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Answers for MJ 2

In which MJ asks about Platonism and Socrates:

I wanted to ask you about your view of Platonism. I have two acquaintances who are fellow classical language majors; they are both atheists (I view them as rather militant at times) and as far as I understand they became Platonists after having taken a Greek philosophy course. I was wondering how compatible atheism and Platonism are.

While I am convinced that the human mind is able to fuse even contradicting philosophies together to its liking, avoiding the inconsistency in the process, I am not so sure that they form a coherent pair. In particular, Platonism opens up the necessity of a non-material world of the Forms. While a non-material level of existence does not immediately imply the existence of god, I conjecture that the necessity of a non-material world does at least open up the possibility of the existence of god more greatly than atheists would like. After all, I ask, if a non-material realm of the Forms exists, what is preventing there from being a non-material realm of flying monkeys, or other nonsensical abstractions? I don’t believe Plato’s philosophy expressly and logically forbids the possibility of other non-material worlds.

While Occam’s razor could be invoked, the razor alone wouldn’t necessarily bring truth to the discussion. Plus, the razor could work against Plato’s world of the Forms if there were a simpler non-material realm available. I don’t particularly care for Plato or Socrates. They’re fun to read at times, but…well, I think you have similar sentiments. While definitions may be the beginning of wisdom, they can also be the seeds of deceit; Socrates takes advantage of that time and time again.

I am a nominal platonist in the sense that I believe in the supernatural realm but I am not a Platonist who subscribes to Plato’s various theories concerning that realm. Just to be clear, “platonism refers to “the philosophy that affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to “exist” in a “third realm distinct both from the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism”, which is either the assertion that everything that exists is a particular thing, or that everything that exists is concrete.

So, while it is technically possible for an atheist to be a platonist, at least in the case of a Christian atheist such as Scheisskopf from Catch-22 who does not believe in a very particular god with very specific attributes, it is extraordinarily unlikely. A platonist, by definition, believes in the supernatural, and it is absolutely impossible for a platonist to be a rational materialist, which is the spectacularly ill-named nominalist philosophy to which most atheists subscribe.

MJ’s two fellow students are no more platonists than they are giraffes, indeed, they demonstrate very beautifully the intellectual shallowness of the militant atheist as well as the truth of Chesterton’s quote concerning how those who do not believe in God will readily believe in anything, no matter how absurd.

As for definitions being the seeds of deceit, well, we have certainly seen that in the series on the Fifth Horseman. While I am a fan of utilizing the Socratic method, I believe it should be used honestly, to better open men’s eyes to the truth, not deviously in order to trap people into confessing falsehoods in which they do not believe. As I demonstrated in The Irrational Atheist, Socrates is not above cheating and moving the goalposts, taking his opponent’s agreement and applying it to something to which Socrates himself admits the other man did not agree.

I vastly prefer Aristotle to either Socrates or Plato. And Aristotle correctly identified “ambiguity” in definition as being one of the chief rhetorical tactics of the sophists. And indeed, we see that very ambiguity utilized on an almost daily basis by intellectually dishonest interlocutors here on this blog and elsewhere. The sophistical manual of the Street Epistemologist is nothing but one long exercise in rhetorical ambiguity.

A THRONE OF BONES is back

I am extremely pleased to see that the first volume in Arts of Dark and Light, A THRONE OF BONES, is available again on Amazon. Seeing as I am elbows’ deep in the guts of the sequel, (and a very convoluted, but action-filled Book Two it is too), I found it more than a little irritating that all of the secondary works were back up online again, but the central one was not.

If you haven’t read A Throne of Bones yet, it is my answer to the modern epic fantasy. Interestingly enough, Amazon appears to have categorized it in the category Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Myths & Legends > Greek & Roman. I take this as the same sort of compliment that a Black Gate reviewer once paid to Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy when he commented on the arguments by Thomas Aquinas it contained. I don’t claim that A Throne of Bones rises to the level of Greco-Roman myth, much less that my argument for elven ensoulment is as logically sound as the arguments in the Summa proper, but the mere fact that my works can be mistaken for such things, however briefly, is interesting in its own right.

As for the present lack of reviews, I am confident that all 134 reviews, including the spurious ones, will soon be attached to the new Castalia House listing. The price remains the same as before, and at $4.99 for 854 pages, A Throne of Bones has to be one of the better bargains Amazon is presently offering. As for the book itself, this three-star review might provide an informative perspective:

“Vox is adept at balancing out a very complex story. This is only the first book, but Vox wastes no time establishing what are, I assume, the majority of the key forces at play on the chess board so to speak. And that’s one of the biggest draws of the book, because I don’t know how you could read it and not at least be a little curious who’s going to come out on top considering not just the volume of opposing forces, but the variety as well, between demons, different humanoid races, and monsters. Vox has created a house of cards that should be entertaining to watch come crashing down.

“Making this conflict an even more exciting prospect is the way he handles the battles. The battles are some of the best I’ve read in a fantasy novel. Whereas Tolkien didn’t care about strategy, or going into the specifics of the personal impact of the conflict, and seemed to only put the action into his books because he thought that’s what the readers wanted, Vox relishes in strategy, and the up close and personal consequences of the violence. The battles are great, and they don’t feel forced in just to add conflict. The final battle in the book was the end result of a chain of dominoes first tipped over right at the start of the book. Kudos on that, because it definitely has more impact when the battle literally couldn’t exist without the prior 600+ pages setting it up.

“I’d like to give this book a four star review, because I enjoyed reading it despite its flaws, but it’s a three star book. With just a couple of (easier said than done) improvements, this could be an easy four stars if not five. Vox has laid a solid foundation, and I’m still looking forward to seeing who dies next, who betrays who, and how the alliances change.

“Also, just sayin’, I’d much rather read this than Martin’s Game of Thrones.”

I don’t know if I will succeed in making the series continuously improve or not; presumably no author wants to see his books on a downward-trending arc. But I have paid attention to all of the substantive criticism that has been offered. Some of it is admittedly beyond me: it is clear at this point that I’m not going to magically become a more talented weaver of prose. Some of it is simply misguided: “a shrieking, struggling dwarf-sized body” is not necessarily a dwarf and if you can’t figure that out, well, that’s perfectly understandable, but in that case you are not my ideal reader. Some of it is simply subjective and therefore irrelevant. But some of it is very useful indeed, and I very much appreciate those who have criticized the book with the objective of making the subsequent ones better.

I am presently on track for Book Two to be published in ebook in December. Kirk and I were discussing the cover just yesterday, and there will be a hardcover versions of both Book One and Book Two available, although I can’t guarantee that the hardcover release will coincide with the electronic one.

Fat Bastard lied

In news that will surprise exactly no one, it appears that Fat Bastard knew about the politically motivated lane closures despite his previous claims of ignorance:

A lawyer for the former official, David Wildstein, wrote a letter describing the move to shut the lanes as “the Christie administration’s order” and said “evidence exists as well tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures, during the period when the lanes were closed, contrary to what the governor stated publicly in a two-hour press conference” three weeks ago.

During his news conference, Mr. Christie specifically said he had no knowledge that traffic lanes leading to the bridge had been closed until after they were reopened. “I had no knowledge of this — of the planning, the execution or anything about it — and that I first found out about it after it was over,” he said. “And even then, what I was told was that it was a traffic study.”

Good riddance. The man was less electable than the corpse of George Wallace. And he probably would have made for an even more vindictive president than Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Forget IRS audits, Fat Bastard is petty enough to send a team of Navy SEALs to neutralize a political enemy’s pet hamster.

Mailvox: Answers for MJ 1

This was a long letter from MJ, so I’ll have to address it in parts:

I am 21 years old and a student at a small Jesuit college in Ohio. I just recently came across your blog. To be precise it was introduced to me last spring–March, I believe. I wasn’t part of your regular traffic until October or so. Now I think hardly a day goes by that I don’t read what is stirring in your head. First, thank you both for your insights and your (at least I consider it) courage (maybe you consider it normalcy). To be brief, I grew up in a relatively conservative Roman Catholic household. However, as one who prefers to avoid confrontation, I rarely engage in debates about politics or religion. I’ll speak vehemently about such subjects with people with whom I agree. When it comes to others, I prefer to keep quiet or, if necessary, appease. I say this so that my thanks might be better placed. You have no desire to avoid or appease those whom you consider wrong. Your example is a great help.

Perhaps it was divinely ordained, but I had been reading through a handful of literature on science, atheism, and religion at around the same time that I grew fond of your blog (I didn’t read any Dawkins; I skimmed the first five chapters of Hitchens’s memoir; I gravitated toward Stenger’s God the Failed Hypothesis and Cunningham’s Decoding the Language of God)…. At the time I started this endeavor and even during the initial stages, I probably would have classified myself as an agnostic….

Now, I am not contacting you solely for the sake of encomium; I have a few things that I wish to ask. First, I remember reading some comments you had about the omnipotence, omniscience, etc. of God. You suggested replacing such attributes with ideas about tantipotence, tantiscience, etc. I prefer to think of my theology almost in terms of mathematics (just to note, my theology is incredibly uninformed. A current goal of mine is to become both more biblically literate and theologically literate. The downside of a Catholic upbringing!). I have never been a fan of the arguments of god’s nonexistence by means of syllogism (that is, God is A, but A leads to B, and B is inconsistent with well known fact C, so God is not A or something like that) since syllogisms of this sort seem to be equivalent to abusing and mutilating the dictionary. However, since these arguments are out there, I began to consider the following. I don’t wish to jeopardize God’s infinite nature.

However, pure omnipotence can cause logical problems (if we wish to impose some logical structure on God’s nature, something that I think objectionable). In your suggestion of tantipotence, you (I think) mentioned that to the human mind tantipotence would virtually appear to be omnipotence. To the human mind, there is no significant difference between a God who can do all and a God who can do nearly all things. My only qualm is that to the believer this might be an acceptable concession; but I would imagine that the non-believer would love to poke fun at the not-fully-all powerful God. I was wondering what you might think of this idea. In mathematics there are different gradations of infinity (I am sure you are aware). The set of integers has a cardinality of infinity, but this infinity is less than the infinity that is the cardinality of the set of real numbers. That is, there are more real numbers than integers even though both are technically infinite in extent. If we take omnipotence as the cardinality of the real numbers and tantipotence as the cardinality of the integers, then God still remains infinite even if “less so.”

My point is to ask your opinion about thinking about theology in terms of mathematics. To some degree I think that mathematics presents the universe (or multiverse, hyperverse, or whatever they are calling it now) with its own mind-body problem of dualism. How is it that mathematics, something so abstract, can interact with the physical world? (I suppose something similar could be said about language; how does an abstract concept such as language reflect, relate, and influence the material world?) I read your post today from Spengler’s Decline of the West. I am definitely going to look into that book. As a final point, I am awestruck at one of the most basic ideas in mathematics, continuity, and how continuity affects infinity. For example, I am still puzzled by how an infinitely long number line can be looped up into a circle of radius 1 through a simple compactification method….virtually allowing me to hold infinity in my hand! I am also intrigued that through a few simple lines a mathematician can prove a statement that can solve an infinite number of problems. I suppose it’s akin to what you write in The Irrational Atheist that a few lines of programming can generate the infinitely complex Serpinski Triangle.

In relation to the above, I encountered on Richard Dawkins’s website the classic argument that atheists make: if god is all-powerful and all-loving, then he should wish to stop and be able to stop evil. You know the rest. Just out of curiosity, does this argument presuppose that God operates on a kind of utilitarian moral code? After all, the alleviation of suffering is precisely Sam-Harrisian…er…I mean utilitarian. Not for a second do I imagine a utilitarian God! If, indeed, this argument presupposes such a God, it seems to me all the more reason to throw it out immediately! 

I’m glad that some people are finding my anti-anti-apologetics to be useful. I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy beating up on the intellectual cripples of evangelical atheism, as one agnostic described them, but there is a more serious aspect to the activity than my own personal amusement.

First, I think it is important to always keep in mind that whether it is theology, psychology, philosophy, or even history that we are contemplating, we see as though through a glass, darkly. Nothing we do, think, or say can jeopardize God’s nature, whatever it actually happens to be, from nonexistence to omnipotent omnipresence. We are not debating the truth, we are not even capable of perceiving the truth, we are merely debating our superficial observations and our momentary perceptions of the truth. The truth is out there, but it is grander and more complicated than we can possibly hope to comprehend.

In other words, don’t flatter yourself, sport. Neither God nor nature depend upon MJ’s opinion of them. Or mine.

So, the idea of shying away from an idea due to its potential effect on us or anyone else is fundamentally misguided. Anyone who attempts to make hay with regards to the imagined limits of a tantiscient and tantipotent God is doing nothing more than demonstrating himself to be a midwit and a fool. The analogy of the limits of the two infinite sets MJ mentions is a very good one; regardless of whether one is considering integers or real numbers, it is objectively stupid to claim that the number 100 is bigger than the upper limit of either set.

As for the idea that an all-powerful and all-loving God should wish to stop and be able to stop evil, to say nothing of the idea that the existence of evil therefore disproves the existence of such a god, well, that doesn’t even rise to the level of midwittery. One has to have a truly average mind and remain ignorant of basic Biblical knowledge to find either of those concepts even remotely convincing.

Imagine the Sisyphean hell that is the existence of a video game character, literally created to die over and over and over again. Does the misery of his existence prove that the video game developer does not exist? Of course not. Does it prove that the developer has any limits upon him that the video game character can observe? Of course not. Does it prove that the developer has any particular enmity for the character? Not at all.

Now, it does prove that the developer is not all-loving. But then, the Christian God is not all-loving. He plays favorites. He loves some and He is very specific about others for whom He harbors not only antipathy, but outright hatred. It is fine to attack the idea of an all-loving god, but it is a mistake to assume any such attack is even remotely relevant to the Christian religion.

The argument is stupid, ignorant, and while it can theoretically rest on a presumption of utilitarianism, more often it rests upon the clueless moral parasitism of the atheist who subscribes to it. It is ironic that the more foolish sort of atheist often attempts to disprove Christianity by an appeal to Christian morality, but then, as MJ has already discovered, we’re not dealing with intellectual giants here.

It’s not broken, so why not fix it?

The NFL playoffs this year were exciting. The best teams advanced to the Super Bowl. Naturally, this doesn’t prevent the meddlers from insisting on “improving” things. Unfortunately, it turns out that one of those inveterate meddlers is the NFL Commisioner:

“We currently have 12 teams qualify for the playoffs, as you know. We are looking at the idea of expanding that by two teams to 14,” Goodell said at his State of the League press conference. “There’s a lot of benefits to doing that. We think we can make the league more competitive. We think we can make the matchups more competitive towards the end of the season. There will be more excitement, more memorable moments for our fans. That’s something that attracts us. We think we can do it properly from a competitive standpoint.

And then the complaints will start that the #1 seed has too much of an advantage, so two more teams need to be allowed in. The crazy thing is that the people whining about the need for seeding have been complaining about 8-8 teams making the playoffs, but adding more teams is only going to increase the likelihood of that happening. 

Amazon vs BEA

So, on the one hand, the BEA is reporting 3.2 percent economic growth. On the other, retail sales are below expectations, both in physical and online terms:

Amazon.com Inc.’s shares fell almost 10 percent a few minutes past 4 p.m., after the company dropped some disappointing earnings news. The title of the company’s news release is cheerily optimistic: “Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 20% to $25.59 Billion.” And its operating income actually beat estimates — $510 million, compared with $489.9 million. But fourth-quarter sales of $25.6 billion were considerably below estimates of $26.08 billion, and earnings per share were 51 cents instead of the 69 cents that analysts had been expecting.

That’s not just disappointing for Amazon; it’s also not great news for the U.S. economy. When retail foot traffic and sales were disappointing in December, the standard explanation was that people must be moving their purchases online. Obviously, they weren’t — at least, not nearly as much as analysts expected. Given how dominant Amazon is in e-commerce, this should cause most of us to revise our expectations of fourth-quarter retail sales, as well as growth in gross domestic product.

Now, I wonder if perhaps the data being produced by the government bureaucracy might perhaps be less than entirely accurate? No, surely that’s not possible. That’s crazy conspiracy talk!

A meeting of exceptional minds

If you haven’t read Richard Cantillon’s An Essay on Economic Theory, I highly recommend it. It’s really remarkable for its insights, especially considering when it was written. I have about twenty bookmarks, each of which probably merit their own post, but it was this one little aside on metal ratios that truly blew me away:

It is true that the coinage in England might equally have been adjusted to the market price and ratio by diminishing the nominal value of gold coins. This was the policy adopted by Sir Isaac Newton in his report, and by the Parliament in response to this report. But, as I shall explain, it was the least natural and the most disadvantageous policy…. Newton told me in answer to this objection that according to the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, silver was the true and only monetary standard, and that as such, it could not be altered.

Can you imagine being a party to that conversation? Listening to one of Man’s greatest economic minds in history criticizing the currency policy of what may have been Man’s greatest mind in history would have been an unparalleled privilege. Even if it was only an exchange of letters, it is still amazing to be offered this glimpse into such a fascinating interaction, however brief it may have been.

It also shows how government interventions were having materially deleterious effects on the economy long before Keynes and Marx produced their fallacious justifications for deeper and more pernicious interventions.

And now the punchline. I was reading this in between sets at the gym, and, being understandably overcome by the excitement of the passage, told the story to a junior Swiss diplomat who often works out at the same time I do. He’s a sharp, well-educated guy in impressive condition. He nodded appreciatively, (or so I thought), then said: “so do you know these guys?”

I am 95 percent sure that he thought the conversation took place at Davos….

Betrayed by Fat Bastard

Ron Fournier’s eyes are belatedly opened to Chris Christie’s manifest unfitness for office:

A year ago, I wrote: “The smartest move in politics today is to move against Washington and the two major parties. And the smartest man in politics may be Chris Christie.” I take it back.

At the time, the New Jersey governor had channeled the public’s disgust with political dysfunction, chastising House Republican leaders for refusing to allow a vote on a Hurricane Sandy relief bill. Christie said the game-playing that derailed the relief bill showed “why the American people hate Congress.” He accused his own party’s leadership for “selfishness,” “duplicity,” and moral failure.

His approval rating topped 70 percent.

Now his numbers are dropping, because he wasn’t so smart. Rather than stay true to his post-partisan image, Christie ran a hyper-political governor’s office that focused relentlessly on a big re-election win to position him for a 2016 presidential race. In this zero-sum gain culture, Christie enabled (if not directly ordered) an infamous abuse of power: the closure of traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge in a fit of political retribution.

If not criminal, it was pretty damn stupid. His reputation is in tatters.

Like girls chasing loser bad boys, the supposedly conservative media is forever getting starry-eyed over moderate Republican candidates that they wrongly believe to be electable. For some reason, they never seem to understand that politics is a strong horse game and that the electorate has to be led rather than followed.

But none of these people should be surprised. Christie’s maximum upside was John McCain. It’s not only pointless and self-defeating to elect moderate Republicans, they’re not electable in the first place. If George W. Bush had campaigned in the manner he governed, he would have lost too.

Book Review: Escape from Tekmar II

Jill reviewed Kiti Lappi’s Escape from Tekmar:

I’m technically a bi-lingual person.
However, I would never have the confidence to pull off a book-length
manuscript in my second language. For that reason, I applaud Kiti
Lappi, the author of Escape From Tekmar, whose native language is
Finnish. She rose to a challenge and actually met that challenge.
Undoubtedly, she improved her skills in English by doing so. That
being said, while her book is readable in English, the level of
readability is extraordinarily low. The sentences are wordy and
awkward, and she often uses words improperly. For example, she
repeatedly confuses “commend” and “recommend”. While these
words are similar, they have subtle distinctions in usage. In
addition, there are many unclear run-on sentences, and I’m not sure
if this is owing to her limited knowledge of English, or simple bad
editing. Completing a cohesive thought in sentence-form is a matter
of logic, as far as I’m concerned.
Despite all that, the manuscript is
not
irredeemable. I would highly recommend (that is, advocate) that
she
pull this book off the market and choose one of two options: hire
a
native English speaker to help her with language edits; or write
the
book in Finnish and hire an English translator. Left as is, the
author risks giving herself an unnecessarily bad reputation as a
self-publisher of junk, which is a shame.
And to be fair, the story isn’t junk.
The elements of a well-told story are there, albeit lost in the
awkward language. The plot, itself, is a simple sci-fi adventure
story about the space travelers, Rahan and Ryn, who find
themselves
unwittingly involved in another world’s revolution. The author
uses
many sci-fi tropes to give the basic plot color: genetic
modification, space travel, invasive spy technology that is too
expansive for upkeep, etc. Some of it is quite interesting and
imaginative, such as the “silver” that repairs the
genetically-engineered Shemasharras and gives them their
distinctive
silver eye color.
The characterization is decent,
especially when the author depicts the relationship between Rahan
and
Ryn. Their relationship shines through enough that I’m not left
reeling when the author reveals their true relationship near the
end
of the book. Although the female protagonist, Lida, isn’t as
fleshed
out, I find it believable that she, as an idealist, has become
embroiled in a revolution that isn’t about the good of the people.
On
the other hand, I never get much sense of Ryn’s character, except
that he feels duty bound to always protect Rahan. Ryn is a
genetically-engineered human, yet he fills the ubiquitous sci-fi
role
of the almost-human robot. Sadly, there are many sci-fi robots out
there with more personality than the genetically-engineered Ryn.
Ryn
is too good, too intelligent, too strong to be entirely relatable.
Along the same lines, the main
character, Rahan, has a strong character arc, from childish
dependency on Ryn’s saving him from disaster (as shown in the
first
scene), to fighting his own battles and becoming the rescuer of
Ryn.
Likewise, the main female character, Lida, also transforms
throughout
the story, beginning with reluctant compliance and ending with
defiance. Ryn, as befitting his flat character, doesn’t change
much;
however, the author allows him to be possessing of weaknesses, as
he
is able to be captured at a crucial moment.
The scene-setting is also quite well
done for an author who has a limited vocabulary in English. I’ve
read
that there are literally no cognates between Finnish and English,
which further gives me admiration for the author’s skills. That’s
obviously beside the point, as I get a general sense of a planet
that
had one time been decked-out with better technology, but has
devolved
into an economic and social decline. The scene-setting works, even
if
it’s not extensive. For the record, I prefer books with extensive
scene descriptions, almost to the point of travelogue, but I
certainly don’t expect that from modern authors.
If I have any banal writer-workshop
type recommendations for the authors, they are these: she needs to
learn how to write without giving info dumps. Info must be told in
order to ground the reader, but it needs to be accomplished a
little
at a time through the scene itself (showing vs telling), or
through
natural dialogue, or through SHORT pieces of exposition. I don’t
really give a shit about the absurd convention of excessive
showing
in fiction—the pretense that fiction should be written as though
it
were a film—but the author needs to work on her art of subtlety.
Storytelling is an art, in which scene and exposition are woven
smoothly together, and the author needs to work on this.
As an
extension of show-vs-tell, the facts the author presents in the
story
often don’t sound planned. I found myself wondering if the author
made things up as she went along. For example, Rahan will suddenly
be
possessing of useful items in his backpack, when he had a moment
before been deficient in useful items, which left me thinking,
“How
convenient for him!” This credulity could easily have been avoided
if the character had been shown finding whatever-useful-item in
real
scene time.
As a last word, the beginning scene is
necessary, and a great way to demonstrate the relationship of
Rahan
and Ryn, but it’s too long. The author spends an inordinate amount
of
time describing a world that the characters are just passing
through
before landing on the planet where they will spend the next 250 or
so
pages.
To reiterate, Escape From Tekmar has
merit. It’s a story that would be worth more of the author’s time
and
attention, as well as the money it would cost for an
English-speaking
editor to clean it up. As it is, though, I can’t rate it well. In
fact, I would probably give it 1 or 2 stars out of 5 due to the
sheer
difficulty in reading the language.

Books on Amazon

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted is now available again on Amazon.  All of the book links on the right sidebar are active again, with the exception of A Throne of Bones. That should be good to go sometime this weekend.

My apologies to those who were waiting to read this, but we only learned about the Marcher Lord sale at the end of December, so this was the fastest we were able to get the books back online. But the new publishing structure will allow for a lot of new activities in the coming year, so I think the wait will prove well worth it.  Also, it appears I spoke too soon about the reviews being lost. They’ve already reappeared on AMB, TWC, and TLW, so kudos to Amazon for having a sufficiently flexible system to keep the information from being lost.