Donald Trump and the birthers

On his MSNBC show, Lawrence O’Donnell lashes out at the racism that motivates people like Donald Trump and others who question Obama’s eligibility to be president (and even his academic record) and the media’s complicity (particularly NBC) in allowing these crazies to have a platform.

It seems like quite a lot of people simply cannot stomach the fact that a non-white person with a foreign-sounding name could be the president of ‘their’ country.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bernie Sanders on The Daily Show

The independent socialist senator from Vermont says what I have been saying for some time, except far more clearly and succinctly and without using the word oligarchy. It was clear to me that Sanders thinks that most Democrats are also representing oligarchic interests but since he caucuses with them, he pulls his punches slightly.

I am not sure if Jon Stewart really believes that the Democrats and Republicans are deep ideological enemies or whether he is just saying that to provide a foil for Sanders. The two-part extended interview is well worth watching in full.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive – Bernie Sanders Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

The creationists’ dinosaur problem

Dinosaurs are a headache for biblical literalists. Since religion has no rational basis, you have to build your base of believers by indoctrinating children at a young age. And because children are fascinated by dinosaurs and can’t seem to get enough of them, you need to work them into the story somehow. The fact that dinosaurs existed at one time and are now extinct is an unquestioned fact and must be faced. The catch is that dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible. It is no good for creationist adults to deny their existence the way they deny other inconvenient scientific facts because even the most trusting and naïve child is going to balk at such a counterfactual statement.
[Read more…]

The news media’s priorities

The radio program Marketplace reports on the absurdly high level of media attention devoted to the royal wedding.

CNN will have a 125 journalists on the ground. Fox is sending 50. NBC’s broadcasting the “Today” show from London. Even Al Jazeera’s on it. There are reports the networks are spending up to $10 million each to cover the event. And that’s in a year when shrinking news budgets have also been squeezed by the natural disaster in Japan and uprisings in the Middle East.

CNN is sending 125 journalists? It struck me that since the newsworthiness of this highly scripted event is essentially zero, the media might have been well-advised to have pool coverage, where one outfit televises it and everyone uses the same feed.

But what do I know.

Atheism’s morality

In his regular New York Times column, David Brooks trots out his usual banalities, this time about how without god we cannot have a timeless morality.

That’s because people are not gods. No matter how special some individuals may think they are, they don’t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own.
…
Rigorous theology helps people avoid mindless conformity. Without timeless rules, we all have a tendency to be swept up in the temper of the moment. But tough-minded theologies are countercultural. They insist on principles and practices that provide an antidote to mere fashion.

How can people write such nonsense? Does he really think that how we understand what the Bible says about morality has not changed from Biblical times?

The book The Christian Delusion edited by John W. Loftus has a chapter titled Yahweh is a Moral Monster by Hector Avalos that lists the horrendous morality that is found in the Bible. (The essay is largely a refutation of a defense of god offered by Christian apologist Paul Copan in an essay titled Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics that can be read here. )

In his chapter, Avalos ends (p. 232) with a section titled Atheism’s Morality that is worth quoting at length:

Copan fundamentally misunderstands the New Atheism insofar as he believes that it cannot provide a sound moral ground for its judgments. For a Christian apologist to think he or she has triumphed by pointing out the moral relativism of the New Atheism is to miss the entire point. As an atheist, I don’t deny that I am a moral relativist. Rather, my aim is to expose the fact that Christians are also moral relativists. Indeed, when it comes to ethics, there are only two types of people in this world:

1. Those who admit they are moral relativists; and
2. Those who do not admit they are moral relativists.

Copan fails because he cannot admit that he is a moral relativist, and he thinks that God will solve the problem of moral relativism. But having a God in a moral system only creates a tautology. All we end up saying is: “X is bad because X is bad.” Thus, if we say that we believe in God, and he says idolatry is evil, then that is a tautology: “God says idolatry is bad and so idolatry is bad because God says it is bad.” Or we end up using this tautology: “Whatever God says is good because whatever God says is good.”

As Kai Nielsen deftly argues, human beings are always the ultimate judges of morality even if we believe in God. After all, the very judgment that God is good is a human judgment. The judgment that what God commands is good is also a human judgment. So Christians are not doing anything different except mystifying and complicating morality. Christians are simply projecting what they call “good” onto a supernatural being. They offer us no evidence that their notion of good comes from outside of themselves [My italics]. And that is where the danger lies. Basing a moral system on unverifiable supernatural beings only creates more violence and endangers our species. I have already discussed this at length in my book, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence.

Copan cites Dinesh D’Souza who repeats the oft-cited anecdote that atheists have killed more people than religionists. Again, this is based on the false idea that Nazis were atheistic Darwinists, and that Stalinist genocide was due to atheism rather than to forced collectivism (something I discuss in detail in chapter 14 of this book). Speaking only for myself here, I can say that atheism offers a much better way to construct moral rules. We can construct them on the basis of verifiable common interests, known causes, and known consequences. There is an ironclad difference between secular and faith-based morality, and we can illustrate it very simply with these propositions:

A. I have to kill person X because Allah said so.
B. I have to kill person X because he is pointing a gun at me.

In case A, we commit violence on the basis of unverifiable premises. In case B, we might commit violence on the basis of verifiable premises (I can verify a gun exists, and that it is pointed at me). If I am going to kill or be killed, I want it to be for a reason that I can verify to be true. If the word “moral” describes the set of practices that accord with our values, and if our highest value is life, then it is always immoral to trade real human lives for something that does not exist or cannot be verified to exist.

What does not exist has no value relative to what does exist. What cannot be proven to exist should never be placed above what does exist. If we value life, then you should never trade something that exists, especially life, for something that does not exist or cannot be proven to exist. That is why it would always be immoral to ever take a life based on faith claims. It is that simple.

Avalos captures quite succinctly my views on this topic. I am a moral relativist because I simply cannot see how a moral framework can be constructed that is independent of human input and judgments. The reason that Brooks thinks the rules are timeless is because a human being told him that one particular holy book’s rules (out of the many holy books with their own rules) are given by a god and are thus timeless. He chose (or was indoctrinated) to believe that claim. How is that not a product of human judgment?

If a god were to suddenly appear to me, even then I would not unhesitatingly accept those moral commands. If this god said, for example, that I should murder my children (as the Bible says he told Abraham to do with his son Isaac) or indeed that I should murder anyone at all, I simply would not do it and I am confident that these days most people would do the same. None but the most fanatical god believers would comply and we would consider such people to be either insane or moral monsters.

If a god issued commands that we now consider immoral, he/she/it would face a revolt on his hands because all thinking people are, in the end, moral relativists and reject moral commands that are not congruent with their own moral sensibilities or based on agreed-upon humane principles.

The vanishing of privacy

While I tend to be scathing about the general vacuity of the mainstream media in the US, there are a few reporters whose investigative work is excellent. One of them is Dana Priest of the Washington Post. I had been meaning to draw attention to her excellent series on the way that the government monitors people.

One key point that emerges from her story is that all you have to do is just one thing, however innocent and innocuous, that is deemed to be suspicious by any authority for you to be placed on a watch list that results in all your personal data and all your actions accumulated in the data banks for investigators to peruse.

Glenn Greenwald points out the dangers of this and the way that it contrasts with the government insisting that everything it does is secret.

That’s the mindset of the U.S. Government: everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes. And what’s most remarkable about this — though, given the full-scale bipartisan consensus over it, not surprising — is how eagerly submissive much of the citizenry is to this imbalance. Many Americans plead with their Government in unison: we demand that you know everything about us but that you keep us ignorant about what you do and punish those who reveal it to us. Often, this kind of oppressive Surveillance State has to be forcibly imposed on a resistant citizenry, but much of the frightened American citizenry — led by most transparency-hating media figures — has been trained with an endless stream of fear-mongering to demand that they be subjected to more and more of it.
…
Of all the surveillance state abuses, one of the most egregious has to be the Government’s warrantless, oversight-less seizure of the laptops and other electronic equipment of American citizens at the border, whereby they not only store the contents of those devices but sometimes keep the seized items indefinitely. That practice is becoming increasingly common, aimed at people who have done nothing more than dissent from government policy; I intend to have more on that soon. If American citizens don’t object to the permanent seizure and copying of their laptops and cellphones without any warrants or judicial oversight, what would they ever object to?

Recent news reports reveal that Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones track and record your every move even when the location detection option is turned off and to serve marketers.

All these developments have caused some alarm amongst privacy advocates but I suspect that most people will not care. After all, people now voluntarily give out their private information on social network sites, information that those sites can harvest and sell to marketers and pass on to governments. People seem to either take the attitude that if you are doing nothing wrong then you should have nothing to worry about or have resigned themselves to the idea that the government and private companies can gain access to information about our private lives to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a couple of decades ago.

Are we past the point of no return when it comes to personal privacy? I suspect so. We have to live with the fact that anything we do is in principle knowable by others.

Is there a real danger to this loss of privacy? Yes. In addition to enabling companies to try and manipulate us, there is an special danger from governments. What governments fear most is when people start sharing dangerous ideas about democracy and freedom and human rights and start organizing around those subversive concepts. Getting wind of those things early and neutralizing key people enables government to control its populations which is why historically governments have depended on informants and spies and detection devices to monitor their own people. What the new technology has done is enable this to be done more easily.

On the other hand, human ingenuity should not be underestimated. People will find ways to use the same technology to get around the snooping. WikiLeaks, for example, has pioneered ways of getting information out that was not possible before. Also the sheer volume of information that is transmitted suggests that it can drown the signals in massive noise, even with sophisticated packet sniffing software that can look for keywords. The catch with all those devices is that if you narrow the search fields you might miss things while if you broaden it you get swamped.

And finally, technology and force can only take you so far. When enough people are united around a common ideal and rise up in unison, even the most repressive and technologically advanced governments will fall.