Archives for the month of: July, 2005
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On weaponry, part 2

28 July 2005 //
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What can one say about such people? – that they have twisted, shriveled, putrefied souls? I don’t suppose that would do any good.

CNN.com – Senate GOP moves gun bill atop list – Jul 26, 2005

What is the purpose of Bill Frist’s oh so important pet project? To protect gun manufacturers from “trivial” lawsuits.

Let’s go over that again. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist considers it crucial that before they do anything else, the members of Congress pass a bill exonerating gun manufacturers, in advance, from any blame for how their products are used.

The funny thing is, there is only one way weapons can be used. They either sit in your drawer, waiting to kill someone, or they kill someone. They have no other function; that’s what they’re for. I mean, this stuff is so obvious I feel like a dingbat for bringing it up! But apparently, many Americans are having trouble following the logic. So let me say it again.

The purpose of armaments is to kill people. If we didn’t “need” to occasionally kill someone, then we would have no “need” for weapons.

I say again: weapons have only one purpose: to cause harm. Therefore, weapons are evil, by definition. You may call them a “necessary” evil, but you may not call them good. There is no way in which weapons are good.

Now, the people who design, build, and sell weapons don’t want you to think of it that way. They want you to think of the designers as scientists, the makers as artisans, and the sellers as mom & pop convenience stores who deserve their fair share of the economy, damn it. So if someone goes out and uses a gun to actually shoot someone, it can’t possibly be their fault.

But you know what? It is their fault. They designed the guns, and manufactured the guns, and sold the guns, by the millions, for no goood purpose.What good can you do with a weapon? None. I say again: the purpose of making or owning a weapon can never be good. There is nothing good you can do with a weapon (excepting ad hoc uses such as the driving of nails). And I am obliged to point out, though it’s embarrassingly obvious, that if no one felt like making these god-damned things, then there wouldn’t be any, and we would all be better off.

Now, some folks will say, “I use my ____ for self-defense. Doesn’t that count as a good?” Actually, no. Self-defense might be a good, but keeping or using a gun for self-defense does not count as a good, because:

  • Killing someone is never a good idea. Maybe you killing them is better than them killing you (maybe), but the fact remains than anyone getting killed is worse than no one getting killed. Oh – did you miss that possibility?
  • Weapons held for self-defense are notorious for killing people who have been merely mistaken for a threat; or entirely innocent, random people like the gun owner’s best friend; or the owner himself.
  • Might there not be a way to defend oneself without killing one’s attacker? And might that not be a much, much better solution? In the big arguments over self-defense, people tend to forget that the choice is almost never between someone killing you or you killing them. That almost never happens. The situation is practically always a lot more nuanced than that, and waving your Glock around is almost never the best solution.

Some folks will say, “I’ve been in this industry all my life, and you’re telling me it’s immoral and I should get out? What am I supposed to do for a living, then?”

I recommend that such people go fuck themselves volunteer at a local hospital and help take care of people who have been shot.

For more on the question of weaponry, see my earlier post.

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Categories consequentialism, fascism

You can’t just decide to have a war, even if you’re the president of the United States. Besides being immoral, it’s against the law, hello!

28 July 2005 //
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May I just remind you that nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the President can declare war, all by himself, on another country.

ARTICLE 1, SECTION 8
The Congress shall have Power:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress…

ARTICLE II, SECTION 2
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States…
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur…

The power to make treaties, it says. Not the power to kill thousands of people.

May I just remind you that the Congress gave the President war powers after the entire staff of the executive branch lied through their teeth about Iraq’s military capabilities.

That George W. Bush refers incessantly to a “religious faith” that he claims guides his activities. (He has even implied that he receives guidance from the Creator Himself.)

That there is no such Creator.

Thank you.

Categories fascism

How well-meaning intellectuals get religion wrong

28 July 2005 //
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Bill McKibben’s “The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong” (in the latest Harper’s) is fascinating and wrong.

Christianity in America has gone bad, McKibben says. It’s concerned with the wrong things. It needs to return to its roots: the actual admonitions given by Jesus.

America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. […] [T]here is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. […] That’s what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity. But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers.

The article proceeds to describe two specific ways in which people have strayed from the True Way. But, for all McKibben’s obvious intelligence and sincerity, this argument – that people aren’t doing it right; that real Christians wouldn’t behave that way – is threadbare, confused, and dangerous.

Here are just the few objections I see right off the bat.

  1. Bill McKibben does not know what Jesus actually said.
  2. Whether or not Jesus actually said any particular thing is not relevant to whether it has any utility for us here and now.
  3. Religious groups always say that other groups are doing it wrong. But there has never been a method for ascertaining whose claims might be “genuine.” Why? Because there are no genuine claims in this field. No one’s favorite flavor of total nonsense is more genuine than anyone else’s favorite flavor of total nonsense.

The only way to resolve the “paradox” of Christian “belief” is to recognize that belief is the wrong word for it.

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Categories consequentialism, theism

Just because there’s a tip doesn’t mean there’s an iceberg underneath

27 July 2005 //
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Many of the atrocities of the present government are justified by reference to the ongoing “terrorist threat,” or, in shorthand, “terror.” I’ve been maintaining that this threat has been vastly overstated, to the point where it would probably be more sensible to say that there is no terrorist threat than to obsess over how we can protect ourselves from it. When I put it this way, though, no one wants to agree with me.

Richard Bulliet says it better:

Terrorism relies on horrifying acts to generate the popular conviction that those acts are but the tip of an iceberg of violence and chaos. […] From this perspective, each terrorist attack, whether in England, Egypt, Iraq or Israel, provides evidence that the bulk of the terrorist iceberg lies unseen below the surface.
An opposing view sees acts like the 9/11 attacks and the Madrid and London bombings as jagged bits of dangerous ice floating on corks. Terrorist motivations may readily be discerned within specific arenas, such as Israel, Chechnya, Egypt or Iraq. But beyond these arenas, the subsurface threat is far from being an iceberg. Instead, this view starts from the idea that terrorist acts outside those war zones represent more or less the maximum capacity of the perpetrators at any point in time.

Categories fascism, security theater

That’s odd – prayer doesn’t work??

22 July 2005 //
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From the Evangelical Atheist: News Flash: Distant Strangers Talking to Themselves Fail to Save Lives.

T.E.A. is discussing a Washington Post article on a study just published in the Lancet by Krucoff et al of Duke University Medical Center. (There is a summary on the Lancet‘s site; free registration is required. Another synopsis is available without restrictions on Duke University’s site.)

Here are the first three paras of the Post article:

Praying for sick strangers does not improve their prospects of recovering, according to a large, carefully designed study that casts doubt on the widely held belief that being prayed for can help a person heal.
The study of more than 700 heart patients, one of the most ambitious attempts to test the medicinal power of prayer, showed that those who had people praying for them from a distance, and without their knowledge, were no less likely to suffer a major complication, end up back in the hospital or die.
While skeptics of prayer welcomed the results, other researchers questioned the findings, and proponents of prayer maintained that God’s influence lies beyond the reach of scientific validation.

What? – skeptics like these results, but proponents don’t? This is science, not an opinion poll! Here are the results. It doesn’t matter how anyone wanted them to come out.

I do see one methodological problem in this study, though. “The mechanisms through which distant intercessory prayer might convey healing benefit are unknown,” the Lancet article stipulates. True enough, but you know what? We don’t know that prayer even exists. Has anyone recorded a specific activity, or a specific collection of activites, or a loosely-correlated family of activities that corresponds to this word? Of course not, because the very idea makes no sense. The most plausible reason that prayer has never been found to have measurable results is that there is nothing people do that can legitimately be called prayer – duh! I mean, doesn’t the fact that there is no god you can pray to kind of call into question the idea that prayer has any function at all? Of course it does.

Listen to me: Give it up. Let it go. Drop it, and let it lie. There are no gods, so no one has ever had and no one will ever have a conversation with any god. The “tools” we’ve been given to effect that communication – prayer, ceremonies, blessings, invocations, special words, beautiful costumes – these are tricks; figments; lies; games; scams. It’s all pretend, and it has to be entirely discredited and forgotten if we all want, some bright day, to be happy.

Categories theism

Stop pulling punches with regard to creationism

21 July 2005 //
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Scientific and pop-sci journals have been responding strongly to the threat of creationism and its lunatic mercenaries and that’s good. New Scientist had a special section on the topic, called out on the cover as The End of Reason. I have seen pieces in Nature and Scientific American as well. A recent editorial in Science (309: 221, 8 July 2005) – Redefining Science by Alan Leshner (CEO of the AAAS) – is strong, but still manages to pull some punches.

Much is well said. You can tell that the writer knows scientific culture first-hand.

Are scientists [...] afraid to subject the core concepts of evolution to public scrutiny? Not likely. They’re accustomed to that. Scientific theories and principles are routinely subjected to close examination and systematic testing. Moreover, scientists are notoriously argumentative and enjoy debating theories with one another.

On the notion of “belief” he says:

In fact, “belief” is a word you almost never hear in science. We do not believe theories. We accept or reject them based on their ability to explain natural phenomena, and they must be testable with scientific methodologies.

– and on the claim that evolution is “just a theory”:

In one sense that’s true. Evolution is only a theory, but so is gravity. People often respond that gravity is a fact, but the fact is that your keys fall to the ground when dropped. Gravity is the theoretical explanation that accounts for such observed facts.

A nice bit of epistemology there. Then we come to the pulled punch.

At the same time, it is important for scientists to acknowledge that not all questions can be answered by science. Scientific insights are limited to the natural world.

Why do intelligent people who actually know something have to get all polite and modest and pretend they don’t know it? Is it political correctness? – a wish not to offend? – do we want to protect people from being embarrassed by their own ignorance? – or have religious memes have so infected us that we don’t notice ourselves caving in to them even as we critique them?

It is not in fact “important for scientists to acknowledge that not all questions can be answered by science.” The wording implies that some questions cannot be answered by science, but can be answered some other way. But there are no such questions. The only questions that science cannot, in principle, answer are questions that no method can answer – that, strictly speaking, do not have an answer. Take, for example, “What is the purpose of life on Earth?” If there were a straightforward way to answer it, no one would be excited about asking it. It’s pretty much unanswerable by definition. Those are the questions that can’t be answered by science: the questions that aren’t even really questions in the first place.

By the same token, when Leshner says that “scientific insights are limited to the natural world,” he implies that one should be concerned with more than the natural world. But what else is there? Show it to me, and we’ll discuss it. Until then, there’s nothing to talk about.

People complain to me, “You think that science has answers for everything!”

Well, perhaps I do, but that’s a stupid way to put it. I say that every question that can in principle be answered, can in principle be answered by science – that is, by observation, because that’s all science is. Science is not a parallel Universe separate from ordinary life. It is not an arcane discipline understood only by initiates. Science is just regular people paying careful attention to the world. How else are we going to find anything out? Where else would we look? Truly, it’s time to stop pulling puches and just let people who are being idiotic know that they are being idiotic.

I mean let’s be polite when we can, and when it’s appropriate; and let’s be plain and direct and unflinching, when that is appropriate. The risk of hurting people’s feelings has been vastly overstated; I’ll show why that is in a future post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories theism

“The power of freedom”

18 July 2005 //
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At a recent White House press briefing, Bush’s press secretary Scott McClellan said:

We are waging a comprehensive war on terrorism. You heard the President talk earlier today [...] about our strategy for taking the fight to the enemy, staying on the offensive, and working to spread freedom and democracy [...]. Freedom is a powerful force for defeating an ideology such as the one that the terrorists espouse. [...] As the President said, free nations are peaceful societies. And that’s why it’s so important that we continue to support the advance of freedom, because that’s how you ultimately defeat the ideology of hatred and oppression that terrorists espouse.

Now, it may not be fair to quibble with the pronouncements of a mindless mouthpiece, but this is the mindless mouthpiece of the President of the United States. He must be held to high standards of public service – I mean, we need to at least try.

So I ask: if “free nations are peaceful societies,” why are we “taking the fight to the enemy” and “staying on the offensive”? Is the idea that if we fight really hard now, things will be really peaceful later? – that if we accept not being free right now, we’ll be much freer some time later… like, after the war is over… if it ever is over?

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”, New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15

It must also be pointed out that freedom is not a “powerful force,” just as love is not a powerful force. Where does this idea of the power of freedom come from? Freedom does not have any power. Armies have power, but armies are not free; countries have power, but not in proportion to their freedom.

There seems to be a fundamental, sophomoric – hilarious, really – misunderstanding here about the nature of freedom. By definition, freedom cannot be imposed on people. People are free when stuff isn’t being imposed on them.

I suppose that Mr. Bush really means that Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis, etc. are not free now, and that by eliminating the despots running those countries we can bring their freedom back. (This might actually be a good idea! – but not if it’s executed with the ferocity and mendacity that have characterized this adminstration’s efforts to date.) He doesn’t want to say, “We have come to depose your government and replace it with our own,” so he speaks of freedom as if it were a force of nature or the work of a god: powerful, inevitable, benevolent, and impersonal. This imagery diverts our attention from “the man behind the curtain.” And, like everything else Dubya has ever said, it is a lie.

Categories consequentialism, fascism, security theater

On “belief”

4 July 2005 //
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[Update 14 July 2009: I have removed the link to this document. My thinking on this topic has been refined and the book will be available soon.]

[Update 20 May 2008: document moved to a different host]

I’ve completely rewritten my famous article on the epistemology of religious belief, and it has a new title: What the heck is “belief in God”?

Categories theism

“The power of love”

3 July 2005 //
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Love has no power. Love is the willingness not to have power. Love is when you choose not to impose your own preferences on the choices being made by someone else.

We hear that “love brings people together.” No, people bring people together. Sometimes they choose to love. It doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a choice. You’re building something that wasn’t there before. Love is a geometrical construction in interpersonal space, like ikebana. People move toward love – arrange love – make love – if they wish. There is no “power of love,” just as there is no “power of triangles.” It can’t tell you what to do. It can’t even make suggestions.

I’m not saying that love is not beautiful. Love is the beautifullest thing ever. And one of the ways in which it is beautiful is that it is not a form of power. You can’t manipulate people with love! Love is when you don’t manipulate them.

Love can’t even untie the knots in your heart. You untie the knots yourself – then, if you choose to, you love.

Categories consequentialism, delight, monism

The Earth is very beautiful and does not have feelings

3 July 2005 //
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One of the beautiful things about planet Earth is that it does not care whether we live or die. It is independent. It has its own thing going on. We are tiny, tiny mites on the surface of the Earth. And some day, if we’re careful, if we care, we will learn how to live on the Earth without wrecking it. You see: it doesn’t care if we wreck it, but we should, because it is we who find it beautiful. Some day whole nations will move across the Earth and leave every place just the way they found it, not a blade of grass bent over. And they will do this not because the Earth wants them to, but because they want to.

Categories delight, monism
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