Circuses

Glenn Greenwald captures precisely my own feelings on the Anthony Wiener episode and what it tells us about the state of politics and the media in the US.

There are few things more sickening — or revealing — to behold than a D.C. sex scandal. Huge numbers of people prance around flamboyantly condemning behavior in which they themselves routinely engage. Media stars contrive all sorts of high-minded justifications for luxuriating in every last dirty detail, when nothing is more obvious than that their only real interest is vicarious titillation. Reporters who would never dare challenge powerful political figures who torture, illegally eavesdrop, wage illegal wars or feed at the trough of sleazy legalized bribery suddenly walk upright — like proud peacocks with their feathers extended — pretending to be hard-core adversarial journalists as they collectively kick a sexually humiliated figure stripped of all importance. The ritual is as nauseating as it is predictable.

I am as titillated as the next person by salacious gossip about people I know either personally or as public figures. I won’t pretend that I turn away in high-minded purity from such stories. But I wonder about the health of a society in which the private lives of people escape from the gossip columns of the tabloids (which is where they belong, if at all) and become a major obsession. It seems to indicate a society that seeks distractions because it does not have the stomach to confront the far more serious issues it faces.

As Greenwald says:

Can one even imagine how much different — and better — our political culture would be if our establishment media devoted even a fraction of the critical scrutiny and adversarial energy it devoted to the Weiner matter to things that actually matter? But that won’t happen, because the people who comprise that press corps, with rare exception, are both incapable of focusing on things that matter and uninterested in doing so. Talking about shirtless pictures and expressing outrage about private sexual behavior — like some angry, chattering soap opera fan furious that one of their best-known characters cheated — is about the limit of their abilities and their function.

Greenwald’s whole post is, as usual, well worth reading.

The failure of fine-tuning arguments for god

When I ask people why they believe in god, their response almost invariably comes down to them being impressed with the complexity of the world and thinking that it could not have come about without some intelligent agent behind it. It is highly likely that this ‘reason’ is not the actual cause of their belief but a later rationalization for beliefs that they unthinkingly adopted as part of their childhood indoctrination into religion. When people become adults, they realize that saying they believe something because they were told it as children is likely to expose them to ridicule, and so they manufacture a superficially more rational answer.
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Church cancelled due to lack of god

From a 1996 issue of The Onion.

Parishioners of Pastor Theo Leobald’s First Congregational Church of Holy Christ In Heaven will not meet next Sunday morning for a coffee social and morning Bible study as they do every week, gathering in fellowship and offering thanks and praise to God on high. The reason for the cancellation? Simply the fact that, according to Leobald, God does not now, has never, and will never exist.

When asked why he is convinced of God’s nonexistence, Leobald became visibly irritated with reporters.

“What’re you, an illiterate peasant? Aren’t you familiar with 20th century thinking at all? Christ, read a book, or maybe just think about the idea for a minute. Pretty ridiculous, huh?” he said.

When pressed, however, he sighed heavily, and explained that thousands of years ago, tribes of nomadic desert peoples made up God because, being incapable of scientific reasoning due to caveman-like existences, they had no other way of making sense of things like sunshine, rocks and pork-transmitted trichinosis.

“They made it all up, and they were ignorant, unwashed, half-naked pre-historic barbarians,” Leobald said. “So who are you gonna believe: Carl Sagan, and the pantheon of the world’s greatest scientific and intellectual minds, or some guy who measured wealth by how many goats he had?”

Why a god is not necessary to create the universe

In an article titled Does the Universe Need God?, cosmologist Sean Carroll provides a rejoinder to those who would try to squeeze god in as an answer to what they perceive as unexplained gaps in our knowledge. It is a long article that is worth reading in full but for those who lack the time, I will excerpt some of the key points.

He starts by making the same point that I made in the series Why atheism is winning, that the long-term outlook for religion is extremely bleak because science and its associated modernistic outlook is making it irrelevant in ways that are hard to ignore even by the most determined religionist.

Most modern cosmologists are convinced that conventional scientific progress will ultimately result in a self-contained understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, without the need to invoke God or any other supernatural involvement. This conviction necessarily falls short of a proof, but it is backed up by good reasons. While we don’t have the final answers, I will attempt to explain the rationale behind the belief that science will ultimately understand the universe without involving God in any way.

Those who want to insert god somewhere, to show that he/she/it is necessary in some way, need to realize that they have at most a window of one second just after the Big Bang to work with.

While we don’t claim to understand the absolute beginning of the universe, by the time one second has elapsed we enter the realm of empirical testability. That’s the era of primordial nucleosynthesis, when protons and neutrons were being converted into helium and other light elements. The theory of nucleosynthesis makes precise predictions for the relative abundance of these elements, which have passed observational muster with flying colors, providing impressive evidence in favor of the Big Bang model. Another important test comes from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the relic radiation left over from the moment the primordial plasma cooled off and became transparent, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Together, observations of primordial element abundances and the CMB provide not only evidence in favor of the basic cosmological picture, but stringent constraints on the parameters describing the composition of our universe.

He then clarifies what it means to talk about the Big Bang event, a singular event in time, as distinct from the Big Bang model that is the working out of the aftermath of that event.

One sometimes hears the claim that the Big Bang was the beginning of both time and space; that to ask about spacetime “before the Big Bang” is like asking about land “north of the North Pole.” This may turn out to be true, but it is not an established understanding. The singularity at the Big Bang doesn’t indicate a beginning to the universe, only an end to our theoretical comprehension. It may be that this moment does indeed correspond to a beginning, and a complete theory of quantum gravity will eventually explain how the universe started at approximately this time. But it is equally plausible that what we think of as the Big Bang is merely a phase in the history of the universe, which stretches long before that time – perhaps infinitely far in the past. [My italics] The present state of the art is simply insufficient to decide between these alternatives; to do so, we will need to formulate and test a working theory of quantum gravity.
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The problem with “creation from nothing” is that it conjures an image of a pre-existing “nothingness” out of which the universe spontaneously appeared – not at all what is actually involved in this idea. Partly this is because, as human beings embedded in a universe with an arrow of time, we can’t help but try to explain events in terms of earlier events, even when the event we are trying to explain is explicitly stated to be the earliest one. It would be more accurate to characterize these models by saying “there was a time such that there was no earlier time.”

To make sense of this, it is helpful to think of the present state of the universe and work backwards, rather than succumbing to the temptation to place our imaginations “before” the universe came into being. The beginning cosmologies posit that our mental journey backwards in time will ultimately reach a point past which the concept of “time” is no longer applicable. Alternatively, imagine a universe that collapsed into a Big Crunch, so that there was a future end point to time. We aren’t tempted to say that such a universe “transformed into nothing”; it simply has a final moment of its existence. What actually happens at such a boundary point depends, of course, on the correct quantum theory of gravity.

The important point is that we can easily imagine self-contained descriptions of the universe that have an earliest moment of time. There is no logical or metaphysical obstacle to completing the conventional temporal history of the universe by including an atemporal boundary condition at the beginning. Together with the successful post-Big-Bang cosmological model already in our possession, that would constitute a consistent and self-contained description of the history of the universe.

Nothing in the fact that there is a first moment of time, in other words, necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment. [My italics]

The Big Bang event itself does not necessarily imply that the universe had a beginning in time and even if it should turn out that it had, it does not imply a beginner. This strikes at the heart of the arguments of religious apologists who need a beginning to make their claim say that a beginning necessarily implies a beginner. That argument is weak to begin with, but is the main one they have for god.

Religious people know that this conclusion is a devastating one for them. After all, if no god is required to create the universe, then he is truly an unnecessary concept. So they will fight or ignore or obfuscate this point with theological jargon.

Politics for the lazy

Kevin Drum touches on a peeve that I share, which is how politicians toss out slogans that sound strong and tough when the actual ideas contained in those slogans are obvious, vague, impractical, implausible, or even meaningless.

He gives four examples:

  • Zero tolerance
  • Everything is on the table
  • Across the board cuts
  • Doing nothing is not an option.

He calls for further examples. Here are some of my pet peeves:

  • Eliminate waste
  • Reduce bureaucracy
  • Hold people accountable

Any other ideas?

Hotel housekeepers

The recent events surrounding Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund accused of sexually assaulting the person assigned to clean his hotel room shows, irrespective of the truth of the matter that eventually emerges, how vulnerable hotel housekeeping staff is to predatory guests.

Jacob Tomsky, who has worked in various capacities in the luxury hospitality business, says that events like those alleged in the Strauss-Kahn story are sadly all too frequent, and that guests not only often try to take advantage of the staff sexually, they also frequently falsely accuse them of doing things such as stealing, making international calls from the room, going through their belongings, etc..

I encounter the housekeeping staff in hotels quite a lot. When I go to conferences, the meetings take place in the hotel itself and so I frequently go back to my room during the day between sessions, sometimes for extended periods when there are no talks I want to listen to. Since I cannot read or work very well in public places with a lot of background noise and movement (a symptom of my need for lack of distractions when I am working), I prefer to work in the quiet of my room. As a result, I frequently encounter the housekeeping staff, sometimes in the hallways, and sometimes when they knock when I am in the room. It never happens that they come in unexpectedly because I always have the deadbolt in place when I am in the room.

The host-guest relationship becomes ambiguous when you stay in a hotel. Since you are renting the room, it ‘belongs’ to you in some sense and so, if you wish, you can think of yourself as the host and anyone who enters as a guest or, in the case of the housekeepers, your personal employees. On the other hand, you are the transient while the housekeeping staff is there permanently, which can make you feel like you are the guest and they are the host. I tend to think of myself in the latter category and so I try to accommodate the hosts and not upset the work schedule of the housekeeping staff. As a result, if they arrive and knock while I am the room, I tell them to go ahead and clean the room while I continue to work, and they usually do so.

My interactions with the housekeeping staff are friendly but minimal, limited to exchanging smiles and a few pleasantries, since we both have work to do. It had not occurred to me until the Strauss-Kahn story broke that the staff might have to make quick judgments in such situations as to whether I could be trusted to be in the same room with them.

As Dean Baker points out, one of the important facts about this case is that the reason that the employee was able to complain was that she belonged to a union.

This matters because under the law in the United States, an employer can fire a worker at any time for almost any reason. It is illegal for an employer to fire a worker for reporting a sexual assault. If any worker can prove that this is reason they were fired, they would get their job back and probably back pay. (The penalties tend to be trivial, so the back pay is unfortunately not a joke.)

However, it is completely legal for an employer to fire a worker who reports a sexual assault for having been late to work last Tuesday or any other transgression. Since employers know the law, they don’t ever say that they are firing a worker for reporting a sexual assault. They might fire workers who report sexual assaults for other on-the-job failings, real or invented.

In this way the United States stands out from most other wealthy countries. For example, all the countries of Western Europe afford workers some measure of employment protection, where employers must give a reason for firing workers. Workers can contest their dismissal if they think the reason is not valid, unlike the United States where there is no recourse.

Unions matter for many things other than the ones we most focus on, such as obtaining decent pay and benefits. They also provide minimal protections against abuses by the rich and powerful. Without them, management of luxury hotels would be strongly tempted to sacrifice their employees in order to placate the wealthy clientele who abuse them.