Category: Uncategorized

We are Bud Grant

Chad the Elder is a true Vikings fan. He knows the drill:

I don’t get the impression that many true Vikings fans are all that confident that their squad will beat the Cowboys. Sure you hear a lot of false bravado on local talk radio stations and some of the younger cadre of Purple fans may honestly believe their team is Miami bound. But deep down the fans who have been around for a while, the ones who can all too clearly still recall the playoff and Super Bowl losses, know that when it comes to the Vikings letting us down it’s not a matter of if but when. The Vikes very well might defeat Dallas this week. All that will do is postpone the inevitable letdown.

What best describes this attitude? Some might say cynicism, others fatalism. I would say it’s more of a stoicism, taking the definition of the word commonly used today rather than the philosophy itself. We accept our destiny but continue to carry on anyway, impassive in the face of eventual defeat. It’s almost as if Viking fans have taken on the persona of Bud Grant, a man well-versed in hiding the pain of crushing losses…. So on Sunday we’ll put on our grim game faces, utter a stern “Skol!,” and await our fate.

I didn’t bother posting about yesterday’s games because I wasn’t interested. The Saints and Colts won, as I expected, although the Ravens put up a better show than I would have thought. I’m not afraid of Dallas; the hype always favors the NFC East team and there is a reason teams that go 12-4 and 13-3 usually win. New Orleans shellacked an Arizona team that was clearly better than Green Bay, the team that all the NFL chatterboxes were saying everyone should fear to face. Dallas looked good in twice beating a Philadelphia team that was crushed by New Orleans this season, but the Cowboys are a good team, not a great one.

The Vikes should win. But we’ve known them to fail to close the deal before.

Conspicuous charity

Richard Dawkins and the Reason Project have ulterior motives for helping Haiti:

Help for Haiti

It is widely imagined that, in times of crisis, religious people render aid in disproportion to their numbers. Richard Dawkins has now created an opportunity for non-believers to put the lie to this myth.

One hundred percent of the funds raised will go to Doctors Without Borders and/or The Red Cross (you decide). But giving in this way will send an additional message: one need not believe in God to care about one’s fellow human beings.

First, it’s not “widely imagined”, it is an established fact. I think it would have been much more effective if Richard Dawkins had set up the No Religion Emergency Response Squad to directly help the Haitian people instead of relying upon atheists to give money. That way, they could at least burn all the copies of The God Delusion and The End of Faith that would be donated for warmth and heat. And I’m sure the three Haitians lucky enough to score the sticks of gum from the near-empty pack of Juicy Fruit that was also contributed would particularly appreciate the effort.

Dawkins is such an unmitigated and self-centered ass that he can’t even permit a natural disaster to take place without attempting to turn it into a statement about atheists. If you want to help someone, then just shut up, do it, and spare the press release. Let not your right hand etc etc. The point is: it’s not about you or your godless ideology, you narcissistic wanker.

I happen to think it is stupid and pointless to “help” Haiti. I oppose all government aid; as for private giving, it’s no business of mine how you choose to spend your money. My point is simply that the Haitian people are in this desperate position due to all the “help” they’ve received in the past. Neither individuals nor societies change when others prevent them from experiencing the predictable consequences of their actions. This doesn’t prevent me from respecting those who believe otherwise, especially those like the four ex-military guys who took it upon themselves to fly to the Dominican Republic in order to personally deliver medical supplies to Haiti. I don’t respect those who give exactly like the Pharisees did; in order to find favor in the eyes of men.

The cynic’s reaction to this conspicuous charity is confirmed when Dawkins, or whoever wrote the appeal on his behalf, writes: “It goes without saying that your donations will only be passed on to aid organizations that do not have religious affiliations.” This is a clear admission that this “charitable effort” isn’t about helping Haitians, it’s merely about advancing the atheist cause.

Helping Haiti

David Brooks contemplates why international aid doesn’t work and fails to reach a conclusion:

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not….

The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient. Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus on microprojects. More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord’s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.

I see absolutely no benefit to anyone, least of all the Haitians, by turning it into the latest iteration of Band Aid. The track record of “international aid” is perfectly clear; it does not work, it fosters dependency, and it creates far more long-term problems than it solves short-term ones. The tragedy of this earthquake is, as Brooks correctly points out, the three orders of magnitude difference between it and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. This is not an act of God, it is the entirely predictable consequences of human action. The West has abandoned the White Man’s Burden for the world along with its Christian identity. Furthermore, there are already 10,000 aid organizations present in Haiti, so one more organization or one more dollar of aid is not going to accomplish anything positive, it is merely going to prolong the very situation that turned what should have been an expensive, but minor societal annoyance into an appalling human tragedy.

Being a moderate, Brooks splits the difference by implying that those doing “the Lord’s work” should continue even though it’s not going to do any good and can even be shown to have done tremendous harm. I disagree, as I think it is wrong to act to save one life today if that action will cause one thousand deaths tomorrow. A refusal to act is not always a sin of omission; if anyone besides the people of Haiti are to blame for this lethal debacle, it is the tens of thousands of people who were so magnanimously “helping” them in the past.

It is good to help the poor and needy. But it is evil to keep people in a constant state of poverty and deprivation. Distinguishing between the two requires wisdom and discernment, not science and politics. The people of Haiti need prayer, discipline, and wise leadership, they do not need more of what has played such an important role in killing so many of them.

Letter to Common Sense Atheism VII

Dear Luke,

In your last letter, you wrote that before you could answer my questions, it was necessary to define the concept of “best explanation”. While I would have been fine with the concept of “the explanation that you find most convincing for whatever idiosyncratic reason the murky crevices of your psyche can produce to rationalize its decision”, I understand that you prefer “a model of explanation called explanationism that is intuitive to most people.”

x is the best explanation of y if it is the case that:

(A) if x were true, then by knowing x we would better understand y’s causal background than by not knowing x [i.e. x is a potential explanation of y],

and if it is also the case that

(B) x possesses the following explanatory virtues to a greater degree than any other known potential explanations of y: testability, consistency with background knowledge, past explanatory success, simplicity, ontological economy, informativeness, predictive novelty, explanatory scope, and explanatory power.

The problem with this definition by explanatory virtue is that some of the virtues cause you to artificially limit the investigation of the unknown by handcuffing it to the parameters of that which is presumed to be known. This all but guarantees systematic errors based on incorrect assumptions of the past. While it would certainly be ideal for a good explanatory hypothesis to be testable, but that is simply not possible in all cases. It therefore sets an artificial and incorrect technological limit on the process; for example, the x-ray hypothesis was correct regardless of whether it was possible to test for them.

Consistency with background knowledge is irrelevant. Fitting within a tradition of past success is similarly irrelevant. Simplicity is irrelevant too. This is philosophy, not interior design. Ontological economy begs the question of what is “necessary”; Occam’s Razor is a shortcut, not a reliable rule. On the other hand, informativeness is correct, predictive novelty is both applicable and useful, and explanatory scope and power are reasonable. I would give priority to informativeness, explanatory scope, and predictive novelty.

So, I am content to accept your explanatory model if you are willing to give priority to the three aformentioned explanatory virtues.

Best regards,
Vox

This was written in response to Letter to Vox Day VII.

The Stupid Party

I am really going to laugh if Brown manages to blow the big Republican upset bid in Massachusetts because he’s more interested in protecting the profits of the zombie banks than he is in being elected:

It’s been five new attacks a day from the Coakley campaign, so it’s hard to say if they’ve settled on the final push. But it appears that they want the last four days to be about President Obama’s $90 billion bank tax. She’s for the tax hike. Brown is against it. On one level, there’s nothing new here for either candidate. Martha “We’ve Got To Get Taxes Up” Coakley is already on the record for billions in new taxes. Scott Brown is the tax cutter. What gives this a problematic wrinkle for Brown is that the energized part of his base, the “tea party” voters are very mad about the bailouts and the big banks. This could be a wedge issue for Coakley to use to cool off some of his support.

I am against taxes too, but this tax has nothing to do with taxes per se. I’m 100 percent for a 100 percent tax on the profits and bonuses of the giant zombie banks and the pirate-class executives who run them for the next 20 years. They are no longer private institutions and they are not capable of surviving in a free market without government support, so they should not benefit from crying capitalism and the free market. And the claim to have repaid the TARP money is a red herring, as Karl Dennninger shows, that’s only the frosting on the bailout cake.

Mailvox: an atheist economist considers TIA part II

In which I reply to the remaining portion of SS’s email from last week:

6) Your point about the way in which atheists construct our systems of morality is well made, and I take your argument about “moral parasitism” without offence. I am yet to be fully convinced, however- though I agree with both you and John Locke that atheists have a very hard time trying to prove that we are “moral”. (Given the awful record of atheists with political power, I think we’ve got a long way to go.) I think that the remarkable similarities that are found in the moral systems of various religions and civilisations demonstrates that it is possible for morality to “evolve”. This is not to say that all moral systems are equally acceptable. Suffice to say that I think I have a lot more reading to do in this area before I can fully agree or disagree with your argument.

7) I found your explanation of various aspects of Christian philosophy to be very enlightening. I was particularly interested to find out that Christians embrace the concept (at least in theory) of “many gods, one God”. It is the same in my country, where Indian Hindus see no contradiction whatsoever between offering alms to one of the millions of Vedic deities, and worshipping a unified Divine Power. The King James Bible is on my reading list and I’ll get around to it eventually; I think it’s past time to find out more about what the Bible actually says, instead of what the New Atheists think it says.

8) In your comments about omniderigence, I found myself wondering if Christian philosophy allows for a flawed Creator? If I understood your book, you do not believe in an omniderigent God. If God exists and is omniderigent, and is therefore capable of both good and evil, would this not obviate the need for Satan in Christian theology? (I think you may have already addressed this in a previous post; I’m just curious about your particular point of view on the subject.)

9) I liked your arguments about the hands-off “designer God” very much. It’s a concept that I’ve been thinking about for some time, and it seems no more or less silly than the “infinite Multiverses” idea. Since we have no idea (yet) about what exactly happened at the moment of the Big Bang, it’s as good a theory as any. I’m not personally convinced by the Designer God argument, but then the alternatives aren’t all that convincing either.

10) I’m curious about your arguments against evolution by natural selection. From what I’ve read of your blog posts, you don’t seem terribly enamoured of Creationism, but you slam TENS regularly. Is there room for any form of evolutionary theory in your view? I’m not trying to defend or oppose Darwinian natural selection; I’d like to know more about the theory’s weaknesses before coming to any conclusions. I just don’t know enough at this point to make a valid argument either way.

11) Your comments about Islam in the book dovetail very well with what I’ve been reading of late. I think atheists make some serious errors of judgement by attacking only Judaism and Christianity; as my own people have found out from very painful past experience, Islam isn’t exactly a friendly religion, and in many ways was less friendly to us than the Anglican British who invaded and conquered my country. If we atheists are going to attack religion, let’s do it consistently- and let’s attack religions on the basis of their merits alone.

12) What news of the Rational Response Squad’s work on refuting your arguments?

In conclusion, I’d like to thank you for providing some very good answers to some very important questions that I’ve been asking of myself for some time. After reading your book, I think I have a much better understanding of Christian theology in particular. I also think I have a lot more reading to do, which I generally regard as a Good Thing. And I will be looking with a great deal more scepticism at the arguments made by the New Atheists in the future. Thank you again for writing a most interesting and useful book; I look forward to reading more of your work in the future.

6) I think “atheist morality” is a misnomer in that there is no such thing as an atheist moral system there is only the opinions of individual atheists about other people’s moral and ethical systems. As for those moral and ethical systems, I think the similarities between the Christian systems and non-Christian systems are grossly exaggerated. For example, despite all of the hysterical reactions to my apparently infamous column on historical attitudes towards rape, not a single person even attempted to argue with the substantive point I made. So, color me dubious about the concept of moral evolution, which is a misleading concept anyhow. What is the moral equivalent of the species, the beneficial mutation, or the allele?

7) I have never understood the common Christian inability to understand that other gods exist, but are not to be worshipped. While I am aware of the tendency of Christians to cry “metaphor” every time a Biblical concept unsettles their assumptions, there is nothing inherently metaphorical about the statement “thou shalt have no other god before Me”; the obvious implication is that there are other gods.

8) Flawed by which standard? God is, by many human standards, flawed. Just ask Christopher Hitchens, who correctly observes that a human engaging in the various activities described in both the Old and New Testaments would be more than a little indictable by many human legal systems. I don’t recall reading of Mary consenting to an ex vitro fertilization procedure, after all. But this does not mean that He is flawed by the relevant standard, which is His. It is almost a tautology to say that God is perfect, in that He is the Creator and therefore the definition of perfection would change according to His will. So, to me the idea of a “flawed Creator” is essentially a contradiction in terms.

9) I would argue that it is markedly less silly. To me, the logic and evidence of God’s design, and designed purpose, is almost inescapable. I am always amused by those, like Richard Dawkins, who genuinely believe that flaws, perceived or real, somehow indicate an absence of design. They quite clearly have never been witness or a participant in a technology design and development process. Above all, keep in mind that you cannot correctly identify a supposed flaw unless you know the designer’s intent. The game designer can easily make a character in the game he designs immortal and impervious to harm. Why doesn’t he? Because it does not serve his purpose.

10) Despite the fervent denials of Young Earth Creationists and Darwinians alike, is plenty of room for evolution and creationism to coexist. Just ask the Pope. The core of my skepticism regarding Darwinian theory is that it is based on a logical concept that has not been sufficiently tested via science, the predictive and explanatory models it produces are either uselessly broad or wildly inaccurate, and the supporting evidence cited for it is reliably false. Time will tell, but I expect genetic science to eventually cast aside the remaining tatters of Darwin’s long-outdated theory. There’s very little left of Darwin’s original theory in the current synthesis, and much of what remains actually predated him. E Conchis Omnia, n’est-ce pas?

11) If secular humanists were one-tenth as rational as they like to think they are, they would be begging Christians to ally with them against a return to pre-Christian paganism. But for the most part they’re not rational, they’re shallow hedonists, anti-Christian reactionaries, scienthological romantics, and larval-stage pagans. Regardless, SS is correct. Every idea and every belief system must stand or fall on its own merits.

12) It would appear Mount Chapter Four has claimed another victim. My understanding is that Kelly is presently hors de combat.

SS is, of course, quite welcome and I appreciate his comments. I’m pleased that he thought well of the book despite his atheism, and I was even more pleased to learn that it has inspired him to delve further into these philosophical and theological matters. The primary conclusion I have reached after two years of intellectual dispute on this subject is that the vast majority of Christians and atheists alike would do well to read more, think more, and opine less. The truth is nothing more or less than what it happens to be, and not a single one of us properly groks the elephant. I’m merely hoping that I’m not the one with his head up the elephant’s rectum.

BNP: the truth comes out

It took a while, but Daniel Hannan’s summary of the BNP’s ideology has finally percolated up to the front pages:

The trouble is that it is a national socialist party. Take a look at its 2005 election manifesto. You won’t find much about reducing the power of the state and increasing that of the individual. It has a curiously dated air of the 1960s and 1970s, with talk of controlling the commanding heights of the economy and building barriers to trade. To be kind to the BNP, one might call it a corporatist party. To put it more roughly, one might say that it is a fascist party, a Left-wing authoritarian party. One thing is certain. As a socialist party, the BNP can only be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The important point to note is that the problem with the BNP is not that it’s a national party, but that it is a socialist one. That is why it takes votes from Labor, not the Conservatives, much less UKIP. Basically, if someone is talking about “commanding heights” in any non-military sense, there is approximately zero chance he is right-wing.

A rare mistake

By the NFL:

The National Football League has been careful not to suggest that the aim of its current effort to obtain a finding that, for the purposes of selling hats and shirts, the 32 teams are a “single entity” that cannot conspire with each other in dealing only with Reebok and shutting out companies like American Needle. However, the transcript of Wednesday’s oral argument before the Supreme Court suggests that, if push comes to shove, chief NFL outside counsel Gregg Levy (a finalist for the position of Commissioner in 2006) believes that the league is a single entity, for all of its relevant business purposes.

The key moment in the exchange between Levy and the Court comes at page 47 of the transcript, when Justice Sonia Sotomayor poses this question to Levy: “What decision could the sports teams make that would be subject to the antitrust scrutiny under your definition of the permissible range of the joint venture activities? It seems to me that if the venture wanted to make sure all the teams hired secretaries at the same $1,000-a-year salary, that under your theory, that’s okay, because it’s a joint venture.”

In response, Levy didn’t say, “We are taking that position only as to matters relating to the promotion of the league,” which is what he basically said in the NFL’s written brief. Instead, Levy said, “Your Honor, my view is that the — the NFL clubs are not separate sources of independent power. As a result, they are a unit. They are a single entity and it’s –“

At that point, Justice Sotomayor cut him off.

“So to the answer to my question is, there is — you are seeking through this ruling what you haven’t gotten from Congress: An absolute bar to the antitrust claim.”

Perhaps the Wise Latina isn’t quite as dim as I’d expected her to be. And if the NFL is seriously attempting to parlay its antitrust exemption for broadcasting into a broader one covering everything from player salaries to logo gear, it is insane. As an NFL fan, I’m hoping this does not turn out to be yet another example of an extremely successful organization sowing the seeds of its own destruction through foolish greed and overweening arrogance.

If I were an NFL owner, I would pull Levy off the case immediately. And it’s worth noting that when it serves the NFL’s interest to argue the contrary, it claims precisely the opposite:

“The question is whether Minnesota law permits Pat and Kevin Williams to be suspended for a first positive test, and whether Minnesota law allows punishment to be imposed on an employee who uses an over-the-counter substance on his own time. Among the league’s arguments is that the Vikings, not the NFL, employ the players.”

Prediction 3 is looking good

“3. The Federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed the projected $1.17 trillion.”
– December 28, 2009

It’s nine months too soon to declare victory, of course, but that prediction isn’t looking too bad as of January 13th.

The December figures bring to $388.5 billion the deficit for the first three months of Washington’s 2010 fiscal year. That’s on top of a staggering $1.4 trillion budget shortfall for fiscal 2009, more than three times the size of the deficit that the government ran in 2008.

In other words, the federal deficit is on a pace to hit $1.554 trillion in FY2010. Which is remarkably strange considering that we’re now six months into an economic recovery featuring 3.5 2.8 2.2% GDP growth. Say, doesn’t the GDP formula include government spending….