons which should be too obvious for me to rehearse.
My point is that a person with a deranged mechanism of belief formation can’t cope with reality – they are unable to adjust their model of what is to what is. This is different, and much more serious, than having contingently mistaken beliefs. And it’s the key thing religious believers and paranoid schizophrenics have in common.
The difference between religious believers and paranoid schizophrenics is that religious believers have a lot of social insulation around them that often enables them to evade the consequences of their insanity. Which would be fine for the rest of us, too, except that now some of these nutjobs might get their hands on nuclear weapons.
The time when we can afford to treat faith-holding religiosity as a virtue, a private matter, or anything else than a deadly disease is passing. The most likely way we will know it has ended is when someone incinerates a city in the name of Allah.
Brian Marshall Says:
> Building an atomic bomb is easy – I could do it in my apartment.
No you couldn’t, unless you’ve got an awesome apartment. It is conceptually easy, however, the engineering is quite difficult. It requires timing and geometry tolerances that are very small.
> The problem is getting enough weapons-grade uranium – as I recall, it has to be 99% U235 whereas reactor-grade uranium only has to be 90%.
Your numbers are off. Nonetheless, making weapons grade Uranium is also conceptually easy, but a challenging engineering project.
However, no matter how hard it is, the point still stands. If a bunch of resource poor buffoons like the North Koreans can do it why is it taking the Iranians, with all their money, and much broader access to markets, why is it taking them so long?
@ LS
The short answer:
If a person’s brain doesn’t work well enough to realize that “faith” is not an acceptable answer to the question of why the person believes in a god, that person’s brain is flawed enough to consider the person insane.
Um… why?
@ Jessica
You are probably correct.
I admit I got this from a fiction book by Robert Forsythe, and in the story, all that was wanted was an atomic explosion for political reasons, it didn’t have to be a good bomb.
The idea is using very strong steel pipe and half a stick of dynamite to blow two hemispheres of uranium together.
However, I can imagine this failing to work because of air pressure effects or the dynamite simply not doing what is expected.
> Fundy Christians, not a powerful or influential voting bloc? Ha! They are nearly half the country — it’s hard to get a more powerful voting bloc in your corner!
They why don’t they win more elections?
Answer – they’re not the monolith that Read assumes.
> If a bunch of idiots like the North Koreans can do it
Do we know how much help the NKs got from the Chinese? Who is helping the Iranians?
@LS
> They are not insane….. Neither were the Shakers.
Okay, have it your way. The Shakers are not “illogical” or “insane”. They are simply dead.
They were functional enough to feed, clothe and shelter themselves for a while. They were even able to practice some replacement strategies.
Now, extrapolate the Shakers’ internally “logical” beliefs to those of Islamic eschatology, and of Nigel’s harmlessly decadent Revolutionary Guard. Logic requires more than just internal consistency based on fantastical inference. It requires reasoning based on observable facts (and if anyone starts talking about “observable religious facts” I won’t bother answering them, because they are kooks).
The sort of world these people inhabit is quite a bit more dangerous and insane than that of the Romanticists. In the West, we evolved many benign outlets for our irrational urges before we developed The Bomb. The Iranian people also had some of those outlets before 1979, but the Islamists and the Marxists bricked them shut (and then the Islamists dealt with the Marxists).
OK, Ok everyone! Now, why do I keep harping on “the xxxxs are NOT insane”? It’s because we have to deal with all these other peoples and their strange belief systems. esr’s definition of insanity is not helpful there. We need more understanding of other cultures in order to deal with them effectively. This does NOT mean a descent into bullsh*t cultural relativism – just a recognition that ‘those people’ are the way they are, and we must deal with them as such. We need to learn more about them; calling them insane is to dismiss them as beyond our understanding.
“If one of them comes into our society and acts according to their logic, you might be justified in jailing them, or even executing them, but you would be wrong to commit them to a psychiatric facility.”
Why? Because they don’t fit the real definition of insanity, which is enforced by the judgement of psychiatrists. They don’t hallucinate, or have delusions of persecution, or suffer violent mood swings, or … . We don’t want to use our mental hospitals that way. The US is not the USSR.
“Do we know how much help the NKs got from the Chinese? Who is helping the Iranians?”
We don’t know the answers to those questions with any certainty, but I can offer some good guesses:
The Chinese are known to have helped the Pakistanis. They gave Khan a complete bomb-making kit, with instruction booklet, back in the ’80s. It included enough highly enriched Uranium to make at least one bomb, perhaps two. The Pakistanis subsequently bought centrifuges, copied, and improved them so as to be able to make more bombs for themselves.
The NKs developed a Plutonium bomb. This is different. There are no centrifuges; instead, you harvest Plutonium from the spent fuel rods of a nuclear reactor. From this, and the idea that a nuclear NK on their border would make the Chinese very nervous makes me believe that the NKs pretty much did it themselves. Another factor favoring this view is the low yield of their bomb test. It takes special techniques to make Plutonium into a bomb; they are probably still low on the learning curve.
The Iranians are going full-tilt down both roads – Uranium and Plutonium. They seem to be committed to learning every step of the process themselves, though the Russians are building a heavy water reactor for them. They plainly want to have their bomb-making unconstrained by any other nation.
@LS
> They don’t hallucinate,
“God told me to slaughter the infidel.”
> or have delusions of persecution
“The Jew pigs eat pastries made with the blood of muslim infants”
> or suffer violent mood swings
Hahm hah! You’re kidding, right?
> or …
Or what? Strap explosives to themselves? Firebomb markets filled with unarmed people? Riot over cartoons in foriegn papers? Execute suspected adulterers and homosexuals? Throw acid into the faces of rape victims? Fly planes into buildings? Arrest squirrels on charges of espionage?
What does it tske to call insanity “insanity”? Maybe we ought to go back to using the word “evil”, so that average minds understand how they should respond to sick cultures. Calling them insane seems to confuse the issue for some people, because in the West we think of the insane as helpless victims to be treated.
@ Brian Marshall:
> I admit I got this from a fiction book by Robert Forsythe, and in the story, all that was wanted was an atomic explosion for political reasons, it didn’t have to be a good bomb.
You probably mean “The Fourth Protocol” by Frederick Forsyth. A most undervalued British author (not sure if he was really widely known or read over there in the USA), whose views I am sure would resonate well with most readers of this blog. Never afraid to depict the USSR as the villain even in the days when most creative types worshipped international communism.
Forget his later books (anything after “Icon”), though, they’re nowhere near as good.
“Not thinking the way I do isn’t the point. Recall that I once defined sanity as the process by which you continually adjust your beliefs so they are predictively sound. ”
Your original post with this definition (the link is wrong BTW, you want http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2658) treats sanity as a continuous variable and it seems to me that you’re really talking about rationality here. How calling insane mostly everybody (questioning your beliefs is difficult, so I doubt too many people bother) is going to decrease probability of another 9/11?
>How calling insane mostly everybody (questioning your beliefs is difficult, so I doubt too many people bother) is going to decrease probability of another 9/11?
Until we recognize insanity we cannot treat it. Yes, this will be difficult, because the insanity has a lot of social support. So did slavery, once. I didn’t say it would be easy, just necessary.
@Jessica
My understanding is that it wasn’t on the internet. The worm was capable of being spread through, among other means, removable flash drives. It seems likely that users of the control system were using USB drives that had been connected to internet-attached computers. Like so much in computer security everything falls apart when humans become involved.
>Until we recognize insanity we cannot treat it. Yes, this will be difficult, because the insanity
>has a lot of social support. So did slavery, once. I didn’t say it would be easy, just necessary.
If you want to do that, then you have to take a page out of the marxist handbook in the US and break down the institution slowly over generations. We didn’t get to the overreaching massive nanny state we have today overnight. There wasn’t some guy going around on TV declaring all of capitalism evil and our cherished institutions insane. Instead they snuck the ideas into the culture a little bit at a time, slowly until there were generations of Americans who had internalized such beliefs, to the point where many even believe that “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was in the Declaration of Independence.
If you want to eliminate religion as an institution, the flashy public displays, whether its getting on national TV and deriding all religious people, or filing a lawsuit over the fact that the town has a nativity scene that they’ve had for generations, is only going to slow the process and hurt your cause. It does this for a number of reasons but probably the biggest one is that you’re painting with to wide of a brush. There are far too many people that believe in a god simply because they haven’t examined their belief systems with any rigor. When you get on TV and declare these people to be idiots and insane, you harden them against you. When you go to the courts and tear down their childhood memories, you make them angry and resentful. Paint with a narrower brush, and attack the edges first, the fringes that everyone agrees are insane. Tear down the extreme institutions, and when changing the laws argue from a position that avoids anti religion.
And bear in mind that you have to have something to replace the institution. For many of these people their religion is their social connection, their charity connection, their support group and their way to get through a world that doesn’t make sense sometimes.
Lastly, you’ll never get the importance what religion a politician is (or isn’t) removed from American politics without changing the concerns over radical islamists to something other than religion, because all it does is confirm to the fundamental christian voters that people who “aren’t christian” are dangerous. And Athiests are just as “not christian” as any radical islamist.
> If a bunch of idiots like the North Koreans can do it
Nice. Why do folks assume that North Koreans are stupid and incapable of developing an atomic weapon if it’s one of the regime’s primary goals? As stated in the thread it’s an engineering challenge. Something the South Koreans clearly excel at. The North Koreans had a more advanced economy and industry through the 60s prior to the rapid ascent of South Koreans later. Their ability to develop the bomb isn’t surprising and they didn’t conduct a test until 2006. The Chinese probably didn’t directly help them much…a nuclear armed Korea is not a very pleasant neighbor. Their primary help was probably from Pakistani sources (including their centrifuges) which as LS points out got their start from the Chinese. Meh.
That Iran (probably) doesn’t quite yet have bomb production capability is due to several factors. They probably weren’t working on it very hard until maybe a decade ago. Prior to that they had the distraction of a revolution (and loss of many trained people) then ruinous wars with Iraq and rebuilding.
It’s amazing that folks will call others idiots while blissfully staying misinformed about basic points of facts that can be easily googled. Like whether or not the Iranian SCADA systems were connected to the internet.
# Nigel Says:
> Nice. Why do folks assume that North Koreans are stupid and incapable of developing
> an atomic weapon if it’s one of the regime’s primary goals?
It is also one of the primary goals of Iran. How come they haven’t succeed, despite the fact they have many advantage over NK?
To call the NKs idiots, in to context of this thread doesn’t seem unreasonable. From the top to the bottom of their society they are engaged in a horrible religion, namely the apotheosis of the dear leader. If you think the people are faking it, I think you probably don’t understand the psychosis of religion. It is no different than the Catholics who indoctrinate you from the breast.
To question their engineering abilities or their manufacturing capability is not hard to justify. One need only look at the classic nighttime satellite photo of the Korean peninsula. If you can’t turn on the lights, how the heck do you build a nuclear device?
>Like whether or not the Iranian SCADA systems were connected to the internet.
I was being hyperbolic and sarcastic. I guess it isn’t conveyed well in text.
Jessica:
> namely the apotheosis of the dear leader. If you think the people are faking it, I think you probably don’t understand the psychosis of religion.
Yes, I was talking with a friend recently who was in awe of the acting performances of the NK mourners, as though there were soldiers with rifles point at them just out of shot. I told him that they weren’t acting. There are actors in NK, putting on a show to stay out of trouble, but probably not many of those in Pyongyang. Those are the true believers and the most-favored subjects of the regime. As for the bad actors and the non-actors, they are mostly dead or locked up in gulags.
> If you can’t turn on the lights, how the heck do you build a nuclear device?
In a totalitarian society, it’s all about priorities. They would rather build a nuke than a grid, just as they would rather buy tanks than feed starving citizens.
Iranian Intel: “It is our mission, and our holy duty, to stop the infidel before he–SQUIRREL!!!”
@Jessica
You’ll notice though that there is a huge concentration of light in Pyongyang. Like @Grantham says, it’s all about priorities.
If you’re willing to completely enslave your entire population in order to provide resources for your pet projects it’s amazing what you can achieve.
@grantham
> I suppose I should depend on you for my intel instead?
Of course not. I have no particular expertise in the region and if I did I wouldn’t be able to speculate on it anyway. But “Reza Kahlili” is clearly a questionable source of information. He boasts of being a CIA double agent, he makes outrageous statements for effect and much of his statements regarding current Iranian nuclear capability very dubious. To the point that even you don’t agree with those assertions.
If you don’t believe his bullshit regarding Iran already having nuclear weapon production capability WTF would you believe his bullshit about the IRGC being suicidal crazies without question? It is quite amusing that most of his “analysis” and “talks” are sponsored by an organization founded by a senior official of AIPAC. Gee, is it in Israel’s interest for Americans to believe that Iranians are batshit crazy and ready to deploy a thousand suitcase nukes all over the world to jumpstart Armageddon? Nah…
Probably he had a relationship with the CIA at some point. Super Sekrit Double Agent as described in his book? Yah, mkay. It reads well and it provides insight and from some angles you have a great desire to believe. But just as Primakov’s book provides insight on the region from the Soviet angle you still have to take both with VERY large blocks of salt from both a factual and analysis perspective.
So I don’t buy the assertion that a senior IRGC general, not even Suleimani, is going to declare himself the 12th Imam and blow the world up next year or anytime in the near future. Aside from being rich, these guys are not going to accept a peer elevate themselves in such a manner. Suleimani may be Mr. Scary to pretty much everyone else but to other IRGC generals he’s one of them. Probably not even in the first among equals strata even with his presumed control of Quds.
Besides, the 12th Imam can’t just show up by himself. Jesus Christ is also supposed to make an appearance AND it has to be in a period of chaos and war. Which arguably Iran could cause but strikes me as unlikely and if they do, Persians as an ethnicity will survive only outside the nuclear wasteland of former Iran. They aren’t going to have bunkers deep enough to survive.
And if you DO believe that Kahlili is a credible source then the rational response IS to run off and start a shooting war with Iran. He states that the IRGC is planning to deploy a thousand backpack nukes across the world in an orgy of suicidal bombings. If I had actionable intel confirming that “fact” then I’d declare war on Iran without a second thought or any hesitation at all.
Also, I never stated that the IRGC was harmless. Just that they were not suicidal maniacs bent on causing Armageddon. The Quds are considered very effective special forces with many operational successes. The IRGC will kill many more Americans and frankly I prefer we get them before they get us. Given the news reports someone is being fairly successful at getting at them. But my perception is that this will stay a shadow war because all of the participants (US, Israel, Iran, Syria, NK, Pakistan) are rational actors not inclined to kick off Armageddon, Mayan calendar ending next year or not.
That many suicide bombers are wealthy and so forth doesn’t change my analysis. If the presumption is that war exist between the US and the muslim faith (an incorrect presumption but not insanely so) and given the military disparity between the US and the muslim world then the only way to hurt the US proper is through asymmetric warfare. Given you’re likely to get caught and probably killed anyway whether you succeed or fail, if the probability of success is greatly increased and the impact much greater then the case for riding the bomb into the target can be made. Especially if you can con an overeducated, affluent, but weak minded individual to be doing the martyrdom for you.
You’ll note that suicide bombing IS pretty rare even given that the west is STILL a fairly soft target. Given a target rich environment where you can park an IED on a local road and detonate from a safe distance away currently exists to strike at the infidels this is not surprising. And only truly insane people prefer to kill women and children when you can kill soldiers instead.
There is also a world of difference between strapping a bomb on yourself to blow up infidels because there’s no other way to get some hits in and making the jump to a world in which your family will die in horrific nuclear fire. Sure there are insane folks that would do this but that state of actual insanity is fortunately rare.
But hey, it’s far easier to simply state that I’m self-deluded and beyond reach when I state your assertions based on some grandstanding yahoo being paid by an Israeli think tank to make alarmist statements about Iran are actually full of bullshit. If you actually BELIEVED that bullshit yourself then you’d be building a bunker in your basement, stocking up on iodine pills and planning multiple SHTF bugout routes away from likely hotzones.
I’ve got some nice, soon to expire, MREs to sell you for cheap if doom is that imminent. Otherwise I’m just going to have to dump them in the charity bin when I refresh my own kit after the new year.
Y’all have a happy holiday. I got me some nerf lazertag guns (for my kids, honest) and it’s going to be a fun. Can you believe these things have recoil and you have to reload the “clip” after 10 shots? Way too cool…
I have also brought up the subject of patriotism, which also can substitute for religion. I read about a SOUTH Korean ‘intellectual’ who reasoned as follows:
“Democracy? So what? Korea has had an authoritarian government for centuries. Why should we change for foreigners?”
We MUST make more of an effort to learn about how other people think if we are to be able to better predict how they will respond to our policies. Getting them to change the axioms that underlie their reasoning (their VALUES) will be even harder. Calling them fools or buffoons won’t do it.
Andy Freeman Says:
My only point was that there is still some benefit to debating with people, even when it’s obvious that you won’t be able to change their position if that debate can be seen by others, not to state what ‘the big problem’ is or to encourage anyone to pick one party or another in any particular race.
tmoney Says:
Agreed. Insulting people and putting them on the defensive is usually a good way to achieve the opposite of your objectives.
> My point is that a person with a deranged mechanism of belief formation can’t cope with reality – they are unable to adjust their model of what is to what is. … And it’s the key thing religious believers and paranoid schizophrenics have in common.
I’ll bite.
What part of your every-day reality depends on the age of the earth? How about evolution vs creation?
Yes, there are religious beliefs that have an effect in reality. I’m pointing out that the ones used to damn Christians don’t.
>I’m pointing out that the ones used to damn Christians don’t.
That’s because you cherry-picked a couple of relatively benign ones. The most centrally dangerous belief in Christianity is the exclusivity of revelation.
>> More to the point, if you think that fundamentalist Christians are the big problem, you’re deluded. That delusion, while common, has led to horrible politics, akin to “Kerensky is horrible, let’s go with Lenin”. Kerensky was horrible, but that’s no reason to pick a worse alternative.
>My only point was that there is still some benefit to debating with people, even when it’s obvious that you won’t be able to change their position if that debate can be seen by others
What do you think that arguing that fundamentalist Christians are the big problem accomplishes with said others?
I’m one of said “others” and since I understand that fundamentalist christians aren’t the big problem …..
> From this, and the idea that a nuclear NK on their border would make the Chinese very nervous makes me believe that the NKs pretty much did it themselves.
Do we know that the Chinese don’t have effective control over the NK nuke program?
> So I don’t buy the assertion that a senior IRGC general, not even Suleimani, is going to declare himself the 12th Imam and blow the world up next year or anytime in the near future. Aside from being rich, these guys are not going to accept a peer elevate themselves in such a manner.
Was Gadaffi or Saddam Hussein one of the top generals before he took over?
I mention them because, IIRC, a significant fraction of military coups are actually initiated by folks of lesser rank. This isn’t exactly a coup but it has some similarities.
@ esr
> The most centrally dangerous belief in Christianity is the exclusivity of revelation.
Would you elaborate on that, please?
If it is only revelation from the Bible,… society does seem to buffer the effects fairly well. If it is also revelation from their pastor, it can get into the realm of politics, which can lead to… just about anything.
>If it is also revelation from their pastor, it can get into the realm of politics, which can lead to… just about anything.
You got it right there. The feature that is most dangerous about the post-Zoroastrian religions is the fact that any random charismatic nutter can hook into the central belief in exclusive revelation and use it to turn millions of believers into memebots.
Sorta on-topic (size and power of government) – here is a link to a
CNN article about the government trying to suppress research results…
I imagine that (almost) all of us take the position that suppressing scientific research is bad. And modifying viruses is presumably fairly difficult to do. In any case, it wouldn’t make a good weapon because if it was effective enough to kill a lot of people in one country, it would probably spread to all countries.
It would be bad if some dictator had it and had his own Mutually Assured Destruction plan.
It would also be bad if a couple of grad students screwing around could create a disease that would wipe out a good fraction of the population of the world.
Comments, anyone?
@ James M
re: making a nuke in my apartment
Of course, Frederick Forsyth – “Eye of the Needle” – I don’t know where “Robert” came from. You are correct – it was in “The Fourth Protocol”.
After a bit of thought, given two hemispheres of weapons-grade uranium (and the disk of the odd-ball metal, if it would make a significant difference), some stuff from local home hardware store and one or two pieces of steel pipe bought by and worked over by a machine shop, I believe I could build a… maybe not half-assed, but quarter-assed nuke in my apartment.
By using only two pieces of uranium, there are no timing issues. The only issue is to slam them together and keep them together long enough for some of the uranium to undergo fission. Black powder or standard powder for reloading bullets, set off in stages to get one piece of uranium moving would presumably do it. I would have the moving piece in the end of a cylinder of wood to keep it in alignment. It would require some research about small cannons.
What would make it only quarter-assed is that a little bit of fission would probably blow the pieces apart, aborting any further fission, but you never know – it doesn’t take much fission to make an impressive bomb.
Clearly, getting the weapons-grade uranium is the hardest part. For me, getting the uranium into the form of two hemispheres would be a show-stopper as well, if I was limited to my apartment.
Andy Freeman says:
Andy, can you point to where I said that fundamentalist Christians are the big problem? You’ve said this twice. The first time, I reiterated my point and tried to clarify it. You replied by saying the same thing again.
@ Jessica Boxer
Re: nukes in my apartment
I was thinking of a nuke with 2 pieces of uranium and one moving part. If a much better bomb can be make using multiple pieces of uranium with multiple moving parts, then I agree – it would require timing and engineering aspects that I would not know how to determine and would not be able to achieve in my apartment.
@ Brian Marshall:
Would getting the uranium to a critical mass alone even make a 1%-assed nuke? Even the “Demon Core” going critical only resulted in lethal radiation (to those nearby), but no explosion. That was plutonium… not sure that even pure weapons-grade uranium, even assuming that you could collect enough in your apartment, would be substantially more reactive than that. You would be the only person in danger.
Making any sort of nuclear bomb needs an initiator – in the book, polonium/lithium. (The polonium is the key to the plot – possibly deliberately allowed to be captured, having no other application apart from nuclear, so being a obvious clue leading to the discovery of the bomb plot).
Brian Marshall, U doesn’t have as high a rate of background neutron production as Pu does, so you don’t need to do exotic things like implosion. Nonetheless there are still enough background neutrons that assembling the supercritical mass fast is important, enough so that people naturally use designs like firing a big slug of U through a remachined high-velocity gun barrel into a complementary cavity machined out of a blob of U. They also apparently go to some trouble to generate an intense burst of neutrons just as the mass assembles. A design that assembles the critical mass an order of magnitude more slowly and is an order of magnitude sloppier about knowing exactly when is the best time to flood with neutrons and has a somewhat less sharp bright burst of neutrons is probably going to give up a lot of yield. Of course with an A-bomb there is a lot of yield to give up before you fall below “ruin someone’s whole day”. But I think doing it with black powder literally in an apartment — where the apartment setting would naturally limit not just the tools you use, but your ability to test-fire subassemblies to get the gritty details right — might well lead to much more of a fizzle than you anticipate.
What is true is that building an effective U-based bomb is so much easier than acquiring the weapons-grade U that in that context the building part of the project can usefully be considered “easy”. But it’s not as absolutely easy as, say, building a barometer-controlled bomb to place in an airliner, or other minor bits of tech nastiness that non-state organizations have managed somewhat routinely and that can naturally be cobbled together in apartments. I went to college with people who built things like amateur satellites and little dorm-scale custom PBX systems for fun, and I’ve read Rhodes’ _Making of the Atomic Bomb_ (which I recommend) and some other stuff bearing on bombs. I’d guess several of my ex-classmates might be capable of creating a decent atomic explosion given the uranium and a highly motivated year or two, but I think it’d be a serious obstacle if as you contemplate they had to limit themselves to black powder and cylinders of wood and hemispheres and such, and had to do all the work in an apartment. It’s also hard to imagine a scenario where this happened naturally:anyone that has the resources to get the refined uranium likely also has the resources to support building a bomb with a bigger workspace, someplace to test explosions, and at least hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tools and materials.
Let’s bring it closer to home.
Please explain to me the axioms and reasoning of inner city black culture. Tell me what we need to do to -reach- these people, to understand them.
While you’re at it, explain the disparity between immigrants from Africa and black children born in the US on test scores.
It’s not just religiousity that represents a delusional defense mechanism. Notice the tenor of this article; the Seattle Times is two steps to the left of the New York Times in terms of race relations.
Instead of “Hey, we’ve found a cadre of black students who achieve highly and can isolate them, let’s figure out what they’re doing right!”, the tenor is ‘Alarming’ new test-score gap discovered in Seattle schools!
Are you capable of recognizing the delusional aspects of that belief system, and how it directly correlates to the statement I quote above? Or will you engage in Micheal Hipp-levels of rationalization gymnastics?
@ James M, @William Newman
The “Demon Core” was plutonium and sub-critical mass. When a couple of accidents made it briefly “critical” (using neutron reflectors), it only give off some energy, a lot of neutrons but (if I understand this) it did not become “super-critical” with a constantly increasing chain-reaction, so it did not explode.
In any case, conceptually, the “gun design” using uranium is very simple but the sizes and weights involved would preclude doing it in my apartment. I was thinking that the critical mass was smaller and that research into small cannons would make it possible to design the “gun” using gun-power without experiment. The weights of uranium involved would require quite a bit of gun-powder and a very heavy “gun barrel”. After a bit of research, it would seem that to get any sort of decent explosion from two hemispheres, an initiator (ex. polonium) would be required.
It is also necessary for the pieces to stay together – not produce enough energy to blow the pieces apart and stop the chain-reaction.
This last point raises the question of whether the double-hemisphere-with initiator design described in “The Fourth Protocol” by
Frederick Forsyth would explode much at all.
In my post, I did say
I was assuming I had the initiator if it was required.
For anyone that cares…
“Little Boy” (dropped on Hiroshima) was a gun-design uranium bomb that did not use any initiator. A hollow cylinder of uranium was fired down a gun barrel using cordite so that it went around a cylinder of uranium and was surrounded by steel and tungsten carbide neutron reflectors, making the whole thing super-critical and it went off with a bang, so to speak.
Wikipedia says it used 140 lbs of uranium and that this was more than two critical masses, but it also says that the critical mass for a bare sphere of U235 is 115 lbs. It says that the hollow cylinder projectile was 85 lbs and above the critical mass, which is another inconsistency. Gotta be careful with Wikipedia.
@ James M, @William Newman, @ Jessica Boxer
Short answer: I was wrong. The double-hemisphere with initiator design has the problem of blowing the hemispheres apart and stopping the chain-reaction. The sizes and weights of everything mean it could not be done in my apartment.
# Brian Marshall Says:
> … mean it could not be done in my apartment.
I hope that means you are now abandoning your plan for world domination Brian? :-)
> I hope that means you are now abandoning your plan for world domination Brian? :-)
Yeah…., for the moment, at least.
> Andy, can you point to where I said that fundamentalist Christians are the big problem?
While you haven’t used the phrase “the big problem”, you clearly believe that they’re an important danger. You’re wrong.
And you seem to think that arguing with them about the age of the earth or evolution is somehow useful in persuading others of that danger. Wrong again.
> >If it is also revelation from their pastor, it can get into the realm of politics, which can lead to… just about anything.
> You got it right there. The feature that is most dangerous about the post-Zoroastrian religions is the fact that any random charismatic nutter can hook into the central belief in exclusive revelation and use it to turn millions of believers into memebots.
The problem with that argument is that the only folks who have managed to turn millions of believers into memebots were not religious, they were leftists. In particular, they were anti-Christian and the Christian churches were significant in the resistance.
Yes, there are Christian cults, but there is such a variety in cults that it would be surprising if there were no Christian cults.
@ Jessica Boxer
re: building nukes
@Ken Burnside:
“Let’s bring it closer to home.
Please explain to me the axioms and reasoning of inner city black culture. Tell me what we need to do to -reach- these people, to understand them.”
I think that you meant the above as a challenge to me, but I’ll answer and hope that all would give their opinions on such an important topic.
An important thing to understand about the American blacks that you are talking about is that they are black and SOUTHERN. Their culture is a relic of the culture of the pre-Civil War American South. (You might talk to someone who objects, “Hey, my great grandfather came to Philadelphia in 1912…” True enough, but his family has been relatively isolated from the American mainstream by various social factors.) This southern culture went down in defeat in 1865, and has been on the skids ever since, but southern notions of ‘honor’ and fighting for ‘your side’ persist.
One of the main principles of this southern culture is the idea that the whole world is broken up into white people and black people. It was adopted as an excuse for slavery, and is probably absolutely the dumbest idea we Americans have had during the last 400 years. It dies hard, but it has to die.
I’m 65, and I’ve seen the situation improve considerably over my lifetime as more blacks mainstreamed themselves. There are a bunch of things we should be doing, but I’m going to suggest that we attack the heart of the cultural problem ‘culturally’. We have to take the idea of ‘white people’ away from them.
I would suggest that, starting now, we all insist on being known as ‘mainstream people’. This reinforces the notion that many of us are NOT white (you can start with President Obama, and work your way down) and also gets back at that ‘people of color’ dig (that suggests that *they* have something that *we* don’t have).
It *is* a dig at the ethnics, of whatever kind. The multicultural truth is that there are only two cultures in the US – the mainstream culture and all those others off on the margins. We should not be shy about saying it. It needs to be emphasized that we *all* have our little ethnicities, we need our parents and we need our families, but long-term, over the generations, ethnicity is a LOSER. The social and economic disadvantages of staying ethnic are many and they are severe. That’s why the vast majority of us don’t do it. It’s not the future.
There could be a lot more, but this comment is already very long. It’s so important, though, that maybe esr could consider starting a new thread devoted to this OT subject.
@Andy Freeman:
“The problem with that argument is that the only folks who have managed to turn millions of believers into memebots were not religious, they were leftists.”
Gee…have you ever heard of the Rev. Jim Jones…or the Rev. Sun Myung Moon? Ever have your doorbell rung by a Jehovah’s Witness?
“Sorry, lady…I can’t be a Witness; I didn’t see The Accident.”
Brian Marshall writes of gun-type bombs “the bad aspect is that they can go off if the plane crashes”. As I understand it, they aren’t used not just because there is “the” single bad aspect you mention, but also because they lack some good aspects of implosion-type bombs, so that once you learn to do implosions routinely, it is natural to prefer to do things that way. E.g., if you can implode hard enough that the density of the fissile material is significantly increased, you should be able to build a bomb using less fissile material because the critical mass decreases as density increases.
“I have discovered some truly marvelous advantages of implosion-type weapons, but my apartment is not large enough to manufacture them.” — the Fermatomic manifesto
@LS: not all components of ethnicity are a disaster. For example, ethnic food is generally a good thing, depending on which ethnicity you’re talking about. If it’s say, British, or Guatemalan, don’t even bring it up. Other than that, I agree with you entirely. Black (southern) culture is not a successful one — which is why a lot of blacks have abandoned it.
@esr:
Not present in the Religious Society of Friends. Feel free to argue that we aren’t Christian. Some of us do, too.
>Feel free to argue that [Quakers] aren’t Christian. Some of us do, too.
Yes. The key fact you’re hinting at is that the “are we Christian or not?” dispute in the Society of Friends is largely a proxy for an underlying dispute over whether claiming exclusive revelation is a good idea. Or at least that’s my understanding of the matter; it is somewhat complicated by the fact that many of the disputants only partly understand the implications of their own positions.
It’s a meme plague specifically engineered by the ruling class after Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, because said class felt threatened by the successful routing of a governor by the unified forces of poor white and black farmhands.
One of the biggest history lessons you will ever learn is that it has never been a race war; it has always been a class war.
One wonders what sort of memetic horror TPTB will engineer to break up Occupy…
@LS: not all components of ethnicity are a disaster. For example, ethnic food is generally a good thing,
@Russell Nelson: You have brought up yet another reason why the mainstream culture bowls over all the others. The mainstream is free to pick up (some would say ‘steal’) the best of other cultures. That’s why we all eat pizza – it’s delicious. If you are an ethnic that does things that the mainstream doesn’t, you *might* be onto something great, still undiscovered by the majority, but more likely it’s something that most of us have rejected as second or third-rate.
LS Says:
>I would suggest that, starting now, we all insist on being known as ‘mainstream people’.
I don’t agree. I think you have misidentified the problem. There is nothing wrong with having an ethnic identity, it adds a richness and depth and grounding to people that is hard to find other ways. No the problem is not the idea of ethnic culture, it is the fact that there are some really bad memes in some specific cultures. The idea that we should homogenize is very unattractive, and comes from an unwillingness in our judgement free culture to call out specific cultures and memes as bad. Lets have all these different cultures, fix what is broken and enjoy what is great, rather than neutering then all to spare people’s feelings.
So the atomic bomb in the apartment project is dead. Pity that… not that I have any ambitions in that area myself, but I would love to be able to handle some (safe amount of) uranium one day. Just for the feel of its weight – I can still remember from school being able to handle mercury, in the days when that would have allowed, and being fascinated not only by it being liquid but the unexpected weight of it for even a small quantity. Just trying to imagine how U (half as heavy again) or Pu (even heavier) would feel.
Yes, I know there are even heavier metals, unfortunately just as difficult to obtain :-(
@Jessica Boxer:
>I would suggest that, starting now, we all insist on being known as ‘mainstream people’.
“I don’t agree. I think you have misidentified the problem. There is nothing wrong with having an ethnic identity, it adds a richness and depth and grounding to people that is hard to find other ways.”
It’s not about people who self-identify as ‘Italian-American’, ‘Polish-American’, etc.; they still refer to themselves as ‘white people’. We’ve got to kill that so that ‘African-Americans have a clearly defined place to go.
As to these various identities, you should look at them more carefully. The people who identify as ethnic in America are actually ‘faking it’. The ‘Irish’ hold a big parade on Fifth Avenue every March 17, but when it’s over, they take off the plastic green hats and the ‘Kiss me, I’m Irish’ buttons and go back to being just like eveyone else. African-Americans will have to hold Juneteenth celebrations, attend the AME church and jump the broom at weddings, leaving the traditional view of the ‘white devils’ behind. That’s how the bad memes get rooted out; people drop the stuff that doesn’t work in mainstream society once they realize that the mainstream is where their opportunities lie.
Once people look outside the group, the greater opportunities become obvious. One of my classmates’ family originated in Syria. He married a girl whose family came from Lithuania. We Americans do that all the time. So much for ethnicity.
“It’s a meme plague specifically engineered by the ruling class after Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, because said class felt threatened by the successful routing of a governor by the unified forces of poor white and black farmhands.”
The above was from Jeff Read on how the idea of black and white people got entrenched in the early American south. That’s not the real reason, though it no doubt helped the planter class. The big landowners needed labor, which was hard to get. African slaves were available, but there was a problem – in English society, slavery was immoral; it was WRONG. Their society had eliminated serfdom, and you could not keep people as slaves. They came up with the idea that dark-skinned Africans were of another, inferior race and not fully human, and so enslaved them. It’s an evil idea, conceived by evil people for an evil purpose. It has to die.
LS Says:
>It’s not about people who self-identify as ‘Italian-American’, ‘Polish-American’, etc.; they still refer to themselves as ‘white people’. We’ve got to kill that so that ‘African-Americans have a clearly defined place to go.
I don’t really understand what this means, however, this much I will say “white” is a meta-enthnicity. It has its own set of memes, as “the people who came from Europe.” I think celebrating the ethnic heritiage of being white is a good thing to do as well (though what that means is a little less sharply defined than Irish American, or Italian American.)
> As to these various identities, you should look at them more carefully. The people who identify as ethnic in America are actually ‘faking it’.
Don’t agree. It makes me think of one guy, Irish American, who is very proud of his ethnic heritage. Currently he is learning Gaelic, to connect. However, of course not everyone is like him. But that is the beauty of people, they are all a little different. I’ll grant you that white based ethnicity tend to celebrate less, and I’ll also grant you that that is because they are the mainstream — having defined the mainstream.
However, America is full of ethnicity that are committed to their ethnic way of life. Consider Cuban Americans, or Mexican Americans, or Chinese Americans, or Muslim Americans, or Indian Americans, or Cherokee Americans. These groups all contribute bountifully to our cultural diverseness, and to homogenize them into one big sanitized blob would be a crime. If you have never celebrated Chinese new year in Chinatown, you are missing out a special experience. If you have never been to a middle eastern buffet you are doing a disservice to your taste buds.
>Once people look outside the group, the greater opportunities become obvious. One of my classmates’ family originated in Syria. He married a girl whose family came from Lithuania. We Americans do that all the time. So much for ethnicity.
What is wrong with celebrating both?
I sometimes wish I had more time to reply to these threads; they’re some of the best out there content-wise (even with ESR’s WordPress trying to muck the works).
This from Andy Freeman bears repeating:
This should be an enlightening moment for many people. Maybe not commenters here, but just in case: citations that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and gradually evolved life over that time puts Christians on the defensive. Citations that some Earth-sized planets were discovered orbiting stars about 1000 light years away does not put Christians on the defensive. Why? The only difference is that one of them tends to be accompanied by an additional “and by the way, Christians are so stupid that they disagree with this”. Then all you need are a few attention-mongers who really do believe the earth is young and created literally in a week, publish a few articles, and you’ve got yourself a roaring fire.
I’ll claim, even though it’s too late to prove, that if science weren’t served up with a side order of Christian hate, the problem of teaching it would be the non-issue it should have been. I grew up in a Texas town of about 6000 people where a prayer is made over the loudspeaker before each football game; we covered evolution just fine. In fact, evolution was practiced on a daily basis; examples abounded where people would try alternate methods of things and naturally go with what worked. Which also goes to show that they were quite adaptable to reality as well, to speak in counterpoint to Eric.
Speaking of which, I can’t tell whether any distinction is being drawn here between belief in God and blind loyalty to His plan to the point of committing large-scale violence. If there’s a distinction, so be it. If not, then implying that my sister (who believes in God) would be willing to nuke anything other than a Lean Cuisine in the name of God hits me roughly the same way Eric reading global warming research that conflicted with what he knew of the Little Ice Age hit him.
Exclusive revelation, meanwhile, is a bit hard for me to get a finding on. In some cases, I believe there’s some fire to that smoke; I’ve witnessed people espouse views because they trust their priest, reverend, deacon, etc. as an authority. On the other hand, I’ve also witnessed a great many of my acquaintances in that part of Texas have frank discussions about God and the Bible as if they are personal experiences – it is commonplace to offer one’s own opinions about God, to pray without intercession with clergy, and so on. They see their clergy as ordinary people, and have at times had disagreements or general problems with their opinions. (I don’t recall any differences of opinion specifically involving religious doctrine, to be fair; like I said, it’s hard for me to get a definite finding.) In short, I’ve seen too large a streak of individualism in American Christianity to consign the entire movement to memebottery, even accounting for unmistakable authority figures such as the Roman Catholic Pope.
Trust in authority brings me to another point I think bears repeating here, this time from Eric:
In another thread a while back, I mentioned how people don’t think all the time, basically because thinking consumes a great deal of energy. (Indeed, evolutionarily speaking, conscious thought was described as a pretty big bet, according to what I read; it could have failed to pay off if early homo sapiens could not find enough sustenance to afford the calorie expense.) What if that tendency extends to the present day? It could explain why thinking hard about something feels like a chore; it could also explain a great deal of the entire phenomenon of trust in authority. And it could explain a great deal of the observed failure of many people to think about the consequences of their actions beyond their immediate environment.
Out of sight = out of mind. “I’ve seen stuff provided by the government, and the government is powerful; it ought to be able to provide it for everyone. I’m told (by authority!) that the government works for me; therefore I ought to obligate it to providing it. It will pay for it somehow.” …. “My damn taxes are too high. Time to see what I can deduct and get Uncle Sam off my back this year.” …. “I believe the government should provide this…”
“It makes me think of one guy, Irish American, who is very proud of his ethnic heritage. Currently he is learning Gaelic, to connect.”
He’s faking it. He didn’t learn Irish at home, he has to go to class. Anyone can do that.
“What is wrong with celebrating both?”
And when the Syrian-Lithuanian kids marry a Cuban-German-Italian, what do their children celebrate?
At some point, you’ve got to realize that too much water has gone under the bridge….
(I didn’t complete my thought here before I submitted; apologies.)
I believe the cost of thinking is high enough that it factors into the cost-benefit analysis most people engage in when making decisions. In the aggregate, I believe it also is what results in such a large presence of faith. It’s not even that people choose not to think, to put off a decision, or just go along with whatever someone else tells them; I suspect it’s nothing more or less than a successful evolutionary trait in the current environment.
@LS
Every excuse is a good excuse to celebrate.
As a child I got presents from both our local Saint Nicolas and a few weeks later from Santa. I have never complained.
LS Says:
>they still refer to themselves as ‘white people’. We’ve got to kill that so that ‘African-Americans have a clearly defined place to go.
Jessica Boxer says:
“I don’t really understand what this means, however, this much I will say “white” is a meta-enthnicity…”
It’s very important. One of the big problems with being in a minority group is the fear that, no matter how nice the majority people are, there’s the danger that they can gang up on you and do Bad Things. In the US, non-whites have already entered the mainstream. Hard-core, ghetto-type blacks need to join them, and they won’t if they identify the mainstream with white people.
# LS Says:
>He’s faking it. He didn’t learn Irish at home, he has to go to class. Anyone can do that.
It isn’t about what, it is about why.
> At some point, you’ve got to realize that too much water has gone under the bridge….
So? Mongrels can celebrate everyone else’s culture, but a culture is nurtured in a mildly closed group, a meme that many such groups propagate. I see nothing wrong with a Chinese girl restricting her marital preferences to Chinese men. As long as everyone is cooperating willingly, I think we all benefit.
# Paul Brinkley Says:
> I’ll claim, even though it’s too late to prove, that if science weren’t served up with a side order of Christian hate,
I don’t think that is fair at all. Are some people hateful and dismissive about other people’s beliefs? Yes, of course, but it cuts both ways. You should hear what some Christian groups say about evolution believers.
Nonetheless, there is something bigger here, and it is the root cause of the whole problem. It is the appeal to an unchallengable authority, namely the Bible. Not all Christians are 100% bought and sold on the “God Breathed Word” meme, but in the USA a very large number are. The problem is that if your faith in your eternal destiny depends on believing something written in a book, you’ve got big problems if that same book says provably dumb or wrong things.
It really is all based on a measure of utility. It is very useful to Christians to believe that Jesus died for their sins. However, there is almost no utility in believing that the earth is the condensation of dust from 4 billion years ago. The former makes a difference to their lives, the latter does not. So, any rational (or meta rational) individual would throw out the first in favor of the second.
It reminds me of those omnibus bills congress likes to pass. You know, where this guy agrees to the Keystone Pipeline, as long as this guy agrees to a tax increase. You can’t split them, so you’ve got to judge them on their total net utility.
Since the people in question are farmers, and therefore use evolution in the micro, every day of their lives, they use compartmentalization to deal with the dissonance. They will tell you them believe in short term evolution, but that evolution between species is bunk. God made them “according to their kind.” Again, it is a useful rationalization to maximize the utility of their beliefs and their jobs simultaneously.
However, if the politest scientist in the world points out the contradiction between their beliefs and reality, that person is hacking at the foot of a gigantic house of cards, on which much of this person’s life, social group and belief system is built. So strong resistance should be expected.
Moreover, as Eric has pointed out, religion has evolved a very powerful immune system to deal with these attacks. Whether it be the internal support systems of the Church, or some faux scientists putting together fatuous nonsense to support the beliefs, that offer a patina of science on a foundation of bullshit. Or, religion’s crown jewel of defense mechanisms — to doubt is to sin. To doubt is to cause your prayers to fail. To doubt is to cause the crops to fail. To doubt is to let the devil in and make your kids sick, or rob you of your peace of mind. Religion has been defending itself for thousands of years, and it is really good at it.
It has also developed a powerful self propagation strategy by telling people the importance of teaching their kids. By isolating your kids to a narrow peer group, by having classes to inculcate the values into them and by imbuing key transitional moments in a child’s life with deeply religious overtones. Gosh, it is so effective that even people who have no particular connection to religion still seek to subject their children to these tools of indoctrination.
Religion is a powerful organism. I should not be underestimated.
@ William Newman
re: gun-type nukes versus implosion-type nukes
Absolutely. And, we all know development didn’t stop there:
– make a bigger bomb with the same amount
– make a smaller bomb – ie. tactical nukes
– fusion boosting fission
– 2-stage: fission making fusion
and more.
@Jessica: I don’t doubt that there exist Christians who say or imply nasty things about evolution believers. What I doubt is whether they are as prevalent as the evolution believers who say or imply nasty things about Christians. My evidence is obviously anecdotal, but nevertheless, having spent about two decades around each crowd, I ran into virtually none of the former, but plenty of the latter. What criticism I see of the left from the right virtually never occurs when I’m at positive social gatherings of the right, as opposed to the left; said criticism is typically quiet and very specific, as opposed to shrill mocks from the left. Feel free to poke holes in this experience: what could explain it better, than that more of the aggression is going from left to right? (Am I sampling only the left when they’re feeling defensive? Am I not hanging around with enough of the right? Should I be watching more commentators on Fox News?)
I’ve long considered your current criticisms of the Bible hefty enough to want to re-read my copy of King James with a specific eye toward that. My impression of my acquaintances’ management of the Bible is that they have an aggregate cultural sense of what is right and wrong, passed down mainly by parents and then by clergy and selected other trusted social leaders, and when they study the Bible, they focus on the passages that uphold that cultural sense, and the passages that contradict it simply don’t get as much or even any focus. That said, again, I’d like to re-read my copy with an eye toward that, and bring such passages up with Christians I know, when I have the opportunity.
I think I somehow failed to characterize them if you think they’re farmers. Some of them certainly are. A great many of them also work in the technical industry around Austin. (My father was himself a physicist, building equipment to detect elemental compositions of various substances for use by large manufacturing and industry companies. And he believed in God – or, at least, he went to church. I sometimes suspect he was a closet agnostic, but I’ll never know.) The point here is that these are smart people that aren’t exhibiting any cultlike behavior, aside from attending mass.
In addition to these are of course various people you may have heard of in the press referred to as “Christian scientists”, which I’m guessing what you were referring to as faux scientists with their “fatuous nonsense”. From an atheist a viewpoint, I agree it’s nonsense. From a Christian viewpoint, I’m not sure what it is. From a viewpoint detached from either, it looks to me like the Christian view is subconsciously thinking it only far enough to enable itself to get work done, i.e., compartmentalizing the dissonance.
But atheists do this too. I could use the belief that there is no god as an example, but I believe there’s the critical degree of merit in atheists who point out that even if there’s some omnipotent being out there, with technology so advanced so as to be indistinguishable from divinity, it’s a distinction as makes no difference, as the result is still a universe in which scientific experimentation yields tangible positive results. In short, it doesn’t matter whether there’s a God or not, for the purposes of how we behave. In the secular realm, atheists and theists behave by and large the same way.
I could also use as examples all the cognitive shortcuts we use in daily life that don’t make complete sense upon examination – which shampoo to buy, how to troubleshoot a broken computer, whether a given law is just, and so forth. But I could apply the same to theists; there’s nothing specific to atheists there.
What I do consider specific to atheists is this: they exhibit an awareness of the unscientific reasoning of theists, and yet, when forced to explain it, they all too often fall into their own unscientific traps to do so. They’ll fail to examine their own premises, They’ll beg the question. (“[Given that Kansans are dumb,] What’s the matter with Kansas?”) They’ll develop theories that couldn’t possibly be falsified. The list goes on. (I note here that I’m armchairing my own way to glory with my “thought takes energy” theory, but hopefully I’ve made enough hay out of wanting this questioned to sidestep the landmine.)
I’ll especially agree with the second part. :-D
Oh, BTW, if you really want to convince a religious person to abandon their beliefs, I believe there are only two ways with any hope of success. The first is to alienate them from their social support structure. The most common way that happens is if there is a romantic breakup, where one person feels that their friends are all siding with their former partner. The powerful emotional response to this pulls them away from the cocoon of religious belief that nurtures them, and decrease the utility of remaining part of it. This allows the person enough breathing room to reconsider and reformulate a social structure that does not depend on religion. IT also happens sometimes when a minister or priest pisses a congregant off for some reason.
The second method is to get into their holy book itself. Unfortunately this requires that you know quite a lot about the book. But most of them have got some real easy targets. Targets where you can show that the morality of the deeply respected does not correspond with the morality displayed in their church. Two examples being God’s demand that Saul kill all the babies in 1Sam 15, and for Muslims, it is always challenging to point out that Muhammad married a six year old girl (Aisha), and that the most generous interpretation of this is that he consummated the marriage when she was nine.
This is a useful technique because it overcomes that most powerful of defense mechanisms — doubt is evil, and brings about bad things. Because what you demand of them is that they have faith in, and believe in things that it is impossible for them to do so comfortably. Less effective is showing contradictions in their holy books — unfortunately, religious people have developed a skill for the double think necessary to accept contradictions. Only stimulating their emotional disgust at killing babies or screwing nine year old girls, is sufficient to shake people out of their stupor.
Nonetheless, you might want to tread carefully. The unwinding of deeply held religious beliefs in a person’s life can be devastating, and can cause spectacular damage. I’ve seen it happen, it can get very ugly, and it can have consequences that lead to horrible long term emotional trauma, and even, in some cases I have heard of, suicide.
As far as I am concerned atheism is not an evangelical system. The word “evangelical” comes from the Greek euagenlion, which means “good news.” The plain fact is that atheism isn’t particularly good news. We don’t offer an objective purpose in life. Death is inevitable and is the total extinguishing of all that you are and have worked for. Hope is vain. Evil often prevails.
However, at least we atheists have one thing to offer. Unlike religions, we atheists can offer miracles. Miracles like insulin injections. Miracles like the free market. Miracles like innovation that leads to spectacular wealth. Miracles like fertilizer and irrigation, so that the rain dance can be a thing of the past. We might not be able to turn water into wine, but we can secure our water systems so that wine is not the only safe thing to drink. We might not be able to cure the woman with the issue of blood with a mere touch, and with her faith only, however, we can certainly perform an operation to remove endometriosis, or ovarian cysts.
Of course religious people participate in, and help bring about these miracles. However, it is the brutal unyielding rationality of atheism and it partner unflinching rationality, that allow them to happen.
>> Religion is a powerful organism. I should not be underestimated.
> I’ll especially agree with the second part. :-D
That was, of course, a humiliating and embarrassing typo, but I’ll accept the compliment, thanks.
I’ll actually disagree with your implication that “good news”, whatever that is, is the only thing a belief system has to offer. That value, which includes the miracles you describe, *is* what I consider to be the sum whole of the content on the “step this way!” board outside any belief system’s tent. (Perhaps Michael Hipp feels differently. I’d be interested to know if there’s an objective difference.)
I see atheism as promising a happier life via a basis for clarity of knowledge. (It doesn’t outright hand it to you, but that’s fine; most human psyches have no problem expecting to have to work hard for something valuable.) I see Abrahamic religions as promising a happier life via an extension of that life on another plane of existence. The latter seems silly, of course, from an atheist viewpoint. But if I’m some random human choosing my belief system, I’m not presupposing the atheist viewpoint, by definition. Given that,it requires a great deal of thinking to drill down to that hindbrain-driven nugget of underlying premises shared between views. Most people are too busy with their lives to afford that examination. To put it more economically, they derive more value from spending that thought on secular considerations and just going along with their upbringing, than they do from deep examination. (How many atheists contemplate a theistic view and decide it was a waste of time afterward? How many theists do the analogous?)
(Aside: just in case I’m not clear, I feel I should apologize for implying some conflations I don’t mean in my previous comment, which in my opinion was a bit rambley in places. In particular, I definitely don’t equate atheists with the left.)
@ Paul Brinkley
Whether the Christian God exists or not is a very important question.
I agree that the majority of people don’t want to think any harder than they have to, particularly about a question of giving up a belief and possibly rejecting something their friends and family believe in.
But some people (presumably, most of the people reading this blog) like to think. We are a minority, but we are disproportionately responsible for the progress humans enjoy in understanding and manipulating the world around us.
The (metaphorical) sheep, are just along for the ride, at best, and can be talked into atrocities, at worst.
I don’t believe they’re just along for the ride. Suppose they were. Then if they were to cease to exist tomorrow, the lives of the people who like to think would be better, right? Probably orders of magnitude better, given how many “sheep” there are relative to the thinkers. I find this exceptionally hard to believe. An enormous portion of the production of humanity would follow it – agriculture, manufacturing, construction. Thinkers would have to do it, and now there aren’t enough people to build smartphones.
Furthermore, not only do I claim thinking is so expensive that many people choose not to do it, but I also claim it’s so expensive that no one can afford to do it all the time. We spend most of our lives on autopilot. Conversely, many – I’d go so far as to say most – people who choose not to think, still do think, on occasion. They save it for when it matters most. A lot of them are building impressive stuff. If they went away, so would that.
I see little merit in acting on the notion that there are thinkers and sheep as a result. We are not two species in one.
# Paul Brinkley Says:
>I see little merit in acting on the notion that there are thinkers and sheep as a result. We are not two species in one.
Indeed, thinking is not the only useful activity. In fact there are lots of thinkers who contribute little, and some whose contribution is negative (Karl Marx being one that springs to mind.)
@ Paul Brinkley, @Jessica Boxer
No, of course not.
My statement about “(metaphorical) sheep, [being] just along for the ride” implies two groups of people. I realize that it is a continuum.
But there is a distinction between people who love to think and those who do not.
Human progress is partially evolutionary – decisions are made for whatever reason and good results lead to remembering and repeating the choices that appear to be good.
But, I would guess, people that love to think are disproportionately responsible for human progress. Not making another sky-scraper or another smart phone – inventing sky-scrapers and smart phones (to pick two examples at random).
I also realize that some thinkers come up with bad ideas – Jessica’s example of Karl Marx, for example.
Sure, many people save their thinking for “when it matters most”. It is unfortunate that (I am guessing again) those people may not think enough to make good decisions about “when it matters most”. To pick an example that is not at random, they may just go along with being religious and accept it on faith.
@ Jessica Boxer
I also agree that there are many people who love to think that contribute little to society.. And I realize that society runs on many kinds of people, whether they love thinking or not.
@Paul Brinkley:
Yes, people like Madalyn Murray O’Hare raised a stink in a way that may or may not have been all that productive. Even so, for the most part, you’ve got it 180 degrees backward in terms of who started what. I’ve heard plenty of Christians ranting about godless heathen.
I don’t know anybody who says nasty things about everyday Christians doing everyday Christian stuff. But when the nudge-nudge wink-wink politicians claim they’re “Christian” and then go out of their way to break every commandment, it pisses me off and I’ll say bad things about them. And when the Texas schoolbook committee tries to teach intelligent design in science class, they and all their followers deserve all the ridicule that the Pastafarians can heap on them, and that ridicule will naturally fall on anybody who believes in Young Earth Creationism.
Go on — tell me that I’m going about buying shampoo the wrong way. And take a guess as to what I’ll do — (a) say “you’re right, I never thought of that”; (b) say “well maybe so, but it works for me, and it’s not worth it to change”; or (c) attempt to co-opt the political process to make sure that everybody learns how to buy shampoo my correct way, and that public buildings can be emblazoned with the Crest logo?
I haven’t seen this.
What I have seen is this: Theists go out of their way to create elaborate, tendentious, specious arguments that are expressly designed to make people fall into these traps, and when one of these “articulate bastards” (a favorite expression I got from my father-in-law, who was using it to describe Arthur Scargill at the time) puts someone on the spot who hasn’t had to give it that much thought (because it’s not hard, really, if people are arguing fairly), you’re absolutely right that an unprepared atheist will lose a Fox-style debate. But that doesn’t mean that the atheist didn’t go through some serious self-examination earlier, and reject religion for the right reasons. It’s pretty bloody obvious from the statistics that many, if not most atheists, got that way themselves at some point. It may be they arrived at the correct answer for the wrong reasons, but in a lot of cases, they went through a process almost as difficult as coming out of the closet, so I’d have to guess most of them actually did some reasonable thinking to support their decision.
>It may be they arrived at the correct answer for the wrong reasons, but in a lot of cases, they went through a process almost as difficult as
>coming out of the closet, so I’d have to guess most of them actually did some reasonable thinking to support their decision.
The truth of this might be when you grew up. I seem to recall claiming to be an athiest to be a teenage phase for just about everyone I knew and the default was to stay that way (or relatively agnostic). Perhaps a sign of the changing times.
# Jessica Boxer Says:
> “However, if the politest scientist in the world points out the contradiction between their beliefs and reality, that person is hacking at the foot of a gigantic house of cards, on which much of this person’s life, social group and belief system is built. So strong resistance should be expected.”
This strikes me as *asking* someone to “kill the Buddha”, if I’m understanding that concept correctly. That’s hard enough to do when the demand is coming from yourself. Add the blow to pride at accepting that someone else is right and you’re wrong, and it must be next to impossible.
Sorry, Patrick, but I can’t tell what your point is. …First of all, you’ll note I tempered the point I brought up; I was trying to analyze as many cases as I could, and it was never meant to be some sort of decisive blow. To answer your rhetorical question, I’d expect you to be most likely to choose (b), because that’s what I’d likely choose too, and I figure you and I have about the same temperament. In fact, I’d expect most atheists to choose (b). In more fact, I’d expect most theists to choose (b). (Hence, “there’s nothing specific to atheists here”.) (I know you and I both know of people who’d choose (c), but that’s by the by… except, what if some of those are atheists?)
As for having the causation backward, I’m not so sure Christians were nasty toward atheists first (I’m reading that atheism was presented as a response to religion’s perception as a mechanism for frightening people into morality as early as ancient Greece), but I never made a ruling on who started it, and I also don’t think it’s important at this point. Both sides have had generations of tit-for-tats, to the point that everyone feels defensive. (This implies, among other things, that I sympathize with atheists too.)
So you’re irate at eloquent theists? I sympathize with that. To be honest, it clearly doesn’t affect me as it affects you, and moreover I’d say it doesn’t affect me as much as it probably should. But that may be because of our environments. I often feel like I’m surrounded by what another friend of mine calls EAs (Evangelical Atheists). They’re shrill to a point far beyond being on the defensive. They’re tendentious and make specious arguments. If you had to hang around them, you’d probably be just as irritated. Meanwhile, I see a lot of theists who are agreeable, sufficiently adaptable, and largely just as capable as any reasoned atheist. I suspect we’re each comparing our oranges to the other guy’s apples.
Maybe you’re right; maybe atheists are more likely to have chosen their belief system through reason. (Exactly what statistics did you have in mind that make this “bloody obvious”?) But that leaves me without an explanation for all the irrational atheists I see, overwhelming the atheiss I admire such as Chris Hitchens and Sam Harris. I’m more inclined to believe that most people are only as religious as they can afford the effort for; it explains more of my experience.
@ A
The issue is faith. If someone is fine with believing important stuff on faith, no amount of talking is going to change that. Witness Michael Hipp.
It is like intellectual Aikido – you say something about reason, they say reason doesn’t apply to this in the same way; you say something about science, you get the same basic answer – they will always turn the question back onto you. They will point out that you don’t personally have any evidence for, say, electrons, but you believe in them. You describe the scientific method and they will suggest that you believe in electrons because you are believing people you don’t even know. You use a sentence that includes the phrase “repeatable results”, and, if they are intelligent enough, they say that religion,
like, say, sociology, doesn’t lend itself to repeatable results.
If you ask “Why do you believe this?”, you will get a different sort of answer but it won’t be satisfying.
If the person is religious because they haven’t really bothered to think about it, you may be able to talk them into something, but the guy they sit next to on the bus will be able to talk them into something else.
Some people are OK with faith, some aren’t.
Exactly! It’s like trying to get your cat to stay off the table. :)
The easiest way I’ve seen to get around this obstacle is to imply you’ve been wrong yourself in the past. Most theists I know are Jacksonian in temperament – they’re irascible, but they have a fierce sense of equality among humans, a positive trait that one can use like a pulley. I’ve seen them use it all the time to teach each other in adulthood. “I’ve been there myself”; “try that and see how it works for ya”. That sort of thing. It takes more time, and sometimes it won’t work because there’s something pushing from the other side, but it can nevertheless yield success where success is otherwise unreachable.
@Brian:
You didn’t spend enough time talking with Michael Hipp for me to certain of this. You might be entirely correct, and I certainly understand your not wishing to spend more of your time, but I was seeing too many potential weak points in his reasoning, too little focus on any one of them, and meanwhile, he was willing to talk.
> Sorry, Patrick, but I can’t tell what your point is.
You appeared to be comparing the cognitive shortcut of choosing the nearest available religion to that of choosing the nearest available shampoo. I don’t find those comparable in the slightest, in any way. By the way, depending on the argument about what’s wrong with your shampoo-choosing strategy, I could see several (a) responses, from me, from atheists, or from theists. But the normal theist response to a challenge to something related to his religion is to double down (a choice I forgot to add), and sometimes even to choose (c) to force everybody else to see things his way.
> They’re tendentious and make specious arguments.
Maybe they’re subject to the same kind of Christians I was describing, and are used to tit-for-tat tendentiousness and speciousness.
> If you had to hang around them, you’d probably be just as irritated.
No doubt.
> Meanwhile, I see a lot of theists who are agreeable, sufficiently adaptable, and largely just as capable as any reasoned atheist.
Sure. All the ones I work with are like that. I explicitly pointed to politicians and those who feel their beliefs need to impact the teaching of science as a problem. (There are certainly other religious nutcase problems, but those are the ones that I find bothersome on a regular basis.)
> Exactly what statistics did you have in mind that make this “bloody obvious”?
It’s hard to find good statistics of agnosticism/atheism in the general populace, but from a casual examination of several studies, it appears to me that as a percentage of the population, atheism seems to be trending up. Given that atheists aren’t the demographic group that tends to large families, my conclusion is that more people convert to atheism than convert away from it.
@ Paul Brinkley
I didn’t, but many people did, over hours and hours and Michael Hipp’s position didn’t change in the slightest as far as I noticed.
Michael specifically claimed not to believe “on faith”. This does confound my position. I personally believe what Michael is doing is “faith”, but I can’t (or at least, didn’t) prove it. Maybe my using Michael as an example was not appropriate.
In any case, I would say that people that believe every word in the Bible are not going to change that because other people reason with them. If reason was that important to them, they wouldn’t believe every word in the Bible. I would say that the same thing applies to people that believe in god and only believe part of the Bible.
You can’t use reason to counter faith; if you could, the person with the faith would have done it on their own.
I realize that I am just stating an opinion, that I haven’t proven anything.
“Atheism is no good…no holidays!”
-Henny Youngman
“Get the Festivus pole out of the crawl space! It’s time for the Airing of the Grievances!”
“Happy holidays to all!”
– /me
Oh, I recall pasting a link into a chat to some silly valley denizens (I’m not) with, I thought, a rather poignant analysis by someone in US politics about what the US state apparatus was doing to itself and the world, on a British newspaper’s website, now maybe five years ago. The reply? “That’s written for European consumption.”
Would that invalidate the points made somehow?
Not that I think European governments are all that enlightened or that the European peoples as a whole have much inkling about the consequences of things large and small that’re happening, but that’s not the point.
That’s so full of shit. For every atheist scientist there are probably several equally brilliant scientists that believe in some sort of deity. I’ll match your Feynman with Einstein, Plank, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, etc. And that’s completely ignoring the fact that most scientists were Christian by default prior to the modern age because it was the church that supported/sanctioned many western research universities. Take for example Cambridge University. Established by charter from King Henry the Third and confirmed by Papal bull and the first college was established by the Bishop of Ely. Without religion, specifically the Christian one, we wouldn’t necessarily have modern science as we know it.
I’m not religious (lapsed, lazy, whatever) but I can smell arrogant bullshit when it’s heaped in a steaming pile. Some Atheists are the most annoying people who need to get all high and mighty about what the fuck you’re supposed to (not) believe…mostly so they can feel superior to everyone else.
Unflinching rationality my ass. Unflinching rationality states I don’t have enough data to be an arrogant jerk about my personal belief system. I’ve worked for nobel laureates (before they won) that weren’t half as arrogant as this…and they’re physicists. And I would guess more cosmologists are spiritual (believes in SOMETHING out there) than not. I would hazard one or both have deist spiritual beliefs. Especially Dr Smoot given the press release of the DMR data.
Oh, and I found no indications that the folks that developed the insulin treatment were all atheists. In fact Banting studied divinity before medicine. Doesn’t mean he still believed in some sort of deity but nothing stated he was an avowed atheist.
For those that like stats:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8916982/
As with all surveys these need to be taken with a grain of salt.
If your disbelief in the existence of any deity (not just the one defined by the judeo christian religion) is founded on something other than faith then show me the data that proves the lack of such a thing. And no, don’t give me logic. Depending on logic (aka “rationality”) is simply another form of faith because without empirical data and you end up down the path of Aristotelian Physics.
Given that I cannot produce such data I am disinclined to pat myself on the back regarding my towering intellect and keen grasp on rationality nor believe I’m superior to folks that believe in such silly superstition. Especially given some of those folks are highly intelligent, have contributed far more than I have to the understanding of the universe and haven’t made nearly the same amount of self-serving and stupid statements as evidenced in this thread.
Electrons are a piss poor example either way since I can conduct (heh) experiments that show me that they (or something) do exist and fits the my model of the observable universe.
So show me that the ardent disbelief in any sort of supernatural entity is based on actual hard data or I’d contend that agnosticism is far more rational and far less annoying than the creed of atheism. Proving that Christianity is sometimes silly or inconsistent is not nearly the same thing.
>So show me that the ardent disbelief in any sort of supernatural entity is based on actual hard data or I’d contend that agnosticism is far more rational and far less annoying than the creed of atheism.
I used to share this position. And it is true that it is possible to be an atheist on insufficient grounds. But…
I don’t need hard data to conclude that there is no such thing as a square circle. Some existence claims are not merely contingently false in this universe, they are necessarily false in any possible universe. The existence of the theist’s god is in the latter category, not the former.
“Some Atheists are the most annoying people who need to get all high and mighty about what the fuck you’re supposed to (not) believe…mostly so they can feel superior to everyone else.”
Yes. Over at Instapundit, there’s a link to a story about some atheists that gamed a lottery to take over a holiday display space in California. Reynolds’ comment was that atheism would be a lot more popular if atheists weren’t such shmucks. He’s right. Too many are of the sort that like to ostentatiously look at their watch and call out, “God! I’ll give You 5 seconds to strike me dead!…..Time’s up!”
# Nigel Says:
>That’s so full of shit. … I’ll match your Feynman with Einstein, Plank, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, etc.
I assure you not a single one of these esteemed scientists was a Bible believing Christian by the measure I used in my comment — such as believe in the special, one week long creation of the Universe. If you think you can be a decent physicist and hold that view, I respectfully disagree.
Scientists who are Christians can only be successful insofar as they suspend or compartmentalize the literal belief in the Bible for duration of their work.
> …I can smell arrogant bullshit … Some Atheists are the most annoying people who need to get all high and mighty about what the fuck you’re supposed to (not) believe…mostly so they can feel superior to everyone else.
As I specifically said: atheism should not be evangelical. I don’t give a hoot what you believe — until you start telling me what to teach my kids in school, or knocking on my door to save me, or flying planes into buildings. I don’t knock on people’s door to tell them there is no god. But if you come knocking on mine, don’t expect me to listen to your nonsense without comment.
But if some atheist wants to put up a sign in the State House announcing there is no god, why the heck are they poopy heads, when across the rotunda the Christians are weeping over the birth of baby Jesus? Atheists have just as much right to speak their views as Christians.
> Unflinching rationality my ass. Unflinching rationality states I don’t have enough data to be an arrogant jerk about my personal belief system.
Curious indeed. Unflinching rationality demands that I recognize the limits of my knowledge. I don’t remember saying I was omniscient. I do remember some people telling me they knew a guy who was omniscient. The arrogant bullshit seems more prevalent on that side as far as I can see.
>If your disbelief in the existence of any deity
I agree with Bertrand Russell on this. Certainly I am, by the strictest definition an agnostic, but the word carries way too much cultural baggage to be useful. See Russell’s teapot. To quote the most important part:
“I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla.”
@esr given that the lindemann-weirstrass theorem proves mathematically that you can’t square a circle that may not be the best choice.
I would argue that Santa and the Easter Bunny as constructs of man are arguably provably (or necessarily if you prefer) non-existant in reality. You can go as far as argue that deities, as described by religion are also constructs of man trying to grasp the universe (as opposed to entertaining the kids).
However, the existence of some kind supernatural entity (defined as some entity outside the frame of this universe’s constraints that may or may not have set in motion the creation of this universe and possibly be at the root of human creation myths) I would say is not in that same category which must be necessarily false in any possible universe. Our knowledge of this universe is far too spotty to make that kind of assertion except through faith.
Imagine, if you like, that someday we can create true simulations of intelligent beings in virtual environments complete with their own “universal” physical laws. How would they be able to prove or disprove our existence? Would you then still be able to argue that in no possible universes that a theist god can exist? Including illogical and capricious ones?
Give Blizzard a dozen decades as we’ll likely have such a reality. Perhaps we’re just a video game sim left running unattended while the kids go out to have pizza…ragnarok will commence when the player avatars return…hey nifty! Look the mobs have developed nuclear weapons while we were gone!
@ Nigel
There are three reasons that I don’t believe in a god.
1. As esr pointed out, it is appropriate to not believe in anything that is logically impossible, such as an omnipotent being.
2. Any examples of belief in a god that I am aware of require faith on the part of the believer and faith is…. not an acceptable, no…. faith is not any substitute for reason. I was repelled by the idea of faith when I was 10 years old; I just didn’t understand why people were willing to believe elaborate beliefs without reason.
3. In the case of an elaborate or unusual belief, the burden of proof is on the believer. If anyone has a what I consider to be a good reason to believe in god, I will believe in god (my belief is neither ardent nor a creed). But I won’t believe in a god for no reason.
When I was about 11 years old, I still tentatively believed in the Christian God because everyone around me did, but I didn’t understand why. But, quite suddenly one evening, I realized that all these people around me believe in a god on faith because they were brought up to do so and that this passing along of belief from one generation to the next had been going on for thousands of years.
It was GREAT!. I understood. These people did not reject faith. They believed in a god for silly/mentally-lazy/foolish reasons. With that out of the way, I have not believed in a god since then.
Agnosticism isn’t appropriate for anyone who cares to seriously consider the issue. It is not appropriate to believe in a god, so I don’t. There is no reason to sit on the fence, and there are the three reasons above to take a position.
The last sentence of
Russell’s Teapot
may explain why so many people do believe in a god, but these are not reasons to do so. I won’t be an agnostic for no reason, either.
I should point out that I consider each of my three reasons, above, to be sufficient for not believing in a god or being an agnostic.
“Perhaps we’re just a video game sim left running unattended while the kids go out to have pizza…”
The Hindus are way ahead of you. The delusion of the world (the Maya) is merely a dream of Vishnu as he slumbers on his bed of cobras. It’s clearly a much better story.
> >The problem with that argument is that the only folks who have managed to turn millions of believers into memebots were not religious, they were leftists.
> Gee…have you ever heard of the Rev. Jim Jones…
Yes, and I even know the definition of “millions” – Jones didn’t come close. We can argue whether he was religious or a leftist in a religion mask.
> or the Rev. Sun Myung Moon?
Yup. And his membots have done what? Oh yes – they get married in large ceremonies. Some danger there.
> Ever have your doorbell rung by a Jehovah’s Witness?
Yup. And whenever they do, you should thank them for the modern 1st amendment jurisprudence, where there’s at least some restriction on govt power wrt speech. You should thank JVs because they were the plaintiffs in the important cases where the previous status quo was overturned.
What? You think that I should be concerned by JV? Why?
While you’re worring about “religious memebots” who haven’t done anything more than ring your doorbell (which various leftist groups do as well), you’re ignoring the leftist memebots who killed 10s of millions. Yes, some others didn’t reach that point, but only because they lacked “reach”.
> They came up with the idea that dark-skinned Africans were of another, inferior race and not fully human, and so enslaved them. It’s an evil idea, conceived by evil people for an evil purpose. It has to die.
I note that “Christians” had a huge role in killing slavery in the US. That’s the closest that “modern” Christianity has gotten to leftist-level of killing.
Feel free to equate the Civil War with Cambodia’s killing fields.
@Andy Freeman:
“I note that “Christians” had a huge role in killing slavery in the US.”
They had a bigger role in maintaining it. The meme was, “Yes, we are enslaving them, but we are bringing them to Jesus.”
The huge role in killing slavery in the US was played by the Union Army. It was not a religious institution.
I won’t equate the Civil War with the killing fields, but there’s always the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Thirty Years War, the Crusades, Serbian actions in Croatia and Kosovo, …
Christianity is no bargain. It’s had 2000 years, and took most of that to learn not to do the above. It only took the commies one tenth of that time to see the light. I can do better without either one of them.
> The huge role in killing slavery in the US was played by the Union Army.
The US Army was on the field because religious institutions in the North made that happen.
And, it wasn’t atheists who ran the underground railroad.
> It only took the commies one tenth of that time to see the light.
Assumes facts not in evidence. See Russia, China.
> I can do better without either one of them.
Maybe so, but for all the sins of Christianity, there are lots of virtues and good deeds.
What are the corresponding “virtues” of Communism?
Note – Yes there were religious folk who supported/justified slavery. However, that’s a long way from “slavery was caused by/relied on religious institutions.”
I’m pointing out that the religious effect, on balance, was significantly anti-slavery.
>I’m pointing out that the religious effect, on balance, was significantly anti-slavery.
That is a ridiculously untrue and ahistorical claim.
Yes, we’ve all seen Amazing Grace – some of us knew that Wilberforce’s (and John Brown’s) abolitionists and were largely Protestant pietists well before the movie, thank you very much. They were exceptional. In the history of Christianity, religion’s moral weight has overwhelmingly been pro-slavery. In the Confederate South clergy issued sermons assuring their flocks that the institution of slavery had firm scriptural foundation, and (unlike Wilberforce’s reformers) they could cite chapter and verse in both Old and New Testament.
This is quite representative, in that Christianity did not merely condone slavery but held up slavish obedience to divine authority as the ideal attitude of free persons.
Andy Freeman Says:
> Note – Yes there were religious folk who supported/justified slavery. However, that’s a long way from “slavery was caused by/relied on religious institutions.”
But part of the reason for that is that the Bible is not especially anti-slavery. From my knowledge of the Bible I’d say it was benignly accepting of it, if not positively supportive of the institution. To look to a book for moral guidance when it does not roundly condemn slavery doesn’t seem like a good plan to me. And to be clear, it is not that the subject isn’t touched on, it is discussed extensively.
I think it is important to distinguish between the christian religion and the christian religious institutions. The former oftentimes are simply secular institutions with a patina, or at most a veneer of Christianity, witness the Catholic church of the Borgias, the Holy Roman Empire or the Spanish Inquisition. Witness also the fact that even these dreadful organizations became queasy at some of the more extreme views expressed in the Bible such as Matthew 19:12.
“For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it.”
There aren’t too many sects demanding chopping off their manhood. (Note this was so offensive to some in the modern church that the disguise it with a very dishonest translation of the Greek in, for example, the New International Version.)
@Andy Freeman:
“The US Army was on the field because religious institutions in the North made that happen.”
Of all the causes of the Civil War, that has to be the least.
@Jessica Boxer:
I hope you realize that your last comment was number 666. Bwahahahaha….
LS Says:
> Of all the causes of the Civil War, that has to be the least
Yes, that’s what this thread needs — a discussion of the causes of the civil war. That isn’t controversial is it? :-)
Lumping campaign-finance reform in with SOPA? Now who’s oblivious?
SOPA exists not because the U.S. government is big, but because it is particularly and notoriously controlled by corporate dollars rather than the will of the people. Other welfare states don’t have this sort of tendency towards onerous copyright legislation — until the United States starts actively pressuring them. New Zealand had famously liberal copyright laws until recently, when they caved to U.S. government pressure to pass the one-suspected-strike-and-you’re-out law.
The problem with libertarianism and minarchism is that in a small-government scenario, corporations will fill the power vacuum — and will have little accountability except to their own profitability. In most of the anglosphere and Eurozone, government acts as a check against corporate power. The United States gets the shit end of it because the government is neither sufficiently small nor sufficiently antagonistic to corporate hegemony and is thus, as Richard Stallman says, a puppet of corporate interests — or perhaps their armed enforcement division.
Right or wrong, SOPA will pass. The folks at Aaron Swartz’s little PAC, Demand Progress, like to brag and take responsibility for Congress stalling on it, which is dubious both because far more people oppose SOPA than are in contact with Demand Progress, and because their efforts will ultimately prove unsuccessful. The copyright lobby is strong — to that champion of human rights, Senator Al Franken, his friends in Hollywood are apparently more human than you because their rights certainly take precedence — and there’s pretty much no way of solving the piracy problem without screening and policing the distribution channels. The internet is a distribution channel. SOPA will probably do nothing to stop the serious pirates, but it doesn’t matter. Looking like you’re doing something and doing something are extensionally equivalent to politicians and their financial backers. SOPA will also stay the law of the land for a long time, and here’s why.
Let’s look again at DRM. You and I know it doesn’t work, right? That’s because what we see is “Since hackers cracked that DRM the music labels and movie studios have made more money than ever. DRM obviously doesn’t work.”
Here’s what the studios and record labels see: “Since we adopted that DRM scheme we’ve made more money than ever! DRM obviously works!”
Now let’s apply this to the DMCA. We know it’s pretty much done nothing to stop widespread piracy, and interfered with legitimate interoperability and security concerns. We know it’s a bad law. But MGM, AOL Time Warner, Disney, BMI, etc. are just as convinced that it’s a good law which protects business because since its passage they’ve grown by leaps and bounds. I think SOPA will have a similar effect, but at significant cost to the internet industry,. But who cares about them, they’re nerds who think everything should be free and don’t recognize that we live in a society which protects intellectual property. A lot of them use that freeloader pirate “Linux” operating system as well. Oh, and SOPA contains anticircumvention provisions; PIPA does not but I bet they make it into the final bill. So editing /etc/resolv.conf or tunneling through a proxy to get around the DNS blockage may become a crime.
But we’re living in an era where people become suspected terrorists by booting into an OS with white scrolling text. If you don’t use an operating system recognized by the authorities (meaning Windows and maybe Mac, because TSA drones aren’t going to know what a Lunix is) you may be imprisoned by the military for as long as it pleases them.
esr Says:
>…and (unlike Wilberforce’s reformers) they could cite chapter and verse in both Old and New Testament.
This is THE most important point of all. For sure, any religious organization can claim their followers were weak and sinful. But when their core definitional document, the written word of God, indicates that their god is weak and sinful, then you are in a whole heap of trouble.
@jessica, literal belief in the biblical 7 day creation myth is not a requirement for being a christian and if far too narrow a definition for whom is religious. It would be like someone insisting that all open source proponents must be zealots like RMS. To me, that’s moving the goalposts…I went back and checked this thread and that requirement was not explicit in your posts.
Obviously Einstein was not Christian nor a religious Jew but believed in a created universe. Heisenberg was a Protestant and religious. Schrodinger was born Catholic but I believe was a proponent of Hinduism. Plank was Christian as well and believed in a deity. I should have found a buddhist and moslem physicist nobel winner to complete the major religions…but many if not all these guys believed in something beyond current understanding that created the universe.
You weren’t saying you were omniscient nor did I claim you did. You DID claim that you can’t believe in God AND be a good physicist. There is empirical evidence to the contrary…but according to you, these guys must have only been successful by compartmentalizing their faith. What on earth is that assertion based on? Faith, not data.
Actually I was thinking along those lines and some of the epic Vedic battles would make awesome video games…of course it would get reduced to something like:
“What did Shiva drop this time?”
“That stupid Pinakin again…I can’t use bow weapons. Lame.”
Nigel Says:
> literal belief in the biblical 7 day creation myth is not a requirement for being a christian and if far too narrow a definition for whom is religious.
Sure but that was the context of our discussion, a follow on from Michael Hipp, who claimed to be a fundamentalist Christian. I’ll certainly grant you can be “spiritual” and be a good scientist. It is when the two are mixed that conflict happens. Insulin was found effective, almost magically so, by reason, experiment and statistical analysis. God played no role in this process. Had the scientist followed along with his spiritual views he might have believed that diabetes was caused by demons, or sin, or masturbation rather than a failed pancreas. These unfounded, memetically derived, faith based reasons are not only not helpful, they are positively damaging to the progress of science. But, certainly, they can be put in a box, and frequently are.
Much like fundamentalist Christians can believe in a 6000 year old world because the true genesis of planet earth has effectively zero impact on their lives, so too a scientist can believe all sorts of fairy stories about demons and angels, and deities, as long as it doesn’t have a material impact on their work.
So I stand by the claim that it is brutal, unyielding rationality and reason that leads to scientific progress, not spiritual fantasies. One can hold both in the mind, but it is the former rather than the latter that makes our lives better,; a fact that I stated in my original claim.
> You DID claim that you can’t believe in God AND be a good physicist.
I don’t remember claiming that at all. I don’t believe it is true either. I think you can believe in Zeus or Voldemort or the Tooth Fairy and be a good scientist. I did claim that you can’t believe in the 7 day creation and be a good physicist. That is a much narrower claim than the one you just claimed I made, and it is certainly one I stand by.
Back to Aristotelian Physics…you can logically argue against vacuum…which is empirically proven to exist. Aether not so much unless you want to make the claim that quantum foam fits that bill.
So why is logically impossible to have a being that is omnipotent in the context of THIS universe?
Is it irrational to believe that multiple universes COULD exist? Dang, I guess Andrei Linde is just a kook along with quite a few other Cosmologists. You can’t likely directly prove the existence of multiverses…but if enough data points confirm the multiverse model then, with a little bit of faith, you can believe it likely is the right (or at least workable) model.
And if you believe the science behind anthropic principles (if any one of lots of different variables were different then life cannot exist) then the mulitverse is the best alternative theory to the existence of some entity fine tuning our universe to have life at all. Weinberg, who’s no fan of religion, points this out…with an infinite supply of universes no God is required to produce the improbable confluence of physical laws that allows life to exist in this universe.
Being repelled is an emotional response, not one founded on reason. That faith exists and you find it repulsive does not mean that god cannot exist.
So don’t believe in god. That’s still not hard data to show that such an entity cannot exist. In any case, belief in God is not an unusual belief…but the disbelief in such an entity is rarer. Are you suggesting that the burden of proof is on you?
I like Freeman Dyson’s quotes regarding science and religion:
“I am content to be one of the multitude of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty. Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason. The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.”
and
“Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.”
@Nigel
You claim to be religious in some way. Do you believe in God and/or the Bible on Faith? As I have already said, a person can’t use reason to convince someone to abandon their faith – if a person does faith, they don’t take reason seriously enough for it to work. It would be convenient to just brush you off as someone not worth arguing with.
But, as it happens, I have nothing better to do so I will make a few of points…
1. Omnipotence means all-powerful – able to do anything. In a/any universe, this leads to contradictions… making a rock too heavy to move and a force that can move it, making a problem too hard to solve and a person smart enough to solve it, etc.
2. Faith is no substitute for reason. If faith is all you have, you have nothing. I only mentioned being repelled so that I could tell the story of how I became an atheist; it has nothing to do with my “3 points”.
3. You claim to be religious in some way. If you want me to apply the principle of the burden of proof, you will have to supply some details. But let me give you an example of how this works. If you believe in a god that isn’t logically impossible (ex. omnipotent) but yet impressive enough to call a god, I say, “Oh, why do you believe that?”. It isn’t up to me to prove your improbable claims.
You said
and variations.
For starters, it is up to you to give me a definition or description if you want me to apply reason to the subject.
Secondly, if you believe something that is impossible, it is impossible; if it isn’t impossible, I suspect that we wouldn’t call it a god. If we are speaking of some neo-pagan god, I would say that we are talking about something that ultimately comes from our own minds, however practical you may find it to consider it an independent entity.
Thirdly, it generally isn’t possible to provide “hard data” about the non-existence of something. There are exceptions, such as “I can prove, by syllogisms based on definitions, that there isn’t a real, Cadillac inside this regular shoe box.” But I can’t very well give you hard data that there isn’t a god…. what do you want? Photos with no gods in them?
The whole point is that I am providing 3 reasons, each of which are sufficient for a reasonable, thinking person to be an atheist; I am not suggesting that I have “hard data” that there is no god.
@esr
I only included that quote (from a post hundreds of posts ago) to start with the premise that Nigel has a religion.
I suspect what he meant was that your religion is, like, open and free, as in “Linux is open source”, not that Open Source is your religion.
>I suspect what he meant was that your religion is, like, open and free, as in “Linux is open source”, not that Open Source is your religion.
Perhaps he’ll tell us. But that claim wouldn’t be any more compatible with my observed behavior.
When Nigel said his religion is perhaps [like] Apple, I guess he meant that it is slick, well packaged and you do it their way or go elsewhere.
or, perhaps, you do it their way or you go to hell.
>Perhaps he’ll tell us. But that claim wouldn’t be any more compatible with my observed behavior.
Yeah, no kidding.
Governments never fail to find new ways to stun and anger me:
First read this:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/18/1027775/-TSA-Arrests-Me-for-Using-the-Fourth-Amendment-as-a-Weapon-(Tales-from-the-Edge-of-a-Revolution-2)?via=blog_737732
And then this:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/06/1042790/-Holiday-Wishes-from-the-TSA?showAll=yes&via=blog_737732
And then come back and tell me you’re as angry as I am, because I need some reassurance that I’m not the crazy one.
@ Tom
I am not any more angry now than I was before I read the two main posts (I didn’t read the following comments below each piece).
I saw a SlashDot sig a while back that said:
“The Constitution may not be perfect, but it is better than what we have now.”
America is a police state inasmuch as it has a variety of organizations that use police-like powers to enforce vague and/or secret laws (including rules and regulations given the force of law) to ruin the day of anyone that violates these laws. These laws have provisions that make it difficult for a person that violates these laws to legally defend themselves. These laws provide for a process that has been common in America for some time – encouraging a person to plead guilty to a lesser offence rather than have a trial to determine the guilt or innocence of that person.
The person that wrote the two posts was aware of all this. The person went to a location and into a situation where the person knew there were people with police-like powers ready to enforce secret and/or vague laws. She deliberately yanked their chain. Now she is indignant?
I live in Canada. As I understand it, after 9/11, Canada passed some new secret and/or vague laws. These laws are not generally apparent to the average person except in certain situations, like trying to cross an international border.
The cardinal rule of living in a (semi-)police-state is don’t draw attention to yourself and don’t conspicuously break laws.
You don’t want to obviously break any laws because it draws attention to yourself and it may put you in a position where you have fewer rights and options, and it may give extra rights and options to people wielding police-like powers.
@Tom:
Angry? Sure. Surprised? Sorry, not at all. It’s not sufficient to request hand inspection as opposed to machine scanning, one must also properly genuflect and recite the correct catechisms (and no, they don’t include the word “constitution”, sorry).
@Brian:
Indeed. Vexing to me at the moment as I will have to travel from chicago to san diego in february for a conference, and that’s a good bit outside the range of what I could afford (both money and time) to drive. Maybe if the airlines didn’t have an effective monopoly on “long-range” transportation there would be some check on the tsa’s constant expansion of their “secret/vague” powers, but I don’t see anything changing that anytime soon.
@ darrin
Good luck. If you avoid drawing attention to yourself, you will probably not hear the air travel nightmare phrase: “cavity search”.
Air travel security is not only a component of the (semi-)police-state, but an industry, with manoeuvring for money and power, and a constant desire to grow. Businesses have an incentive to invent new techniques and try to sell them to the government. It is self-perpetuating. There is plenty of competition to encourage it to grow, but, as you pointed out, no competition to make it more pleasant for the long-distance traveller.
> In the history of Christianity, religion’s moral weight has overwhelmingly been pro-slavery.
Yup, but they got over it.
> In the Confederate South clergy issued sermons assuring their flocks that the institution of slavery had firm scriptural foundation, and (unlike Wilberforce’s reformers) they could cite chapter and verse in both Old and New Testament.
Yup, but they wouldn’t have had to do that without other churches pushing the conflict.
Institutions tend to support the status quo, but that support isn’t necessarily strong or significant. However, when an institution goes against the status quo, that position is significant.
>>What part of your every-day reality depends on the age of the earth? How about evolution vs creation?
>> Yes, there are religious beliefs that have an effect in reality. I’m pointing out that the ones used to damn Christians
> That’s because you cherry-picked a couple of relatively benign ones.
Fine – then come up with your own list.
> The most centrally dangerous belief in Christianity is the exclusivity of revelation.
Except that it hasn’t worked that way. Leftist dogma has.
Which belief is more dangerous in everyday-life, “young earth” or “with govt, it will be cheaper”?
FWIW, I find it interesting that so many of you think that religion is special, that methods used to analyze its effects should not be used on other social structures.
>Yup, but they wouldn’t have had to do that without other churches pushing the conflict.
Facile nonsense. Christianity had been a key element of the social support structure for chattel slavery in both wartime and peace for 1500 years before the Civil War. Yes, I do know about the handful of exceptions like Bartolomeo de Casas; they don’t signify in the larger picture, which was Christian preachers ever since the early Roman Empire telling slaveholders (quite correctly) that their crimes against humanity were supported by Biblical precedent and Church doctrine.
>Except that it hasn’t worked that way. Leftist dogma has.
There speaks one ignorant of history. Leftist dogma killed and oppressed more people in the 20th century, leaving monotheistic religions to the undisputed top spot in just about every other century in the previous fifteen. The only exception I can think of is the Mongol conquests in the mid-1200s.
>Which belief is more dangerous in everyday-life, “young earth” or “with govt, it will be cheaper”?
What, so because cancer exists I’m supposed to relax my guard against bubonic plague?
> “For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it.”
> There aren’t too many sects demanding chopping off their manhood.
What demand?
> But when their core definitional document, the written word of God, indicates that their god is weak and sinful, then you are in a whole heap of trouble.
You don’t have much experience with people.
The Communist Manifesto never mentions killing lots of people. Would you accept that as a defense by someone arguing that Communism doesn’t have a tendency towards mass murder? Or, would you argue that what Communists actually do trumps whatever their “Bible” says?
> I did claim that you can’t believe in the 7 day creation and be a good physicist. That is a much narrower claim than the one you just claimed I made, and it is certainly one I stand by.
I’ll bite – how does that belief interfere with one doing good particle physics? (That’s arguably your strongest subfield.) How about atomic, molecular, or optical physics? Turbulent flow? Condensed matter physics?
Be specific. (“If you refuse to deal with a contradiction that has nothing to do with your work, you can’t do said work” simply isn’t true, as one can see by observing people.)
In regards to the TSA, there are some interesting parallels between what people do in the security line and what they do in the church sanctuary. In almost any other venue were we to be offered the following three choices:
1. Have strangers in a dark hidden room look at naked pictures of you.
2. Have gruff strangers grab your boobs and stick their hand up your skirt to grope your genitals.
3. Not use the a particular service.
Nearly everyone, certainly every female I know would chose option 3. However, Flying has such high utility we have decided, as a population to compartmentalize sexual assault and TSA searches into two different things, even though by objective measures they are indistinguishable. Which is to say we suspend some of our most dearly held beliefs for a large utility.
Similarly, religious people suspend some of their most closely held beliefs (baby killing is bad, people should be responsible for their own mistakes rather than punishing an innocent in their place) in order to gain the high utility offered by religion.
To put it another way, sometimes it is “meta rational” to suspend thinking so that it doesn’t spoil our fun.
Oh, and BTW, the chick standing in the security line chanting the constitution — it is just insane. Don’t get me wrong, what the TSA do is absolutely reprehensible, but this woman was clearly acting to provoke the reaction she got. I think she behaved in a nutty manner, though the police and TSA also behaved in a ridiculous manner. I don’t know what the solution to the TSA problem is, my choice is that I just refuse to fly, however I am sure that chanting the Constitution like a prayer in the middle of a busy airport is not the solution. It shouldn’t be illegal, but it is nonetheless stupid.
(Actually I do know the solution — privatize the whole thing top to bottom, and let customers decide. However, that is about as likely to be implemented as my solution for the national debt, or the patent crisis.)
Andy Freeman Says:
>Would you accept that as a defense by someone arguing that Communism doesn’t have a tendency towards mass murder?
No, I wouldn’t. what people do is certainly important. I presume you are not arguing that churches have their hands free of blood though? But the two things are orthogonal. Communism advocates robbery in its core documents. That makes it bad. Communist systems practice robbery. That also makes it bad.
The point I was making was that if your God, by his own words, proves to be morally contemptible, it is hard to see how looking to him for moral guidance is a wise choice.
> I’ll bite – how does that belief interfere with one doing good particle physics?
It doesn’t directly, you are correct. I’m not a particle physicist, but I do imagine that understanding how particles condensed out of the big bang is important to understanding what particles to expect in your accelerators, but I don’t know for sure. My statement should perhaps be more narrow.
The broader point still stands. When your faith and your science conflict, and you choose your faith, you become a bad scientist. If you believe that demons cause epilepsy, you are going to be a very poor neurologist. If you believe sin causes the crops to fail, you are going to be a very poor agriculturalist, if you believe that lack of sacrifice holds back the rains, or causes the volcanoes to erupt, meteorology and vulcanology are not for you. If you are a gynecologist, and the woman with the issue of blood asks for your help, and you tell her to pray and believe — then you should loose your license.
@Jessica
I don’t know that she was trying to provoke the reaction she got (maybe she was, but I don’t know). I think she was trying to make a protest. To raise consciousness about the unconstitutionality of the search process in those around her. It could have been a perfectly peaceful protest if they had just allowed her to say her piece and get through the line, but they chose to flip out over it.
I think it was worth doing, and ballsy. Maybe it *was* nutty. She surely knew that she could get into serious trouble, but she did it anyway. Jefferson probably knew he was causing trouble when he wrote the declaration of independence, bit he did it anyway.
>I think it was worth doing, and ballsy.
It’s called “civil disobedience”, and part of a long and honorable tradition.
Tom Says:
>I think she was trying to make a protest. To raise consciousness about the unconstitutionality of the search process
Think she did? Or did she just paint the rest of us who try to work against this as a bunch of crazy people? This is the classic protest method of the left — cause great inconvenience and say “my issue is the most important thing in your life, you need to listen to me.” I don’t think it is helpful at all. I don’t think it moves the cause forward, and in many ways it is often counterproductive. However, it is very good for the ego of the protester.
@Jessica
I’m surprised that you would classify the issue as one of the left. It seems to transcend the old left/right divide to me.
At some point you get to the stage where you can only get attention by causing inconvenience, because everybody has become so inured to what is happening to freedom.
And, actually, I don’t think she was the one who caused inconvenience in this case. It was the TSA.
“…and in many ways it is often counterproductive. However, it is very good for the ego of the protester.”
Yes. Way too much ego. I’m sure that the onlookers picked up on that. I’m equally sure they were glad when the cops dragged her away. They came to the airport to fly, not watch political theater.
For those tempted to emulate that woman, be aware that a great part of a cop’s job is order maintenance, not law enforcement. To that end, just about every jurisdiction has a ‘disorderly conduct’ offense, which is a catch-all for just about anything the cop thinks is disruptive. In most places, judges will believe the cop, and not you. What the police did to that woman is typical. It’s evolved over the years to allow the cops to handle disturbances without getting sued. When a cop tells you to shut up and move on, that’s what you’re facing if you refuse.
Tom Says:
>I’m surprised that you would classify the issue as one of the left. It seems to transcend the old left/right divide to me.
I don’t classify the issue as left (though the left’s passion for civil rights is one I share), I classified the protest method as one of the left.
> At some point you get to the stage where you can only get attention by causing inconvenience,
> because everybody has become so inured to what is happening to freedom.
Do you think they became less inured to what is happening to freedom, or did they become more inured to “those crazy hippies who want terrorists to fly on our planes.” Protest is not an end in itself, it is supposed to advance a cause. But like I say, it makes you feel good that you have stood up against the man, lets you post on your blog, and get free drinks at the local coffee shop as you tell the story of the police state busting you up for righteousness.
Civil disobedience is a glorious thing: sit at the front of the bus. Refuse to pay your whiskey tax. Run hooch down to Chicago from Canada. Burn your draft card. All glorious.
Civil disobedience would be flying passengers in a plane and refusing to let the TSA grope them. Civil disobedience is saying you’ll never fly again. Civil disobedience is cutting the cables to the XRay machine. Civil disobedience is hacking the back scatter machines and posting the pictures on You Tube.
Reciting the fourth amendment like a prayer in the middle of an airport? That isn’t civil disobedience. It is behaving like a lefty nut job.
I’m sure most of the passengers on that bus thought Rosa Parks was a crazy moon-bat and would have preferred that she get to the back of the it so they could get to work on time.
I’m also sure that vandalizing the buses would have re-inforced the notion that keeping people like her in the back of them was a good idea.
Agreed. In the Rosa Parks case it was actually the black community’s choice to walk rather than take the buses that forced the change. Her civil disobedience is what got the ball rolling. If enough of us stopped flying, the TSA would be gone tomorrow.
All that being said, I agree that she probably more harm than good. Presentation is everything.
LS Says:
> When a cop tells you to shut up and move on, that’s what you’re facing if you refuse.
Just to be clear, in the general case, I think it is outrageous that cops can tell you to shut up and move on. I think what the TSA did to the crazy nut job was wrong, our society is supposed to be open enough to incorporate crazy nut jobs. However just because something should not be subjected arrest doesn’t mean it is a good idea.
BPSouther Says:
> I’m also sure that vandalizing the buses would have re-inforced the notion that keeping people like her in the back of them was a good idea.
Just to be clear, I was not advocating any of the aforementioned civil disobedience actions, just saying they were more in line with the tradition of civil disobedience. My choice is to not fly. In fairness, apparently my choice is inconveniencing me only, no one else. But it isn’t really a civil disobedience thing for me. I simply have this crazy notion that I don’t want strangers groping me just so that I can get to my destination.
The plain fact is that the TSA has had far more egregious acts than moving on some crazy nut job. Making a woman remove her prosthetic breast. Forcing an old woman in a wheelchair to remove her adult diaper. Groping little girls and little boys. The list is endless. Finding a way to make these more well known is certainly more likely to benefit the cause.
However, I should point out that the TSA employs tens of thousands of people; I find it hard to imagine any political circumstance that will make them go away.
I would have hoped that the smiley would have sufficiently indicated I was kidding around. My religion is no more Apple than anything else.
For the record (in case anyone cares), I was brought up Christian like many others here but not a currently practicing one. Do I believe there might be some entity out there? Sure. As described in the Bible? Meh. Folks that claim to comprehend the nature of God is probably selling something. Christianity as a modern religion, as practiced in the US, is as useful a moral framework as any other and probably superior to many alternatives.
If you were to ask if I was Christian, I might answer yes as a quick and dirty answer. Culturally this would be correct.
If you asked if I were religious I’d say no…I’ve not set foot in a church in quite a while. :)
Not having interacted with RMS on a personal level I wouldn’t know but it strikes me as very easy to annoy him considerably on this topic. That said, annoying RMS doesn’t overly concern me except on a general politeness basis. Frankly, it’s kind of a side benefit. :)
@Jessica
I’m really not sure what you mean by this. Is it that the left use this sort of protest more frequently than the right? Does that make it bad?
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether it was an effective form of protest. I think it absolutely was.
Did it draw attention to the ridiculous powers that the TSA has? Yes it did.
Did it make people angry about that? Yes, no question.
Was it, from the narrow perspective of minimising her personal inconvenience, ‘crazy’. Yes, maybe so. Does that make the woman herself a ‘crazy nut job’? No.
You seem a bit mercurial on the subject of ‘civil disobedience’:
but then:
Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus seems pretty analogous to reading the fourth amendment while being searched at the airport. Both are actions designed to bring attention to an institutional injustice. Both have the potential to cause inconvenience for those just trying to get to their destination. Both of them are absolutely worth doing.
@Nigel
Have you read any of the Bible? It’s probably one of the worst ‘moral frameworks’ I can imagine.
Congratulations! With answers as nebulous and noncommittal as that you are now ready to become a citizen of the United Kingdom. Welcome.
As would that first sentence. :)
Tom Says:
> I’m really not sure what you mean by this. Is it that the left use this sort of protest more frequently than the right? Does that make it bad?
Yes, to the first, and no not directly to the second. However the second is a marker for crazy loon.
> Did it draw attention to the ridiculous powers that the TSA has? Yes it did.
Only amongst those who already know the problem. For the people in the airport (based on her report) it brought attention to her and her nuttiness only.
> Did it make people angry about that? Yes, no question.
Weren’t you the guy who said you were already pissed? Maybe that was someone else.
> You seem a bit mercurial on the subject of ‘civil disobedience’:
I haven’t heard the word “mercurial” in a while — thanks for reminding me, its a great word.
> Just to be clear, I was not advocating any of the aforementioned civil disobedience actions
You’re reading between the lines. I didn’t say I was opposed to them either. I was just listing what might be civil disobedience in line with the historical tradition. And I was doing so without a value judgement on any of them. Some of them I favor, some of them (such as the destruction of property) I do not.
> Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus seems pretty analogous to reading the fourth amendment
Not at all. They are completely different. Ms. Parks had, by every sense of justice, just as much right to sit at the front of the bus as anyone else. She was acting in accordance with justice despite what the law might have said. That is the civil disobedience at its best. Chanting a prayer to Jefferson in the middle of the airport is nothing like that at all. An appropriate analog would be to slip through the security gate and get on the plane without going through security. That I’d support. (However, you’d probably end up in jail for that one.)
>>Yup, but they wouldn’t have had to do that without other churches pushing the conflict.
> Facile nonsense. Christianity had been a key element of the social support structure for chattel slavery in both wartime and peace for 1500 years before the Civil War.
And in the 30 years leading up to the Civil War?
Yes, historically Christianity was tolerant/supportive of slavery. It changed. And, as a result, slavery became a lot less common.
>>Except that it hasn’t worked that way. Leftist dogma has.
> There speaks one ignorant of history. Leftist dogma killed and oppressed more people in the 20th century, leaving monotheistic religions to the undisputed top spot in just about every other century in the previous fifteen.
Since monotheistic religions were the only organizations with significant scope during those times, that reasoning also lets us conclude that said religions were also responsible for the sun rising every day.
>>Which belief is more dangerous in everyday-life, “young earth” or “with govt, it will be cheaper”?
>What, so because cancer exists I’m supposed to relax my guard against bubonic plague?
Except that belief in “young earth” is a “threat” akin to lower-back tattoos.
Ewww…bad blockquoting above. My bad.
>indications are that the alternative path (simply lagging and skipping on the upgrades) seems to be the current preference of the carriers.
That delays and mitigates the economic cost of carrier skins, but doesn’t eliminate it. When (say) Samsung wants to put TouchWiz on a new device, it still has to pay NRE and incur a time-to-market delay. So I think the same logic still pushes towards raw Android. But who knows when the pressure will mount enough for the carriers to abandon skinning entirely?
We’re making progress, though. The skins are less obtrusive than they used to be. The NASCAR-branded Sprint phone and similar atrocities are behind us. Thank goodness.
>>Would you accept that as a defense by someone arguing that Communism doesn’t have a tendency towards mass murder?
> No, I wouldn’t. what people do is certainly important. I presume you are not arguing that churches have their hands free of blood though?
In the past, no, but we’re not living in the past.
> But the two things are orthogonal. Communism advocates robbery in its core documents.
Irrelevant – the question wasn’t whether communism is bad, it’s whether it has a tendency towards mass murder. You insist that we should judge modern day Christianity by “core documents”, so I’m asking if that principle applies more generally.
>> I’ll bite – how does that belief interfere with one doing good particle physics?
> It doesn’t directly, you are correct. … My statement should perhaps be more narrow.
I’m curious – how did this error come about? You were quite confident. Did you not know that there’s no actual conflict or not care?
> The broader point still stands.
This “broader point” seems to have amazingly narrow applicability in this instance.
> When your faith and your science conflict, and you choose your faith, you become a bad scientist.
Yes, but “conflict” and “choose” is important – the “conflict” has to actually matter for one to “choose”. Young vs old universe/earth simply doesn’t matter much of the time, even to physicists/geologists. Neither does creation vs evolution, even to biologists. The “choice” comes up a lot less often than your position wrt “religious scientists” requires.
It looks to me like you’re trying to use the “conflict/choose” argument to impose a religious test….
@tom Of course I read the Bible. There are many bits that modern Christianity tends to gloss over for a much kinder and gentler religion.
Personally I can’t attend Bible studies. I have to bridle my tongue far too much as the folks are just too well meaning for me to piss in their cheerios with overly pointed questions. And, of course, I’m way too lazy for actual scholarship and learning to read the original text. So it’s just an exasperating experience for me.
Well I have the right name for it. And if I had to pick a religion I’d probably pick Anglican. All the pomp with half the guilt of Catholicism.
Was my answer really that nebulous? I would think it very analogous to being a secular Jew only for Christianity. Non-observant religiously but observes holidays and festivals as a cultural thing. Even to the point of going to temple for socializing and networking.
If I were culturally Jewish I’d probably raise my kids that way and belong to a synagogue. If you asked either me or my hypothetical rabbi if I were religious I think we’d both agree not so much.
> Irrelevant – the question wasn’t whether communism is bad, it’s whether it has a tendency towards mass murder.
I never mentioned communism, I think you are confusing me with someone else. My point was, as I stated, if your core documents document your god as immoral and bad, why would you want to be involved with such a god. (Unless you want t appease him, I suppose.)
> You insist that we should judge modern day Christianity by “core documents”,
No, I didn’t, I insisted that you judge god by what he alegedly claims he is in his own book. It isn’t pretty.
> I’m curious – how did this error come about? You were quite confident. Did you not know that there’s no actual conflict or not care?
How remarkably unmagnanimous of you. I was using one specific Biblical claim that is clearly in conflict with science, to illustrate the general principle that if you take the Bible’s word for it, you have chosen faith over the scientific process. Insofar as the origins of the universe actually matter to your science, you are a bad scientist if you believe the Biblical account. It is not a good sign of being a good scientist if you believe it under any other circumstances, but it is not quite so definitive.
Of course, it has to be said that it depends on the circumstances. Newton could not have known much about the true origins of the universe because the information was neither available nor discernible. So his failure to accept the big bang theory does not make him a bad scientist. So all the ancients who built the foundation of the modern world get a pass.
I have given you many other examples of different science religion conflicts in this thread. The Bible is just plain wrong about a number of things that have an immediate impact on people’s day to day lives. Certainly the origins of the universe are less impactful, but you’d better hope your doctor takes his training over his Biblical faith. The fact that most don’t is a testament to our medical training that beats the religion out of people (though allows them to compartmentalize it in some neutered manner.) Nonetheless, there are many kids who have died because their parents chose to pray rather than treat.
What’s more, there is a general mushy headedness that comes from religion. The idea of faith is intimately tied with the idea that asking “why” is a bad thing. Yet the foundation of the modern world is built on “why”. We need more “why” and less “just believe.”
@Jessica
Maybe. We don’t really know. Based on her report, I would say she came pretty close to making one of the cops have a spark of ‘wait, maybe there is something wrong here’. Probably he won’t change any behaviour just because of this one incident, but I bet the memory of the encounter sits at the back of his mind. Maybe the next time something like this happens he might remember it and behave a bit differently. People are convinced a little bit at a time. Changing people’s perspective can be a war of attrition. We do it little by little. This initial incident might plant a seed that will eventually change a person’s view of the world.
Even for those who are already aware of heinous ‘disorderly conduct’ laws and breaches of civil rights, reports like this one add a visceral element that can fan the flames of resentment higher and hotter than they were before.
Ok, fair enough. I think we could legitimately argue about whether it was an example of civil disobedience. Technically she broke no law, so you could see it as not being CD. However, she did something that she knew might be interpreted as ‘disorderly conduct’. By deliberately engaging in such behaviour she is calling attention to the injustice of the law. It’s a subtle distinction.
I agree that it’s not a perfect analog in every way. However, my point in making the comparison was that we should not object to an act of protest on the grounds that it causes inconvenience. Sometimes the best protests are great *because* they cause inconvenience.
@Nigel
Yes. I wouldn’t call it ‘modern’ Christianity, because there are many extant strains of that religion that most certainly do *not* gloss over any parts of the Bible.
I will call the species of Christianity you refer to ‘diluted Christianity’.
Diluted Christianity cherry picks the parts of the Bible it likes. It discards parts of the Bible that it considers unacceptable.
You have now got to ask yourself what the criterion is by which the cherry picking is done. Once you have figured that part out you might have the basis for a ‘moral framework’, and it will have nothing to do with the Bible, or Christianity.
Ask yourself this: is there any worthwhile moral principle that you could not have arrived at by yourself, or from secular philosophical thinking, in the Bible?
I doubt you will be able to think of one.
And the reverse question is this: is there any evil moral principle that is advanced by the Bible that would not have occurred to you as being acceptable had you not read that book?
I doubt you have to think for more than five seconds to come up with an example.
The bible is at best entirely unhelpful, and at worst a handbook for how to be evil. It most certainly is not the basis for any moral framework worth the name.
@tom Nope, not a one and some of the sins/virtues somewhat dubious.
However, diluted Christianity has packaged a reasonable set of guidelines, nice branding and in some churches, excellent user support and a thriving community.
Just as I’m not going to reinvent an operating system from scratch even though I kinda sorta can (assuming I was not lazy) I’m not going to recreate a moral framework from the ground up if I find an existing one tweakable enough to do the job. And just like proponents for vi or emacs, I’m comfortable with the quirks of this one to require significant advantages to bother changing (for the record, I use Eclipse and other IDEs). I assume that someone brought up Buddhist would feel the same vis a vis Christianity.
Not entirely sure what you’re trying to convince me to say or do. Someone asked if I were religious. I said not really and it seems you’re trying to convince me not to be religious. Okay, that was easy. I’m not religious. Done.
Do you wish me to be fervently not religious? Nope, sorry, requires too much effort to argue against something that I feel can be a positive in some people’s lives (including my own). Call it being wishy washy if you like but my lack of zealotry in your cause isn’t exactly my problem, now is it?
Do you wish me to look down on those who are religious? Call them sheep, insane and whatnot? Not in my nature or too much in my nature to willing want to engage in. I only gleefully look down on those poor souls still coding using vim and emacs.
That’s a joke by the way. I don’t believe my humor is THAT dry but it seems in this thread I need to be more explicit than a smiley.
I do have a fervent desire for an edit feature…
@ Nigel
re: religion and faith
As I said to Michael Hipp:
Arguing with you doesn’t seem to be a whole lot different than arguing with Michael Hipp.
I have made my points twice now. To summarize: Faith is nothing. If you believe in a non-impossible god, trot out some evidence/reason. Lacking that, I am an atheist. This is the last time (in this blog) I am going to say this.
Personally, I believe that the “infinite universes” theory(?) is a silly artefact of the way we interpret quantum physics. It is sort of like the assumption that we are not dreaming this – we have to make the assumption that we are both in the same universe, otherwise you can believe… anything, an idea that seems to attracted you.
If you don’t want to be taken as religious, you shouldn’t have started a sentence with “My religion is…”
@brian
Gee, reason dictates that when someone ends with “my religion is Apple” and includes a smiley that they are joking and probably not actually religious, least of all to a consumer electronics company in California. This is the last time (in this blog) I am going to say this because it’s beyond reason that you’re likely to want to revisit such a silly utterance on your part again.
Now I have a religious desire for a rolleyes emoticon…
> I never mentioned communism, I think you are confusing me with someone else.
The “other” Jessica Boxer wrote: “Communism advocates robbery in its core documents. That makes it bad. Communist systems practice robbery. That also makes it bad.”
Of course, I introduced Communism to the discussion by asking if we should ignore its tendency towards mass murder because there’s no support for mass murder in its “core documents”. Note the distinction between theory and practice, a distinction that doesn’t exist wrt robbery, hence the irrelevance of communism and robbery to my question.
>My point was, as I stated, if your core documents document your god as immoral and bad, why would you want to be involved with such a god. (Unless you want t appease him, I suppose.)
We’re not judging god, we’re discussing how to treat Christians. (What’s the point of judging an imaginary being?)
>> I’m curious – how did this error come about? You were quite confident. Did you not know that there’s no actual conflict or not care?
> How remarkably unmagnanimous of you.
Your specific claim was, and I quote (as can be verified by grepping above) “I did claim that you can’t believe in the 7 day creation and be a good physicist. That is a much narrower claim than the one you just claimed I made, and it is certainly one I stand by.” I then listed several types of physicist and asked if that claim applied to them. You backpedaled, which led to my question about the basis of “certainly stand by”.
> I was using one specific Biblical claim that is clearly in conflict with science, to illustrate the general principle that if you take the Bible’s word for it, you have chosen faith over the scientific process.
Unless you’re claiming that there are people who never choose faith over the scientific process, that’s not particularly useful. If we’re going to have scientists, they’re going to be people who have chosen faith over the scientific process on at least some issue because that’s the only kind of people we have. (If you disagree, the first thing I’m going to ask for is an example of this “scientific human” and supporting evidence.)
I’m comfortable saying that both creationists and lamarckists aren’t likely to be good evolutionary biologists, but that either one can be a decent optical physicist.
Which part do you disagree with?
> Insofar as the origins of the universe actually matter to your science, you are a bad scientist if you believe the Biblical account.
Bingo. However, that’s a lot less common than you implied. Moreover, there are lots of not-scientific beliefs. Does the above apply to them as well?
Remember – I’m asking whether religion is special.
> I have given you many other examples of different science religion conflicts in this thread. The Bible is just plain wrong about a number of things that have an immediate impact on people’s day to day lives.
“many”? I found three, young earth, creation, and “susceptible to memebots”. The first two do NOT have immediate impact except in a very few cases and the third doesn’t seem to be true any longer AND is currently true of leftists.
Please indulge me – what are two bible errors that have have immediate impact. For bonus points, how many people actually act in accordance with those errors?
Or, are you really going to hang your hat on theory when practice conflicts?
> Sometimes the best protests are great *because* they cause inconvenience.
Yes, but not all inconveniences are protests, let alone good ones.
“They” may have laughed at Einstein but they’re usually laughing at bozo the clown.
> [The bible is] most certainly is not the basis for any moral framework worth the name.
And yet, numerous good people find it to be such. (Yes, some people find it to be a framework for evil that they do.)
Theory vs practice….
> what are two bible errors that have have immediate impact. For bonus points, how many people actually act in accordance with those errors?
I missed the “no medical treatment” example – my apologies.
Yup, NMT happens.
I note that it’s less common than the vaccine paranoia. Are those people “religious”?
My point is that while religion is one source of unscientific behavior/belief, it isn’t the only one and that the real problem is not religion but unscientific behavior/belief.
Do you think that religious unscientific behavior/belief is usefully different?
I don’t think there is very good biblical support for no medical treatment. Are there people who believe such crap and let their children die as a result? Yes, but they are hardly mainstream and fortunately the laws have been evolving to make them responsible for their crime.
Andy Freeman Says:
> I note that it’s less common than the vaccine paranoia. Are those people “religious”?
I think you will find that they are mostly religious yes. You will also find that the people who are trying to rescue people from homosexuality are religious too. I think you will also find that almost all people who refuse essential medical treatment for their children are religious. You will also find that the large majority of people trying to push Intelligent Design on children (and consequently undermine their scientific education) are also religious. I think that you will also find that the majority of people who are pushing to have children stay in state care rather than be adopted by decent hardworking homosexual couples are mostly religious. I’ll agree that the secularization of society has ameliorated these effects, but that is a reason to encourage secularization, not to view religion as benign.
> My point is that while religion is one source of unscientific behavior/belief, it isn’t the only one and that the real problem is not religion but unscientific behavior/belief. Do you think that religious unscientific behavior/belief is usefully different?
As Eric said, do you think I should not protect myself against bubonic plague because I protected myself against cancer?
>> I note that it’s less common than the vaccine paranoia. Are those people “religious”?
> I think you will find that they are mostly religious yes.
Based on what evidence? http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/06/study-linking-vaccines-to-autism-is-fraudulent/doesn't mention religion. (Note, we’re talking about current US objections, not the 19th century or Nigeria.)
> You will also find that the large majority of people trying to push Intelligent Design on children (and consequently undermine their scientific education) are also religious.
And, as you’ve conceded, the truth of evolution is almost always irrelevant, even for scientists.
Every scientist has unscientific beliefs. So, the relevant question is whether a given scientist’s beliefs interfere with his/her science. And that question does not depend on where those beliefs come from.
Again, you’re only interested in unscientific beliefs that are religious AND you’re “concerned” even when those beliefs are irrelevant. So much for being concerned about science.
> I think that you will also find that the majority of people who are pushing to have children stay in state care rather than be adopted by decent hardworking homosexual couples are mostly religious.
Except that that’s not what they were doing – they were placing kids. And, no one was stopping other organizations from placing kids in other kinds of households.
Note that the alternatives are placing fewer kids, so given a choice between N kids placed, none with homosexual couples, and N-K kids placed, some with homosexual couples but K staying in state care, you’ve chosen the latter, arguing that it’s wrong to leave kids in state care.
Which reminds me – what’s your position wrt organizations that insist that black kids should not be adopted by white parents?
> As Eric said, do you think I should not protect myself against bubonic plague because I protected myself against cancer?
And as I pointed out in response, there’s no actual religious threat, so that argument doesn’t apply.
However, it’s actually worse than that. Ranting about the non-existent religious threat is usually accompanied by ignoring real “not scientific” threats.
So, your argument is accurately summarized as “I’m going to worry about cooties, not cancer.”
Cooties are highly contagious but fortunately I have a permanent cootie shot from my playground days.
Religious in what sense?
Jaron Lanier once noted that the left-wing equivalent to right-wing fundamentalism was New Age sentimentalism. (A profound statement from one who markets himself as making profound statements, but usually doesn’t deliver.) Both sides seem prone to champion anti-rational kook causes like the anti-vaccine agenda.
For my part, I’ve seen many more of the New-Age, hippy-dippy types take up the anti-vax cause in recent years and that includes some of the anti-vax movement’s most strident evangelists, like professional bimbo Jenny McCarthy.
Andy Freeman Says:
> Based on what evidence?
Based on the fact that these issues are discussed extensively in Christian media. However, Jeff Read is right also, there is a big contingent of them from the back to the land granola eating, lefties.
>And, as you’ve conceded, the truth of evolution is almost always irrelevant, even for scientists.
If you think teaching ID is bad because it misrepresents the theory of evolution then you have completely missed the point. The problem is not who’s your mamma, it is can you think clearly, can you understand natural processes can lead to complex and amazing organisms. ID is horrible because it undermines the basic premise of science — that natural processes produce all the effects that we see, that if we ask why enough times we can understand why everything is what it is. That is why I would be very dubious listening to any scientist who promulgated the 7 days of creation myth, regardless of whether it had an immediate effect on his work. It shows he can’t think clearly.
> Again, you’re only interested in unscientific beliefs that are religious AND you’re
> “concerned” even when those beliefs are irrelevant. So much for being concerned about science.
If I own a trucking company, and have an alcoholic driver, even though he never comes to work drunk, am I concerned about him? You bet your ass I am.
> Which reminds me – what’s your position wrt organizations that insist that black kids should not be adopted by white parents?
Your statement about adoption was too turgid for me to follow. However, the subject of who should be allowed to adopt whom is non trivial, and I don’t want to open that can of worms on this already old and rather tired thread.
>> And, as you’ve conceded, the truth of evolution is almost always irrelevant, even for scientists.
> If you think teaching ID is bad because it misrepresents the theory of evolution then you have completely missed the point.
We’re not discussing teaching ID. We’re discussing your insistence that one can’t be a good scientist and be religious.
> > Again, you’re only interested in unscientific beliefs that are religious AND you’re
>> “concerned” even when those beliefs are irrelevant. So much for being concerned about science.
> If I own a trucking company, and have an alcoholic driver, even though he never comes to work drunk, am I concerned about him? You bet your ass I am.
Except that, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly every potential driver is an alcoholic. There isn’t a single person in the world who doesn’t have some irrational belief, yet the only ones that you’re concerned about are religious, even when they’re not relevant to the specific field of science.
As to your “worry”, let’s think about all of the fraudulent science that has been popping up recently. How much of it has been due to religion?
Like I said, theory vs practice. It’s pretty much a religious belief for you…
Wow, looks like Nigel fell into a Kafka void here with his bizarrely assured “Iranian muslims are really self-interested snake-oil salesman” thing. Best example of someone defeating their own ridiculous ideas I’ve ever read.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25473/Google_Facebook_Amazon_May_Go_Black_in_SOPA_Protest
I hope they do
Andy Freeman Says:
> Except that, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly every potential driver is an alcoholic.
I am reminded of a discussion between Sheldon Cooper and Stuart the comic book guy on my favorite TV show “The Big Bang Theory”:
Stuart: Oooh Sheldon, I’m afraid you couldn’t be more wrong.
Sheldon: More wrong? Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.
Stuart: Of course it is. It is a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it is very wrong to say it is a suspension bridge.
>Stuart: Of course it is. It is a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it is very wrong to say it is a suspension bridge.
Oh, thank you, Jessica. Funny because it’s true; that’s the best laugh I’ve had all week.
>> Except that, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly every potential driver is an alcoholic.
> I am reminded of a discussion between Sheldon Cooper and Stuart the comic book guy on my favorite TV show “The Big Bang Theory”:
Way to miss the point.
You claim that religious folk are unsuited to be scientists because they have unscientific beliefs. My point is that everyone has unscientific beliefs. So, unless religious unscientific beliefs are different, your litmus test means that no one is suited to be a scientist.
Do you believe that good scientists do not have any unscientific beliefs? How about some examples?
If, not, then what distinguishes the unscientific beliefs of good scientists from the irrelevant-to-their-field religious beliefs that you’re so concerned about?
I note that you ducked the question about existing bad science.
@Andy Freeman
Yes, and Jessica’s point was that there are unscientific beliefs and then there are unscientific beliefs.
For example, I feel the need to press the ‘lock’ button on my car’s key fob four times before I walk away from the car. I have no evidence that the car isn’t locked just fine the first time I press the button, but I do it anyway.
This is mildly irrational behaviour, but it’s a long way from believing that the earth is 6000 years old, or that all the evidence for evolution should be discarded because an old book from the bronze age contradicts it. These beliefs are evidence of a mind that is not thinking with a great deal of clarity or rigour.
Hi Eric,
Question is SOPA at the same level that UPOV and the Budapest but taking about plants and seeds (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants)
Just one Question, is SOPA at the same level that UPOV (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants) and the Budapest?
Do they have the same effect against liberties?
roche,
SOPA is quite a bit worse. It’s shoot first and ask questions later, on any sort of copyright infringement. If I complain that Eric quoted me a little too closely in one blog post, theoretically under SOPA I could have this whole blog taken down.