It has been brought to my attention that last week I posted a video that portrayed cats as cute and lovable. All I can say is that it was a very rough week, coming down off of CONvergence and having to catch up on a lot of work, so I was probably in an incoherent and fatigued state of mind. My apologies.
Here’s an antidote.
There. I feel better. I hope you feel better too.
Oh, christ. It’s the philosopher’s version of the Courtier’s Reply. There’s been some back and forth about Christopher Hitchens on Salon, with the first hack at Hitchens by Curtis White (and a ghastly bafflegab it was), followed by a defense by Dellora, and now Joe Winkler charges in, arguing that Hitchens wasn’t a philosopher.
All right, stipulated. He was not a philosopher. Much as I may respect some philosophy, you know that it’s no insult to state that someone is not a philosopher, and when someone uses philosophy as a clumsy bludgeon as does this Winkler fellow, it’s actually a compliment.
It’s another terrible effort at religious apologetics through confusion. This one paragraph ought to be enough to indict him on charges of sowing doubt and discord through dissembling noise.
Religion itself, especially the avant garde thought of religion, has been grappling with the issue of historicity in an honest manner for decades. What’s worse is that Hitch doesn’t really do justice to the systems of countless of thinkers (Wittgenstein, Jung, Heschel and Niebuhr) who discuss the nature of religious claims and their relationship to truth. At no point does Hitch think to ask himself in this respect, what kind of truth are we talking about, historical truth, experiential truth, or maybe symbolic truth?
Jebus. I throw up my hands and throw up my lunch.
So what is, for instance, the claim of an afterlife? Historical? Nope. No one has died and come back to credibly summarize the event for us. Experiential? Have you died lately? Symbolic? Symbolic of what? We can play this game for every single contrivance of religion — it’s authority in morality, the power of prayer, transubstantiation, salvation, whatever. I don’t give a good god damn what label you give it or whether somebody believes in it fervently — it doesn’t make it true in any reasonable sense of the word.
And I mean true in the good old practical, pragmatic sense of being repeatable or verifiable, having some material evidence for its reality, or having verifiable consequences that cannot be explained by mundane, plausible phenomena.
How about true in the sense of it actually happened, or the process actually works?
You know, in the kinds of masturbatory games some philosophers and theologians play with the truth, they could just as well argue that Harry Potter is “true”, in the same sense as Jesus. Winkler tries to argue that what he calls “polemics”, or what I call cutting through the pretense, are “interesting, enlightening and often compelling, [but] rarely further the conversation.” That’s true, but only because he seems to regard spewing more bullshit as “conversation”. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is shut down the stupid conversation by tearing apart its counterproductive premises, and simply ending the circle jerk.
How odd. An article was removed from The Guardian website, and now only this note has been left in its place.
This article has been taken down on 14 July 2013 pending investigation.
I guess they’ll investigate away. Meanwhile, you can read the article as originally posted.
Open season on black boys after a verdict like this
Posted:Sun, 14 Jul 2013 07:25:00 GMTPosted:2013-07-14T08:07:42ZCalls for calm after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin are empty words for black families
Let it be noted that on this day, Saturday 13 July 2013, it was still deemed legal in the US to chase and then shoot dead an unarmed young black man on his way home from the store because you didn’t like the look of him.
The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year was tragic. But in the age of Obama the acquittal of George Zimmerman offers at least that clarity. For the salient facts in this case were not in dispute. On 26 February 2012 Martin was on his way home, minding his own business armed only with a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. Zimmerman pursued him, armed with a 9mm handgun, believing him to be a criminal. Martin resisted. They fought. Zimmerman shot him dead.
Who screamed. Who was stronger. Who called whom what and when and why are all details to warm the heart of a cable news producer with 24 hours to fill. Strip them all away and the truth remains that Martin’s heart would still be beating if Zimmerman had not chased him down and shot him.
There is no doubt about who the aggressor was here. The only reason the two interacted at all, physically or otherwise, is that Zimmerman believed it was his civic duty to apprehend an innocent teenager who caused suspicion by his existence alone.
Appeals for calm in the wake of such a verdict raise the question of what calm there can possibly be in a place where such a verdict is possible. Parents of black boys are not likely to feel calm. Partners of black men are not likely to feel calm. Children with black fathers are not likely to feel calm. Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young black men can be thus slain and discarded.
But while the acquittal was shameful it was not a shock. It took more than six weeks after Martin’s death for Zimmerman to be arrested and only then after massive pressure both nationally and locally. Those who dismissed this as a political trial (a peculiar accusation in the summer of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden) should bear in mind that it was politics that made this case controversial.
Charging Zimmerman should have been a no-brainer. He was not initially charged because Florida has a “stand your ground” law whereby deadly force is permitted if the person “reasonably believes” it is necessary to protect their own life, the life of another or to prevent a forcible felony.
Since it was Zimmerman who stalked Martin, the question remains: what ground is a young black man entitled to and on what grounds may he defend himself? What version of events is there for that night in which Martin gets away with his life? Or is it open season on black boys after dark?
Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict will be contested for years to come. But he passed judgement on Trayvon that night summarily.
“Fucking punks,” Zimmerman told the police dispatcher that night. “These assholes. They always get away.”
So true it’s painful. And so predictable it hurts.
I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Maybe the editors noticed a typo.
I expected this result: George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin.
This is America. He was in a state that allowed a vigilante to carry a gun, and to use it if he felt the least bit threatened. The victim was a black man in a hoodie. I would have been floored if they’d convicted him.
How about if people work to put laws in place that make it illegal to hunt black men?
Blake Stacey has a good quote quoted at Science after Sunclipse:
The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, Chapter 24.
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When we last encountered Virginia Heffernan, she was upset that hatefest science blogs had journalistic integrity, and encouraged everyone to read science denialist blogs instead; then the usual gang of anti-science frauds joined in, with Rod Dreher and various Catholics chiming in. It was all over the Pepsico debacle, in which the Scienceblogs management gave advertorial space to Pepsi without marking it as an ad, prompting a whole bunch of science journalists to promptly decamp…but Heffernan exposed herself as just generally anti-science in her reaction.
Now she’s back, declaring that she loves technology and dislikes science, and that she’s openly a creationist.
I assume that other people love science and technology, since the fields are often lumped together, but I rarely meet people like that. Technology people are trippy; our minds are blown by the romance of telecom. At the same time, the people I know who consider themselves scientists by nature seem to be super-skeptical types who can be counted on to denigrate religion, fear climate change and think most people—most Americans—are dopey sheep who believe in angels and know nothing about all the gross carbon they trail, like “Pig-Pen.”
Did I mention she’s a raving climate change denialist? Yeah, she’s a raving climate change denialist and a creationist, but she loves her little smart phone. And her entire argument against science is that she doesn’t understand it, it’s complicated enough to contain internal debates, and she has this bigoted stereotype of what scientists are like. Oh, and science stories are impersonal, while Bible stories are fun and amusing.
She also mentions that the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology are inconsistent BS, but she’s such a delusional twit that I can’t even agree with her there, just on principle, much as I’d like to.
You know, I don’t assume most Americans are dopey sheep. It takes a little evidence to convince me. But at least I can say that Virginia Heffernan has persuaded me that she, at least, is a dopey sheep. Maybe that’s her problem; every time she meets a scientist she opens her mouth and says something stupid, and they react appropriately.
He really is a very dishonest guy — which is probably why he is so committed to a Christian faith that gives him a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Now, not only has Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter boondoggle been delayed and delayed and delayed, but it has also shrunk. Cincinnati news reports money problems and that they’ve cut back on the grander version they proposed. You know, the big project that would create 900 jobs for the area, and got tax breaks from the state on that promise? Not going to happen. It’s been scaled down to almost a third of what was initially planned.
Answers in Genesis hoped to break ground on its "Ark Encounter" project nearly two years ago. Since then, the 172-million dollar project has been scaled back, redesigned and slowed down by a sluggish economy.
The Williamstown on the property the Ark will rest on doesn’t look much differently than it did in February of 2012. That was a few months after the original groundbreaking date. Planners insist it will be built, but they can’t say when.
…Ark Encounter’s project manager, Mike Zovath says they are working every day on the design for displays and content. They hope to get all the necessary permits for drainage and underground utilities by the end of November. But even if they had them today … "Right now we don’t have the money for construction, yet."
The Ark project has enough money to continue moving forward with the design and architecture work — but not enough to build it. They’ve raised between $12 and $15-million. " We need about $45-million to break escrow and start construction for a $60-million end project," Zovath says.
The scaled-down $60-million dollar project would include parking lots , a ticketing area and the Ark. The walled city and other features would come later. Zovath has faith in the project and points to the Creation Museum as something critics said would never be built. "I’m absolutely positive it’s going to happen."
We all know what faith is worth. Nothing at all.
Give it a few more years, and they’ll deliver a toy boat in a rubber tub with some plastic animals scattered around.
The song is a little bit naughty, so you might not want to play it where non-nerds might hear it.
Wired has an excellent article on why harassment policies are needed — it’s because the social dynamics of conventions can mess up people’s perspectives.
Conventions need anti-harassment policies. Not because convention attendees are disproportionately boorish or creepy–they’re really not–or because of social obliviousness. Rather, the difficulty lies in the very thing that makes conventions conventions: the social phenomena that come into play whenever humans gather in large groups.
Read the whole thing. It’s very thorough in discussing the psychology behind harassing behavior, and why it’s not just something evil psychopathic trolls do.
