Category: Uncategorized

Comment update

Thanks to the HTML master MK – who has the same initials, but is NOT Markku of the Dread Ilk – the Blogger comments now closely resemble CoComment and are much more legible. He was not, however, able to recreate CoCo’s special mashup feature, which I’m sure everyone will regret. A few things.

1. Clicking on the post title now accesses the comments, embedded below the post.

2. Anonymous commenting is technically permitted. This doesn’t mean you should use it because it’s too confusing. Pick a name and stick with it; you don’t have to register, just use the Name/URL option and leave the URL blank. Anonymous comments will generally be shot on sight.

3. To post with the embedded comments, your browser must be set to accept third-party cookies. Otherwise, you’ll see the “post comment” box, you’ll be allowed to click both Preview and Publish, but the comments will not appear. I’m not crazy about this either; it wasn’t set to embedded previously because they didn’t work with my usual setup, but just set the cookies to flush when you close your browser and you’ll be fine.

4. At the bottom of the post, you can now cycle through the comments on the individual posts using the OLDER/NEWER text.

Science and the problem of the hammer

Stephen Law not only points out that science is fundamentally incapable of answering many questions and solving many puzzles, but that it wasn’t even involved in one of its landmark “experiments”:

KEY POINTS ARE:

(i) this is not a puzzle that can be solved by empirical research.
(ii) It’s a conceptual puzzle that requires a conceptual solution. It’s a puzzle that takes armchair reflection to solve.

So not every puzzle is a puzzle that is best solved by empirical investigation. Some of the deepest and most baffling puzzles can, in fact, only be solved by armchair reflection.

In fact, all sorts of interesting discoveries can be made from the armchair. Mathematical discoveries, for example, can be made from the armchair. They can be achieved by pure thought alone – without doing any data collection or laboratory experiments.

We can also RULE OUT certain hypothesis from the comfort of the armchair.

Suppose an explorer claims to have discovered a four-sided triangle on their travels. Should we mount an expedition to go and check whether this momentous claim is correct? Of course not. We can figure out, from the comfort of our armchairs, that no such triangle exists. Triangles, by definition, have three sides. So a four-sided triangle involves a contradiction. It cannot possibly exist.

This is a rather obvious example. It’s obvious that four-sided triangles are ruled out conceptually. They involve a logical contradiction. But sometimes what is ruled out conceptually is NOT so obvious.

Aristotle claimed that objects of different mass will fall at different speeds. A large, heavy metal ball will fall faster than a small, light metal ball.

Back in the late 16thC, Galileo proved that Aristotle was wrong. Some say he did this by dropping two balls off the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. The two balls landed at the same time. Neil Armstrong did the experiment with a feather and hammer on the Moon

But actually, Galileo probably didn’t perform that experiment. He actually performed a thought experiment – one that he describes in his book On Motion. And of course thought experiments can be run from the comfort of ones armchair.

Galileo reasoned like so…

Imagine two balls, one heavier than the other, connected by a string. Drop this system of objects from the top of a tower. If we assume heavier objects do indeed fall faster than lighter ones (and conversely, lighter objects fall slower), the string will soon pull taut as the lighter ball drags on and slows the fall of the heavier ball. But the system considered as a whole is heavier than the heavy ball alone, and therefore should fall faster than the heavy ball on its own. So Aristotle’s theory, just like the claim that there exists a four-sided triangle, generates a contradiction. Galileo could establish that it is false from the comfort of his armchair.

True, this is a scientist doing a scientific thought experiment, but it illustrates the point that highly significant discoveries can indeed be made from the armchair.

Of course, philosophers need to be scientifically literate. Scientific discoveries can be of philosophical relevance. But, at heart, philosophy IS an armchair discipline. And it is none the worse for that.

Philosophy is about conceptual investigation and clarification. Philosophers make conceptual discoveries. I have illustrated how they tackle conceptual puzzles – puzzles that the scientific method just isn’t equipped to solve.

They also probe what we take for granted, our common sense assumptions, sometimes with dramatic results. Philosophers may reveal that what we believe has quite shocking unacknowledged consequences, for example.

This can lead to important breakthroughs. Particularly in moral philosophy. Many of the most important developments over the last couple of hundreds years or so have come about because of philosophical reflection – questioning of, and thinking through the consequences of, some of our most basic moral assumptions and principles.

So philosophy, it seems to me, is not just fascinating, it is also hugely valuable. Blah blah…

Richard Dawkins thought the mirror puzzle and solution was science not philosophy (really? – the last two papers I read on it were in philosophy journals, and I cannot imagine they’d be published in a science journal as they were purely conceptual and involved no empirical claims). Richard wondered why what I do is labelled “philosophy” at all. It’s just thinking, he said.

It’s been conclusively demonstrated that Richard Dawkins doesn’t know much about history, theology, or philosophy. But I have to admit, I find it remarkable, bordering on astonishing, that he apparently doesn’t even know what philosophy is. No wonder he doesn’t believe in God, he doesn’t even believe in philosophy when it is being performed right in front of his face.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that due to their enthusiasm for science, the scientific-secular faithful is like the proverbial man with the hammer, always searching for a nail.

Of infidelity

The results of the Alpha Game survey on sexual fidelity. Here are three of the key observations:

1. 31% of women and 28% of men admit to cheating in their premarital relationships.

2. The risk of female sexual infidelity rises considerably with increased sexual experience.

3. The risk of both male and female sexual infidelity rises considerably with male sexual experience.

Mailvox: the autoneurotic atheist

EC wonders who is reading whom:

I love the blog and your book TIA; TIA is actually the best polemic I’ve ever read. Anyway, I saw that Edward Feser recently posted a blog article in which he says that the New Atheists engage in “mutual mental onanism”. That’s pretty close to your “atheist circle jerk”. So, who owes whom a royalty check here?

I think it is readily apparent that the use of the similar phrase – and it says much about the difference between Mr. Feser and me, mostly to his advantage, that he prefers the relatively genteel description “mutual mental onanism” to “bukkakelypse” – is nothing more than straightforward observation. It is simply an obvious metaphor for the autoneurotic activities of the leading New Atheists. The only significant difference between Mr. Feser’s independent observations and my own is my preference for the vulgate. It’s interesting to note that he also pins down the intrinsic anti-intellectualism of the Fowl Atheist’s misguided foray into philosophy.

“[T]hat Dawkins’ arguments are directed at ludicrous straw men has been demonstrated time and again (for example, here). Yet he resolutely declines to answer those who have exposed the numerous errors and fallacies in his writings — dismissing them as “fleas,” without explaining how exactly they have got his arguments wrong — or, in general, to debate anyone with expertise in the philosophy of religion. Meanwhile, the even more vitriolic P. Z. Myers’ main claim to New Atheist fame is his “Courtier’s reply” dodge, a shamelessly question-begging rationalization for remaining ignorant of what the other side actually says. New Atheists will ridicule their opponents, but actually read only each others’ work. Hence Christopher Hitchens derives his main arguments from Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss learns everything he needs to know from Hitchens, and Dawkins has his confidence in the atheist worldview bolstered from reading Krauss. And now this mutual mental onanism will be expanded across the National Mall. Somewhere Joycelyn Elders is smiling.”

She sounds lovely!

Roissy posted this, complete with some excellent commentary, and as the guy who sent it to him suggested, it really merits going viral. It should be subtitled “I’m throwing in the towel“.

So this is it–I’m not looking, I honestly don’t care if I meet anyone on here anymore–and this is what I’ve learned about the men that I have had interactions on here with a little parting advice.

If you are over 40 and you do not take care of yourself, unless you truly don’t care that a woman is dating you for your money, then maybe a better site for you is sugarbaby.com

Those of us that are of a certain age and reasonably successful on here are on here, want to meet someone reasonable–intelligent, successful, happy, that we’re attracted to physically and emotionally, not because we’re desperate, but usually because we’re too busy to date, or we do not wish to date through our work. We have businesses to run, we travel frequently, or we be on here because our friends and family are bugging us about being single and this is way to get them off our backs. What that means is–
1. We are not desperate–we do not need you to have a fulfilling life.
2. We are busy people–just like you–and we mean what we say, and say what we mean because we don’t have time to play silly word games or have drama like 20 somethings.
3. The silly little texting games are the fastest way to blow it. If we give you permission to call–then call–don’t text to see if its ok to call–we have a life–random texts from people we don’t know don’t cut it if we haven’t met you.
4. If we ask you not to contact us further–then don’t–unless you want to appear as a crazy person.
5. If we call you on the above..we’re not crazy, or scary..we just don’t have time to waste on people who don’t get it. We deal enough with that in our work.
6. Life gets shorter for us every day–we have no time or desire for drama, games or people who do not have their act together.
7. If we reject you after you have done any of the above, put your big boy pants on and move on.
8. We are not angry–we know what we want–we know what we’re willing to put up with. With age, the list of what we want gets a little longer, while the list of what we’re willing to put up with gets infinitely smaller because we have learned from our youth.

I don’t think this woman understands that any man with half a brain not only prefers younger, hotter women to the likes of her, but she is such a nasty piece of work, rotting from the inside out from all of her bitterness and barren professional ambition, that only the most masochistic of gamma males would ever want anything to do with her.

Some women are astonished by the fact that I repeatedly assert that men actively dislike intelligent, successful, educated women. What, I ask them, sounds even REMOTELY attractive about this woman and her poisonous attitude. I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with her, let alone an entire evening.

And here is a little nota bene for women. “Busy” doesn’t impress men. I don’t quite understand what women think they’re conveying by resorting to the term as they do – I suspect it’s supposed to be a display of high value – but when a woman says “busy”, men hear “bitch”.

I know! (raises hand)

Victor Davis Hanson asks a multiple-choice question concerning American strategy in Afghanistan:

Somehow the U.S. finds itself in a position of having to apologize for the inadvertent burning of terrorist-desecrated Korans; of not expecting an apology from Karzai (a recipient of the 2004 Liberty Medal) for the murdering of U.S. troops by their supposedly friendly Afghan counterparts; and of again having to apologize for a horrific mass murdering spree by a lone, rogue gunman, who, nonetheless, off-the-record, is said to be emblematic of the frustration of U.S. troops. Our troops are largely forgotten by the administration and the public, cannot trust fully those on behalf of whom they are risking their lives, and are not sure what the U.S. mission has become. When an invading and occupying force apologizes so repeatedly to the resident population, it is a sign that locals have lost any fear of its unpredictability and lethality, or respect for its proven record of reconstruction and humanity, or for its own sense of self-confidence in its mission.

So what now?

a) To escalate is politically impossible and strategically nonsensical.

b) To leave abruptly is to admit defeat and cede complete control of the country de facto to the Taliban, and to confess that the previous human and material cost was wasted, while relegating millions of pro-Western-reform Afghans in the major cities to Taliban reprisals or refugee status. (I assume that at this point the Afghan Security Forces would not fight on, or at least not fight very well, alone against the insurgents.)

c) To continue with the present policy of announced withdrawal dates, and a final departure in two years, punctuated by periodic apologies to the Afghans when their customs are abridged, or civilians killed, in the hope that the Karzai government and its successor by 2014 will come to a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban, one that will not nullify all the gains achieved in the last decade — a dubious proposition at best.

The answer is (b), VDH. The answer is (b). No one is fooled when the defeated occupation force “refuses to admit defeat”. All that refusal does is square the stupidity. Not only was all of “the previous human and material cost” wasted, people like me have been telling people like you that for years!

And as for the “pro-Western-reform Afghans”, screw them. Don’t even think about bringing them over here, or you’ll soon discover that they’re a hell of a lot closer to the Taliban than they are to the West.

In which we are amused

I don’t know which is more amusing to me, the fact that some of you are actually lamenting the demise of CoComment or the idea that the world has suffered any loss from the disappearance of the comments into the great digital void. The comments are a daily conversation, and like most conversations, exist only in the moment. When they did produce one of those rare moments of enlightenment, I usually turned them into posts anyhow.

Since none of the external comment systems are either very good or play well with the old Blogger template, I’ve simply gone with the existing Blogger comments since they’ve worked fine on Alpha Game. Unfortunately, there is no quote button, so I would encourage everyone to adopt the practice of italicizing text that one is quoting in order to distinguish it from one’s own comments. I would also encourage everyone who wants to provide links to learn how hotlink a URL; it’s not difficult and it will significantly increase the chances that someone will visit the link you are recommending.

Seriously, at this point, you look downright retarded when you copy an entire URL into a comment rather than hotlinking it. If you don’t care enough to hotlink the URL, then obviously it’s not important enough to bother pasting it in there in the first place.

While I’ll permit anonymous commenting for the time being, mostly because the alternative is requiring Open ID registrations, I would prefer everyone commenting to at least enter a name using the Name/URL box. It’s even easier to Remove Content than it was with CoComment – one fell click instead of the previous 7-step process – so don’t operate under the mistaken assumption that it’s going to be any harder for me to keep the usual suspects from getting out of hand than it was before.

Anyhow, it’s a sub-optimal solution, but a functional one, and should allow the daily conversations to continue to flow freely. A few notes:

1. If you don’t want a pop-up, but prefer to see all the posts embedded below the post, click on the hotlink on the bottom of the post in the white box. On this post, it looks like this: “3/15/2012 11:24:00 AM”.

2. The blogger pop-up window is not only limited to 200 comments, but won’t give you access to comments 201 or higher. To see them, you need to make use of the method described above in point (1), then click on either Newer or Newest depending on whether there are 401+ comments or not.

3. If any HTML-head knows how to adjust the template to allow the functionality described in (1) to be utilized using the post title in addition to the time, please let me know. It works like that at Alpha Game and I think it’s more intuitive.

It’s fascinating to see how much humans hate change. The traffic here dropped 600 visits from the lowest it has been in more than thirty days on a weekday, including holidays, simply due to the change from CoComment. Who would have thought the old commenting system would have so many fans? Somewhere, on an island not so very far away, Blackblade is wiping away a single tear….

UPDATE – All right, just pick a name, any name. It’s too much trouble trying to keep track of multiple Anonymouses, so I’ll just delete comments without names. It’s a pity Blogger won’t permit Name/URL without permitting Anonymous.

An ominous sign

It’s readily apparent that the women calling for a sex strike haven’t actually thought through the implications of their modern-day Lysistrata:

A group that supports health care coverage of contraception is calling for women to withhold sex from their partners between April 28 and May 5.

“This will help people understand that contraception is for women and men, because men enjoy the benefit of women making their own choices about when and if they want to get pregnant,” Liberal Ladies who Lunch says on its website. “Once congress and insurance agencies agree to cover contraception, we will then resume having sex. Until then men will have to be content with their left hand.”

On its Facebook page, the group charts a brief history of similar “strikes,” starting with Aristophanes’ ancient Greek play “Lysistrata,” where women refuse to have sex until the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Settling aside this ridiculous and totally obnoxious attempt to exert political control over men – and I recommend that any man immediately rid himself of a woman who would ever attempt to run this sort of power move on him – the basic concept of a sex strike is palpably stupid.

Six years after Aristophanes produced Lysistrata, which of course was written as a comedy, the Athenian fleet was destroyed by the Spartan admiral, Lysander. A year later, a starving and besieged Athens surrendered and lost its walls, its fleet, and its empire. And were it not for the unexpected mercy of the Spartans, granted in gratitude for the Athenian resistance of the Persian invasions, the Athenian women would have been enslaved by the men of Corinth and Thebes.

The lesson is that the society whose women attempt to use the crudest form of what John Adams once describes as “the tyranny of the petticoat” is a society that is unlikely to survive for long.

To Hell with secular society

I no longer have any use for it. None whatsoever. I was raised and indoctrinated in the ideal of the “separation of church and state” and genuinely believed that it was best if religion was not permitted to dictate societal rules or even unduly influence society. But this has finally convinced me that the Muslims have the right idea and secularism merits nothing more than being stamped out, ruthlessly and without remorse:

It is a world-renowned work of literature and one of the foundation stones of the Italian language, but Dante’s Divine Comedy has been condemned as racist, homophobic, anti-Islamist and anti-Semitic. The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination.

Dante’s epic is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group’s president….

Schoolchildren and university students who studied the work lacked “the filters” to appreciate its historical context and were being fed a poisonous diet of anti-Semitism and racism, the group said. It called for the Divine Comedy to be removed from schools and universities or at least have its more offensive sections fully explained.

Consider this. The Papal States produced La Commedia Divina, Catholic Italy produced Vivaldi, Anglican England produced Shakespeare, Christian Austria produced Mozart and Haydn. What have two generations of modern secularism produced despite its lofty claims concerning the female liberation and the unchaining of the human spirit? Avatar, Twilight, and The Vagina Monologues.

Camille Paglia was right. “Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.”

Secular progressives are totalitarians and book-burners every bit as fanatical as religious extremists they decry. They always have been, they just build their cultural walls one stealthy and dishonest brick at a time.

Now this is sad

I am a huge proponent of ebooks. They’re fantastic and I now prefer reading on my Android phone to an actual book. But that doesn’t one doesn’t feel a genuine sense of loss at this news of the classic encyclopedia series ceasing traditional publication:

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

If it weren’t for the pervasive political correctness that has infested encyclopedias for the last 20+ years, I would pick up a set. As it happens, I might consider picking up an older one, ideally the legendary 1911 edition.