Targeting and bullying

Well... maybe sometimes mockery does work. Grizwald Grim's earlier post was pretty damn stupid, but his latest post, Atheism in 2012: Double Standards & Hypocrisy is not stupid. He's still wrong, of course, but he's expressing a definite position on a controversial issue.

Grim is not certain, so let me clarify that I definitely do self-identify as an atheist (the big red A in the sidebar is a clue), and I self-identify as a New Atheist, because I have a lot in common with people such as PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins.

I cannot improve on Grim's presentation of his primary argument:

As the obvious common thread when referring to a group as atheist is their common lack of belief in a deity, the article is likely to lead one to believe that the inclusive group is being targeted because of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof).

As the cartoon series in question is (barely debatable) obvious mockery of the behavior and attitudes of the religious as observed by the cartoonist, and the cartoon uses characters from those religions to express that mockery - it's evident that the mockery is targeted on the basis of religious beliefs.

I'm of the mind that it's a double standard to target a group because of their religious beliefs and then rage against those that would target others because of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof).

I do not object to people targeting my beliefs because I am an atheist. I have never seen any atheist blog arguing that atheism should be immune to criticism, mockery, or ridicule for any reason, much less for the reason that the author has targeted atheism. For example, the Barmaid directly concurs: "I don't want my fundamental beliefs protected from attack or ridicule, thanks." I don't know of any atheist, or any New Atheist, who would disagree with this unequivocal statement.

Target away. Attack as best you can. Ridicule as much as you please. Criticize to your heart's content. Bring it on. As long as you stick directly and indirectly to words and ideas, take your best shot.

We do not object to targeting. We do not object to mockery, ridicule, or criticism. We do, however, object to threatened or actual physical coercion to suppress any speech (outside well-established legal boundaries, e.g. incitement, "fighting words", etc.). When an institution is in a position of authority over an individual, sanctions are inherently coercive. When an individual makes a credible threat of violence, or when an individual actually acts violently, that's coercion. And we object to coercion to suppress any speech, not just when the speech is targeted towards one particular group or another.

And atheists do not use coercion to suppress others speech. We do not threaten or use violence. We do not threaten or use official sanctions. The closest you'll find to atheists, secularists, or scientists using any kind of official sanctions is denying tenure or promotion to scientists promoting Intelligent Design, and in every case you'll find the denial of tenure or promotion was based not on the person's views, but on objective measures of their scientific competence.

Of course, atheist organizations do prioritize objecting to real offenses specifically against atheists. That's what special-interest organizations are for. Atheists do not expect NAACP or NOW to prioritize the interests of white male atheists. Prioritization is not just a matter of expediency; it also stems from the same philosophical roots as the judicial standing that only an actual (alleged) victim of a tort has standing to sue. Once the victim chooses to sue, the matter is up for social decision, but the victim is specially privileged over whether or not to put the matter in the social arena. But just because atheist organizations prioritize offenses against atheists does not mean that we object just because the perpetrator chose atheists as a specific target.

Grim happily modifies his earlier stance. He seems to retract his contradictory position that he supports the right to free expression on the one hand but will not protect it on the other, he instead explicitly supports an exception to the right of free expression, presumably enforced through legitimate legal means:

I accept the limited right of freedom of expression and will vehemently defend anyone's right to expression that doesn't infringe on other rights. Cross that line, start using it to infringe on the right of freedom of religion, and my support stops at the line.

Grim argues that mockery crosses that line:

Frequency and recurrence of such mockery starts to look like a campaign to to dehumanize a people because of their religion. If the campaign remains intact and escalates above mockery, you're well on your way to persecution on the basis of religious beliefs (or lack there of).

A position and an argument. Full marks!

But in today's context, mockery does not infringe on freedom of religion. One important feature of modern life is the social, political, and legal privilege afforded to religious belief. This social privilege, labeling a belief as "religious" exempts it from not only mockery and ridicule but also rational criticism, prompts much of the New Atheist agenda. In a truly secular society, where labeling a belief as "religious" would not afford it any special status, mockery might well be inappropriate. But so long as the religious wield real power on the basis of their religion, mockery is a legitimate social response.

Secondly, criticizing a belief does not dehumanize people, because beliefs are not ineluctable. To criticize an ineluctable characteristic such as race, sex, national origin, or physical "disability", tends to dehumanize a person because no person can ever change his or her race, sex, etc. But a person can change his beliefs, and the whole point of having a society, the Libertarian fantasy of "rugged individualists" notwithstanding, is to influence and change each others' beliefs. If your beliefs are indefensible, change them.

It's almost impossible to draw the line between mockery and legitimate criticism. I don't mean that there might be some gray area — that's true of almost every distinction — I mean that it's hard to come up with a definition that does not exclude any criticism. The response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a case in point. This book, which to my eyes is calm, reasoned, and nuanced, has been denounced as the worst sort of illegitimate, disrespectful mockery, and not just by religious believers. And as any reader of academic literature knows, the most savage insults can be couched in the most rarefied academic language. A ban on "mockery" seems like the essence of the slippery slope: it's not that there's some gray area, it's that it's all gray area.

Atheists do not object to offenses against atheists just because someone has specifically chosen an atheist to offend. Atheists and atheist organizations prioritize offenses against atheists because that's what special-interest organizations routinely do in a society, and because atheists have the most standing to object to offenses against atheists. We do not consider mockery or ridicule to be offenses; we consider, rather, the use of coercion, violence, threats, and official sanctions, to silence our well-established right of free expression to constitute offenses. Some atheists use mockery in no small part because of the social privilege of religious belief; mockery is a well-established political tool for opposing the dominant majority. Finally, it seems impossible to exempt mockery and ridicule from our notions of protected free speech. Grizwald Grim might find our tools objectionable, and he's free to object, but his arguments for silencing us simply fail.

The Stupid! It Burns! (yet another omniscience edition)

Atheists Must Be Divine!

Dr. Chalmers discuss this saying,

"To be able to assert that there is no God, we must walk the whole expanse of infinity, and ascertain by observation that no evidence of God exists anywhere. Grant that with the narrow limits of our observation no traces or vestiges of Deity be found, does it follow that throughout all immensity a Being, with the essence and sovereignty of a God, is nowhere to be found?

Yes, God might me hiding behind the couch. Ho hum.

Freedom of expression

I usually don't bother to explain entries in The Stupid! It Burns!; any reader with a triple-digit IQ a Google PhD will immediately get it. But Grizwald Grim has politely asked me why I think his post is burningly stupid. He won't understand the explanation, of course — if he were intelligent enough to understand the critique, he wouldn't have posted something so stupid to begin with — but his request gives me an opportunity to heap additional abuse on someone whose stupidity is exceeded only by his self-opinion.

The most obvious feature of Grim's post is that he himself is acting like an insufferable prick. I don't mind prickishness; I'm often a prick myself, and I'm being one now. But Grim is an insufferable prick complaining about other people being insufferable pricks, which makes him a hypocrite. I, on the other hand, am being a prick because Grim is a hypocrite (as well as being stupid). Not only is Grim being a obvious hypocrite, he is (incorrectly) condemning others for being hypocrites. Just by itself, two levels of clueless self-parody is enough to earn him a spot on TSIB.

But Grim is not only a stupid, hypocritical prick, he also so deeply misunderstands bullying and the concept of rights that I wonder how he's able to find his mouth with a spoonful of soup.

Bullying is coercion. Mockery and disrespect are not (for adults) bullying. Grim is correct: atheists are mostly immune to (legitimate) mockery precisely because we don't have many obviously stupid beliefs to mock. (Of course, that doesn't stop a lot of religious believers from inventing stupid things they think we do or ought to believe, and mocking those made-up beliefs. But that's grist for other TSIB posts.) Grim links to Paula Kirby's article, Worrying developments for freedom of expression in the UK, and highlights the case of Rhys Morgan, who, according to Kirby, "has apparently received veiled threats of expulsion or suspension from his school if he does not remove a Jesus & Mo image from his personal Facebook page" and has received threats of violence from his Muslim classmates. Morgan was not attempting to coerce anyone. He didn't harass anyone, he didn't threaten anyone, he didn't demand anyone be expelled or suspended, and he certainly didn't actually harm anyone. Morgan is, contrary to Grim's assertion, not a bully. And atheists in general do not engage in coercive behavior, except to insist on the ordinary social coercion to prevent harassment, threats, and overt violence prescribed by law.

Finally, Grim risibly completely fails to grasp the concept of rights. Regardless of their ontological origin — objective, subjective, or socially constructed — to accept a right is to accept a social obligation to protect that right. The connection between rights and protection is not just an entailment, it's an identity. So when Grim both asserts the right to free expression and in the same sentence implies that he will not protect those who exercise the right of free expression, he is blatantly contradicting himself.

When Grim says, "You're on your own when the consequences of being an insufferable prick come back to haunt you," he is essentially saying that if someone murdered a 17 year old for posting a cartoon on his Facebook page, he would give the murderer a round of applause instead of a lifetime in jail. I am a civilized person, so I will not harass, threaten, or harm Grim (and even this second post is at his explicit request), but I can with a clear conscience say that he is a stupid, contemptible, disgusting excuse for a human being.

The five-paragraph essay

I have a new post up on my other blog: The five-paragraph essay.

Attack and ridicule

multi, from Jesus and Mo

Shit skeptics say

(via PZ Myers)

Thanks!

Thanks for the books, Eric! Wow! That means a lot to me.

They're going straight to the top of my reading list, and I'll post a review/reflection of each book when I finish reading it.

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

— Harry Blackmun, Roe v. Wade

Real and financial economics

Part 1: What is "real"? (commentary)
Part 2a: Real microeconomics (demand shocks)
Part 2b: Real microeconomics (supply shocks)
Interlude: Real and financial economics

I come to economics and political science from an unusual place. I was a computer programmer for many years, and an avid reader of popularizations of science. When I'm thinking about science and engineering, I'm always keeping one eye on the physical. I'm always asking, "What does this have to do with what's physically happening?" I have to be especially careful about the physical as a computer programmer. I mostly worked on business information systems: my job was to help people track and control what was physically happening in their business. (I also had to worry about what was more-or-less physically happening with the bits and bytes.) We have to worry about what's physically happening with the economy, too. All too often, economics deals with money, but money — even hard money — is not itself physical. Money is still important, but it's not physical. It's not an end in itself.

Imagine that for a thousand years, everyone in the country (or the world) decided to consume nothing but the bare minimum necessary for physical survival (mud huts, rice and beans, etc.), work as hard as possible, and put all our (fiat) money in the bank to grow at compound interest. In a thousand years, would our descendents be fabulously wealthy? Of course not. Not only is it unclear what we would be working at, our physical productive capabilities would be geared towards producing only subsistence. The money in the bank would represent nothing real.

"Hard" money doesn't change anything. Imagine that for a thousand years we produced only subsistence goods, and with our extra time we all worked as hard as possible getting every possible gram of silver, gold, platinum, etc. out of the ground (we might even work on producing "hard money" by transmutation). Would our descendents be wealthy? Again, of course not: they would have a lot of yellow metal in vaults and the productive capability only to produce a lot of gold; they wouldn't have cars, televisions, cell phones, and they wouldn't have any more capacity to build such things than if we, their parents, had spent a thousand years masturbating.

To be wealthy in the real sense, we have to have physical goods and services that it gives us pleasure to actually consume. Money itself is not the end; money is the way we try to work out socially what physical goods and services to produce, and who gets to consume them. At a microeconomic level, how many lattes should we make? How many hours of yoga instruction should we provide? It's a trade-off: producing more of one means producing less of the other. We use money to try to balance the production of the two for maximum happiness. At the macroeconomic level, how much of our time and effort should we spend actually making stuff? How much should we spend investing, making factories, educating people, and improving our stuff-making technology? Again, these are trade-offs; we use actions such as monetary and fiscal policy to balance between consumption and investment.

If we lose sight of the underlying reality, of the physical production of goods and services, we enter the land of theology. Indeed, one economist I read (I can't recall which; JFGI if you're interested) calls this "theoclassical" economics. We do have to have a control system to manage a 300,000,000 person economy, and we do have to spend some time maintaining the integrity of the control system itself, but if we don't always think carefully about the effects on the real, physical production of goods and services, worrying about the properties of the control system itself is at best pointless and at worst mendacious.

(As an aside, and because I'll take shots at Ayn Rand whenever possible, it's notable that Rand has to handwave away the real economy to make her "strike" work. Without John Galt's perpetual motion machine and magic science, the strike would have failed: the strikers would have starved long before the lights of New York went out.)

As a more concrete example, think about what really happens when you put your money in the bank. It's not enough to say only, "Oh, the bank pays 2% p.a. interest, compounded quarterly." What's the underlying reality? Really, you are making a decision to invest rather than consume. If all goes well, your investment should make the production of goods and services more efficient: after a year, we will be able in general to produce stuff with less human time. Indeed, if all goes well, we should increase our productive capabilities by exactly 2%. That's why, if you invest rather than consume some amount of real stuff today, you should be able to consume 2% more real stuff next year: we have spent a year becoming more efficient at producing stuff.

One advantage of tying financial economics to real economics is that we can use the philosophy and all the tools and techniques of scientific examination to discuss the physical; we don't need to to descend into any "praxeology" bullshit.

Whenever you see an economist (or anyone else) talking about financial economics without referencing the underlying reality (or telling a false or unfalsifiable story about the physical economy), you should call bullshit. Does someone say that taxation, or debt, or fiat money, etc. is bad? These are just example of moving money around; they cannot be intrinsically bad or good, because money itself isn't real. Ask, "Under the current conditions, what are the effects of adjusting the control system (money) on the physical, measurable, scientifically examinable reality?" Always always always keep one eye on the physical.

Money for nothin'

For five years, I've been putting out some decent stuff — or so I think — here at The Barefoot Bum. I've never asked for anything before, but I have become an impoverished college student. So, if you like the content, feel free to buy me a book. Thanks!