…without a creator. I agree that many people are too eager to attempt to use evolution as a proof for their atheism (i.e., a belief that there is no God, as opposed to skepticism on the matter). I agree with Derb’s comment, though.
Category Archives: Philosophy
A Milestone In AI
Two chatbots being d**ks to each other. Are they really being emotional? Only Turing knows.
Angry Nature
Twice this morning on ABC I heard the storm referred to as having emotions. “The ire of Irene,” (OK, I see the alliterary appeal) and “the wrath of the storm.”
Folks, don’t anthropomorphize rotational fluid dynamics. The storm didn’t really have it in for anyone, honest. Besides, it hates when you do that.
The Lies Of Rousseau’s Disciples
…have been laid bare in England:
The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.
What is not ludicrous and insulting to common sense in these propositions is contradictory in its own terms. There are indeed views of the human condition which hold that all species of wickedness are connected, because they are all rooted in the fact that man is a fallen creature. But somehow I doubt that the ardent liberal secularists who were piping up last week were believers in original sin or the machinations of the Devil.
The moral equivalence that they wanted to establish between looters and arsonists on the one hand, and the perpetrators of any other kind of bad behaviour you can think of on the other, was rooted in ideological, not theological, orthodoxy. The rioting gangs could not simply be what they seemed – what they so obviously were – because that would be a devastating victory for the judgment of popular opinion over the fantasies of liberalism.
There’s actually nothing “liberal” about it.
Christianity And Redistribution
Sorry, no, it does not compel it.
Old Law School
…versus New Law School:
New Law School culture, growing out of the Critical Legal Studies movement that first surfaced in law schools during the 1980s, is quite different. In New Law School thinking, the law does not embody a rational system of justice—or even strivings toward such a system—but is essentially a political construct that has historically operated to keep the rich and powerful in their places of wealth and power and other groups—women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor—in their socially subordinate places. If this characterization sounds Marxist, that is because Critical Legal Studies—and its intellectual progeny, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory—grew out of the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, which viewed American governmental and social structures as systems of oppression. It has also been influenced by postmodernist literary theory, with its assumptions that there is no objective truth or reality. In New Law School thinking, reason, free will, and personal responsibility are illusions, for all legal battles are actually struggles of race, class, and gender, in which power, not justice, is the ultimate goal. In New Law School scholarly writing, rigorous analysis of court opinions and the drawing of fine distinctions underlying legal arguments have been supplanted by “story telling”: personal narratives typically involving the law professors’ own experiences as members of an oppressed group with the race-gender-class matrix that is the source of their oppression. Since a shift in the power structure, not justice, is the goal, any tactic that coerces the recalcitrant into conforming to the new power regime is permissible in New Law School thinking.
Somehow, I suspect that the current Attorney General of the United States is a product of New Law School, as is his boss in the White House. Speaking of which, here is the latest outrage in the federal gun-running program:
In a surprise move in a controversial case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona is opposing a routine motion by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry to qualify as crime victims in the eyes of the court.
…The maneuver by Burke appears self-serving: his office ran Operation Fast and Furious on the ground, and two guns “walked” under Burke’s command were used in the firefight that murdered Agent Brian Terry. Burke’s provocative decision to block a routine filing seems intended to protect him in the event of a criminal or civil trial…
Laws are for the little people.
The Real Story Of The Debt-Limit Fight
It’s not about a Tea-Party Victory, but the death of the socialist left:
Most pundits are crediting this U-turn to the political muscle of the Tea Party and it’s true that President Obama would never have agreed to this deal if the Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives hadn’t engaged in the brinkmanship of the past few weeks. But to focus on the Tea Party is to ignore the tectonic political shift that’s taken place, not just in America but across Europe. The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer.
Let’s hope, though socialism is driven by innate human traits, primarily laziness and envy (and to be fair, misplaced compassion), so it will always rear its ugly head as long as we remain human.
[Update a while later]
Was this Obama’s “read my lips” moment?
And so we have the best of both worlds politically: a deal that leaves the Tea Party unsatisfied and therefore fired up for the next battles and election cycle, and a demoralized liberal base that can’t come to grips with the fact that socialism is over because we’ve run out of other people’s money…
Is it almost the end of the beginning?
The Man Who Fights Death
I have more thoughts on Bob Ettinger’s deanimation over at Pajamas Media.
More Ettinger Thoughts
I’ll have my own obituary up at Pajamas Media tomorrow, but he’s an interesting example of a man who lived (and perhaps continues to live) by his own beliefs, never relinquishing them even as he approached deanimation.
Many more men are interested in cryonics than women (though there are many of the latter as well), and generally the explanation for this is that women tend to be less individualistic, and define themselves in terms of their relationships, particularly family. I recall, almost forty years ago, when a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and his mother said, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to live forever, or wake up in a future in which I didn’t know anyone.” That has never bothered me, and I have never had trouble meeting new people and establishing new relationships. I’d rather do that than give up my individuality and memories. But Ettinger got around it partially by persuading his loved ones to get aboard the ambulance with him (though as he noted himself, it will be interesting times if he gets revived with both wives).
From Norway To Hell
Walter Russell Mead is channeling Bill Joy:
The inescapable reality is that the very forces creating our affluent, modern and democratic world also generate violent antagonism. Breivik, like Al-Qaeda and like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, is the shadow of progress. When conditions are right, the lone psychopath becomes a cult leader; in a perfect storm when everything breaks his way, the psychopath becomes Fuehrer.
That would be bad enough, but there’s one more turn of the screw. The same technological progress that helps create violent alienation and rage also empowers individuals and groups. 200 years ago a Breivik could not have done so much damage. 100 years ago Al-Qaeda could not have hijacked a plane. Modern society is more vulnerable than ever before to acts of terror, and developments in weaponry place ever greater power in the hands of ever smaller numbers of people.
This is still in early stages. Fortunately Breivik was a traditionalist and relatively low tech mass murderer; he did not hack vital computer systems to wreak murderous havoc with a rail or air traffic control system. He did not poison the reservoirs with weaponized biologicals. He did not even pump poison gas into a subway system.
We can be reasonably confident that an increasingly chaotic and stressful 21st century will generate more bitter nutjobs and place more destructive power in their hands. Democracy and affluence won’t cure it; the same forces that raise those golden arches build bombs to knock them down.
I have to say that Breivik and McVeigh are in an entirely different category than bin Laden. The latter is part of a totalitarian religious movement, with the support of millions, while no one is cheering the former in the streets, and in fact they are being roundly condemned by their own group members (that is, those with whom they share a genetic heritage). I am particularly disgusted by the media’s attempts to paint both as “Christians” when I’ve seen no evidence that either is, and McVeigh actively disavowed a belief in God. But they have to do so to feed the moral relativistic narrative in defense of Islam.
But here’s where I just don’t get his argument at all:
The only conclusion that makes sense to me is that human beings are stuck in a condition of radical uncertainty. Something big and earth shaking is going on around us, but the information we have does not allow us to predict where it all goes.
In my view, this is one of the reasons that belief in a transcendent power beyond the human mind is intellectually necessary to grapple successfully with the realities of our time. When the determinist progressives threw God under the bus, they threw away the possibility of an integrated world view that has room both for scientific and rational analysis on the one hand and a honest, unsparing appraisal of the radical uncertainty around us on the other.
We still live in the Age of Apocalypse that opened in World War Two when Hiroshima and the Holocaust delineated the essential problems of the new and possibly last era of human civilization. Mankind has long had the potential for radical, desolating evil; today we still have that potential among us, and we have united it to the power to end all life on earth. We live with one foot in the shadows and another on the high and sunny uplands of democratic and affluent society. We have one foot in Norway and the other in Hell and nobody knows where we step next.
One of the reasons to bother God in our century is the hope that in turn he will bother about us. Whatever is coming, we will face it more honestly and live it more richly with him.
This presupposes that he exists, but that we are just ignoring him. Well, that may be, but I have no sense of it, which is why I’m a non-believer, and furthermore, I feel no need for him for me to intellectually grasp what’s happening. While I admire Professor Mead, I think that he is projecting his own apparent intellectual inadequacies on the rest of us.