The Barefoot Bum

The first step

2012-02-02T06:37:00.000-07:00

In his response to my post targeting and bullying, Grizwald Grim has new arguments against the New Atheists. According to Grim, the stupid behavior of religious people is just a consequence of there being a lot of religious people, and Grim claims that "promoting and defending mockery based on group membership is the first step [emphasis omitted]" towards death threats and violence against a group. Grim also believes that mockery implies that the group is inferior and less human. Finally Grim thinks that mockery is ineffective for the goal (which he seems to share) of reducing or eliminating the social privilege of religion. Given the context (I'd want to see more supporting detail in a college paper), Grim makes a decent argument, but he's mistaken on all counts.

The idea that the stupid behavior of religious people is an artifact of the size of the group seems insupportable in the face of the evidence. We have ample evidence showing a direct causal mechanism between religious belief and stupid behavior. Both The God Delusion and god is not great provide considerable documentation. Almost all opponents of GLBTetc. marriage and queer rights in general are religious, they make directly religious arguments for their positions, and explicitly state that not allowing them to discriminate is specifically religious discrimination. Almost all opponents of abortion and women's rights are religious with specifically religious justifications. (It's notable that while sexism and racism are rife in the atheist community, the response is usually to deny that it exists rather than attempt to justify it.) More importantly, we know independently that a lot of religious beliefs actually held by religious people are flat-out delusional. to a person who strongly values the truth, delusional beliefs can have nothing but deleterious effects. That religious stupidity is an artifact is a legitimate null hypothesis, but just as it's delusional to reject the null hypothesis without evidence, it's delusional to accept the null hypothesis in the face of persuasive evidence to the contrary.

The "first step" argument is nothing more than the slippery slope fallacy. To make a valid slippery slope argument, you must show that there is no good objective way to distinguish between deprecated and acceptable actions. But New Atheists make three important objective distinctions. First, we do not criticize people for ineluctable traits: we criticize people for holding beliefs, and beliefs are not ineluctable. Second, there's an obvious and very sharp line between mockery and criticism on the one hand and violence on the other: violence, threats of violence, and violent imagery.

The third distinction is a little more subtle. Grim is somewhat vague when he talks about "targeting". There are (at least) two legitimate interpretations of this term. In one sense, it just means choosing to criticize this person rather than that person just because the critic prefers to criticize one group rather than another. There's nothing wrong with this sort of "targeting": black people tend to target racism; women tend to target sexism; gay people tend to target homophobia. No one can criticize everything, so we generally tend to pick and choose based on our specific interests.

Second, it might mean mocking someone or drawing a conclusion about someone just because he adopts a label: "You call yourself a Christian, therefore you are stupid." Targeting in sense is not necessarily bad: I doubt anyone would object to mocking someone who calls himself a neo-Nazi, or drawing the conclusion that he's not at all fond of blacks or Jews, just because he adopts that label. However, given the broad application of most religious labels, this kind of behavior is inappropriate. But the New Atheists don't actually do that. There's a difference between making a negative generalization (supported by evidence and with a discernible mechanism) about a group and actually mocking people just because they belong to that group.

Indeed, it is precisely because it seems extremely difficult for a member of a group to separate generalizations about that group and personal mockery that Grim himself is on a legitimate slippery slope. It's easy, I think, for a Muslim to hear the criticism that Islam (as a religion) is generally sexist as the accusation that he personally is a sexist. It's easy to see mockery of some egregiously sexist action of an Islamic authority (impeccably supported by quotations from the Koran and Hadith) as mockery of the individual just because he self-identifies as a Muslim. "What!?" he exclaims, "I'm not a sexist!" Fine. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it. Just because I might believe, for example, that 80% of Muslims are sexist doesn't mean that I believe that 100% of them are in that 80%. (I might note that if they are not sexist, it's odd that they self-identify with a religion that seems to have sexism as such an integral part of the foundational documents, and where a majority of the adherents agree with that sexism, but that's a discussion for another day.)

I do the same thing: I take offense all the time when atheism is criticized. The difference, of course, is that I inquire as to whether the criticism is true. If it is, I get over myself, accept the criticism, and work to correct it. The question is not whether the criticism is pejorative, the question is whether it's true. And when I do express offense, it's not because the generalization is pejorative, but because it's untrue.

If Grim wants to argue the falsity of New Atheist generalizations about religion, let him make that argument. It's tough: you have to do actual research, but it's not impossible. But if Grim wants to argue that we simply should not give offense — defined only by the reaction of the listener — regardless of the truth, then he has certainly offended me, and he should — by his own lights — just STFU and GBTW. Pull down those mocking, offensive, disrespectful posts, Grim, which have deeply offended me and hurt my precious little snowflake feelings! Stop throwing stones at the New Atheist castle! If you don't, I'll come over and rearrange your furniture!

The Stupid! It Burns! (Thursday hat trick edition)

2012-02-02T05:23:00.000-07:00

A trio of stupid today!

What’s Going on with the Atheists?

If there was ever any doubt that Atheism is a belief system (rather than a factual system based on empirical proof), the Atheists, themselves, are removing any doubt. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Two unrelated stories were reported this week which clearly make the case.

First, a group of Atheists in England have proposed a 151 foot tower in London to celebrate “new atheism.” This tower is being proposed as a “Temple to Atheism.” Now why would Atheists need a temple?

The second story is the account of an upcoming Atheist rock festival at the Ft. Bragg military base called “Rock Beyond Belief.”

Atheistic Materialism’s Failure to Account for Enduring Personal Identity: Part II

One problem for strict atheistic materialism is its failure to account for enduring personal identity over time; since the body undergoes constant intrinsic material change.

It's so cute when idiots try to mimic the conventions of philosophy.

Top 10 Questions for Atheists

Here are some questions I have for the lowest of the low, the worst people, the most disgusting form of life, the most hateful of all human beings, the lowest possible form of existence – the atheist.

#10 – Do you take pleasure in telling lies or are you just so gullible that you believe any anti-religious lie you hear?

It just goes downhill from there.

The social value of religion

2012-02-01T05:22:00.000-07:00

But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation. In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused. Go read some of the arguments against integration and you’ll see the same bible verses used today against homosexuals. Fifty years from now, they’ll be recycling them again to trash someone else they don’t like or who isn’t good enough for them.

— John Cole

Read, as they say, the rest.

(via PZ Myers)

The Stupid! It Burns! (deluded polytheist edition)

2012-02-01T05:16:00.002-07:00

Stand Up to Militant Atheists in Public Society

Here is an irony about atheism: Atheists are self-deluded polytheists. ... In denying the existence of God, the atheist is saying wittingly or unwittingly that he is his own god. Since the atheist is his own god only those that have authority over him have nominal control of their life. ... Science is a deity because science is the knowledge fount for human understanding. ... [Thus] dogmatic/militant atheism has a stringent belief system that can easily be quantified as a set of religious values that denies the existence of a supernatural existence which for Christians would be God Almighty that is all and in all.

Tips for Tim Tebow

2012-02-01T05:03:00.000-07:00

TIPS FOR TIM TEBOW

By Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

DOWNLOAD POSTER OF THIS ARTICLE (PDF, 17x22")

Tim Tebow, quarterback for the Denver Broncos in the National Football League, is being widely, and seemingly endlessly, promoted—as an icon not only in the realm of sports but much more broadly. I have followed sports, including football, for many decades now, and I cannot recall ever witnessing anything like this. In a highly orchestrated and concentrated campaign, Tebow is being held up as a “worker of miracles” on the football field but, more than that, as a “role model” and moral standard-bearer.

This hype around Tebow is completely and strikingly out of proportion to any demonstrated ability or actual accomplishments on Tebow’s part, in terms of performance as a professional football quarterback. If you have been paying attention not only to the arena of sports but to things more broadly in this society and the world, you should be able to quickly guess why this is: Tim Tebow is a religious fanatic—of the Christian fundamentalist variety—who aggressively promotes his medieval views and values in a way that is obviously considered useful by significant sections of the powers-that-be in the U.S. Among other things, during the Super Bowl (the American professional football championship) a couple of years ago, Tebow was the centerpiece of an ad whose purpose was to oppose the right of women to reproductive freedom, in particular abortion. The ad was sponsored by a right-wing Christian organization which aggressively opposes the right of women to abortion (it is also a fact, and highly revealing, that as a general rule the reactionary Christian fundamentalist forces that oppose a woman’s right to abortion also want to ban birth control).

This promotion of what is in reality a fascist outlook and program, in the form of fundamentalist Christianity, is aided by the notion—aggressively championed by some, and far too often unchallenged by others—that there is a direct connection between how religious someone is and how “moral” he or she is. Which avoids the critical question: What is the content of this morality? More specifically: What, in fact, is being promoted through the propagation of religious fundamentalism, including the kind of “Biblical literalism”—insisting that the Bible is the word of God which must be accepted as absolutely true, and as the standard for behavior, in every respect—with which Tim Tebow is associated? In reality, it is irrational, anti-rational ignorance and superstition—which denies well-established scientific fact, such as evolution, and is opposed to the scientific method and approach in general—as well as the insistence upon all kinds of reactionary, extremely oppressive and literally murderous values, social relations, and actions. And this is not something that should somehow be overlooked, excused, or minimized because Tebow works hard at being a quarterback (has a “good work ethic”) and supports religious charities (something reactionary religious fundamentalists often do).

Since one of the main ways in which Tim Tebow in particular propagandizes and proselytizes for his religious fundamentalism is through continual and prominent citation of verses from the Bible, I am offering the following tips for Tim Tebow, in terms of passages from the Bible he should cite and call attention to, in order to bring to light what is the actual content—the fundamental worldview, relations, values and morals—which are promoted, and indeed insisted upon, in the Bible.

Deuteronomy, Chapter 7; Exodus, Chapter 32; Numbers 31 (especially v. 13-18 and 31-35). These are just some of the passages in the Bible in which the God of this Bible insists that people who practice another religion, or who oppose or stand in the way of this God’s will, must be slaughtered and utterly destroyed—or, in the case of virgin women, raped and enslaved—without mercy.

Exodus 20:1-17 (this contains the Ten Commandments, with Commandment 10 of particular relevance); 1 Timothy 6:1-6; Ephesians 6:5-6; Colossians 3:22-24. Again, these are just some passages—among many which could be cited—from the New Testament as well as the Old Testament of the Bible, where slavery is upheld and treated as legitimate.

Deuteronomy 22:13-21 (in particular v. 20 and 21). Here is it said that women who are not virgins when they marry must be put to death.

Exodus 22:18 Women who are accused of being witches (sorcerers) must be put to death as well.

Leviticus 21:9 A priest’s daughter who becomes a prostitute, and thereby profanes her father, must be put to death.

Exodus 20:1-17, the Ten Commandments Commandment 10 (Exodus 20:17) treats wives (as well as slaves) as part of the property of a man (“thy neighbor”) which must not be coveted.

Ephesians 5:22-23; 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 Here Paul insists that women must be subordinate to their husbands, and in fact must be silent and subordinate in the churches. In 1 Timothy 2:11-15, Paul says that the subordination of women is because of the role of woman (Eve) in original sin, and that child-bearing and the pain associated with it is a punishment women must endure because of the sin of Eve in succumbing to Satan in the garden of Eden and seducing Adam into eating the apple (see also Genesis chapter 3, in particular v. 16). In these passages, as well as many others throughout the Bible, suffocating and brutal oppression of women is insisted upon and sanctified. And, as we see in Numbers chapter 31, as well as many other places in the Bible (such as Isaiah, chapters 10-14, and Psalm 137), the mass raping of women, and the murder of babies and little children, is not only justified but said to be righteous, if it is carried out on behalf of the supposed one true God.

Leviticus 20:13 Here it is said not only that homosexuality is an abomination but that homosexuals must be killed.

Proverbs 23:13-14; Exodus 21:17; Deuteronomy 21:18-21; Romans 1:30 In these passages—again, from the New Testament as well as the Old Testament—we are not only told that children must be beaten in order to keep them on the right path (“spare the rod and spoil the child”) but that children who are rebellious against their parents must be put to death.

Leviticus 24:11-16; Deuteronomy 13:5 Anyone who curses the God of the Bible—or who “blasphemes the name of the Lord”—is to be executed, as is any prophet who calls on people to rebel against God.

The book of Numbers—once again, particularly Numbers 31:13-18 and 31-35 In Numbers, perhaps even more than other books of the Bible, the maniacal and merciless bloodthirstiness of the one true God of the Bible is graphically shown, in his insistence on slaughter, plunder, rapine and rape. In Numbers 31, especially verses 13-18, Moses, the messenger and enforcer for this God, becomes furious with his followers because, in attacking the Midianites, they only killed the adult men and stole some of their property: go back again, commands Moses, speaking in God’s name, and massacre all the males, children as well as grown men, and kill also all the females who are not virgins—but as for the females who are virgins, carry them off as sex slaves (concubines) for yourselves.

Matthew 17:14-20 (also Luke 8:26-39) Here we see that Jesus is ignorant about epilepsy and seizures—he treats this as a matter of demon possession, as opposed to the true, scientifically established understanding that epilepsy has to do with chemical and electrical processes in the nervous system and the brain—and in voicing and acting on this ignorance, Jesus afflicts people with the cruel notion that their sickness is their own fault, a result of their own sinful conduct.

John 14:6 and John 15:6 Here we are told, by Jesus himself, that he is the only way to salvation. Those who don’t follow him will be condemned to eternal damnation, that is, endless torture: burning in hell, excruciating physical as well as mental pain, torment and anguish. (See also Luke 19:1-27, especially v. 27.)

The above are only some passages from the Bible—and many, many more could be cited—which clearly illustrate the truth that (as I put it in the book, Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World) the Bible, taken literally, is a horror. (I would be happy to provide Tim Tebow with a copy of this book.)

If Tim Tebow wants to truly inform people about what the Bible represents, let him cite the above verses of the Bible and acknowledge what they actually advocate. If he wants to claim that he does not insist on taking the Bible as the literal and absolute word of the one true God, then let him say that openly and without equivocation—and admit that the Bible is not a divine work, but rather the work of human beings, which is full of ignorance and superstition as well as the advocacy of all kinds of truly horrendous values, relations, and actions. If he wants to say that he does not uphold what is put forward in what has been cited here, then let him disavow not only these particular Biblical passages but indeed the Bible as a whole, for the words spoken in these passages are not presented in the Bible as deviations from the righteous path, advocated by enemies of the one true God. No, these are said to be the words of the Biblical God himself, or of those identified, in the Bible itself, as the most worthy messengers, prophets, and apostles of this God—such as Moses, Isaiah, and Paul—as well as the supposed son of this God, Jesus.

Meanwhile, enough with the incessant campaign to not only portray Tim Tebow as a far greater football player than he actually is, but also to portray him as a nearly god-like icon, serving as a moral example and compass. Enough of the morality, and all that is bound up with the morality, that Tim Tebow stands for and aggressively shoves in everyone’s face.

[This article originally appeared in Revolution #258, 5 Feb 2012, Tips for Tim Tebow. Reprinted with permission.]

The evolution of altruism by individual selection

2012-01-31T19:40:00.000-07:00

Jerry Coyne reviews Michael Price's review of A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Basically (and I can't do justice to Coyne's comments), the evidence suggests that "altruism" as we actually see it looks like a standard evolutionary "arms race" between cooperators and would-be "free riders", which is explainable by individual selection.

Targeting and bullying

2012-01-30T04:57:00.002-07:00

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)

2012-01-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

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

2012-01-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

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

2012-01-27T07:22:00.000-07:00

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

Attack and ridicule

2012-01-26T05:55:00.001-07:00

multi, from Jesus and Mo

Shit skeptics say

2012-01-25T05:49:00.000-07:00

(via PZ Myers)

Thanks!

2012-01-25T05:10:00.000-07:00

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.

2012-01-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

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

2012-01-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

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'

2012-01-21T20:35:00.001-07:00

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!

The psychology of poverty

2012-01-20T04:10:00.000-07:00

Despite the title, the habits John Cheese describes in The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor aren't really stupid. Human beings in any environment do not operate by "rational" thought, i.e. thinking through the consequences of every possible action in every situation, and picking the action that will result in the best outcome. Instead, people develop habits of thought, and then pick the most applicable habit to each situation and act accordingly. Rationality is, I think, more applicable to evaluating our habits: does this habit usually lead to a moderately good outcome; if it does not, the rational response is adjust the habit.

The habits that Cheese describes are, when you're poor, actually rational, in that they usually lead to a moderately good outcome, and the habits that middle- and upper-class people develop would typically be disastrous. When you're poor, according to Cheese, you're always facing critical-priority expenses. You don't buy a new dryer when it's on sale because your car needs a new transmission that month. The only thing you buy in bulk is food, because transaction costs (driving to the grocery store) dominate food shopping. (Also, I suspect that, like me, a lot of poor people buy prepared food because they work a lot, at physically demanding jobs; cooking takes time, energy, and attention that's already in short supply.)

What Cheese means by "stupid", I think, is that when poor people suddenly become slightly less poor, it's hard to abandon the rational habits they learned and developed to survive poverty, but have become counterproductive in their new environment. But that's more-or-less how habits have to work; the propensity to behave in a certain way that is easily abandoned will not serve as a survival strategy, especially under stress.

The Stupid! It Burns! (freedom edition)

2012-01-19T03:23:00.000-07:00

This gem doesn't really capture the point of Atheists are Bullies; it's hard to figure out the author's actual point, much less the quality of his support. But wow.

You are completely entitled to freedom of expression. However, if you use that freedom to be an insufferable prick - you're on your own when the consequences of being an insufferable prick come back to haunt you. So don't come crying to me to help protect your freedom of expression. If that's how you're going to use it, as far as I'm concerned you don't deserve it.

Shit Christians say to atheists

2012-01-17T05:05:00.000-07:00

(via Richard Metzger)

The Stupid! It Burns! (16 things edition)

2012-01-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

16 Things Atheists Need Christians to Know is definitely not stupid. I include it because 90% of the stupidity I highlight here comes when some Christian (and occasionally Muslim) does not understand one or more of these points. Add in the Establishment Clause (the prohibition on the government establishing a religion is in the Constitution precisely to exempt individual decisions from the will of the majority) and you get 99% of the stupid.

To paraphrase:

"Atheists are atheists"
Don't capitalize "atheist"
We're not angry at God
Deep down, we're still atheists
"'You're such a nice person! I can't believe you're an atheist!' is not a compliment'
There really are atheists in foxholes
"How can our lives have any purpose without God? One word: chocolate."
We're not going to believe "just in case"
Let's dispense with the questions we both know are stupid
We didn't "turn our backs" on God
Yes, we've heard about Jesus
You won't miss us when you get to heaven
Yes, we know we can't prove there's no God
Yes, we can be moral without God
Either you're a member of a persecuted minority or you're part of the dominant majority. Pick one.
Christianity used to be a persecuted minority; now that you're in the majority, how do you want to treat other minorities?

There will be a quiz on this every Tuesday.

Real Microeconomics (supply shocks)

2012-01-14T06:02:00.000-07:00

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

In the last post, I talked about real "demand shocks", when we want a lot more of something than we can presently produce. There are also real "supply shocks". A supply shock happens when something becomes considerably more expensive: given some set of resources, we can produce less of something we want or need than we could yesterday, with no compensation in the production of other things.

But what do I mean by "more expensive"? I'm talking about real economics, economics without money. The only resource we can arbitrarily change is how we spend our time. We cannot just arbitrarily make decide to have more iron: if we want more iron, human beings have to spend time digging it out of the ground. (We might also spend time creating machines to dig it out of the ground, or we might choose to use up some of the labor "embodied" in an already created digging machine to dig up iron instead of copper or uranium). So, by more expensive, I mean producing something requires more labor* than before, labor that has an opportunity cost, that could have been used to produce something else.

*Strictly speaking, socially necessary abstract labor time.

Real supply shocks tend to "creep"; in this sense, "shock" is kind of a misnomer. (In economics, "shock" just means something exogenous, i.e. in some sense outside the normal economic system.) We don't wake up one morning to find that hats suddenly take twice as much labor to make as yesterday. Rather, the real cost — the labor — tends to inexorably increase over a long period of time.

Oil is a good example of a supply shock. We believe (IIRC) we have in the last century extracted about half the oil that's in the ground. The problem is that we've already extracted the oil that's "easy" to get to, and increases in our productivity are starting to fall behind the increase in difficulty in extracting the rest of the oil. We're not going to "run out" of oil; oil will just take more and more labor time to extract, until the oil that's left is so expensive it will be used only for those things we really really want.

In a similar sense, agriculture before the industrial revolution was in a state of creeping supply shock. As the population grew, more and more land had to be put into food production. The problem is that we used the most productive and fertile land first; additional land was less productive than new land. This caused the average labor time for a given quantity of food to rise over time. Improvements in technology and the production of capital could not keep up with the loss of productivity, to the point where food production was a severe constraint on population growth. This sort of constraint is not pretty: people tend to actually starve to death.

Of course, supply "shocks" don't have to be crisis producing. As we create more capital, which makes labor more productive, and as technology improves, it requires less labor time to make most goods and services, which reduces the opportunity cost in terms of making goods and services that cannot have improvements in productivity. (One cannot, for example, greatly improve the productivity of live performances of classical symphonies.)

One interesting comparison of real economics vs. financial economics is that "positive" supply shocks (which can be abrupt), where the labor cost of something decreases, cannot produce a crisis in real economics, but can produce a crisis in financial economics. Curious.

Can we deduce supply and demand curves

2012-01-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

Can we deduce the the supply and demand curves in terms of opportunity cost assuming only declining marginal utility of consumption? (I.e. without assuming increasing marginal labor cost of production.)

I think it can (and perhaps it's already been done), but I haven't seen it done and I don't think I yet have all the right mathematical tools to derive it. Perhaps a reader who has better math than me could help?

Declining marginal utility of consumption means basically that to obtain the first widget, which takes three hours* to produce, I might forego the last doodad, which takes one hour to produce. To obtain the second widget I will not, however, forego the second-to-last doodad, but I might forego the last thingamabob, which takes two hours to produce.

*of abstract labor time

Given fixed marginal labor time of supply (it takes x hours to produce one more of any good at any quantity) but declining marginal utility of consumption, what is the overall equilibrium price of each good in an economy?

Feel the LOVE!

2012-01-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist won her lawsuit removing from her public school a banner containing a prayer.

Here's what Christians have to say in response.

Can you feel it? Can you feel the love?

The Stupid! It Burns! (entitlement edition)

2012-01-13T06:06:00.000-07:00

Fake Economist Ben Stein Sues Company for Discriminating Against Global Warming Deniers

Ben Stein ... has sued Japanese electronics firm Kyocera for violating his "freedom of religion" by not hiring him as a pitchman because he denies the reality of global warming.

(It's not quite as cut and dried as Gawker makes out to be: Stein alleges that there was a valid contract in place.)

(via PZ Myers)

An honest question?

2012-01-12T05:54:00.004-07:00

Recently, a commenter on another blog (lost in the mist of bygone days) chided me for labeling an "honest question" with "The Stupid! It Burns!" I never found out specifically what question he was referring to, but I assume it was this one: And Atheists Want What?: "What do atheists hope to accomplish in the world? ... I can’t see any other motivation that can come from believing that the physical world is all there is or ever will be other than complete selfishness and narcissism."

Now, to most atheists, especially atheists who have been talking with religious people about religion, it's obvious why this is not an honest question. It's possible that religious people cannot understand why this is not an honest question. But on the off chance that there's some religious person reading this blog who is genuinely confused about whether this is an honest question, let me explain.

First, because the original post offers an answer, the author is by definition not asking an honest question; he is asking a rhetorical question to make an assertion. My response is directed toward his assertion: atheists are motivated only by complete selfishness and narcissism. He can couch his assertion in all the weasel words he wants; his underlying meaning is clear. Not only is the assertion rude by virtue of its obviously falsity, it is more rude precisely because it is framed as a question. If you're going to ask me a question, shut up and let me answer. It is not only intellectually but socially rude to cut me off and offer your own answer.

More importantly, the author asks a question that I should not have to answer. I don't in any way have to justify acting like a civilized, socialized person in a civilized society. The author is essentially saying, how dare I act in a manner he finds socially acceptable!

Look, if you're a Christian (or Muslim, or whatever) apologist, I expect you to be an idiot and/or asshole, and I expect you to see yourself as a reasonable, nice person. The problem is not that you're a Christian (your private delusions are none of my business) the problem is that you're an apologist for a transparent fraud; your social identity has become intimately bound up with complete bullshit. People who keep their delusions private, who are not so insecure that others who don't swallow their brand of bullshit drive them crazy, do not become apologists.

Ron Paul and liberals

2012-01-12T05:23:00.000-07:00

So... about Ron Paul challenges liberals?... Go read the conversation yourself, because I'm not going to respond directly to it.

One of the most difficult decisions in my life was to abandon my self-identification as a liberal (in the modern, social sense) and a member of the Democratic party. Because I want to exercise what little power I have, I still vote (which irks many of my communist friends), but I don't consider the electoral system to be particularly important. Without the partisan self-identification, I no longer really buy into the apocalyptic visions of what will happen if the other guy actually wins. Sure, I think Barack Obama is a better President than John McCain would have been, but the country did not descend into permissive chaos because Obama won, and I don't think the country would have been a totalitarian dictatorship if McCain would have won, nor do I believe it would if Romney (or, heh, Gingrich) wins in 2012.

I don't accept the narrative of intervention. In the abstract hypothetical, I think that intervention can be right, but I think that modern states in the West are interested only in interventions that will enhance the power and prestige of one or another of the factions of the ruling class; the supposed moral benefits are at best a happy accident and at worst — and usually — a cynical lie.

Before the scales fell from my eyes, I was a liberal, but the Democratic party has abandoned all the reasons I personally was a liberal. I don't need Ron Paul to tell me that. That Ron motherfucking Paul could challenge liberal ideology is astonishing. Really: do we really need Ron Paul to challenge the War on (some) Drugs (used by some people)? Do we really need Ron Paul to challenge indefinite detention without trial of American citizens on US soil, a (barely) covert war in Iran, assassinations, censorship, massive government secrecy, etc. ad nauseam? Apparently we do, because no other candidate for President (and come on, the Presidency is where the action is) is talking about these issues. If Obama were a Republican (and thus white), but doing all the same things he's doing for all the same publicly stated reasons, I can't see but that the Democratic party intelligentsia would be up in arms.

Part of self-identifying as a revolutionary communist is the idea that I can no longer tolerate the choice between getting worse quickly and getting worse a little less quickly. The first rule of sales is that you do not try to coerce the prospect's decisions. Instead, you frame the questions so that you benefit no matter what the customer decides. You never say, "Buy this product!" You never ask, "Would you like to buy this product?" You always ask, "Would you prefer the basic or premium version of our product?" or, "Would you like the product in red or blue?" If you're in the showroom with a good salesperson, you will buy something no matter how you answer the salesperson's questions. The only way to escape without buying something is to break the salesperson's frame. The entire idea of republican "democracy" (democracy by elected trustee representatives) has been, in both theory and practice, to frame the question of governance so that the common interests of the ruling class are always preserved. When those common interests are fundamentally contrary to the interests of the people, the interests of the people will not be a viable electoral choice.

Of course, I don't think Ron Paul really is breaking the underlying frame. He simply represents a marginal faction of the capitalist ruling class that does not want to use particular measures (centralized government finance, foreign intervention, and a drug-war-justified racist/misogynist police state) to advance and secure its interests. Instead, I think, Ron Paul and the faction he represents prefer centralized private finance outside even token public control, isolationism, and a poverty-justified racist/misogynist police state. Ron Paul is not, I think, challenging the modern ruling-class narrative that we should have some sort of police state, but challenging even the present justification for the police state seems profoundly uncomfortable.

I don't think liberals in general are in favor of a police state. I think, however, they are willing to tolerate a police state, as long as police and military oppression doesn't much affect people like themselves. They will tolerate a police state as long as the dominant conservative/Republican faction of the ruling class doesn't use the police against the liberal/Democratic faction, as long as the police state is used only to maintain the common interests of both the liberal and conservative factions, i.e. remaining the ruling class. Of course, the intelligentsia of both factions are not above using the other party's "police state" tactics as a rhetorical tool, but it's apparent that concern for civil liberties is, as far as the intelligentsia is concerned, only that: a rhetorical tool, not an actual principle of governance.

I abandoned liberalism not because I stopped holding liberal principles, but because I saw all too many self-described liberals apparently supporting — or not condemning — politicians who did not hold my liberal principles. I don't think that's because liberals are bad people, but because the liberal intelligentsia is part of the ruling class and their middle-class supporters. I don't think they're terribly bad people because of that, but I'm not going to play that game myself anymore. I am opposed to the ruling class in general, so worrying about my insignificant part in choosing a faction of the ruling class is a waste of my time.

Ron Paul challenges liberals?

2012-01-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting conversation. I'm not sure what to make of it, or even what parts to excerpt to give an overview of the story.

Why Ron Paul challenges liberals, by Matt Stoller
Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies , by Glenn Greenwald
Debunking the “Ron Paul Cares About Civil Liberties” Myth
Glenn Greenwald is an asshat for his support of Ron Paul.
Democratic Party priorities, by Glenn Greenwald
Ron Paul has two problems: one is his, the other is ours, by Corey Robin
Naked Capitalism, “A Home for All Sorts of Bircher Nonsense”, by Matt Stoller
Ron Paul Challenges Liberals - or Maybe Not, at Angry Bear

Ohio parents plead guilty in son's cancer death

2012-01-11T16:44:00.002-07:00

Ohio parents plead guilty in son's cancer death

The parents of an 8-year-old Ohio boy who died of cancer in 2008 have pleaded guilty to attempted involuntary manslaughter in his death.

Monica Hussing, 37, and William Robinson Sr., 40, face up to eight years in prison each; sentencing is scheduled for February 16.

"They thought the kid had swollen glands," John Luskin, Hussing's Cleveland-based attorney, told CNN on Tuesday.

From time to time, the boy's parents would notice a lump on his neck, but it would come and go and did not appear to bother him, Luskin said.

The parents never sought a diagnosis for their son, William, who was suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma, CNN affiliate WJW reported.

They did not have much money, struggled to make ends meet and "were doing the best they could," Luskin said.

This is our world.

(via SouthernFriedInfidel)

Principles of democratic communism

2012-01-10T04:59:00.002-07:00

Democratic communism begins with a truly democratic state*, with constitutional limitations on its power and checks and balances. The democratic communist state consists of three major institutions. The people and their delegates set policy. The civil service implements policy. The judiciary ensures that policy and its implementation is reasonable, lawful, and constitutional. Unlike the modern republican** state, there is no separate executive; although the civil service implements policy, it does not have the same policy-making powers employed by republican presidents and prime ministers.

*I mean "state" as those institutions with a collective monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
**I mean "republican" in the sense of a state where the people elect trustee representatives; trustee representatives have the authority to act in secret, are not immediately accountable to the people, and can use their offices for economic, social, and political privilege.

The people comprise all citizens, as defined by the constitution. No citizen may be involuntarily excluded from participation except for medical incapacity and by due process of law. Where practical, the people set policy by direct democracy. Where direct democracy is impractical, the people appoint delegates to act on their behalf. Delegates must act transparently: they may not keep any secrets from the people. Delegates are immediately accountable: a majority of the people whom a delegate represents may at any time recall that delegate. Delegates cannot accumulate or exercise privilege: their pay is fixed by law and must not exceed ordinary workers' wages, and delegates cannot accept any other direct or indirect economic compensation during or after their services as delegates.

The civil service implements policy. The people cannot act directly; they must direct the civil service to implement a policy. The civil service cannot implement any new policies or procedures without explicit, public approval from the people. The civil service must act transparently: they cannot keep secrets from the people except where information affects a criminal investigation in progress (and the information must be made public when someone is charged, when the investigation is abandoned, or after a fixed period of time), or when the information would give immediate tactical advantage to a hostile or potentially hostile foreign state. The civil service must be independent of the people: the people cannot arbitrarily affect the promotion or retention of anyone in the civil service. The people can intervene in the civil service only when a member of the civil service is insubordinate, when he or she refuses to carry out the policy of the people when it is possible to do so. All of the people's interventions must be by due process of law. A member of the civil service can be internally fired, demoted, or have his or her pay reduced only by due process of law.

The police and the military are special branches of the civil service. The police are responsible for actually coercing people within the geographical boundaries of the country; the military is responsible for protecting the geographical boundaries of the country from foreign actors. All* citizens must serve, and only citizens may serve, as "on the ground" members of the police and/or the military (i.e. patrol officers and private soldiers), under the supervision of officers who are members of the police or military civil service. The person who actually holds the baton or the rifle must be a citizen. It must always be an affirmative defense for insubordination by a citizen than an order is illegal, unconstitutional, or immoral; if a citizen asserts such a defense, his or her case must be heard by the civil judiciary and in no case may an officer implement summary justice.

*Exceptions for religious or moral reasons are a topic for future debate.

The judiciary defines and implements due process of law. The state may exercise violence only with the specific assent of the judiciary: an individual, for example, may be arrested only with approval of a judge and imprisoned or otherwise coerced only after a judicial trial. Where prior approval of coercion is impractical (e.g. "exigent circumstances"), the judiciary must in every case exercise specific post hoc review. In general, "due process" must include the ordinary western standards: an impartial judge, a jury of citizens, an adversarial process with guaranteed competent legal representation of all parties, publicly declared and objectively determinable legal standards, general applicability of laws to all people, and the prohibition of ex post facto laws and "bills of attainder".

A judge may also act as an inquisitor (as both judge and prosecutor, without the presumption of innocence) against any delegate of the people or any member of the civil service reasonably suspected of illegal activity or official malfeasance.

Judges must be generally acceptable and independent. No single faction of the people may ever completely control the appointment or promotion of any judge. Judges may always sanctioned, punished, or impeached for illegal conduct, but no judge may be arbitrarily removed from any single case during its process. No judge may be arbitrarily sanctioned for his or her legal actions or decisions in any case. Judges responsible for the review of other judges' actions must serve fixed terms and cannot be arbitrarily removed from office during that term. Judges primarily responsible for evaluating the constitutionality of laws must serve lifetime appointments.

The constitution specifies the organization of the state, described above, and creates specific limitations on the actions of the state. The specific limitations should include those presently implemented in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution* and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, with the specific exception that protection afforded property be construed as protection of physical objects in the immediate possession and use of an individual.

*If the constitution specifies a unitary state, then provisions of the Bill of Rights pertaining to the separation of powers between the federal and state governments would be inapplicable.

The people and their delegates, the civil service, and the judiciary, operating under the restrictions and with the legitimacy of the constitution, comprise the state.

The state may regulate the conduct of individuals using violent force. All regulation must take the form of generally applicable laws, with objectively determinable standards, acting forward in time. No law may explicitly or implicitly single out any individual or group of the people for applicability, except where membership in that group is voluntary. All coercion must have the primary purpose only of preventing recurrence of prohibited behavior by an individual (or guaranteeing future compliance of required behavior) or ensuring compliance in the future, and efficacy of these purposes must be objectively determinable.

The state is responsible for all monetary and fiscal policy, and may not delegate the creation or implementation of monetary and fiscal policy in any way, in whole or in part, outside the state. The civil service may reject monetary or fiscal policy if there is reason to believe that policy would result in any nominal deflation, or nominal inflation in excess of 50% per annum. The civil service may delay for additional review any monetary or fiscal policy that would result in excessive inflation less than 50% p.a., but must comply if the people or their delegates affirm the policy.

The state is also entirely responsible for the management of financial capital. Only the state may provide money, property or any other valuable consideration for any future consideration in excess of the nominal value of the consideration. In other words, only the state may loan money at interest or provide capital with an expected future dividend or value in excess of the original nominal value*. The state may arbitrarily loan or invest money to one or more citizens to facilitate economic activity. When the state provides for private economic production, the group of citizens must internally manage the production democratically, with all participants enfranchised. The state may also directly engage in economic activity. If the state directly engages in economic activity, it must reasonably capitalize private individuals to engage in the same activity, and ensure that private individuals can compete fairly with the state's operations.

*De minimus, the state does not care if one person lends another $20. For larger amounts, if, for example, one person lends another $1,000, the lender may demand only $1,000 in the future.

The state must employ any individual who requests employment, at wages sufficient to raise a family in civilized dignity and comfort, but without excessive luxury, if two individuals work full time. An individual may receive as many working hours as he or she requests, up to reasonable physical limitations. The state has arbitrary discretion over whether to provide employment less than the hours necessary to provide civilized dignity and comfort to a single individual.

The Stupid! It Burns! (kitchen sink edition)

2012-01-09T16:44:00.000-07:00

In Atheism's DISTURBING Doctrines and tenets... plus videos!, P. P. Simmons offers everything in the realm of the stupid but the kitchen sink. Some highlights:

Atheists repeatedly deny that atheism is a religion. That is a classic delusion. ...

Since atheism teaches that humans are nothing more than animals, it would be completely acceptable for one human being to eat another if it was a matter of life and death. ...

At least one atheist with whom I had extensive conversations with, publicly lamented his own personal use of painkillers and antibiotics because he felt he was doing a disservice to the religious doctrine of evolution. By keeping himself alive he felt he was hindering the process of natural selection and he wished he could sacrifice himself to the process rather than artificially maintain his existence. ...

The apologists of Atheism use incredibly harsh tactics to put unbelievers in their place. They use their time in indoctrination mills to nurse from the breast of elitism and embrace the illusion of intellectual superiority while ingesting the talking points they will later use on people like me. ...

These apparent [atheist] victories are signs of the soon return of Jesus Christ to the earth. It is part of the "strong delusion" and "great falling away" that must happen before His coming. ...

The key word in that entire definition [of liberalism] is the word "unrestricted". Atheists want to live without moral or social boundaries dictated to them by a greater moral authority. In their defeated minds God doesn't exist so his statutes are meaningless. ...

The doctrine of liberalism has led to the modern holocaust of abortion, the destruction of the traditional family, the enslavement of the entire western world due to liberal governing practices leading to unfair taxation, and the degradation of the human condition due to the removal of the restrictions that kept us intact. ...

What would I do if I was faced with the choice of starvation or cannibalism*? That choice will never be a part of my life. In my existential paradigm, there is always the God option. I would pray. I would expect one of three or more or a combination of things to happen. Either God would rescue me out of the predicament or He would provide me with food to eat or probably a combination of both. A third option would be a supernatural sustaining of the body until help arrives. Let me make one thing perfectly clear. Death for the Christian is a sweet release. [emphasis added]

*Simmons seems to have a big hangup about cannibalism.

And just when you thought it couldn't get stupider, along come commenter Piltdown Superman with this gem: Atheists, according to Piltdown, "pretend that they are the brightest bulbs in the cutlery drawer."

(via Alex B.)

The Conservative Reaction

2012-01-09T04:34:00.000-07:00

The Conservative Reaction, by Corey Robin (you should be reading his blog too):

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument for why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty; agency, the prerogative of elites. Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levelers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things."

The Stupid! It Burns! (temporary edition)

2012-01-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

Poor Temporary Atheists

According to the Bible, atheists go to hell when they die to wait in torment for the Judgment of the Great White Throne and the Lake of Fire. In hell the atheist knows that the God of the Bible is real and that he is accountable to him for his angry rejection of Christ. A man who knows that God has put him in hell for his sins is no longer an atheist. He may still hate God and rail against Him, but he can no longer deny the existence of God! ...

Poor temporary atheists. Voltaire, Robert Ingersoll, Christopher Hitchens, and a host of others called themselves atheists while they were alive, but the moment they died, they ceased being atheists. We Christians should put markers on their graves that say, ‘No longer an atheist!’

Santorum

2012-01-07T06:26:00.000-07:00

Santorum? Santorum. Santorum!

Democracy and ideology

2012-01-07T06:21:00.002-07:00

The sine qua non of democracy as an ideology is the principle that the majority, just because it is a majority, sometimes has the right to coerce* the minority, and a minority never has the right to coerce the majority. We can then distinguish democracy from ideologies that hold the majority qua majority never has the right to coerce the minority, and from ideologies that hold that some minorities sometimes have the right to coerce the majority.

*Or "initiate" coercion, even though adding the concept of initiation creates more problems than it solves.

What makes ethics and political science interesting is that we can consider many different questions at different meta-levels, i.e. levels of generality and different levels of abstraction. The concept of free speech makes a particularly clear example. Suppose Andrew (a minority of one) is saying something that most people (the majority) dislike (e.g. "Kill all the redheads!"). We can look at the specific person and his specific speech, or we can look at people in general and speech in general. The question, "Should we permit Andrew to say, 'Kill all the redeads!'?" is a special case of "Under what circumstances should we tell people not to say what they please?" The majority may have very different opinions without contradiction at different meta-levels. At the specific, concrete level, the majority might have the opinion that Andrew's speech is objectionable, but at the general, abstract level, the majority might have the opinion that people should say what they please, even if it is specifically objectionable. Thus we can conclude that even if there were some institutional arrangement that prevented the majority from coercing Andrew (or even coerced the majority into giving Andrew some sort of platform for his speech), it would not be a case of the minority (the members of the institution) coercing the majority, but rather the majority at the abstract coercing itself at the concrete level.

Obviously, ethics and politics gets a lot more complicated when we try to reconcile our abstract opinions with our concrete opinions, especially when some of the abstract opinions take generations to construct. C'est la vie. We have seven billion people on this Earth, in a complex, interdependent technological society. If you want to kill five or six billion of them, and revert to a simple, agrarian society, feel free to try... and I'll feel free to try and stop you. Hard problems are indeed hard, but I have no patience for simplistic, moralistic ideologies.

At the ideological, theoretical level, democracy defines legitimacy as being grounded in some majority opinion. At the practical level, however, all societies can be viewed in some sense as "democratic". If, for example, the majority of the people were to assent to being ruled by an emperor with near-absolute power, then we could say that the emperor's decisions were fundamentally grounded in some majority decision. The emperor obviously cannot rule without an army, and the people must be willing to join, feed and socialize with the army. The emperor must have substantial popular support to rule. Thus "democracy" acts not to differentiate actual societies, but rather to differentiate between the underlying narratives of different societies. In two different hypothetical societies, we might have the same emperor, the same laws, the same army and police, the same territory, but one society has a democratic narrative and another a non-democratic narrative: in the former, the emperor rules because the people want to be ruled by an emperor, that emperor; in the latter, the emperor rules because e.g. the god(s) have chosen him to rule.

We can look at any ethical or political ideology as a "lens", as the underlying theme of the narrative we use to justify the use of coercion. We can construct a narrative of any society using any ideological theme. The narrative might be... strained... but it can be made logically coherent. (If Christianity can be made logically coherent, and it can, anything can be made logically coherent.) That we can narrate any society in terms of any ideology does not, however, mean that ideology is entirely useless. We can, most obviously, look for the strains in the narrative. If some ideological justification for an institution or social practice appears rococo, over-complicated, or just plain weird, narrating a society in terms of that ideology makes that strain explicit and a candidate for amendment. Alternatively, an ideological narrative will highlight areas where the ideology itself seems undesirable or absurd; it is, for example, absurd to construct Libertarianism to the extreme of permitting a person to sell himself into chattel slavery*. Ideology is not useful for distinguishing between societies, but ideology is very useful for directing the future evolution of a society.

*I want to be clear: I think that most self-identified Libertarians would not take Libertarianism to the extreme of permitting slavery (at least not publicly). The objection that the "purest" form of Libertarianism would permit slavery is a weak political objection; it is an objection only to claims of the absolute, objective truth of Libertarianism.

Assuming all societies construct a democratic narrative (and almost every human society in the 21st century does so), we can use democratic ideology to differentiate between societies in practice by determining to what degree the will of the majority directly influences public policy, i.e. the legitimate exercise of coercion. We can construct a completely democratic narrative for an emperor or monarch, but it is of course a very indirect form of democracy: the will of the people does not have any direct effect on public policy, and the acceptance of a particular monarch is infrequent and passive. A republic (such as the United States) is more directly democratic than a monarchy: the government is chosen more frequently and more actively than in a monarchy, and chosen more directly on the promised policies of the candidates. But a republic still interposes the will of the electors between the people and actual public policy. An Athenian* or town hall democracy is about as direct as possible.

*Ignoring, of course, women, slaves, and immigrants.

More democracy is not necessarily better. We intuitively feel, as in the example of free speech above, that simply putting every individual decision to a simple majority vote would not result in a society that we want to live in. An intellectual must I think, not advocate the purest form of any political ideology, but carefully and intelligently examine the ideological narrative of various societies to identify strains and absurdities; her task is to make not a "purer" society, but a better society. Indeed, I myself identify as a communist precisely and only because I (presently) believe that communism is not the purest but the best way to institutionalize a democracy.

The Stupid! It Burns! (missing piece edition)

2012-01-05T05:08:00.000-07:00

Atheists have a piece missing

Most people who believe in God don’t do so because they have been convinced by the cosmological – or any other – argument for his existence. They simply believe, using the same faculty of belief that allows them to believe in such things as the reality of the material world around them, the reality of the past, and the fact that minds exist other than their own. It is an a priori knowledge founded on evidence that is internal to the believer. ...

That is the bit that is missing or deliberately suppressed in atheists: the ability to know God exists. It’s a shame, really.

The Stupid! It Burns! (peer-reviewed edition)

2012-01-05T05:05:00.002-07:00

Where’s the Evidence? Why the New Atheists Fail to Prove their Case

One of the most widespread claims amongst new atheists is that all religion is harmful. ... Given that these sorts of claims are backed up by appeals to science, reason and logic it behooves us to hold these conclusions to very high standards when analyzing them. ... Yet, there have been no scientific findings concluding that all religion is poisonous, that belief in supernatural entities leads to harm or that it infects people like a virus. ...

Case and point: How can Dawkins, Greta Christina or Sam Harris claim that the Dinka tradition of Africa is harmful? They’ve probably never heard of it, let alone conducted any sort of anthropological or sociological studies to determine the degree of harmfulness it poses to its members or others. Dawkins claims “I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence.” I’d love to see the data and research he’s gathered to reach such monumental conclusions about religion. Has he investigated the Japanese religion Tenrikyo? The Korean tradition Wonbulgyo? Have any of these atheists been to Iraq or Iran to interview any Mandeans? Do these atheists ‘know’ in some scientific way that the traditional mythological beliefs of the Inuit of the polar regions were harmful or led to more harm? Is Native American spirituality really child abuse? I can just see it now: “Atheists Launch New Campaign to Eradicate Native American Religion.” Oh, wait that campaign has already been tried.

Update 5 Jan 2012: Scofield has apparently deleted his essay. Google has it cached for now, and I have my own copy.

Update 27 Jan 2012: The article is back up here. As best I can tell, all the original quotations appear in the current copy, but I haven't checked it thoroughly.

The Stupid! It Burns! (moral edition re-re-...-redux)

2012-01-04T03:34:00.000-07:00

Do You Trust Atheists?

Try this: Go to a Christian forum and see how people talk. Then go to a forum like Raving Atheists and see how people talk. Atheists not only have no moral foundation, their behavior quickly deteriorates as a result. It is not injustice that makes public opinion of atheists what it is—it is the fact of the situation.

I'm surprised he doesn't mention Stormfront.

The Stupid! It Burns! (have a little cheese with your whine edition)

2012-01-03T12:44:00.000-07:00

If God Was Real, He’d Prove Himself To Atheists! Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)

Never mind a quotation; go and read the whole thing.

I'll leave the analyses to Coyne, Myers, and MacDonald, (not to mention MacDonald's reply to Hoffmann's comment).

The Stupid! It Burns! (miraculous edition)

2012-01-02T17:51:00.000-07:00

If God Was Real, He’d Prove Himself To Atheists!

What’s really miraculous is the belief that miracles are impossible. On this point the heathen is the real priest of our age, the great mystic who baffles the common people with inexplicable revelations from Holy Science. “Pigs cannot fly,” he says.

“Why not?” the ignorant Christian rejoins.
“Because of the laws of physics.”
“What are those?”
“Laws we make based on common occurrences. Because pigs have not flown every time we’ve observed them, we can safely assume pigs never fly.”
“But pigs flying would be an uncommon occurrence.”
“Yes.”
“So what you’re saying is that the uncommon occurrence of pigs flying is impossible because commonly, pigs do not. That which is unlikely is impossible, because it is unlikely.”
“Yeth.” The atheist inexplicably developed a lisp.
“What is it that makes a pig go on not-flying?”
“Thience!”
“You must not like quantum physics.”
“No, I do. After all, I am an atheith.”

The Labor Theory of Value

2012-01-02T17:39:00.001-07:00

This essay was first submitted to Economics 201-400, at the Community College of Denver, on 6 Dec. 2010.

What determines what quantity of one thing will fetch some quantity of another thing? Why is the price of a pair of ordinary shoes, a shirt, or a loaf of bread the same in every store? Why should bread be $2.50 a loaf and shoes $25 a pair and not vice-versa? Philosophers since Aristotle have inquired into economic value and prices. Beginning with Adam Smith and David Ricardo, economists have tried to understand the exchange value of commodities in terms of the embodied human labor, the Labor Theory of Value. Karl Marx improved the Labor Theory of Value, identifying the source of non-wage factors in surplus labor, and making explicit the fundamentally statistical character of the theory. There are issues with Marx’s theory, however. The most serious issue, the transformation problem, demonstrates that Marx’s theory conflicts with the assumption that capitalists will allocate their capital to achieve a uniform rate of return across all industries, including those that produce both final and intermediate goods. The transformation problem, however, itself requires assumptions that are at best suspect, especially under global equilibrium conditions. While these issues render Marx’s theory insufficient to predict money prices in the short term, we can look at the Labor Theory of Value in a paradigmatic sense, to make issues of political economy explicit and inform normative economics.

Marx himself did not first propose the Labor Theory of Value. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith connects labor to price. According to Smith, “The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities” (par. 1). Although Smith identifies labor as the source of value, he fails to identify the historical labor indirectly embodied in commodities, such as the labor necessary to make a worker’s tools and equipment. To Smith the exchange value of a commodity is the immediate labor saved by the exchange; if buying a commodity will save one person two hours of labor, the exchange value would be two hours of labor, or the equivalent in money. While a useful approximation, the immediate exchange value becomes too imprecise and variable to construct a quantitative theory.

David Ricardo performs a more thorough accounting in Principles of Political Economy: “The exchangeable value of the commodities produced [is] in proportion to the labour bestowed on their production; not on their immediate production only, but on all those implements or machines required to give effect to the particular labour to which they were applied” (par. 19). But Engels still observes that traditional economics fails to give a satisfactory explanation for the distinction between wages and actual labor: If the exchange value of an hour of labor is an hour of labor, then how can wages – just the value of labor in money form – afford the owner of capital any opportunity for profit? If wages are less than the actual value of labor, why are they less? How do we calculate how much less?

In Capital, Karl Marx improves the Labor Theory of Value by formally separating the notions of labor and labor power. Labor is the actual labor performed by a worker; labor power is the cost to make that labor available, essentially the cost to feed, clothe, house, and entertain the worker, as well as providing for the next generation of workers. In any economy generating a surplus, the cost of labor power, i.e. the labor necessary to feed a worker, will be less than the labor made available by that labor power. Wages are therefore a function of labor power, but the exchange value of a commodity is a function of the actual labor required to produce that commodity (ch. 6). We can conclude then that the difference between labor and labor power, the surplus value of labor, is the ultimate source of profit.

Marx also makes clear that the exchange value of a particular instance of a commodity is not related to the total amount of labor embodied in that instance. “Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production” (“Capital” pt. 1 ch. 1 par. 14). The exchange value is instead related to the socially necessary labor embodied in the commodity as a class, which Marx clearly describes as a statistical property: The individual unit of labor “is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour-power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary” (“Capital” pt. 1 ch. 1 par. 14). For example,

The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value. (“Capital” pt. 1 ch. 1 par. 14)

It is thus clear that the exchange value derives from some statistical property of the actual labor embodied in all the instances of a commodity as a class.

Finally, Marx introduces the two distinct notions of abstract labor. The first notion is human labor abstracted from the particular task a worker performs. “Neither can [a commodity] any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. . . . All are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract” (“Capital” pt. 1 ch. 1 par. 10). But Marx also realizes that even in this sense of abstraction, not all labor is created equal. “One man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement” (“Gotha” pt. 1). Environmental factors also affect intensity. It seems obvious that ceteris paribus an hour doing physical labor standing in a sewer would be more “intense” than an hour sitting in an air-conditioned office.

The Labor Theory of Value has considerable philosophical appeal. Smith and Ricardo seem to treat other factors of production – profit, rent and interest – as sui generis, having their own distinct character and contribution to exchange value unrelated to human labor. While these factors contribute to immediate prices, it is difficult to understand how mere ownership – distinct from the administrative or supervisory labor the capitalist, landlord or banker might perform – can itself create value in the same sense that labor creates value. In a society without a class structure, without a distinct class or group of owners, the same competitive forces that equalize prices would ensure that no individual as owner of the equipment, land or money he used directly in his own production could say that the ownership by itself contributed more than just his own labor to the exchange value of the product. All individuals have to trade is their individual time and effort, either directly (“I scratch your back; you scratch mine”) or indirectly by embodying their labor in commodities. The non-wage factors of production would seem, philosophically, to be just social constructions to allocate the surplus value of labor.

As philosophically appealing as Marx’s Labor Theory of Value might be, it suffers from considerable problems as a descriptive theory. A good descriptive theory, especially a reductive theory, requires that the reduced elements be independently determinable. Marx’s Labor Theory of Value fails to the extent that it purports to reduce the competitive market price of a commodity – including labor power as a commodity – to any independently determinable quantity of embodied labor. In this sense the Labor Theory of Value predicts that the market “discovers” the exchange value of a commodity, the socially necessary abstract labor embodied in that commodity. However, the market itself directly affects the socially necessary abstract labor embodied in the commodity in a number of ways.

Unlike any other commodity, labor power is instantiated in human beings. A shoe or a steel girder as a commodity has no preferences, needs or wants of its own; it thus cannot object to being sold at cost. Human beings, on the other hand, do indeed have preferences, needs and wants; they are strongly motivated to act on those subjective properties. Hence the cost of labor power feels a “force” tending towards disequilibrium not present in any other commodity. As Marx notes:

The number and extent of [the labourer’s] so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed. In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element. (“Capital” pt. 2 ch. 6 par. 10)

Although Marx does go on to say, “In a given country, at a given period, the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the labourer is practically known” (“Capital” pt. 2 ch. 6 par. 10), we cannot expect the price of labor power to move toward equilibrium with the same alacrity as other commodities.

Another problem is that market prices do not just emerge from the socially necessary abstract labor time embodied in a commodity; market forces directly affect the labor embodied in a commodity. Marx’s simplistic formulation, “The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production” (“Capital” pt. 1 ch. 1 par. 14), requires substantive revision. Even absent non-wage factors, we see that a shift in just the demand curve, with no changes to technology, individual efficiency, or any other specific characteristics of supply, still changes the statistical properties of the cost of supply, and therefore changes the socially necessary labor time necessary to supply the commodity. When demand falls, the incentive is not to arbitrarily eliminate suppliers of a commodity, but rather to eliminate the suppliers with the highest marginal cost. Similarly, when demand rises, we do not add “average” suppliers; we must add new suppliers with a higher marginal cost. Thus while the socially necessary labor time is still strictly meaningful – regardless of the demand, the marginal cost of supply at equilibrium and the average cost of supply are real costs – we cannot determine the socially necessary labor time independently of market forces.

This characteristic means that the efficiency of labor, a component of abstract labor, is also dependent on demand. The only way to compare efficiency across different forms of labor is to compare an individual laborer’s productivity to the socially necessary labor time for the commodity as a class. If the socially necessary labor time for producing a widget is 10 hours, and a particular laborer can produce a widget in 8 hours, then her productivity is 10/8 x 100% = 125%. But if the socially necessary labor time falls to 9 hours, then her productivity falls to 10/9 x 100% ~ 11% even though nothing about the quality of her own work has changed.

Furthermore, while it’s intuitively appealing that the environmental conditions of some labor can affect the intensity or desirability of the labor, it is difficult to independently measure these factors quantitatively. Yes, working in a sewer might obviously be less desirable than working in an air-conditioned office, but by how much? One tenth as desirable? One half? Ten percent? We have to rely on market forces to quantify these subjective factors. We cannot predict the market price based on the environmental conditions; we must, rather, infer the environment’s effect from the market prices.

The transformation problem is perhaps the most serious problem affecting the Labor Theory of Value. Succinctly, the capitalist mode of production consists of using the production of commodities to convert money into commodities, and commodities into more money. The capitalist wants to realize a profit on the total amount of money he invests in an enterprise, regardless of what that money is spent on. If the surplus value of labor is the only “true” source of profit, then the capitalist could realize a profit only from the direct labor inputs to production; the surplus value of labor embodied in the rest of the inputs, especially physical capital and intermediate goods, has already been extracted by the suppliers of those inputs. Samuelson notes that Marx’s Labor Theory of Value predicts that profit should act like a value-added tax; the “added value” consists of the surplus labor at each stage of production. But in the capitalist mode of production profit actually acts like a turnover tax, where each stage of the production process incurs a “tax” on the entire value transmitted, not just the value added. Samuelson shows that these different ways of looking at profit result in different slopes for the wage component of the production possibility frontier (p. 409). It is mathematically impossible to model a constant turnover tax as a constant value-added tax; they might have the same total cost, but their allocation cannot be transformed to individual industries. The transformation problem alone thus decisively renders the Labor Theory of Value insufficient as a short-run predictor of market prices in a capitalist economy.

It is not clear, however, that the transformation problem decisively rebuts the fundamental premise of the Labor Theory of Value.

Wikipedia attempts an analysis of the transformation problem using the Deer-Beaver-Arrow model, but the analysis has several flaws; it simply assumes a constant rate of return on capital, with no deeper justification. A more careful analysis is required.

Let us first consider a very simple two-product economy, consisting of the production of Deer and Beavers, each of which require only direct labor. We can assume that all labor is homogenous: Any person may turn her hand equally effectively to the production of Deer or Beavers, and she is free to do so. We can also assume that supply curves are horizontal, perfectly elastic; the marginal cost remains constant and demand determines only the quantity supplied. We can make these assumptions without loss of generality: All the properties that complicate microeconomic analysis – comparative advantage, rising marginal cost of supply, land allocation – affect the equilibrium price, a real labor cost that (absent non-wage factors) determines the socially necessary labor time for the production of a commodity. We can assume that to reach some equilibrium, the individuals have made all available Pareto optimizations, and we have settled on some definite socially necessary labor time necessary to meet demand. It is clear in this case that the relative price of Deer and Beavers is the relative socially necessary labor time embodied in their production. Changes in demand curves will change only the relative quantities of Deer and Beaver produced at that relative price.

To this model, we will add a “capital” good, Arrows, which make the production of both Deer and Beavers more efficient. As a capital good, we might conjecture that Arrows would earn a rate of return, over and above their labor cost. But where does this rate of return come from? If we hold to our original assumption, that labor is homogenous and each individual can freely allocate her labor, then a rate of return implies that labor spent making Arrows returns more than labor spent hunting Deer and Beavers, even using Arrows. In this case everyone will “bid” for the privilege of making Arrows until each individual becomes indifferent to how she spends her time, implying a zero rate of return over and above the labor cost. Far from disproving the Labor Theory of Value, simple equilibrium analysis under free market assumptions seems to disprove the capitalist mode of production!

Samuelson concludes from a more sophisticated analysis of the Labor Theory of Value and the transformation problem that the Labor Theory of Value is essentially a restatement of “bourgeois” money-based economics:

Although Capital’s total findings need not have been developed in dependence on Volume I’s digression into surplus values, its essential insight does depend crucially on comparison of the subsistence goods needed to produce and reproduce labor with what the undiluted labor theory of value calculates to be the amount of goods producible for all classes in view of the embodied labor requirements of the goods. The tools of bourgeois analysis could have been used to discover and expound this notion of exploitation if only those economists had been motivated to use the tools for this purpose. (p. 422)

Even though the Labor Theory of Value fails as a short-term predictor of prices in a growing capitalist economy, it does put at the forefront the fundamental dependence of economics on the particular characteristics of labor and labor power. By making labor central, the Labor Theory of Value actually does discover what Samuelson implies traditional analysis could have discovered but did not. Taking a labor-centric view of economics thus has significant implications for not only how economics affects our political decision-making, but also how we should actually conduct economic analysis.

An important consequence of a labor-centric view of economics is that profitability is not intrinsically good. Profit is not “real”; it is, rather, a disguised form of surplus labor. To determine whether some profit is good, we have to look at where it comes from and where it goes. Profit that comes from a real increase in labor productivity is better than profit that comes from a reduction in the price of labor power. Profit that goes to expanding our physical, human and technological capital is better than profit that goes to the extravagant consumption of the capital-owning class. A money-centric view of economics does not make clear the source, destination or justification of profit; a labor-centric view puts these characteristics in plain sight.

Although labor power has unique historical and moral characteristics, it is still in many important senses a commodity, one that workers exchange with capitalists in a competitive market. As a commodity, labor power is subject to the same market forces as any other commodity, forces that tend to move the price of any commodity to its socially necessary cost. Thus we cannot count on the “invisible hand” to raise the price of labor power and distribute the productivity of society to those who do the actual work; raising the price of labor power – if we choose to do so – must therefore be a social decision. In just the same sense allowing the invisible hand to lower the price of labor power is just as much a social decision. Money-centric economics, however, allows us to obscure the social nature of this decision, making it seem the outcome of “inexorable” economic forces.

Finally, the Labor Theory of Value argues that the principal efforts of economists should be turned to understanding and measuring the role of labor in the economy. Statistics about the labor embedded in individual products, the labor available to the economy as a whole, as well as the price of labor power should receive as much or more attention as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and nominal Gross Domestic Product. The Labor Theory of Value implies that every measurement of real economic activity should be stated somehow in terms of labor and labor power. Indeed the Labor Theory of Value suggests that money itself, i.e. nominal economic measurement, should explicitly refer to some property of labor.

The tools are there; we need a shift in emphasis. In 1845, Marx wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (“Feuerbach”). What we do not measure, we cannot optimize; what we do not discuss, we cannot change. We must explicitly discuss and make central the role of labor and labor power in our economy if we want to improve the conditions of the billions of people who spend their time working.

Works Cited

Engels, Frederick. Introduction. Trans. Frederick Engels. Wage Labour and Capital. By Karl Marx. Ed. Frederick Engels. 1849. Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org). Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Ed. Frederick Engels. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. First English Edition ed. Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress, 1887. Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org). Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

Marx, Karl. "Theses on Feuerbach." Marx/Engels Selected Works. Trans. W. Lough. Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress, 1969. 13-15. Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org). Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

Ricardo, David. "On Value." On The Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation. 1821. Project Gutenberg, 31 July 2010. Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

Samuelson, Paul A. "Understanding the Marxian Notion of Exploitation: A Summary of the So-Called Transformation Problem Between Marxian Values and Competitive Prices." Journal of Economic Literature 9.2 (1971): 399-431. EconLit. Web. 2 Nov. 2010.

Smith, Adam. "Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities, or of Their Price in Labour, and Their Price in Money." An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Project Gutenberg, 1 June 2002. Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

"Transformation Problem." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. n.d. Web. 6 Dec. 2010. .

First, they came for the fundies...

2012-01-02T05:34:00.000-07:00

Commenter Hunt remarks:

One thing atheists, even American atheists, should be up front about is, yes, right now Fundies are in the cross hairs, but I think we should predict the understandable hesitancy of liberals who are going to be thinking "first they came for the fundies, then they came for the moderates, and now they're coming for me..." To a certain extent I think there is a veil between present strategies for an immediately better today and what various atheists see for tomorrow. Some people believe that religion and faith, in any guise, will remain a perpetual threat, ready to recrudesce pathologically, and others only hope for a time when religion has been de-fanged and are comfortable with the idea that it can remain a largely benign social adjunct. Even most New Atheists have that view. I think Hitchens may have been an eradicationist.

I don't think that the Gnu Atheists and the confrontationalists, such as three of the "Four Horsemen" (excluding Dennett), Bob Avakian, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, and minor authors such as myself, make it a giant secret that the liberals and moderates are subject to the same critique as the fundies. The fundies' assholery is why they're the primary target, but the New Atheist critique is not that they're assholes. The New Atheist critique is that you cannot legitimately ground any moral beliefs, good or bad, in the existence of God. Accommodationists so persistently misunderstand this critique that one might suspect intentional obtusity: it doesn't matter that some religious people ground perfectly good moral beliefs in God; it's the basis that's illegitimate, not the outcome.

And, as a lot of authors have noted, the "liberal" religious are usually not all that liberal. Talk to a supposedly liberal theologian, and it really won't be long until he uses God to justify some very illiberal belief, usually against abortion or homosexuality. Avakian makes this point very strongly in Away with All Gods. If your religion's morality is totally acceptable without God, what job is God doing?

Roberts is perhaps saying that we have historically constructed a lot of Western liberal (in the contemporary sense, not the political science sense) ideas in terms of God and Christianity. Well, sure. But taking God away does not therefore take those ideas away (or if it does, maybe we should). It seems that the scientific truth that we have evolved biologically to be social animals and evolved socially to create complex, interdependent societies provides a reasonable justification for a lot of the rights formerly constructed in terms of God. I think a natural basis for rights is a lot more complicated than a theistic basis, but that's not any more valid an objection than that quantum mechanics is a lot more complicated (and weirder) than classical mechanics. I mean, here we are: we can observe that societies have constructed quite a lot of rights for their members; a scientific theory has to account for observation, n'est pas?

The essential role of Christianity in Western culture

2011-12-31T05:05:00.001-07:00

Never mind the actual post, The ‘Atheistic’ Character of Christianity and the Question of Christ; the meat of Alastair Roberts' point is in his reply to my comment. (You'll have to scroll down a bit; I don't see any way of linking to individual comments on his blog.)

Roberts seems to make two fundamental points. First, popular forms of Christianity are "heterodox" and "bizarre". His "bog-standard orthodox Christian tradition" is the real Christianity; to address other forms is to attack a straw man. Despite Roberts' effort to find common ground with atheism, Roberts seems to consider the fundamentalists so marginal that they are less of a problem than atheists themselves. Second, atheists seem to have forgotten that Christian ideas, the ideas of his sort of Christianity, are "part of the DNA of Western culture." By abandoning Christianity, atheists are losing a critical grounding for Western culture, without offering a satisfactory alternative. But Roberts is, I think, fundamentally missing the point of the modern atheist movement, which is primarily a struggle against fundamentalism.

Roberts is aware of a wide range of atheist beliefs. He praises (or does he damn it with faint praise?) a strain of atheist thought that is relentlessly questioning and critical. But the modern atheist movement — the New Atheists — aren't really part of the deeper philosophical struggle against theism. Our primary targets are the fundamentalists, those who would use a view of God — a view that I suspect Roberts would find "heterodox" — to assert supernatural status to their petty hang-ups and small-minded prejudices. If Roberts' brand of Christianity does not share those hang-ups and prejudices, good for him; if the shoe doesn't fit, he is not obliged to wear it. If Roberts does not want to struggle against the fundamentalists, that's his choice, but we do want to struggle against the fundamentalists. When New Atheists attack the philosophical underpinnings of fundamentalism, we are not (at least not necessarily) attacking the underpinnings of Roberts own theology. That the New Atheists often seem unaware of his theology is primarily because his theology is not directly relevant to our struggle.

But of course, the deeper philosophical critique against theism, which definitely does include Roberts' theology, is also important. But I think atheists expect a higher burden from Roberts than he would prefer. Roberts claims that Christianity is historically important, but atheists quickly grant that claim. From an historical argument, one can demand only that we include a considerable body of Christian thought in the canon of the humanities, and we do include that body of thought. (Whether we adequately promote that thought as something every educated person should be familiar with is a different argument, and atheists as a group do not have much standing to set the academic curriculum.) Yes, Christian thinkers, operating in various theological contexts, have made important contributions to Western values. Thanks, but what have you done for us lately? But Roberts is not making only an historical argument.

Roberts appears to believe that not only is Christianity an important historical force, but that it is a philosophically essential component of the edifice of Western cultural values, values that atheists themselves endorse. To deny Christianity, Roberts' asserts, is to deny the philosophical underpinnings of our notions of rights, even our notions of skepticism and critical investigation. To assert those same rights and methodologies without Christianity — the right sort of Christianity, of course — is to work on borrowed ontological capital. Hopefully, he will develop this argument further.

But this argument does not require that atheists have a deep understanding of any particular theology; atheists need only offer our own satisfactory grounding, without any gods or supernatural forces. (Of course, I doubt that we will ever satisfy Roberts himself, so we need only satisfy ourselves.) But this grounding is easy to provide. We can observe, and draw scientific conclusions from our observations, many characteristics and properties of human beings in general. We are beings that want to be happy, and we are social beings who have evolved and learned to be concerned with the happiness of others. We can also observe that trying to manage the happiness of large numbers of people is an extremely complicated task, too complex to optimize analytically. We can view all of our discourse on rights, freedoms, ethics, and justice as simply that: a dialectical conversation to address the burning question of how we can all be as happy as possible. We don't need any god to want to be happy, and we don't need any god to observe that we have evolved as a social species, concerned with the happiness of others.

We're all very pleased that Roberts et al. have come to many of the same conclusions that secular humanists have come to, even if they express those conclusions in a theological rather than a naturalistic narrative. But we do not need to be deeply familiar with that theological narrative to address either of our goals. We do not need to address the humanistic theological account to address nonhumanistic religion. To the extent that we struggle against fundamentalism, we don't need to talk about non-fundamentalist theology. And we don't need to address any kind of theology to find that our Western values — the good ones, at least — can very easily rest on our biological and social natures.

Oh, the irony...

2011-12-28T15:23:00.000-07:00

Fark headline of the year: Gold embroidered hat-wearing Pope, carrying a diamond and ruby encrusted solid gold scepter, decries the "superficial glitter" of the season, just after unveiling an enormous 23 foot tall, 82 foot wide nativity scene

Pope calls for worshipers to remember 'essence' of Christmas

My cow collapsed...

2011-12-28T14:03:00.002-07:00

My cow collapsed, and now there's a human to animal infection outbreak among illegal immigrants.

Real microeconomics (demand shocks)

2011-12-27T08:10:00.002-07:00

Part 1: What is "real"? (commentary)
Part 2a: Real microeconomics (demand shocks)

One definition of microeconomics is the economics of individual firms (or consumers) by themselves, as opposed to macroeconomics, which is the study of the economy in the aggregate. Another definition, which seems especially useful for studying real economics, is that microeconomics takes the total level of output of an isolated* national economy for granted, and is concerned with optimizing the mix of goods and services within that economy.

*International trade notwithstanding, it's easier to consider the national economy as an isolated whole, and international trade doesn't substantially change the underlying theory.

Even the most casual reader should be aware of the standard supply and demand curves, with the equilibrium price at the point where the marginal cost of supply (the amount of something required to produce one more unit of the product) equals the marginal utility of demand (the amount of something for which a consumer will forego to obtain one more unit of the product). In financial microeconomics, the y-axis is the price level. In real microeconomics, the x-axis is still quantity produced, but real economics ignores money. So how should we label the Y-axis?

The supply curve increases not primarily because of diseconomies of scale, but primarily because of rising opportunity costs. Every coat we make means that we cannot make a hat*. To make the first, most demanded coat, we sacrifice the last, least demanded hat. To make the second, slightly less demanded coat, we sacrifice the second to last, slightly more demanded hat. And so forth, until we get to the point where we are making the coat that is just about as demanded as the hat we are not making. Therefore, in real economics, the y-axis represents opportunity cost, the quantity of all other goods and services that we're not making in order to make the quantity of the specific good or service under consideration.

*We can assume wolg that the trade-off is one-to-one and linear so long as the demand curves are monotonically decreasing.

For obvious reasons, it is not the case that the amount of each and every service is at exactly the correct level. Tastes, preferences, and costs are all constantly changing. Therefore, the quantity of most goods and services we're producing constantly changes. But in an industrial economy, we cannot simply turn on a dime and change production instantaneously. Suppose, for example, that we are producing too many coats. If we were to not produce some of those coats, we could produce more hats, which we want more than the coats. However, we cannot instantaneously just produce fewer coats and more hats.

We must undertake a two-step process to modify production. First, we have to invest. We have to make more hat-making factories, and we have to train more workers to make hats. Since we are making too many coats, we make (and maintain; factories wear out too) fewer coat-making factories than is necessary to sustain current production. Once we have the new hat-making factories, we have to actually make more hats, deliver them to stores, and distribute them to consumers. All of this activity takes time.

Usually, it all evens out. We're usually making just a little too many of some goods and services, a little too few of others, and everything evens out. We produce about the same amount for consumption and investment overall, month to month, year to year. Everybody is always a little bit dissatisfied: coats are a little bit too cheap, hats are a little bit too expensive, so people end up with coats they didn't want as much as the hats they couldn't afford. But again, this dissatisfaction is more-or-less constant, and drives long-term economic growth.

But sometimes there are more radical microeconomic shifts, radical enough that they deserve to be called "crises". For example, when the computer was invented, a whole lot of people suddenly really wanted one. It took more than one annual accounting period — about twenty or thirty years, all told — to invest enough to make enough computers (and computer programs) for everyone who wanted one (badly enough) to actually get one. That meant that for a couple of decades, we were consuming measurably less than we wanted and expected to, so we could invest in building computers. It eventually sorted itself out, but it took a long time.

At the real level, microeconomics is concerned with precisely what we should produce. Because the real microeconomy cannot "move on a dime", we have to predict, as best we can, not only what we're short of now, but what we'll be short of — and how short we'll be — in the future.

The summit of the human race?

2011-12-25T18:32:00.001-07:00

Why Should We Place Christ at the Top and Summit of the Human Race?

Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than Epicurus? In what respect was he the superior of Zoroaster? Was he gentler than Lao-tsze, more universal than Confucius? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of Zeno? Did he express grander truths than Cicero? Was his mind subtler than Spinoza’s? Was his brain equal to Kepler’s or Newton’s? Was he grander in death — a sublimer martyr than Bruno? Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal of Shakespeare, the greatest of the human race?

— Robert G. Ingersoll

(via Daniel Fincke)

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

Merry Christmas
by Langston Hughes, New Masses, Dec. 1930

Merry Christmas, China
From the gun-boats in the river,
Ten-inch shells for Christmas gifts,
And peace on earth forever.

Merry Christmas, India,
To Gandhi in his cell,
From righteous Christian England,
Ring out, bright Christmas bell!

Ring Merry Christmas, Africa,
From Cairo to the Cape!
Ring Hallehuiah! Praise the Lord!
(For murder and rape.)

Ring Merry Christmas, Haiti!
(And drown the voodoo drums –
We’ll rob you to the Christian hymns
Until the next Christ comes.)

Ring Merry Christmas, Cuba!
(While Yankee domination
Keeps a nice fat president
In a little half-starved nation.)

And to you down-and-outers,
(“Due to economic laws”)
Oh, eat, drink, and be merry
With a bread-line Santa Claus –

While all the world hails Christmas,
While all the church bells sway!
While, better still, the Christian guns
Proclaim this joyous day!

While holy steel that makes us strong
Spits forth a mighty Yuletide song:
SHOOT Merry Christmas everywhere!
Let Merry Christmas GAS the air!

(via David F. Ruccio and Uddari Weblog)

The Stupid! It Burns! (top ten edition)

2011-12-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

Top Ten Anti-Christian Acts of 2011

I cannot improve on PZ Myers' analysis:

The most horrible anti-Christian oppression going on in the country right now is that homophobic/xenophobic Christians are being called out on their bigotry.

Our way or God's way

2011-12-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

Jerry Coyne points us to Denis Alexander's "metaphorical" interpretation of the Adam and Eve myth. Coyne justly criticizes Alexander for ignoring the fact that millions of people (and no small few theologians) really do take the Adam and Eve story literally, and that while Alexander takes Adam and Eve metaphorically, he appears to take Jesus' resurrection literally. Coyne is correct, of course, but even as metaphor, Alexander's interpretation is deeply problematic.

Alexander wants to interpret Adam and Eve as a "narrative" which "tells the story of humankind going their way rather than God's way." "All people," Alexander tells us "sin by their own free will." Without Jesus' sacrifice, humanity can win back a "friendship with God" that "first Adam – Everyman – is unable to accomplish by his own efforts." But if this story is just a narrative, if it's not actually true, then it becomes almost incomprehensible that anyone would adopt it.

What is this "God's way" that we are supposedly abandoning? What are these "sins" and why should they be an inescapable consequence of free will? It would be one thing if it were literally, actually true, if that's how God really did set up the universe. I can't comprehend why an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God would do such a thing, but I'm baffled by far less powerful beings (such as my college's web site designers) than Yahweh. If it's true, we just have to deal with it, just as we have to deal with Quantum Mechanics and economics, which are at least as weird as Original Sin and Redemption.

But if it's not actually, literally, true, then it's not just a story, it's a stupid story. If I have a choice, if the story isn't true, then it becomes at least ridiculous and at worst obscene and immoral. I'm not a "sinner"; I'm very happy going my own way and not God's.
I don't need a "friendship with God", and any friendship that requires the torture and death of a thinking, feeling being — and the character of Jesus in the Bible clearly depicts someone with very human emotions — is a friendship with a psychopathic tyrant: it's not a friendship I even need.

Whether we like it or not, we have to deal with the literal, factual truth. I don't like it that human beings can and have used nuclear weapons on human beings. I don't like it that human beings can and have systematically slaughtered millions of people with industrial efficiency. I don't like it that people can drop brutally torture and rape men, women, and children and then go home and play the part of loving parent and spouse, without a shred of cognitive dissonance and moral qualm. But these things are true.

But if the story of Adam and Eve isn't literally, actually true, if Alexander is seeing it not as a true story we must make sense of, then to not just apply but endorse the metaphorical meaning is to choose it, to endorse it because he likes it. And someone who likes that narrative is not a philosopher or theologian. He's a fool or a monster.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

2011-12-24T05:46:00.001-07:00

Burke ever held, and held rightly, that it can seldom be right… to sacrifice a present benefit for a doubtful advantage in the future… It is not wise to look too far ahead; our powers of prediction are slight, our command over results infinitesimal. It is therefore the happiness of our own contemporaries that is our main concern; we should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear… We can never know enough to make the chance worth taking… There is this further consideration that is often in need of emphasis: it is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.

— John Maynard Keynes, Burke’s Timidity on Embarking on War, 1904

(via Brad DeLong)

Note, however, that when the status quo has become unendurable, it is the conservatives, not the revolutionaries, who are intent on "sacrificing a present benefit," and not for even a "doubtful advantage": if we keep things the same, how could conservatives expect anything but a repeat of the present misery?

Keynes and Burke's advice is so obviously true that one must wonder why they offer it. I'm not an historian, but I've read a couple of books, and when I look at the revolutions in history, I don't see any revolution that sacrifices a present benefit for a doubtful future advantage. Revolutions have usually occurred because the status quo had become unendurable, and there was no present benefit left to sacrifice. Alternatively, (as in the bourgeois revolutions) the revolutionary class had made its benefits manifest and present before the revolution; the revolution occurred only to recognize the already existing real economic and political power with nominal state power. If I'm wrong, let me know, but I just don't see that we ever, as a society, have sacrificed a prosperous present for a conjectured utopia.

The closest we can come to a society ignoring Burke's and Keynes' advice are those two sacrosanct* conflicts: the American Revolution and Civil War. British rule of the American colonies was not catastrophic; independence was about as dubious a benefit as one could imagine, and it nearly failed. Slavery was hardly unendurable (for white people) — it had been legally tolerated for generations — and to even begin to obtain basic participation in civil society, black people had to wait a century after the conflict. Even the benefits of preserving the Union were at best dubious; the nationalist sentiment of the Confederacy still simmers today.

*Sacrosanct to Americans, at least

Why then do Burke and Keynes appear to be stating the obvious with great profundity? I have yet to read much Burke (and, again, I'm not an historian), but it seems clear that Burke had a political agenda considerably more substantive than simplistic caution and cost-benefit analysis. A key component of Burke's political philosophy appears to be that the legitimacy of the state is tradition. It is not that we must proceed cautiously and ensure that the benefit of a radical change in tradition will be worth the cost; a radical change in tradition is inherently evil, because tradition itself is the only political good. Burke's conception of tradition appears to make any cost-benefit analysis irrelevant.

Of course, Burke's conception of what constitutes legitimate "tradition" appears somewhat elastic*. Even the radical notion of democracy can — by appeal to the centuries-dead Athenian democracy and Roman Republic — be given the sanctity of tradition. Burke must not only ground legitimacy in tradition, itself problematic, but also give us a methodology as to which traditions establish legitimacy.

*Keep in mind that I'm relying on secondary and tertiary sources.

Keynes is at least on somewhat firmer ground, as he was probably the guiding intellectual force behind the successful reform of laissez faire capitalism into state-managed capitalism. Burke has no such excuse: the conditions in France that led to the French Revolution were truly unendurable. When tradition catastrophically fails, there is no sense in wondering whether it should be abandoned; we can only speculation on how it will actually be abandoned. Revolution is dangerous, revolution can easily go awry, and thus revolution cannot be undertaken lightly. But the French did not take revolution lightly. Tradition had utterly failed them; their only alternative to revolution was slavery in the guise of tradition. Burke might have argued for a better revolution, but to use the French to condemn revolution and laud tradition, to support the catastrophically inept French monarchy, Burke might as well argue against glaciers.

While he is not inexcusably obtuse like Burke, DeLong is not, like Keynes, justifiably optimistic. The professional-managerial middle-class reforms that Keynes midwifed to save capitalism have, after three generations, decisively failed. We cannot simply make the same reforms that we made in the early 20th century. Even if we could make them again, even if we could take the rentier ruling class again by surprise, they didn't last then, and we have no reason to expect them to do any better tomorrow.

Burke might be correct in a rhetorical sense: no matter how radically we transform our institutions, we might well be best served to give our new society the imprimatur of tradition. We need not lie; we need only to be selective. But to say we must be cautious is too obvious; to be actually meaningful, this supposed "caution" can be nothing but an attempt to justify the unendurable failures of the status quo with the bugaboo of the fear of change.

The 10 worst economic ideas of 2011

2011-12-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

The 10 Worst Economic Ideas of 2011:

Taxes should be more regressive
Austerity works
Export growth models are sustainable
Fannie and Freddie did it
Cutting Social Security benefits is a priority
Inflation is just around the corner
The Medicare eligibility age should be raised
Competition between Medicare and private health insurance will reform the health care system and reduce costs
Federal spending should be capped at 21 percent of GDP
Balancing the budget should involve equal parts tax hikes and government spending cuts

(via Paul Krugman)

A law of nature?

2011-12-22T03:57:00.000-07:00

The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is “rash” to employ men, and that it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an indefinite period, is crazily improbable – the sort of thing which no man could believe who had not had his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years… Our main task, therefore, will be to confirm the reader’s instinct that what seems sensible is sensible, and what seems nonsense is nonsense. We shall try to show him that the conclusion, that if new forms of employment are offered more men will be employed, is as obvious as it sounds and contains no hidden snags; that to set unemployed men to work on useful tasks does what it appears to do, namely, increases the national wealth; and that the notion, that we shall, for intricate reasons, ruin ourselves financially if we use this means to increase our well-being, is what it looks like – a bogy.

— John Maynard Keynes, Can Lloyd George Do It?

[Note, I have not checked the quotation against the primary source.]

(via L. Randall Wray and Edward Harrison)

The Stupid! It Burns! (meaning of life edition)

2011-12-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

And Atheists Want What?

I’m curious: what do atheists hope to accomplish in the world? I mean, working from the premise that there is no God and never has been, what does the atheist want to do? Do they want to make the world a better place? Why?

I can’t see any other motivation that can come from believing that the physical world is all there is or ever will be other than complete selfishness and narcissism. I mean, if animals are all we are (and not even that because animals have an animal spirit and simple souls), then what else is there to do but ensure the survival of our gene pool? And yet, even that isn’t possible.

All-consuming factuality

2011-12-21T05:13:00.000-07:00

Well. A Christian, a conservative Christian, writing about an atheist (Hitchens), and he's not stupid. Go figure.

In The Atheists and the Savior, Christian William Murchison respectfully reflects on Christopher Hitchens' death, and uses it as a springboard to discuss the declining political position of Christianity. Christianity, according to Murchison, has "facilitated the atheist movement ... by downplaying ... its own truth claims while up-playing its social conscience and good works. This leaves the impression ... that faith in Christ, while possibly a good idea, is just a good, modern-style choice -- take it or leave it." Murchison laments that Christians avoid "the over-arching, all-consuming factuality of [their] faith." He recommends that Christians instead would have been better served by "insisting, insisting, insisting on the factuality" of their faith.

Murchison is, as I said, not stupid. He does not admire Hitchens, and he understandably gives more weight to Hitchens' more abrasive personality traits, but he avoids insult, misrepresentation and canard. We must also admire Murchison because he looks to himself, not the stars, for the faults of his religion. Murchison is not entirely consistent — he both asserts the factuality of Christianity and calls it a "mystery" — but he identifies the primary fault of Christianity: its factuality.

Where Murchison goes wrong, of course, is his exhortation about what to do about the factuality of Christianity. In the sense that Murchison uses the word, factuality is not something to be insisted upon, at least not at first. Factuality is something to be proven; we can insist on factuality only after it has been proven. And Christianity's main flaw is not the refusal to insist on its factuality; its main flaw is its inability to prove its factuality. Yes, "either the Son of God came among us or he didn't." Insist as much as you like, but until you prove it, until you present rationally convincing evidence, at the very best you can call belief in the resurrection a choice; at worst, I can call it an irrational delusion.

Questions and answers about philosophy

2011-12-20T13:33:00.002-07:00

Whenever an academic philosopher tells you he has an answer, he's lying. Philosophy is not about answers, it's about questions.

To a normal person, an answer is, in a sense, a stopping point. If you ask me, "How tall is the Empire State Building?" I'll answer, "1,454 feet," and we're done. I've answered your question. Ask me where 4th & Main is, and I'll give you directions. Ask a physicist how the Sun shines, and he'll answer you with what we know about fusion. Ask a doctor why you have little bumps all over your skin, and he'll do some tests and tell you what disease you have, and how (if possible) to cure it. These are the kinds of things that people think about when they talk about answers.

While of course every scientific answer leads to new questions (yay!), scientific answers also serve to, well, actually answer real questions. We have since learned a lot more about evolution, for example, but Darwin's work really does, all by itself, definitively answer questions. There are certain things about which Darwin, Newton, Einstein, etc. (not to mention thousands upon thousands of non-famous research scientists) were just correct. They answered their questions, and unless observations go very far awry, nobody in the world ever has to spend much time going back and revisiting and re-answering those questions.

Philosophy is different. One way to define philosophy (and how to define philosophy is itself a philosophical question) is that philosophy deals with questions that do not and cannot have Answers in the scientific sense. Like the the humanities, arts, and literature, philosophy deals with questions that each society and each individual must answer for him- or herself. What is knowledge? What is existence? What is good? What is beautiful? What is truth? And, most importantly, what is justice? When I say each person must answer these questions, I mean "must" not in the normative sense but the literal sense: just as it is physically impossible to not accelerate towards the surface of the Earth at ~10m/s², it is physically impossible for a human being to not answer these questions. A being that does not answer these questions, somehow, is not a human being. Even the most unsophisticated, philosophically "naive" person answers these questions.

We don't study philosophers because they've answered these questions. We study philosophers because they've thought about these questions. Really, their answers are not very interesting. We don't read Aristotle, for example, to learn how to be a good middle-class slave-owning Greek citizen of a polis. We read him because we want to see how a very smart guy picked up and examined the same questions our nature forces us to answer.

Philosophy is, I think, like climbing a mountain. Sure, a mountain climber needs her share of ordinary, prosaic, scientific answers: she needs to know all about pitons, carabiners, ice-axes, crampons; she needs to know techniques (of which I am entirely ignorant). But all of that knowledge doesn't get her one inch closer to the top of the mountain. She must, somehow, find the will and drive to actually complete the climb. She can read about how other climbers found their will, but she must find this will and drive completely anew, by herself. So too with philosophy. I can find out how Plato, Aristotle, Rawls, etc. answered philosophical questions, but I still have to answer all these questions for myself. It's a lot, but all that another philosopher can do for me is help me think more clearly and deeply about these questions; no philosopher can answer them for me. (Even if one adopts another philosopher's answers in toto, he has done so because he's thought them through himself, and the answers are his own.) In philosophy, thinking about the question is the thing, not coming up with the right answer.

Philosophers are, of course, human beings, and human beings, I think, have a tendency to think of their answers to philosophical questions as The Right Answers. But this is simply not so: a question that has The Right Answer is ipso facto not a philosophical question. When philosophers are honest about philosophy, they offer considerable value; when those reading philosophy understand what to expect, they can profit. But if you read philosophy expecting to learn what The Right Answer is, you will be disappointed. And if you write philosophy and think you're telling people what The Right Answer is, you are either mistaken about what philosophy is, or you are lying that you offer anything but your own answers.

The Stupid! It Burns! (Egnorant edition)

2011-12-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

Atheists in mourning around the world

The worldwide atheist community is reeling from the deaths of two atheist icons.

Author and public intellectual Christopher Hitches died Thursday from cancer at the age of 62. Author and political intellectual/leader Kim Jung Il died Saturday from heart failure at the age of 69.

Each man represented to millions of adoring atheists the incarnation of atheist integrity and wisdom.

Questions easily answered

2011-12-20T06:59:00.001-07:00

Faye has a soliloquy in today's Questionable Content:

Angus loves me. He LOVES me. And I love him. And I was trying to pin down WHY I love him. He's funny, he's smart, he can stand up to me... But deep down, what if the main reason I love him is that it means I'm not alone? Is that enough?

Yes, Faye, yes it is.

(Also, some words of wisdom from last week's comic: "You ought to expect better of people. It encourages you to be a better person yourself.")

Religion and child protection

2011-12-20T06:27:00.002-07:00

It's not often that I agree, even a little, with right-wing nutjobs, but when it comes to religion and the protection of children, I have to agree, with some important reservations, with Don Boys'* article New Atheists Want to Remove Children from Your Home–or Worse!. Reading past some uncharitable and unnecessarily inflammatory asides, Boys to some extent grasps a key element of New Atheist thought. It is indeed true that we "want to remove children from the influence of parents, teachers, or preachers who teach the doctrine of Hell..."

*Boys claims a Ph.D., but it appears to be from Heritage Baptist University, which appears to be unaccredited by any established regional authority.

The New Atheists dispute almost every issue, and seeing extreme forms of the religious indoctrination of children as abusive is controversial among the Gnus, but Boys adequately substantiates that this position has real support. Boys quotes Perry Bulwer, who asserts that the indoctrination of some beliefs can be abusive:

The educational rights of children are also undermined when they are intellectually abused with biblical literalism, anti-science creationism or denied the right to attend university. ... Many fundamentalist and orthodox beliefs are highly detrimental to children’s minds.

Boys also quotes Nicholas Humphrey making the same point:

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Boyd then turns to Richard Dawkins, mentioning that in The God Delusion, Dawkins asserts that teaching children the doctrine of Hell is abusive*, and quotes Dawkins from his essay, Religion's Real Child Abuse: "Priestly groping of child bodies is disgusting. But it may be less harmful in the long run than priestly subversion of child minds." Boys presents adequate evidence that considering some kinds of religious indoctrination of children is, if not widely-accepted doctrine, has real support in the New Atheist community.

*Boys seems to be accurately paraphrasing Dawkins in The God Delusion: "I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell" (358).

While accurately characterizing a real position, Boys also wants to conflate the position on child abuse with the Gnus' general opposition to religion. Boys cites American Atheists' Al Stefanelli, in "Taking The Gloves Off…: When Diplomacy Fails, It’s Time To Fight Using The Law," quoting Stefanelli as saying, "They don’t respond to lawsuits, letters, amicus briefs or other grass-roots campaigns and they must, must, must be eradicated." Boys is not being entirely honest here; he interprets "they" to mean "fundamentalist Christians", but Stefanelli specifically refers to "the underbelly of fundamentalist Christianity and radical Islam" which "does not operate in the legal system." Also, the context of the article makes it clear that Stefanelli is referring primarily to the eradication of "beliefs and doctrines", not people:

Intolerance toward beliefs and doctrines that serve only to promote hatred, bigotry and discrimination should be lauded, as should extremist points of view toward the eradication of these beliefs and doctrines.

Boys also quotes Daniel Dennett, in Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for (516).

But Boys ignores Dennett's clear qualification, that we are "obliged ... to cage or disarm" only those religious people who go "beyond the pale" of civilized behavior:

Slavery is beyond the pale. Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is beyond the pale. The pronouncing of death sentences on those who blaspheme against a religion (complete with bounties or rewards for those who carry them out) is beyond the pale. It is not civilized, and it is owed no more respect in the name of religious freedom than any other incitement to cold-blooded murder (516-517).

Boys' only honest support for true eliminationism in New Atheist thought is Sam Harris' infamous quotation from The End of Faith that faced with a nuclear-armed Muslim state not deterred by certain retailiation, "the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own" (qtd. in Boys). But Harris is responding hyperbolically to an unlikely hypothetical, and he has also faced severe criticism from many published New Atheists and nearly uniform condemnation among the rank and file. While he is accurate that many New Atheists condemn certain forms of religious indoctrination as child abuse, Boys fails to link this specific condemnation to a more general attitude of eliminationism.

Another way to read this article is that Boys attempts to establish that atheists have the same attitude towards the teaching of any religious belief to children that they do specifically towards beliefs, such as Hell, that we consider definitely abusive. The full quotation, elided with ellipses above, is that atheists "want to remove children from the influence of parents, teachers, or preachers who teach the doctrine of Hell and the exclusive plan of salvation through Christ." [emphasis added] Note too his unqualified assertion that "Atheists hate religion and consider it child abuse." But, as shown above, all the cited commenters specifically qualify the beliefs and practices that they label as abusive to children. Atheists certainly consider all religion to be nonsense, but not all nonsense is abusive.

Let us grasp the nettle firmly, though: there are some beliefs, some of them religious, some not, that are so poisonous, so toxic, so damaging, that to indoctrinate children, who are in the near-absolute power of adults, be they teachers, priests, or, yes, even parents, to those beliefs constitutes child abuse. Because all children are the responsibility of every adult member of society, when we have good evidence that a child is being abused, we have a social obligation to stop that abuse. Furthermore, we have a positive obligation to prevent that abuse from occurring in the first place. We have at least a theoretical basis for advocating the removal of children from some homes they are being indoctrinated into some religious beliefs.

Theory is not practice, though*. There are some evils that cannot be coercively addressed, even in the best government. I do not, for example, see anything at all good about racist speech between adults. But sometimes the cure is worse than the disease; we must (legally) tolerate racist speech because no one and no group, even a majority of all but one, will suppress only bad speech; they will, rather, suppress speech contrary to their interests, and sometimes the interests of one can and does finally become the interests of all. I think the idea of actually removing children from homes on the basis of the teaching of belief is problematic, but it is problematic on this "second order" basis: not because these beliefs are not abusive and harmful, but because it may be impossible to just prevent the indoctrination of only harmful and abusive beliefs.

*Einstein supposedly said, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."

Boys' argument is unfocused and distracted, so it's hard to rebut him directly at a deeper level. I suspect that Boys does not consider the indoctrination in children of the idea of Hell to be abusive. I suspect that he would say that our obligation to teach children what is true overrides our obligation not to terrorize them. The first obligation does override the second — we do, for example, need to teach our children to be afraid of traffic until they have the cognitive capacity to cross the street without being hit by a car — but this argument would work only if it were actually true that Hell existed. But Boys doesn't make that argument, and I don't think he can make it. Boys might believe that there's nothing abusive about terrorizing children in general — a lot of Christians have very weird attitudes about fear — but we cannot charitably attribute to him an attitude he does not explicitly declare. Boys does not seem to make any argument based on the direct merits of what he wants to teach children.

To bend over backwards to be charitable, Boys is, I think, trying the second-order effects argument: eliminating the indoctrination of specifically abusive beliefs in children would unacceptably compromise freedom of religion in general. His argument fails, though, because every author he cites explicitly qualifies his objections to specific beliefs, and only in the context of adults who have coercive authority over children. The qualifications are not just specific and narrow; they also fulfill, rather than undermine, the spirit of freedom of religion. In the sense of the legitimacy of coercion, the state is to the citizen as the parent is to the child; a prohibition on what the state may coerce, even with a democratic mandate, should extend to a prohibition on what the parent may coerce in a child. Boys fails to show otherwise; his only fundamental defense can be that religious freedom entails that any indoctrination of children must be permissible, at least if it conforms to his religion.

Even the most "militant" atheist advocates addressing the issue of religious belief as child abuse within the social, political process. To my knowledge, no atheist of any influence argues that religious belief as child abuse justifies illegal or extra-legal action. We do not want to act outside the law; we want to change the laws, using the existing social and political process to do so. This process requires debate, discussion, political action: all the messiness of human, secular, (more-or-less) democratic governance. To make the indoctrinating some religious belief to children illegal requires that we convince a majority of the people (or at least a majority of more-or-less democratically elected legislators) that these religious beliefs really are harmful to children, and that legally prohibiting these beliefs does not create more problems than it solves. If we cannot convince the majority, as well as fulfill all the institutional requirements, we will not prevail.

But overall, it is clear: Many atheists, myself included, believe that the indoctrination of some religious beliefs are actually abusive or unacceptably compromise children's rights to participate in civil society. While the second order effects are problematic, many atheists, myself included, believe that these effects can be adequately addressed. Many atheists, myself included, believe that we have a social obligation to protect the rights of all children. It therefore follows that we have a social obligation to advocate to make these abuses of children's rights illegal. Even if we fail, we should fail because we are unable to convince a majority; we should not fail because we are too fearful to express our opinion and make our argument. To try and fail is honorable; to fail to try is cowardice. But we are trying within the social process.

Boys, however, does not appear to consider the social process legitimate. Boys seems to have contempt for democracy itself. According to Boys,

America is in deep trouble especially when you realize there is still a fool on every corner, a clown in every public office, and every village has not one, but several idiots plus numerous tyrants, terrorists, thugs, and totalitarians lounging down at the American Angry Atheist Association. They are dangerous, duped, dopey and deluded people who might be helped if brains could be transplanted

It's uncertain what Boys is condemning here. One the one hand, how can a democracy (even a half-assed bourgeois "democratic" republic such as the United States) be in "deep trouble" because there is dissenting opinion? On the other hand, Boys apparently believes that not only are there a small minority of atheists around, but these atheists have the power to "get all the state or Federal laws passed they want." But to do so, even here, requires real popular support. Yes, the United States is run by the 1%, but they are not the atheist 1%, and even the 1% ignore popular opinion to their peril. Somehow, I suspect that Boys is not against government by an elite; he wishes instead, I suspect, that the elite not be the bourgeoisie but Christians like himself.

Boys wants the atheists to bring it on: "I simply accept [the New Atheists'] declaration of war. Although the New Atheists might be able to pass any law we want, "they will never take my visiting grandchildren no matter how many warrants they have." Not without a literal fight!" But Boys is wrong: there is no war between Christians and atheists. To have a war, you have to have a violent conflict between two parties, neither of whom recognize a common sovereign authority. Atheists (even revolutionaries such as myself) want to protect children from the worst of religious indoctrination within the sovereignty of the state. The war, if there is one, is between Christians like Boys and the state itself. Unfortunately, while it might be an uneven fight, I think the current government of the United States might be the underdog.

The Stupid! It Burns! (sensus divinatus edition)

2011-12-20T04:35:00.000-07:00

Atheists Disprove God’s Existence Again!

The Lowdown: A Scientist managed to replicate religious experience with electromagnetic waves applied to different parts of the brain. He goes on to tell the world that this proves there is no God. It was an absolute pleasure watching the Reddit crowd blow up over this one, and to see my atheist friends to post it on their Facebook walls with such grave, epitaphic solemnities as “let mankind know knowledge instead of ignorance” and “science has done it at last!” (This time it’s for sure, apparently.)

It gives me the opportunity to clear up — for their sakes — a common misconception about the Christian religion, or perhaps just to assert an uncommon conception: The belief of a Christian hinges upon a Miracle — the Resurrection – and not upon miracles. This is important to realize, for there is an unspoken assumption made by these bored and boring scientists, that if the presence of God can be simulated, then religious experience is not miraculous, and thus God is not real.

Who is The Scientist? He tells us that he has proven the non-existence of God; what did he say? If you don't quote and cite, you might as well just hang a sign on your post in big flashing neon letters saying "STRAW MAN!"

Let me clear up a common misconception about atheism.

It is not part of the atheist project to disprove the existence of God.

There are several reasons disproving the existence of God is not part of the atheist project. First, "God" is equivocal; there are at worst as many conceptions of God as there are believers; at best the conceptions number in the thousands. "God" is kind of like cancer (in more ways than one): there can't be a (singular) cure for cancer, because "cancer" labels a family of very different diseases with very different causes. Likewise, evidence against one particular intervention of God does not act as evidence against any other supposed or imagined intervention. More importantly, too many conceptions of God are entirely unfalsifiable; it's impossible to falsify an unfalsifiable proposition: I can't even tell you with any confidence that God is not hiding behind my couch. There are perhaps some unsophisticated atheists who really do think God can be disproven (but they must be somewhat rare; I've never met one, and I know a lot of atheists), but the idea that atheists can or want to disprove God has been denied so often in both the academic and informal literature that to mention the idea shows either willful ignorance or outright lying.

The atheist project — or, more precisely, the Gnu Atheist project — is to eliminate the social privilege afforded to belief in God.

Sure, we'd like to get rid of religious belief; we'd like to get rid of all superstitions, delusions, and outright nonsense. But that's at best a long term task, and probably impossible. What is feasible in at least the medium term is to make religion private. One's belief or disbelief in God, and the details thereof, should be irrelevant to social, economic, and political life as is one's attitude towards bowling or golf. I should be no more or less of a member of society, an economic actor, and a citizen of the state regardless of what I do or do not believe about God, just as I should be no more or less a member of society, etc. whether or not I enjoy golf, or, if I do enjoy golf, whether I favor the use of a niblick or a mashie.

Fundamentally, the establishment of social, economic, and political privilege requires positive support; we should not require positive support for the elimination of social privilege. It is, for example, impossible to decisively disprove the assertion that white people are inherently superior to black people. We can, however, demonstrate that all the specific arguments so far made for the superiority of white people have so far failed. We are justified, and justified early on, to say, "When you actually can prove it, get back to us. Until then, no, you white folk cannot have any special privileges." Similarly with God: If believers want to introduce positive support for the truth of their beliefs, we can see whether and to what extent those truths justify social privilege. Until then, religion deserves to be only private.

The Stupid! It Burns! (not even wrong edition)

2011-12-18T19:49:00.001-07:00

Usually, I feature egregiously stupid, obviously hypocritical or completely mendacious posts about atheists and atheism, usually by Christians. This post isn't in any of those categories. But I wanted to feature it simply because it's just so vacuous, empty of content. It's difficult to show a lack of substantive content with a quotation or excerpt, so I'll just point you to the original article:

Thank God for atheists

I will highlight this quotation:

Every atheist I have ever read or met does not reject the God I believe in and worship and serve. The ones I know are rejecting an idol (and, of course, replacing it with one of their own making)–e.g., the God of the gaps, the deus ex machina of bare theism or the all determining reality of Calvinism.

That may be correct; who knows? What God does Olson believe in? In one sense, because there simply isn't any way to come to rational agreement about what God actually is (or even whether God is something that can even "be") every believer has a different idea about God is. There's no reason to believe that Olson's idea is any less idiosyncratic.

I suspect that Olson is on the other horn of the theist's dilemma. If they do not define God to be something definite, something about which we can talk meaningfully about truth and falsity, can it be said that they actually believe anything at all? Or are they simply repeating a vacuous slogan, or to use Seinfeld's metaphor, rooting for the shirts? If you construct your belief so that it's logically impossible to prove it wrong, you do not actually have a belief: you have defined your belief out of existence and into emptiness and vacuity.

The value of the humanities?

2011-12-17T19:51:00.000-07:00

The simple yet appalling fact is that we have very little solid evidence that literary studies do very much to enrich or stabilize moral perception, that they humanize. We have little proof that a tradition of literary studies in fact makes a man more humane. What is worse — a certain body of evidence points the other way. When barbarism came to twentieth-century Europe, the arts faculties in more than one university offered very little moral resistance, and this is not a trivial or local accident. In a disturbing number of cases the literary imagination gave servile or ecstatic welcome to political bestiality. That bestiality was at times enforced and refined by individuals educated in the culture of traditional humanism. Knowledge of Goethe, a delight in the poetry of Rilke, seemed no bar to personal and institutionalized sadism. Literary values and the most utmost of hideous inhumanity could coexist in the same community, in the same individual sensibility….

…I find myself unable to assert confidently that the humanities humanize. Indeed, I would go further: it is at least conceivable that the focusing of consciousness on a written text which is the substance of our training and pursuit diminishes the sharpness and readiness of our actual moral response. Because we are trained to give psychological and moral credence to the imaginary, to the character in a play or a novel, to the condition of spirit we gather from a poem, we may find it more difficult to identify with the real world, to take the world of actual experience to heart…The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

—George Steiner, “To Civilize Our Gentlemen,” in Language and Silence

(via Corey Robin)

The Accidental Tutor

2011-12-17T07:21:00.000-07:00

I've started another blog, The Accidental Tutor, to talk about my experiences as a Community College Writing Tutor and my thoughts on the theory and practice of instruction in English Composition.

Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T05:53:00.001-07:00

Christopher Hitchens died today. So it goes.

The best way to memorialize him is, I think, by his words.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

―The Portable Atheist

By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And—most of all—what kind of designer or creator only chooses to “reveal” himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?

―The Portable Atheist

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

―God Is Not Great

What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.

―God Is Not Great

Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world…. Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.

―God Is Not Great

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

―God Is Not Great

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

―God Is Not Great

If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

―God Is Not Great

Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing [in the ten commandments] about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly “in context” to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?

―God Is Not Great

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard—or try to turn back—the measurable advances that we have made.

Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and obstruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two.

Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in proteins and acids which constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.”

―God Is Not Great

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

―God Is Not Great

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

―God Is Not Great

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

―God Is Not Great

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

―God Is Not Great

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

―Hitch-22

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

(from Daniel Florien)

Opportunity costs

2011-12-16T04:58:00.002-07:00

Part 1: What is "real"? (commentary)
Part 2: Opportunity costs

To look at real economics, we're looking at economics in the absence of money. It's important, I think, to revisit a little of microeconomics 101 in real terms.

One thing that doesn't change in real micro is the production possibility frontier (PPF). The PPF basically represents the notion that, ceteris paribus, we can make only a finite quantity of goods: if we make more pizza, for example, we cannot make as much beer, and vice-versa. Since both axes are in quantities of real goods and services, money is not involved, and nothing changes between financial and real microeconomics.

A concept that does change is the partial equilibrium "price" given by the intersection of the supply and demand curves. In standard financial micro, the x-axis is the quantity of some real good (so it's the same in real economics), but the y-axis is the price, denominated in money. Since we don't have money in real economics, we need a new unit of measure for the y-axis. To get the y-axis, we need a narrative about why the demand curve decreases and the supply curve increases.

The demand curve falls because for any single good or service, the more units we already have, the less we "inherently" want yet another unit: the declining marginal utility of demand. The first hamburger keeps me from starving to death, the second makes me feel full, I want the third just because I really like hamburgers, and so forth. The the fifth or sixth hamburger might have negative utility: it'll make me sick. Not all goods and services are like this (think of Imelda Marcos and shoes), but overall it seems intuitively to hold, especially when we start talking about each individual consuming many different goods and services, and each supplier producing for many different consumers.

There are two reasons the supply curve falls. First, there are, especially in the short run (where one or more of the factors of production: land, labor, and/or physical capital are fixed), diseconomies of scale. If I have a certain number of pizza ovens, I can make only so many pizzas, no matter how many pizza-makers I hire. Similarly, for the pizza sector, we can't just magically make more pizza ovens overnight. Even trying to squeeze the maximum productivity out of the pizza ovens we already have becomes less and less efficient.

More importantly, though, if demand "inherently" falls, then, because of the PPF above, if we make more units of one good or service, we must make less of other goods and services. The first, most demanded pizza we make means we must forego the last, least demanded beer we could otherwise have made. The second, slightly less demanded pizza requires foregoing the second to last, second least demanded beer. At some point, we're going to have a coin-flip between the pizza and beer that are equally demanded. Thus the supply curve rises even in the long run (where no factors of production are constrained) because of rising opportunity cost.

We can also talk about demand not just in terms of "inherent" desire, but also in terms of opportunity cost: the "inherent" desire for one good or service minus the "inherent" desire for the most desirable good or service we have to give up to get the first. So in real micro, we can always think of the "price" axis (usually the y-axis) in financial micro as the opportunity cost.

2011-12-15T05:43:00.000-07:00

Fifteen Fatal Fallacies of Financial Fundamentalism: A Disquisition on Demand Side Economics

by William Vickrey, October 5, 1996

Much of the conventional economic wisdom prevailing in financial circles, largely subscribed to as a basis for governmental policy, and widely accepted by the media and the public, is based on incomplete analysis, contrafactual assumptions, and false analogy. For instance, encouragement to saving is advocated without attention to the fact that for most people encouraging saving is equivalent to discouraging consumption and reducing market demand, and a purchase by a consumer or a government is also income to vendors and suppliers, and government debt is also an asset. Equally fallacious are implications that what is possible or desirable for individuals one at a time will be equally possible or desirable for all who might wish to do so or for the economy as a whole.

And often analysis seems to be based on the assumption that future economic output is almost entirely determined by inexorable economic forces independently of government policy so that devoting more resources to one use inevitably detracts from availability for another. This might be justifiable in an economy at chock-full employment, or it might be validated in a sense by postulating that the Federal Reserve Board will pursue and succeed in a policy of holding unemployment strictly to a fixed "non-inflation-accelerating" or "natural" rate. But under current conditions such success is neither likely nor desirable.

Some of the fallacies that result from such modes of thought are as follows. Taken together their acceptance is leading to policies that at best are keeping us in the economic doldrums with overall unemployment rates stuck in the 5 to 6 percent range. This is bad enough merely in terms of the loss of 10 to 15 percent of our potential production, even if shared equitably, but when it translates into unemployment of 10, 20, and 40 percent among disadvantaged groups, the further damages in terms of poverty, family breakup, school truancy and dropout, illegitimacy, drug use, and crime become serious indeed. And should the implied policies be fully carried out in terms of a "balanced budget," we could well be in for a serious depression.

The Stupid! It Burns! (launderette edition)

2011-12-15T03:45:00.000-07:00

The Atheist Delusion

If the chief problem of religion is that it whips up tensions between different groups of people and disturbs peace, then Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are the consummate hypocrites.

The chief problem of religion is that it isn't true.

The militant atheists of our generation are forever badgering people of faith, asking us to justify our own personal beliefs.

We're asking people of faith to justify the beliefs they want to impose on others and/or pay for with public money.

We get it, you don’t believe in God. Can you just leave the rest of us alone?

Happy to. You first, though.

The debate over the existence of a higher being is a question that has been the bane of mankind for centuries, and it isn’t going to be resolved any time soon.

It has been resolved. There isn't one, at least not one worth talking about. (Yes, God might be hiding behind my couch; so what?)

And it certainly isn’t going to be answered by a flustered old bible basher who thinks it’s clever to compare the question of a divine creator with a child’s belief in fairies.

If we look at what actual believers say they actually believe, rather than what "sophisticated theologians" say that believers really believe, Dawkins is spot on.

If you want to know the real reason why Dawkins declined the debate [with William Lane Craig], I’d recommend watching a few clips of Craig debating Christopher Hitchens on Youtube at Balliol College, and observe how the erudite chain-smoking alcoholic gets verbally taken to the launderette.

I haven't watched the debate (I find them tedious in general), but the idea that anyone could hand Hitchens his ass seems... highly dubious. This whole
Craig defeated Hitchens" idea sounds a lot like the Vietnamesque "declare victory then retreat." In any event, Dawkins has talked about the real reason he has declined to debate Craig; why not take him at his word? Author Conor Kenny appears to be simultaneously arguing for amity, condemning hypocrisy, and presuming his opponent is lying. Quite the feat.

According to Kenny, it seems that there are few religious people in the world and nobody takes religion seriously, so how dare Dawkins et al. go around not taking religion seriously!?

I'll close with a quotation that needs no commentary.

For example, the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine has nothing to do with religion; it’s about the illegal occupation of someone else’s land. You’d also be hard pressed to find a UVF or IRA extremist in Ulster who genuinely believes in the doctrine of the religion they claim to belong to.

(via Godless Business)

The Stupid! It Burns! (whiny sniveling edition)

2011-12-14T13:15:00.002-07:00

You Whiny Sniveling Little Atheists Are Pathetic! [title original]

Let’s get this straight. The atheists are suing because they had to turn off the television to avoid the topic of religion or news announcements about the Day of Prayer. They had to alter their conversation to avoid the topic of religion. This made them feel like “outsiders”.

Oh, boo hoo.

You whiny, sniveling, little, pusillanimous cowards. You have the audacity to tell us Christians that we are “weak” and that our religion is a “crutch.” You are supposed to be so “courageous”, venturing forth boldly into the existential mystery of being alone, facing with stoicism the nothingness that awaits you at death, priding yourself on your realism and self-reliance. You are a bunch of feeble fakers.

As usual, there's lots more stupid in the rest of the article, and the comments are also... instructive.

The Good Doctor Myers delivers the smackdown.

The Stupid! It Burns! (insulting edition)

2011-12-14T04:22:00.004-07:00

Host Kicks Atheist Off Show For Calling Jesus & the Nativity ‘An Insult’

On December 12,

Fox Business Network’s Eric Bolling invited a FFRF representative onto his show to discuss the group’s anti-Christian stance.

During a dialogue with FFRF spokesperson Dan Barker ... “Follow the Money” host Eric Bolling was so dumbfounded by the group’s anti-Jesus views that he ended up booting the atheist-spokesperson off of the program. ... Barker claimed that America is not a Christian nation and that the nativity should not be present on government property. He went on to say that the nativity represents "an insult to human nature that we are all doomed and damned." ...

[Later,] "Why was Jesus born? To save us from our sins. What an insult that we are degraded, depraved human beings — that Jesus created a hell — a place or torture," Barker quipped. "And how would you feel if you didn’t believe that… superstition?"

If you want to overdose on concentrated stupidity, read the comments.

Interview with a libertarian

2011-12-12T06:41:00.002-07:00

In "Journey into a Libertarian Future," Andrew Dittmer Interviews radical libertarian "Code Name Cain", who quotes liberally from Hans-Hermann Hoppe's book, Democracy: The God that Failed.

Part I –The Vision
Part II – The Strategy
Part III – Regulation
Part IV – The Journey into a Libertarian Past
Part V – Dark Realities
Part VI – Certainty
Response to Reader Comments

The stench of humanity

2011-12-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche… has a description… of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. …[T]his attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic… When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he… has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, p. 185 (published in 1905)

(via Andrew Dittmer)

Three types of libertarianism

2011-12-12T05:09:00.002-07:00

Libertarianism, by Karl Widerquist,

distinguishes between three types of libertarianism, left, right, and socialist. It then considers the extent to which the policies of these three diverse groups overlap. The third section focuses on the policies [of] right-libertarians, both because they have popularized their association with the name and because they have a more unified policy agenda.

(via Andrew Dittmer)

7 Bizarre Trends That Predict an Economic Collapse

2011-12-11T08:17:00.002-07:00

7 Bizarre Trends That Predict an Economic Collapse:

#7. Mosquito Populations Surge
#6. Waitresses Get Prettier
#5. Tie Colors Turn Bland
#4. Crime Takes a Turn for the Weird
#3. Advertisements Get Nastier
#2. Romance Novel Sales Spike and Playboy Models Get Heavier
#1. Men Have More Affairs

Thoughts on "what is 'real'"?

2011-12-11T06:05:00.000-07:00

I apologize that this exposition is a little disorganized. I'm pretty much figuring this out as I go along.

A few thoughts come to mind after writing part 1.

I define the simplified fundamental identity of real macroeconomics as:

Production = Consumption + InvestmentNote the difference from the fundamental equation of financial macroeconomics:

Gross Domestic Product = Consumption + Investment + Government + Net ExportsI took Net Exports out just because its easier to assume that a national economy is an isolated whole. But I explicitly did not differentiate government spending. In real terms, that is in terms of physical goods and services, there's no real difference between consumption and investment performed or afforded by the government or by the private sector. A bridge built and/or paid for by the government is just as much a bridge as one built and/or paid for by a private firm.

I also don't distinguish between public and private goods. Public goods, defined as non-rival and/or non-exclusive goods, are still, at the real level, still physical goods. I'm happy (for now) to leave the choice of which goods to produce, public or private, to microeconomics.

When I look at the world specifically as an economist, I don't judge people's wants. If a lot of people want Big Macs, or a badass military, then that's what they want.

I am not yet concerned specifically with distribution of consumption, although distribution will come into play soon enough. Even if one person in a 1,000,000 person economy is consuming all the surplus production of the current capital stock and remaining 999,999 workers' labor, we don't have a macroeconomic crisis unless we cannot produce enough to feed those 999,999, or, for some reason, some of these 999,999 are not working to supply what the one consumer wants to consume. For now, I'm pushing the question of distribution to microeconomics and politics.

I was going to wait to differentiate needs and wants until an actual chapter, but I think the explanation is short enough that I can just include it here.

A need is something we have to produce to maintain the productivity of the labor force. If, for example, we had 1,000,000 people in the economy, but we could produce only enough food to feed 900,000 of them (or feed them all only enough to maintain 90% average productivity) we would not be producing as much food as we need. In contrast, a want is something we want but do not need per the above definition. If, for example, each of those 1,000,000 really wanted an iPad, we would not be compromising our productivity by producing only 1,000.

A real theory of economic crises

2011-12-10T08:41:00.005-07:00

Part 1: What is "real"? (commentary)

To understand the current economic crisis, we must look underneath the abstraction of the financial to the real macroeconomy. Doing so is not an easy task, especially when the majority of academic and commercial economists are devoted to obscuring the real economy.

The underlying real economy consists of the use of physical things, such as human labor, steel, land, and machines, to produce other physical things, such as loaves of bread, cars, houses, lattes, and massages as well as (to stretch the definition of "physical" a bit) education, good health, and so forth.

On the supply side, microeconomics talks about how much of each individual good and service we should produce, given some total amount of production. Macroeconomics talks about how much we should produce in total, and how we should allocate that production between consumption and investment in physical and human capital. Macroeconomics also assumes that the national economy is an isolated whole. It is not really isolated, international trade does exist, but it is sufficiently close that the approximation is useful to understand the fundamentals, and the rules of international trade differ substantially from both microeconomics within and the macroeconomics of a national economy.

In a microeconomic crisis, we find ourselves with the productive capacity to produce too much of some things. Because microeconomics takes as given the total amount of production, that we are producing too much of some things implies that we are producing not enough of other things. This state of affairs produces a crisis because it takes time to reallocate the means of production from the surplus to the shortage. During that time, which may be a substantial fraction of or even longer than the traditional annual accounting period, the total production of final goods and services will drop: we will not see the final goods actually sold for consumption until all the capital apparatus has been created and has been in operation for some time. One way we account for this switch is by including investment spending directly in Gross Domestic (and National) Product. From a macroeconomic perspective, we deal with a microeconomic crisis by allocating more real activity from consumption to investment.

In a macroeconomic crisis, however, we find ourselves not producing all we need or want (I will explain the distinction later) to consume. Macroeconomic crises have two causes. First, we physically cannot produce all we need to consume. Alternatively, although we might be physically able to produce more, we are not producing all we want to consume and/or invest. We get into macro crises not because (or not just because) we are producing the wrong sorts of things, but because we are not producing enough things overall.

*If we physically could produce more, but no one wants to consume more, i.e. for everyone the marginal utility of more leisure exceeds the marginal utility of more consumption, then there is no macroeconomic crisis. Alternatively, macroeconomists consider the situation where we do not need to consume more, but we want to consume more than we physically can produce, to be the normal situation, the cause of long-run economic growth.

The fundamental identity of real macroeconomics is:

Production = Consumption + Investment + Net Storage + Waste

Production is the total amount of real goods and services, final or investment, produced for trade.
Consumption is the total amount of real final goods and services used up to enjoy their use values. Investment is total amount of physical and human capital created (either anew or to replace earlier investment used up in the production of goods for consumption) to create final goods that will be consumed (perhaps in a later accounting period).
Net Storage is the total amount of real final goods* produced and then placed in storage less real final goods taken out of storage and consumed**.
Waste is the total amount of final goods and services produced but destroyed (or allowed to decay) without being used.

Because Net Storage tends to zero in the long run (too many goods stored too long tend to be wasted), and since we always want to minimize waste***, we can simplify the fundamental identity to:

Production = Consumption + InvestmentBecause we have eliminated the term for Net Storage, it becomes apparent that in a macroeconomic sense, saving does not mean putting actual physical goods into storage, which tends to be wasteful. Instead, savings means allocating relatively more production to investment and relatively less to consumption.

*We typically cannot store services.
**In financial macroeconomics, we usually count Net Storage as the inventory subcategory of investment spending.
***To avoid a lengthy (although interesting) philosophical debate, here I consider things such as military spending to be consumption.

In addition stating to the fundamental identity of real macroeconomics, it is possible to restrict the factors of production — land, labor and capital — to just labor. First, we use labor to create capital (physical capital such as factories and machines, as well as human capital such as education and training). If we do not have as much capital as we want or need, we must use labor to create more. We can eliminate land (which includes the raw materials actually on the land) because the physical quantity of land (and its raw materials) is fixed; we cannot create more iron ore in the ground.

More importantly, the use of land is entirely in the domain of microeconomics. Most land and raw materials have a continuous (increasing) marginal cost of exploitation. Therefore, we simply add labor to using land until the marginal cost of doing so is in equilibrium with the (continuous, falling) marginal demand of producing the products and services requiring the land. Even when some kind of land or raw materials is discontinuously scarce, the only consequence is that more of the surplus value of labor will be allocated to the owner of the land rather than to other potential recipients.

Therefore, all we need to consider in macroeconomics is labor. A real macroeconomic crisis, therefore, is when the total amount of labor employed in production is less than what we need or want to employ.

I'll put all this together in the next post.

How not to rob a bank

2011-12-09T12:59:00.003-07:00

(via Bruce Schneier)

The failure of accommodationism

2011-12-09T12:17:00.001-07:00

There's no question that if you're reading my blog, directly or by syndication or republishing, you should also be reading Jerry Coyne's blog, Why Evolution is True. If by some weird chance you're not, you should definitely read Coyne's latest post, Julian Baggini discovers, to his chagrin, that atheism and “real” religion are incompatible. Let me briefly summarize Coyne's article, which itself summarizes a series of article by Baggini.

Baggini started out with a strong bias towards accommodationism. He declared "a plague on all their houses": "Janus-faced" mainstream religions, the "thin gruel" of agnostics and religious liberals, and the "tone deaf" anti-theist "New Atheists". Baggini undertook the task of radically restructuring the terms of the debate to find intellectual common ground between all these camps. To this end, after a series of seven essays, Baggini developed his four "articles of 21st century faith."

First, Baggini defines religion as a set of values and practices, a "way of life", and communities of people with similar values and practices, or combinations and permutations of these elements. Second, religious belief does not require supernaturalism or miracles. Third, religion makes no scientific claims; it does not assert anything about the world outside our minds. Fourth, religious texts are the creation of human beings and human beings alone. Baggini is no random ignoramus on the internet; he has a Ph.D. in philosophy, he has published a number of books, and he has been active in the accommodationist/confrontationalist debate for many years. His articles represents the best efforts of an educated, intelligent advocate to forge common ground between atheists and the religious.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baggini's attempt failed. His articles found acceptance only among those who were already atheist accommodationists or "thin gruel" religious liberals. I myself see nothing particularly objectionable about Baggini's articles, but I agree with Coyne that they do not seem to deserve the labels "faith" and "religion". But the notable failure was that no substantially religious person endorsed Baggini's articles. Their objections were the same as the atheists': his principles reject what is truly religious: a supernatural God, a God who intervenes in the physical, material world, a God who performs miracles, and a God who has specially revealed Himself through scripture.

For example, Coyne mentions "Jonathan Chaplin, director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics at Cambridge, and a Christian," who "rejects the four tenets in a Guardian piece called 'Julian Baggini’s articles of faith are a nonstarter.'" Coyne quotes Chaplin, "Baggini wants a form of religion that is the 'benign, unsuperstitious thing that liberals and agnostics have said it is all along.' ... The ensuing debate would be of any interest at all to the vast majority of intelligent religious believers today." Instead, Chaplin suggests as common ground that "both atheistic and theistic beliefs can legitimately claim reasonable epistemic warrant." But this is ground that Coyne will not concede.

I concur with Coyne. I cannot see how any skeptical atheist, even an accommodationist, can concede what Chaplin suggests. To say that theistic beliefs have reasonable epistemic warrant is to say that we know God exists; to concede this warrant, an atheist would have to admit that he does not believe what he knows to be true. Alternatively, we would have to admit that contradictory beliefs can have reasonable epistemic warrant, which poses deeper and and more problematic metaphysical issues than the relatively trivial controversy over the presuppositions of naturalism. Such a concession would, I think, either force atheists to admit irrational contumacy or demolish our deepest intuitions about what knowledge ought to be. The former simply isn't true; while the latter might be true, I would need far better arguments than "it makes me feel good" to admit that I have profoundly misunderstood not just what knowledge is, but also what it ought to be.

The Stupid! It Burns! (two kinds of stupid edition)

2011-12-09T07:55:00.003-07:00

Two Kinds of Atheists

For my purposes, there are just two main kinds of atheists. ... One kind of atheist feels that religion is his enemy, while the other kind looks upon religion as his friend. [emphasis original]

The Type 1 atheist—undoubtedly in the majority these days—takes his inspiration from science and considers himself to be “wised up.” He “sees through” the traditional idealistic teachings of religion, and believes that modern science has proven that human beings are “nothing but” animals with hard-wired synapses put in place by selfish genes, all of which is at bottom just molecules—or atoms, or quarks, or strings, or what have you—in motion.

No soul. No free will. No objective standards of right and wrong. Just a bunch of pitiless particles vibrating pointlessly in the primal quantum field.

That’s it. That’s what human being really are, according to the Type 1 atheist. And because traditional religion teaches something like the opposite of this—that human beings have a soul (or spirit) endowed with reason, a conscience, and free will, all responsive to objective standards of right and wrong—the Type 1 atheist feels it is his duty to oppose religion in the name of defending the “truth” about human nature.

The Type 2 atheist is a very different sort of beast (no pun intended). He is not an atheist because he believes in the reductive picture of the cosmos and the human being within it supposedly painted by modern science. He is an atheist because he isn’t persuaded by any of the arguments for the existence of God. It’s that simple.

More on convictions

2011-12-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

In response to my recent post, Sticking by your convictions, commenter Randy writes,

You need to distinguish between short and long term desires. Short term desires may be intense and you might have trouble controlling yourself. But if it conflicts with a long term desire you should do so. So self control is a virtue even in a purely materialist sense.

Now, my particular attitude might be unique or in the minority, but I don't seem to have any special problem reconciling short- and long-term desires. Not only do I not worry about the value of self control, I don't even think about the concept seriously. The only exception is momentary irritation or anger, but the process of controlling my passion to not act hurtfully is nearly automatic. The process requires no abstract moral philosophy: I don't think about the virtue of self control; I am, rather, convinced — really convinced — that I am the sort of person who does not act harmfully, so I never choose to do so.

Randy goes on:

I am not sure about your convictions vs your commitments. You were committed to marriage until you were not. So convictions and commitments are things you stick to until you change your mind?

Well, sure. Why not? If I change my mind, I am no longer convinced, n'est pas? Why should I make an agreement contrary to my present or future best interests? Of course, I always want to act honestly and forthrightly, so I don't abandon agreements covertly; before I exit an agreement, I make sure I've adequately negotiated the exit with the other party or parties. I see no virtue at all in making an agreement that I would keep even if it conflicted with my best interests. I certainly do not expect anyone else to keep an agreement in conflict with their own best interests; to do so would seem exploitative and oppressive. I do, of course, expect that they would exit the agreement overtly.

Then changing your mind would be something you might do to try and indulge in the short term pleasures.

So what? If I really believed the short-term pleasure was more important than the long-term agreement, then I am ipso facto not convinced that the long-term agreement is in my best interests. The problem is not that I'm unable to act according to my convictions; the problem is that I'm not really convinced. I'm sufficiently self-aware that I know what I'm really convinced of. I do not, for example, so much "promise" to remain faithful to my girlfriend; I know that I am convinced that I want to remain faithful, and that, barring brain injury or disease, I know my conviction is extremely unlikely to change. I don't have to exercise self-control to act according to my wishes.

It is like the spender and the saver. Saving comes naturally to some. For others it is work.

Never use an economic metaphor with an economist. ;) Saving is not a virtue in any sense. For every saver, there has to be a spender.

Where religion comes in is knowing what is your long term good. The notion that there are some timeless principles that lead to long term good. That there is a trustworthy teacher of said principles. That we can know these principles are true even though they might be contradicted by our thinking, our impulses, and our experiences. It essentially takes the short and long term thinking and creates a super-long term thinking.

I do not, of course, agree with this statement in either the literal or metaphorical sense. In the literal sense, religion is not true. There is no God to proclaim any "timeless principles", any extrinsic long-term or super-long-term good, and there are no "trustworthy teacher[s] of said principles."

Metaphorically, why would I want to externalize some belief that I was internally convinced of? It seems to me that pushing some desire on a magical sky fairy, even as a metaphor, is evidence that the person is not convinced, that at best he is convinced only that he ought to be convinced, which seems like the sine qua non of outer-direction.

I am a completely inner-directed person. While my wants and desires have to a large extent been socially constructed, I act only according to those that have become fully internalized. I might do something just because someone else wants me to, but I will want something, and want to want it, ad infinitum only if the primary want is entirely internal. I find it tedious when someone demands not only that I do something (which I might do indirectly because it furthers my other, internal, desires), but that I want to do it.

Randy closes:

Thinking about it, it is not always time based. Sometimes it is depth-based. We have shallow desires, deeper desires, and super-deep desires that we don't even know about ourselves. So you could draw the same distinctions in that direction as well.

I dunno. It seems incoherent to talk about "super-deep desires that we don't even know about ourselves." But, then again, I'm not a psychiatrist.

Especially because Randy invokes religion, this seems not as much a conversation about moral philosophy, but about the psychology of authoritarian outer-directedness and libertarian inner-directedness (excluding "neurotics", who I will perhaps idiosyncratically define as those who have radically incompatible desires). Are you the sort of person who wants and needs someone else — a fearless leader, a guru, a priest, a captain — to tell you what to do? Or are you the sort of person who, having reasonably integrated desires, does what you want? I am the latter sort of person.

The Stupid! It Burns! (shocking edition)

2011-12-04T17:44:00.001-07:00

The Three Most Shocking Beliefs of Atheists

#1 Shocking belief of atheism – life has no ultimate meaning or purpose. ... If there is no God, then there is no context for anything; everything that is, just is, with no ultimate reason or purpose or meaning. Human life just is, each individual life just is, for no higher purpose. This is a very dark and depressing view of life, but it’s one of the main implications of real atheism. ... It’s a dead end philosophy that only ends in despair. But there’s more.

#2 shocking belief of atheism – there is no ultimate right or wrong, no ultimate grounding for morality or ethics. ... In principle, atheism leads to moral relativism. Unfortunately, we don’t have to wait to see the results of this kind of thinking seeping in to society. We see it in the news every day. As atheism has a greater influence on the society, especially the youth, we’ll see what it’s like to live in a world without absolute values. It’s not something to look forward to. Without the intervention of God Almighty, without some form of spiritual revival occurring, I’m afraid we are headed for a dark future on planet earth. Atheism contributes to this darkness.

#3 shocking belief of atheism – there are no ultimate answers to the most profound questions of life. ... Atheism produces no ultimate answers to the really big questions of life, although atheists are fond of claiming only their view gives us all the answers. For example, atheists like to claim that they know why everything exists, then they give you their answer – the Big Bang. ... Atheism teaches that we are accidents of the universe. There is no higher reason why we are here, we just are here.

As usual, there's a lot more stupid in the original post, and the author has apparently a limited grasp of the concept of paragraphs.

The Stupid! It Burns! (chaplain edition)

2011-12-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

Aww Isn’t That Precious- Atheists Want Atheist ‘Chaplains’ in the Military

Atheists want their unbelief to be treated like belief. They want their anti-godliness dignified with their own set of ‘chaplains’. Next thing you know, the pedophiles in prisons across the country will want their own pedophilistic chaplains too.

Just FYI: The armed forces implement many important services, such as counseling, through the chaplain corps. As members of the armed forces, atheists would like to have these services without having to deal with religious bias or proselytizing.

David Graeber (and Daniel Little) on Anarchism

2011-12-04T08:34:00.002-07:00

In David Graeber on the anarchist movement, Daniel Little reviews Graeber's book, Direct Action.

We want to see a world that is genuinely committed to some basic principles of social justice, equality, and personal freedom. And we generally acknowledge the point that the modern world can only function on the basis of social, political, and economic structures that have a degree of authority over individual conduct. These two framing ideas are in tension. ... Is social democracy actually a feasible outcome in the conditions of the 21st century?

There is a strand of radical thought that answers these questions in the negative. The "autonomist" theories and practices within the labor movement of the 1950s... represent one thread in this world. Another is the body of thinking, rhetoric, and action that is involved in the anarchist organizations associated with current anti-globalization activism. David Graeber has done an important service to the rest of us by offering an extended ethnography of this loosely connected movement in Direct Action. The book is the first I've seen to offer a nuanced description of the thinking, practices, and networks that have emerged within this movement over the past fifteen years or so.

Activism is important for correcting specific errors or problems, but according to Little,

it doesn't give a basis for creating institutions and structures that really work from the point of view of social justice and participatory democracy. ... In the end, I am more attracted to the kind of work begun by Fung and Wright, which is aimed at creating sustainable institutions of participatory democracy.

Debt and democracy

2011-12-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

Debt and Democracy: Has the Link been Broken?

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns.

5 Reasons Money Can Buy Happiness

2011-12-02T04:06:00.000-07:00

5 Reasons Money Can Buy Happiness

"Money Can't Buy Peace of Mind!" (yes, it can)
"But Money Can't Buy the Simple Pleasures of Life!" (yes, it can)
"Your Children Are More Important Than Money!" (children cost a lot of money)
"The Best Hobbies Don't Cost a Thing!" (yes, they do)
"Money Can't Buy Love!" (but a lack of money can lose it)

Sticking by your convictions

2011-11-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

Leah Libresco of Unequally Yoked asks, How do you guarantee that you’re going to stick by your convictions and principles? To me, this is seems like a nonsense question. If you don't stick by it, how do you call it a conviction? A conviction is something you're convinced of, n'est pas?

I'm sure it's just an artifact of my particular personality, but I've never in my life struggled to live up to my convictions and principles. I don't worry too much about what other people think of me, but by and large I think I conform to most middle-class virtues. I show up to work on time, every day, and even if I'm doing drudge work, I do my best. I've had some non-committed, open relationships, but I've never cheated on a committed relationship. My friends seem to count me as loyal, generous and kind. None of these supposed virtues have ever been difficult for me: they're how I want to be; why would I not do what I want?

Part of the reason, perhaps, is that I was never raised to be at all hung up about sex. Sex is a natural, positive activity that provides pleasure, comfort and intimacy. To me, sex is no more "intrinsically" morally charged than eating. I don't want to hurt other people in any way, so I don't want to hurt them in a sexual context, but other than its natural intensity, there's nothing particularly special about sex in that regard. So much moral discourse seems fundamentally wrapped up in placing arbitrary controls around sexuality: not the general controls against hurting people, but against "kinkiness", non-monogamy, and non-heterosexuality. I frankly don't understand all these sexual hang-ups: if it feels good, and you're not hurting anyone, enjoy!

There are, probably, people who hurt others, want to hurt others, and for whom hurting others causes no unhappiness. But such people would not, I think, look for any kind of support, internal or external, to not hurt others. Such people would, I think, consider all our moral philosophy to be ridiculous. Hence we rely not on philosophers with arguments to control such people but police with guns and prisons with bars. But such people are, I think, rare. Most people, I think, don't really want to hurt others, or want the benefits that come from not hurting others. When they do hurt others, they seem unhappy: by hurting others, they are hurting themselves. I tend to look on this type of behavior not in a moral context but a medical context: it looks a lot less like vice and a lot more like neurosis. The problem is not that they want to hurt others, but because they have some sort of hang-up or cognitive dissonance, they hurt others to temporarily and unsatisfactorily ease the tension of the dissonance.

There is one very big area where I find social, external "moral" support to be very useful: the establishment of trust. I don't want to hurt or exploit others, but there are very real benefits to persuading them that I will not hurt or exploit them. Similarly, there are benefits to trusting that others won't hurt or exploit me. One easy way to establish trust is to voluntarily subscribe to social coercion. The shopkeeper does not have to understand my character deeply: he knows if I write him a fraudulent check, I run a substantial risk of going to jail. Similarly, I don't have to understand his character deeply: he runs a substantial risk of jail or bankruptcy if he sells me shoddy goods. It's coercion because there really are police with guns and prisons with bars backing up our promises, but it's voluntary because we are both "submitting" to promises we both see as beneficial.

Similarly, I'm in a committed relationship with my girlfriend because I want to be in a committed relationship with her. I'm going to ride through the short term rough patches because I want the long-term benefits of a committed relationship. If I didn't want the long-term benefits, I wouldn't be in a committed relationship. If I wanted the long-term benefits, but did not act according to what I really wanted, then I would be crazy, no? I don't need the external support of society to keep me committed. Similarly, my second wife and I got divorced precisely because we decided that a committed relationship with each other was not in our long-term interests; that we were legally married did not affect our decision. And we were correct: now that we're divorced, we're good friends. Indeed, we got married not to support our own convictions, but to establish trust with the government. We wanted to convince the government truthfully that we were in a legitimate, committed relationship, that we were not just two strangers exploiting the immigration system.

I just don't understand people who can conceive of their own long-term, mutual benefit, but appear unable to act to obtain those benefits. Either their conception of the benefits is insincere — the benefits are not what they want, but what they have been somehow indoctrinated to say they want — or they are just crazy, somehow unable to do what they want to do. Both are to me not manifestations of moral vice, but symptoms of mental illness. Since I am neither insincere nor crazy, I just don't have these kinds of apparently "moral" conflicts.

Why I'm an asshole

2011-11-26T06:21:00.002-07:00

Godless Girl posts 14 Tips for a Less Douchey Life. Some of her tips are entirely unobjectionable, but others are more controversial. I see myself in many of these more controversial tips. I call people idiots, burningly stupid, and other epithets. I not infrequently resort to insults and abuse. But while I do see some of my... sharper... personality traits in her post, I must disagree that they are entirely negative. She encourages nothing bad — a person can follow her recommendations entirely and be completely good — but I don't think they're required.

Everyone adopts beliefs for primarily social rather than rational causes. I am a devotee of science, an atheist, a humanist not because I carefully, logically, and thoroughly considered all the pros and cons and made a reasoned decision, but primarily because that's how I was raised. Likewise too, people become supernaturalists, Christians/Muslims/Hindus etc., and moralists because that's how they were raised. We come from a civilization that reaches back five millennia in the written record and probably ten thousand years or more in the oral tradition. It includes millions of people who spent their entire lives thinking carefully, with greater or lesser success, about what it means to be a wise and good human being. I just don't have time to think everything out from first principles, even if I knew what those first principles were. So I, like everyone else, must rely on "secondary sources".

That everyone's beliefs, including my own, are primarily socially constructed does not entail that rationality is superfluous. A rational person is a person who, rather than constructing her beliefs rationally, will eliminate her beliefs when they fail rational scrutiny. I placed my beliefs about capitalism and republican "democracy" came under critical scrutiny; I became a communist when they failed the test of rationality. Rationality is an indispensable tool for shaping our beliefs, but by and large rationality shapes our beliefs not positively, by constructing true beliefs, but negatively, by eliminating false beliefs. "When you have eliminated the impossible," says Holmes, "whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

But for rational thought to have an effect, a person must be willing, at least potentially, to abandon any belief, however cherished, if it fails the test of rationality. More importantly, a person must be absolutely opposed to redefining what rationality is just to preserve some cherished belief. Without these twin commitments, which are themselves not rational but fundamentally moral, rationality is entirely ineffective. A person who is not morally committed to employing and preserving rationality will not only fail to be persuaded by a rational argument, but their compromise and corruption of rationality will spread into other domains, diminishing the effectiveness of rationality and critical scrutiny in general. The controversy, such as it is, is not just about what beliefs are more rational, but whether rationality itself, and its integrity, is morally necessary.

Moral discourse is fundamentally different from rational argument. There are no objective, purely logical reasons for any fundamental moral belief. Moral beliefs are not about how the world outside our minds actually is; moral beliefs are about how we want to build the worlds inside our minds. Moral beliefs are about who we want to become, as individuals and as societies. Rationality is not completely irrelevant — many people support or justify their moral beliefs with false statements about objective reality — but at the fundamental level, morality is not about truth but about choices. Because these choices are not about objective truth but about about subjective truth, truth about the inside of our minds, discourse about the objective world, the world outside our minds, is irrelevant.

Even to the extent that people use false statements about the world — black people or women are inferior, the poor are lazy, the rich are virtuous — cool rationality is often ineffectual. Rationality never gives us absolutes; it gives us only more or less possible or plausible. Set your threshold high enough, and any belief can survive rational scrutiny: extraordinary claims do indeed require extraordinary evidence. Furthermore, what precisely constitutes rationality is not given without controversy. How, for example, should we evaluate and understand probability and plausibility? Bayesian? Frequentist? Null-hypothetically? And finally, even where the canons of rationality are more-or-less generally agreed upon by scholars and scientists, the exercise of rationality is technically challenging. You must, as Feynman argues, not just decide not to fool yourself, but always bend over backward not to fool yourself. Rationality requires considerable study and unceasing discipline.

There are many ways to change how people think at a social level. If, like Godless Girl, you want to exclusively employ cool, calm rationality, more power to you. But some of us, myself included, want to use all the tools available. Mockery, derision, and insult really do work, and they can go where pure logical, evidentiary analysis cannot go. If a person is not deluded about the effects of cruelty or the objective nature of the objects of his cruelty — and, I think, many cruel people are not so deluded — I cannot persuade him that cruelty is in any sense "false". All I can do is tell him, in no uncertain terms, that I violently disapprove of his cruelty, that I, and others like me, will mock, belittle and ostracize him for his cruelty, and, if sufficiently provoked, react coercively. We do not, for example, have a philosophical conversation with a murderer, rationally convince him of the error of his ways, and then turn him loose; once we have rationally determined that it's objectively true that he committed murder, we punish him. (I do not advocate such extreme measures as coercive punishment in the discourse about religion, superstition, or politics. But I advocate lesser measures not because anything but pure rationality is immoral but because extreme measures are usually disproportionate.) In addition to objective, rational analysis, human beings use shame, guilt, derision, insult, and condemnation no less than praise, approbation, and admiration to affect the social acceptance and rejection of moral ideas. Most directly, derision and insult undermine privilege. Intellectual privilege can be taken to extremes of dogmatism and unquestionable authority, but the sine qua non of intellectual privilege is immunity from the raspberry, that the privileged can say anything, no matter how stupid, and his listeners are automatically compelled to take the idea "seriously" and discuss it "respectfully". Everyone has to earn this kind of respect; it is not automatically granted.

Of course, derision, mockery, and insult are not universally applicable. They are not at all effective in the short term and at the individual level. One cannot change a person's mind by insulting him directly. The effect, rather, is indirect: to undermine the socially constructed intellectual privilege of the speaker and to convince listeners that they too will be mocked, and possibly ostracized, if they express similar beliefs. Derision is ineffective when applied too broadly, because when applied broadly it is often inaccurate, and the rational person, even when using supra-rational tools, still demands accuracy. Finally, derision, mockery, and insult shut down rational discourse because they undermine the necessary presumption of good will; they are most effective when there is sufficient evidence that the target has already fatally compromised rationality and good will. Similarly, although mockery and insult can be applied directly against particularly odious moral opinions, they have additional power when directed not against an opposing opinion, but against the egregious misuse of rational, logical thought supporting that opinion. These tools are limited, but within these limitations, they seem very effective.

I cannot write an essay justifying the use of insult and then take offense that Godless Girl effectively calls me a "douchbag" for behavior that objectively applies to me. The shoe does fit, and I will wear it. It is noteworthy, however, that Godless Girl employs the very tactics she condemns: she identifies behavior that she strongly objects to, and makes it perfectly clear that she does not consider those who use that behavior to be "one of us."* She wants to change social behavior by using insults — e.g. "douchebag", "idiot", "asshole", — to express her disapproval of behavior that she disagrees with. Good for her. I know she and I are not entirely aligned; I am not "one of us" to her. I can live with that.

*Scare quotes, not an actual quotation.

The Stupid! It Burns! (the miracle of language edition)

2011-11-25T19:27:00.004-07:00

In his latest essay, Atheist, Heal Thyself: The Myths of Atheism (this guy is too stupid even for PuffHo), Moshe Averick really outdoes himself in the egregious stupidity department.

Scientists are stymied in their attempts to explain even such a common and basic human ability like verbal communication, in material terms. I will briefly elaborate. Imagine two men; one is an American who only speaks English, one is Chinese and only speaks Chinese. Both are thirsty and desire liquid refreshment. In other words, both are thinking essentially the same thought; namely, that they want to imbibe liquid into their bodies. Each turns to the other and in their respective language, asks for a drink of water. Of course, neither has any idea what the other is talking about. Why? It is because the thought, “I want a drink of water,” is completely separate and different than the words, “I want a drink of water.” The words themselves mean nothing at all. They are arbitrary sounds that represent thoughts, ideas, concepts, emotions, i.e., information. When I am thirsty and want to ask someone for a drink, I proceed to form a series of arbitrary and intrinsically senseless sounds with my mouth. These sounds travel through the air where they are heard by another person, who then decodes these sounds and brings me a glass of water. We take it for granted because we do it all the time, but what is transpiring is nothing short of miraculous. I am taking ideas in my head and sending them through the air to others. I am attaching ideas to sound waves. The words (i.e. the sounds), that I spoke were arbitrary and meaningless, but the information was very specific and very meaningful. Words and sounds do not equal information, words and sounds represent information. The information itself cannot be defined in material terms. [overused emphasis (the good rabbi loves him some italics) omitted]

Seriously, this is what passes for "sophisticated" thought among the religious.

As is often the case, the article is chock full of stupid, a lot more than I quote here.

Meaninglessness and atheism

2011-11-24T05:48:00.002-07:00

In his discourse on meaninglessness, excerpted from Huxley's 1937 book Ends and Means by Ed Babinski, Aldous Huxley (apparently unbeknownst to Robin Schumacher) arguing against a philosophy of meaninglessness. In the essay, Huxley acknowledges the successes of the scientific method and admits its value, but notes that the naive Positivistic, Humean project of reducing all of reality to what can be measured and counted ignores the purely qualitative aspects of reality. According to Huxley, scientists have largely transcended the limitations of Positivism, but the general public, and presumably non-scientific intellectuals, lag several decades behind; the general public had, at the time of Huxley's writing, just begun to see Positivism as the essence of the metaphysics underlying scientific thought, but — with some justice — did not like it. They sought to replace the meaning and value that Positivism ignores with "absurd" philosophies, such as "nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism*."

*Harrumph.

Huxley naturally asks: is there really is meaning and value in the world? If so, what is the nature of that meaning and value? He notes that, at least in his own context, these questions appear to be entirely novel; he and his contemporaries, he asserts, simply "took it for granted" that there was no such thing as meaning and value, partly because he accepted Positivist metaphysics, but also because he had an ulterior motive for seeking and finding meaninglessness. These ulterior motives are not unique to those seeking meaninglessness; they are, rather, ubiquitous. "No philosophy," Huxley asserts, "is completely disinterested."

The philosopher who finds meaning in the world is concerned, not only to elucidate that meaning, but also to prove that is it most clearly expressed in some established religion, some accepted code of morals. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is not valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.

Huxley claims that his own and his contemporaries' denial of meaning was from similar ulterior motives, in reaction to the equally ulterior motives of "Christian special pleaders to justify iniquity by an appeal to the meaning of the world."

Here Babinski leaves off his quotation, but we can imagine that Huxley follows through on his warning that "one unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions. Passions may be satisfied in the process; but the disinterested love of knowledge suffers eclipse," and explores his earlier allusion to "the world we actually live in, the world that is given by our senses, our intuitions of beauty and goodness, our emotions and impulses, our moods and sentiments" from which "the man of science abstracts a simplified private universe of things possessing only... elements which can be weighed, measured, numbered, or which lend themselves in any other way to mathematical treatment." Huxley presumably goes on to argue that it is true that the world has meaning or value, and we must always stand ready to sacrifice our preferences to the truth.

Huxley's passage contradicts Schumacher's thesis — that atheists reject otherwise persuasive evidence for the existence of God because they want to escape Christianity's moral strictures — in several ways. Most obviously, atheism is not synonymous with meaninglessness. Atheism entails only that if there were meaning and value in the world, that meaning and value does not rely on any supernatural being. (It should also be noted that theism is not necessarily synonymous with meaningfulness; a deity can do anything, even act entirely arbitrarily and capriciously.) Furthermore, Huxley clearly asserts the symmetry of both the rejection of and search for meaning; Schumacher's must establish an asymmetry, that atheists (or advocates of meaninglessness) employ ulterior motives in a way that theists do not. Most importantly, while Huxley is realistic about the role of ulterior motives in philosophy, he fundamentally argues the opposite of Schumacher's thesis: from from being a justification for any philosophy, it is incumbent on all philosophers to do their best to transcend their ulterior motives.

Indeed, we can turn Huxley's essay against Schumacher. I do not, of course, want Yahweh, the villainous character depicted in the Christian Bible, to exist. Neither do I want cancer, war, pestilence, famine, murder, rape, nor child abuse to exist. But if Huxley is correct, then Schumacher probably does want Yahweh to exist. Simply pointing out that some atheists do not want Yahweh to exist (and some nihilists do not want meaning and value to exist) is to point out the obvious. We can point out — with equal banality — that some Christians want Yahweh to exist, and employ the existence of Yahweh to support their own preferences and desires. Bias is ubiquitous. The question is not what we want or don't want; the question is not whether or not reality felicitously coincides with our desires; the question is: are we able to set aside what we want the truth to be, so we can determine what the truth really is?

Is Schumacher honestly seeking what the truth really is, instead of simply rationalizing his own biases? I do not intend to single out Schumacher for special investigation; this is a question which everyone must answer; everyone falls under suspicion. As Feynman observes, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." Sadly, Schumacher gives every indication that he is simply rationalizing his own biases; he is projecting his own behavior onto atheists. The logical fallacies, post hoc and anecdotal, the use of quotations out of context, his use of unreliable secondary sources, and his failure to check primary sources, all argue that he is merely assembling a rationalization, not conducting an inquiry.

Most tellingly, though, he fails to directly support what ought to be the most important point: regardless of a priori bias, he does not include any direct support for any atheist, scientist, philosopher, or intellectual, ever admitting that they have ignored compelling evidence to the contrary to maintain their bias. We might forgive this omission: it is true, and perhaps important, that many atheists do indeed have an a priori bias against theism, and every honest atheist needs to carefully examine her own biases. But in the form of an anonymous quotation, Schumacher expressly asserts that not only do atheists have a bias, but they also ignore evidence to the contrary to maintain that bias. If Schumacher wants to argue this case, then it is incumbent on him to actually argue it, with direct, cited, and reliable evidence, not third-party hearsay and friend-of-a-friend urban legend. That he does not do so, that he considers his arguments compelling and persuasive on such ridiculous "evidence", decisively indicates that he is merely rationalizing his own biases; he is the pot calling not just the kettle but also the silver spoon black. Schumacher, like most Christian apologists in my experience, not only fails to honestly inquire into the truth, but appears willfully ignorant of what an honest inquiry actually entails.

Aldous Huxley on meaninglessness

2011-11-24T03:56:00.001-07:00

Dagood points us to Ed Babinski's quotation from Aldous Huxley's 1937 book, Ends and Means, where Huxley discusses "the philosophy of meaninglessness." The passage is very long, so I'm going to just reproduce it here and analyze it in a separate post.

It appears that Babinski (or someone else) has typed the passage by hand, and the passage contains what appear to be typographical errors. I have corrected what seem to be the most obvious errors without annotation.

"From the world we actually live in, the world that is given by our senses, our intuitions of beauty and goodness, our emotions and impulses, our moods and sentiments, the man of science abstracts a simplified private universe of things possessing only... elements which can be weighed, measured, numbered, or which lend themselves in any other way to mathematical treatment. By using this technique of simplification and abstraction, the scientist has succeeded to an astonishing degree in understanding and dominating the physical environment. The success was intoxicating and, with an illogicality which, in the circumstances, was doubtless pardonable, many scientists and philosophers came to imagine that this useful abstraction from reality was reality itself. Reality as actually experienced contains intuitions of value and significance, contain love, beauty, mystical ecstasy, intimations of godhead. Science did not and still does not possess intellectual instruments with which to deal with these aspects of reality. Consequently it ignored them and concentrated its attention upon such aspects of the world as it could deal with by mean of arithmetic, geometry and the various branches of higher mathematics. Our conviction that the world is meaningless lend itself very effectively to furthering the ends of erotic or political passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error -- the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning and value has been deliberately excluded, with ultimate reality.

"[The philosopher, Hume's, erroneous attitude was typical] Hume wrote, 'If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstracts reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or evidence? No. Commit it then to the flame; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.' Hume mentions only divinity and school metaphysics; but his argument would apply just as cogently to poetry, music, painting, sculpture and all ethical and religious teaching. Hamlet contains no abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number and no experimental reason concerning evidence; nor does the Hammerklavier Sonata, nor Donatello's David, nor the Tao Te Ching [book of Chinese philosophy and wisdom], nor the Following of Christ. Commit them therefore to the flames: for they can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

"We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after... The contents of literature, art, music -- even in some measure of divinity and school metaphysics -- are not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements of experience which scientists chose to leave out of account, for the good reason that they had no intellectual methods for dealing with them. In the arts, in philosophy, in religion, men are trying -- to describe and explain the non-measurable, purely qualitative aspects of reality...[p. 308-310]

"In recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one -- the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religious experiences and intuitions of significance. Unhappily, novel ideas become acceptable to the less intelligent members of society only with a very considerable time-lag. Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed -- and the belief caused them considerable distress -- that the product of their special incompetence was identical with reality as a whole. Today this belief has begun to give way, in scientific circles, to a different and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total experience. The masses on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today's scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.

"These last considerations raise an important question, which must now be considered in some detail. Does the world as a whole possess the value and meaning that we constantly attribute to certain parts of it (such as human beings and their works); and, if so, what is the nature of that value and meaning? This is a question which, a few years ago, I should not even have posed. For, like so many of my contemporaries, I took it for granted that there was no meaning. This was partly due to the fact that I shared the common belief that the scientific picture of an abstraction from reality was a true picture of reality as a whole; partly also to other, non-intellectual reasons. I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.

"Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless." [p. 311-312]

"No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingle to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behavior, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community. The philosopher who finds meaning in the world is concerned, not only to elucidate that meaning, but also to prove that is it most clearly expressed in some established religion, some accepted code of morals. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is not valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. The voluntary, as opposed to the intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines of materialism, for examples, may be predominantly erotic, as they were in the case of Lamettrie (see his lyrical account of the pleasures of the bed in La Volupte and at the end of L'Homme Machine ['The Human Machine,' a work of materialist philosophy]), or predominantly political, as they were in the case of Karl Marx. The desire to justify a particular form of political organization and, in some cases, of a personal will to power has played an equally large part in the formulation of philosophies postulating the existence of meaning in the world. Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalistic system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press, and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of [Calvin's] Geneva and [Puritan] New England. In all cases they have shown that the meaning of the world was such as to be compatible with, or actually most completely expressed by, the iniquities I have mentioned above -- iniquities which happened, of course, to serve the personal or sectarian interests of the philosophers concerned. In due course, these arose philosophers who denied not only the right of Christian special pleaders to justify iniquity by an appeal to the meaning of the world, but even their right to find any such meaning whatsoever. In the circumstances, the fact was not surprising. One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions. Passions may be satisfied in the process; but the disinterested love of knowledge suffers eclipse. [p. 314-316]

"For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever... The men of the new Enlightenment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the [conservative] reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated, neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual indulgence. [p. 316-317]

The anti-moral argument for atheism

2011-11-23T06:44:00.001-07:00

Robin Schumacher's recent essay on the anti-moral argument for atheism is poorly constructed, asks (and fails to answer) the right question, but it is an interesting concept.

There is evidence that some intellectuals have some underlying moral motives in investigating the existence of God. In his recent comment, Schumacher quotes Aldous Huxley:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption....The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

[In his comment, Schumacher attributes this quotation to Ends and Means, 1969, pp. 270, 273. I have not verified the citation.] Although I have not checked the original source, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to interpret Huxley's meaningful/meaningless dichotomy as akin to theism/atheism.

Putting aside the absurdity of trying to support a generalization with anecodotes, we can dismiss Schumacher's interpretation of this quotation. Schumacher's original essay was about why atheism is more prevalent among contemporary scientists than the general populace. Huxley is not contemporary, and he was not a scientist. Schumacher has a larger thesis, though, that atheists in general believe that no God exists only because they wish to escape its (sexual) morality, and they persist in their disbelief in spite of what ought to be rationally persuasive evidence. Again, this quotation fails to support his thesis. Huxley specifically asserts that he "was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons" to support the assumption* of meaninglessness. Huxley asserts reasons that appear to be independent of his desire to escape sexual morality. Huxley says that he investigated the question of meaning because of his desire for "liberation", but he specifically contradicts the idea that the direct cause of his actual belief is this desire.

*Huxley appears to be using "assumption" here in the sense of "hypothesis".

Huxley's predisposition to finding meaninglessness seems to bias his investigation. But an a priori bias does not necessarily fatally compromise the search for objective truth. The actual reasons an investigator finds to support an hypothesis stand on their own, regardless of his bias. Our task as scientific investigators is not to eliminate bias, but to recognize it and try to overcome it. I haven't read Huxley's book, and I don't know what the specific reasons he found to support the idea of meaninglessness, so I don't know if his reasons really are good, if they stand on their own regardless of his bias. But I do not know that they are bad, either empirically or philosophically. All I know is what's been quoted: Huxley says he has found reasons to support his conclusion, which contradicts Schumacher's thesis that atheists consciously ignore good reasons that undermine their conclusion, that atheists disbelieve in the existence of God because — indeed just because — they wish to escape theistic sexual morality.

But how far does Huxley's predisposition really bias his investigation? All morality involves a tension between what we want and what is "right". So any moral investigation is biased by what we want; if what we want were exactly congruent to what is "right", it is the same thing to say we're doing it because we want to or we're doing it because it's right. And, at least me, the distinction between what we want and what is "right" is vacuous. I don't worry whether or not it's "right" to eat food and drink water every day, live in a house, read, see a movie from time to time, work, study, etc. I do these things because I want to. It's a reasonable position to say that if I want to do something, I will do it unless there's a compelling reason to the contrary. So when Huxley says he wants some sort of sexual freedom, he is doing nothing but moving this desire into the domain of moral discourse. If he didn't want it, he wouldn't worry about whether or not it was "right".

If a rational, sensible person wants something such as sexual freedom, and someone tells her that this sexual freedom is "wrong", then the first thing she is going to do is investigate the reasons for the prohibition. The first thing she will do is look for direct natural reasons. Does the exercise of sexual freedom, for example, conflict with her desire not to hurt anyone? Does it pose an unacceptable risk of disease or death, conflicting with her desire to live a long and healthy life? (In a related example, I would prefer, ceteris paribus, to smoke cigarettes inside my house. I know, however, that second-hand smoke is harmful, I do not want to harm the people I share a house with, and therefore I don't smoke inside.) If there are persuasive natural reasons not to do something, then, as a rational person, I am not going to do it. Simply denying natural reasons because one wants to do something is profoundly irrational.

Lacking a direct natural reason, she will then look at more indirect social and legal reasons. Will her neighbors dislike her if she exercises her sexual freedom? Is it illegal? Will a police officer arrest her and a judge sentence her to prison? Fundamentally, does her desire for sexual freedom conflict with her desire to participate in her social community and stay out of prison? Again, to simply deny one's demonstrable social and legal context just because one wants to do something is profoundly irrational.

Finally, she will look at "theological" reasons. Does God prohibit her from exercising her sexual freedom? But theological reasons are substantively different from the preceding natural, secular reasons. It is true of reality that some things we might want to do actually do hurt others. It is true of reality that some activities will earn the disapproval or ostracism of our neighbors. It is true of reality that the government uses real police and real prisons to suppress some activities. So when faced with only theological reasons, how can anyone object that she wants to determine if theological reasons are also true of reality. And if they are not, she is justified in dismissing them.

Schumacher is essentially engaging in "underpants" reasoning. Although atheists disbelieve the existence of God for many reasons, and sexual morality seems pretty low on the list (based on my own informal knowledge of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of atheists), some atheists such as Huxley perhaps are motivated by escaping Christian sexual morality. But what of it? It is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to conclude that because Huxley desires to escape Christian sexual morality, and because Huxley is an atheist (or a believer in meaninglessness), he is an atheist just because of his desire to escape Christian sexual morality. And it is not a fallacy but an outright lie to claim without compelling, direct evidence that he has irrationally chosen atheism.

I suspect that many "fundamentalist" Christians (and perhaps Muslims) would decisively reject my central assumption, that wanting to do something, absent compelling reasons to the contrary, is sufficient justification for actually doing it. I suspect that for these "fundamentalists", wanting to do something actually raises a red flag, that wanting to do something compels deep moral scrutiny, that wanting to do something requires a positive, extrinsic justification. I also suspect that if a fundamentalist wants to do something he is extrinsically commanded to do, he will do it in a way he doesn't want to do it, just to avoid the appearance of "selfishness". If so, I would consider this attitude profoundly neurotic. I suspect that those such as Schumacher who make this kind of moral argument are simply demanding that the rest of the world share their neuroses.

Liquidation cycles

2011-11-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

Brad DeLong tries to understand the reasoning of the pre-Great Depression "liquidationists"

“Liquidation” Cycles and the Great Depression

Schumacher responds (still stupid)

2011-11-22T16:09:00.004-07:00

Robin Schumacher, the author of the burningly stupid post that I recently criticized, responds to my criticism. Here's his comment in full:

Hello Larry –

Let me see what I can do to address your concerns.

First, no I did not provide sources for my quotations. Reference usage many times depends on the vehicle being used for communication. It is perfectly acceptable for various informal articles and news stories to contain quotes without references, and given this is a personal blog entry and not something like an academic journal article, I didn’t provide references.

However, since you would like them, let me see what I can for you. The story of the professor (Dr. Carlson) and biologist is referenced in Dr. Norman Geisler’s (the former head of my seminary) book, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist”, page 163.

The Huxley quote appears on that same page in Dr. Geisler’s book and is footnoted in the Notes appendix. However, this may be insufficient for you. Perhaps a quote from his younger brother Aldous – who sports the same position for rejecting God – will suffice (From Ends and Means, 1969, pp. 270, 273): “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption....The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom”. Let me know if you would like me to swap the quotes.

The George Klein quote comes from his book “The Atheist and the Holy City: Encounters and Reflections”, page 203.

My Nagel quote is not out of context whatsoever. Of course the statement was made in regard to his fear of religion. That’s pretty much my point.

My primary argument in the blog post that you say fails to meet the high school test boils down to two positions: (1) Atheists reject God because of the rebellious will that we all (including myself) have and they look for any rationale to reject God’s moral commands - something that has strong Biblical support; (2) Scientism-driven atheists reject God because of their a priori commitment to philosophical naturalism, a point that the quotes in the article aptly demonstrate. I’m sorry it wasn’t framed more to your satisfaction.

Lastly, as to me being a fool… In the same way the Apostle Paul defines fool in the worldly sense, I can be called a fool (cf. 1 Cor. 1:21; 4:10). However, I am not a fool in the Christian sense: “The fool has said in his heart. ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1). What kind of fool are you, Larry?

A suggestion: in the future, rather than resort to character assassination and ad hominem attacks, why not respectfully and calmly ask for references that are absent in an article or clarification of a position? I find it amusing you attack me for supposedly not living up to a particular standard while you violate a very basic one yourself.

I hope this helps and I appreciate your suggested corrections. God bless.

--Robin

Robin,

Your excuse that personal blog posts don't require sourcing references is without merit. We can excuse the lack of citation in a non-academic context only when there is no serious controversy over the accuracy of the quotation. I don't demand full MLA or APA references, but if you're going to use someone's words to make an argument, it is incumbent on you to at least point vaguely to the primary source.

Norman Geisler does not appear to be a reliable secondary source. He has on at least one occasion misrepresented a quotation. Additionally, I asked for the Huxley quote, and you apparently have a secondary source available (Geisler's I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist) which you assert points to the primary source, but you fail to provide it. Curious. Finally, I've requested Klein's book; I assure you I'll be checking whether you have taken this quotation out of context.

As to Nagel, you are using his words to establish the cause of his atheism. That he is afraid of religion does not establish, as you assert, that this fear is the cause of his atheism. You are not just "missing a step", you are misrepresenting the intended meaning of the quotation.

The Aldous Huxley quotation doesn't help your argument; Huxley is a writer, not a scientist, and even for a writer he's kind of weird. Remember, one of my criticisms of your post was that you did not cite contemporary scientists to support your thesis about the cause of contemporary scientists' disproportionate atheism. Neither Aldous nor Julian Huxley are contemporary scientists.

As to your essay overall, it is hardly surprising that you consider your arguments persuasive; if you did not, you would not have made them. And it is hardly surprising that I consider my criticism persuasive and you do not. These are issues each individual reader will have to determine for herself.

Finally, you apparently did not read my conclusion. I've been dealing with bullshit, lies, quote mining, and egregiously fallacious arguments for more than a decade. I've lost my patience for superficial politeness. Your suggestions are unnecessary.

The Stupid! It Burns! (making up quotes edition)

2011-11-22T05:56:00.004-07:00

I usually don't comment on TSIB material, but in Why are so many scientists atheists?, Robin Schumacher commits so many sins against reason that they deserve some analysis.

First, Schumacher engages in quote mining (taking quotes out of context) and repeats what appear to be outright fabrications. Naturally none of his quotations, even the accurate ones, have a citation. Schumacher describes a conversation between an unnamed seminary professor and an unnamed biology professor. The biology professor admits that the evidence for the existence of God is persuasive, but remains an atheist "because I want to sleep with who I want and keep living how I’m living." So many Christian apologists have a seminary professor who's had this conversation that we must conclude the whole conversation is probably a fabrication. Schumacher quotes philosopher Thomas Nagel, who "want[s] atheism to be true" and who "[does not] want there to be a God." But Nagel doesn't say that he is an atheist because he wants it to be true. A larger quotation, attributed to Nagel's book, The Last Word and presented at Wikiquote, makes it clear that Nagel is "speaking of the fear of religion." And finally, Schumacher "quotes" Julian Huxley (~~a.k.a. "Darwin's Bulldog"~~*) and scientist George Klein (presumably the Hungarian biologist), but I'm unable to find any primary references for these quotations; they are almost certainly fabricated. Just fabricating quotations is enough reason to condemn Schumacher as a liar, but the stupidity continues.

*Thomas Henry Huxley was known as "Darwin's Bulldog"; Julian Huxley was Thomas's grandson.

Schumacher's attitude towards evolution is weirdly equivocal. On the one hand, he correctly notes that evolution doesn't disprove the existence of God. He quotes Richard Dawkins accurately (but of course does not cite The God Delusion), but completely misinterprets the quotation that he includes. Dawkins does not offer evolution as a reason to be an atheist; Schumacher quotes Dawkins as saying that even before evolution, and atheist could say, "God isn't a good explanation." But if evolution isn't directly probative (it just removes one more gap from the God of the Gaps fallacy), then why does Schumacher go to great lengths to equate evolution and atheism? Schumacher's atheist professor is a biologist, who, despite the evidence, will continue to "to teach evolution and remain an atheist." Schumacher's fabricated quotation from Huxley (an agnostic) just talks about why people believe evolution (supposedly "without proof"), not atheism. I can only speculate, but Schumacher apparently wants to have his cake and eat it too: he doesn't want to directly confront the mountains of evidence for evolution, but he knows his audience considers evolution to be synonymous with and equally insupportable as atheism.

Even ignoring these previous issues, Schumacher's post fails to meet the minimal standards for a causal essay in freshman English composition. Schumacher boasts of "Ph.D. in New Testament and an M.A. in Christian Apologetics;" if you are going to assert academic credentials, you should meet academic standards. Schumacher sets up his explanandum competently, showing that in a survey 31% of scientists (some fields, such as physics and biology, were surveyed at 41%) "disavowed belief in God," as compared with the much smaller percentage of atheists in the general population. He asks, "Why such a difference between this particular group of surveyed professors and the overall populous [sic]?" That's a good question, and he actually cites the study.

But the quality of Schumacher's argument quickly degenerates. His argument is entirely anecdotal, consisting of individual quotations (most of which are, of course, fabricated); you cannot even address, much less explain, a statistical truth with anecdotal evidence. And only two of the relevant quotations are (if they were real) from contemporary scientists; the others are from people long dead or from non-scientists. And he fails to address any alternative explanations; he offers one — Dawkins says that more scientists are atheists because, "well, we’re bright" — but doesn't address it head-on. Finally, he concludes that scientists are atheists "for the same reason everyone else turns away" from religion. But if scientists are atheists for the same reason as everyone else, then Schumacher has fundamentally failed to explain why there's a difference between the prevalence of atheism among scientists and the populace. His argument, even if he were given the facts he fabricates, is just one long fallacy.

Moreover, his argument is so fundamentally stupid that he has to resort to fabrication and fallacy. Schumacher might have an interesting point if he were to argue that people choose their unfalsifiable, unprovable metaphysical beliefs to rationalize their desires and preferences. Of course that argument cuts both ways: if nonbelievers choose atheism to rationalize their licentiousness, then believers choose theism to rationalize their repression, and of course history is littered with examples of people (such as Joseph Smith) using God to rationalize their licentiousness. But Schumacher attempts a much different argument. He asserts that nonbelievers choose atheism in the face of persuasive evidence to the contrary. For example, he places the admission in the mouth of his unnamed biologist:

I think you’re right. I do think the evidence you’ve presented is correct with respect to God. ... [but] I’m still going to teach evolution and remain an atheist ... because I want to sleep with who I want and keep living how I’m living.

If people would deny the evidence with regard to God, why wouldn't they do it with regard to, for example, the United States government? We have a lot of people who want to break laws and who actually do break laws. Some of them believe they won't get caught, and some of the more crazy believe the US government has no legal jurisdiction over them, but no one denies the persuasive evidence that the government exists to rationalize their criminal activity. Human stupidity (as Schumacher demonstrates) may well be infinite, but his thesis so contradicts ordinary logic and basic common sense that it requires far more than a transparently fallacious anecdotal argument.

More than a decade ago, I "entered the fray" to discuss religion. I sincerely believed that religion and superstition was due only to a lack of education and understandable and excusable ignorance and confusion. (We really do live in a subtle and complicated world, after all.) I hoped to do my bit to help alleviate this lack of education. What I discovered, however, is that Schumacher (a credentialed scholar) is not the exception but the rule: religious belief is supported by a level of mendacity that simply cannot be unintentional. I cannot reason with someone who intentionally lies or willfully remains ignorant; I can only fight, and call him a liar and a fool.

Education

2011-11-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

Money

2011-11-21T10:19:00.002-07:00

Money, by xkcd

Keynes vs. Hayek Rap, Round Two

2011-11-19T20:06:00.001-07:00

theObserver asks: are they being fair to Keynes (and Hayek)? Hard to say. Both videos together form a summary, brief to the point of oversimplification, of the views of two brilliant economists.

Nils Bohr said, "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." To a certain extent, both Keynes and Hayek are correct. I agree (to a certain extent) with Hayek: I don't think it makes sense to try to micromanage a macroeconomy. On the other hand, Keynes is also correct: there are things the government can and must do. I think Keynes is more correct, though, and the government boosting aggregate demand in a depression is hardly micromanaging the whole economy.

There are a lot of positive feedback loops (in the engineering sense) in an economy. Without positive feedback loops, we wouldn't have long-run economic growth. But positive feedback loops have the potential to be destructive as well as productive, as in the notorious "death spiral," where a business lays off salespeople to cut costs, reducing revenue, and requiring another round of cost-cutting. One role of the government is ameliorate positive feedback loops that are resistant to private, individual control.

Note that communism is not synonymous with absolute central planning. Communism is social ownership of the means of production. They're related concepts; the most obvious way to implement social ownership is by government central planning. But the most obvious way is not the only way, and in this case is not, I think, the correct way.

How to fight the Occupation - St. Louis

2011-11-16T06:36:00.002-07:00

Gods Help Us, St. Louis Did it Right #OWS
by The Infamous Brad
Nov. 16th, 2011 at 2:08 AM

Please click through to the original article so Brad will know you're reading him.

Reprinted under the terms of the author's copyright.

Multiple news sources are reporting that the multi-city raids on Occupy Wall Street and its regional imitators were coordinated by the National Council of Mayors, via conference call right before they began. A few minutes ago, I saw an article on a San Francisco news website alleging that, based on deep-background off-the-record anonymous law enforcement sources, the FBI was on that 18-city conference call as well, and that it was the FBI that advised cities on tactics: go in hard, with as many cops as you can, wearing black riot-squad gear to make sure you have the psychological upper hand; do it in the middle of the night and keep the reporters as far away as possible.

The St. Louis Beacon non-profit news site is reporting that St. Louis's mayor didn't bother listening to the conference call himself; he let his chief of staff take the call. And after seeing how other cities handled their raids, and comparing it to how St. Louis handled its raid, I'm left wondering: did Jeff Rainford laugh out loud at the FBI and the credulous mayors who were listening in? Or did he manage to hide it?

See, here's one thing I didn't have the heart to tell my friend who's peripherally involved in Occupy St. Louis: Occupy is not the first liberal group to think that they could win for their political issue by setting up a permanent encampment on a major thoroughfare in downtown St. Louis. They're not even the first in my lifetime. They're the third. The only difficulty that anti-war tax-evasion advocate Bill Ramsey and his encampment posed for the St. Louis police was keeping the feds off of their back long enough for them to deal with it peacefully; homeless services advocate the reverend Larry Rice had multiple churches, half the city's politicians, and significant manpower at his disposal and was never more than a minor annoyance to the powers that be or to their police. And, now that I understand their strategy, St. Louis's sadly under-staffed, horrifically mismanaged, and irredeemably corrupt metropolitan police department did at least demonstrate this: they have dealing with encampments like this down to a science; Occupy St. Louis never stood a chance.

The first thing they did was the one that baffled me the most, at first: they gave the protesters nearly 36 hours notice, as opposed to the 20 to 60 minutes' notice other cities gave. It has taken me almost a week, and the mistakes of several other cities, to see why that was a good idea, because here's how they did it. Early afternoon on Thursday, they gave the protesters 24 hours' notice: as of 3pm on Friday, the no structures in the plaza rule was going to be enforced, and as of 10pm, the curfew was going to be enforced. So, unsurprisingly, Occupy St. Louis put out a huge call for as many people as possible to come to the plaza by noon, to be trained in peaceful civil disobedience; local civil liberties lawyers showed up to brief them. Needless to say, the cops did not oblige them by showing up at 3pm. Heck, I knew they weren't going to show up at 3pm; no way were they going to snarl downtown traffic during rush hour; I told my friend not to expect them any earlier than 7pm at the very earliest.

So, when no cops showed up anywhere near 3pm, the protesters had their biggest rally to date (as I suspect the cops were thinking, "getting it out of their system"), and then started to drift away. Rally organizers advised people to be back before 10pm, to block the enforcement of curfew. Sure enough, by 10pm, they had 350 people down there. And scant minutes later, people were jazzed up and ready to go, because outlying scouts reported that the police were gathering, en masse, with multiple cars, multiple buses, an ambulance, and a firetruck, only a couple of blocks away!

And sometime around an hour, hour and a half later, the cops just disappeared, dispersed, without ever having gotten within two blocks of the plaza. So the confused protesters declared victory, let most of the troops go home, and fewer than a hundred of them bedded down for the night in their tents. An hour later, somewhere around 150 cops showed up. I'm sure people in those tents tweeted and text messaged and phoned for reinforcements. But between the late hour, and the fact that people were exhausted after having been out there all day, and that it was the third call-up of the day? Nobody showed.

Ah, but the cops did more than just show up after two head-fakes and with sufficient numbers ... they did right exactly what the Obama administration told everybody else to do wrong. They didn't show up in riot gear and helmets, they showed up in shirt sleeves with their faces showing. They not only didn't show up with SWAT gear, they showed up with no unusual weapons at all, and what weapons they had all securely holstered. They politely woke everybody up. They politely helped everybody who was willing to remove their property from the park to do so. They then asked, out of the 75 to 100 people down there, how many people were volunteering for being-arrested duty? Given 33 hours to think about it, and 10 hours to sweat it over, only 27 volunteered. As the police already knew, those people's legal advisers had advised them not to even passively resist, so those 27 people lined up to be peacefully arrested, and were escorted away by a handful of cops. The rest were advised to please continue to protest, over there on the sidewalk ... and what happened next was the most absolutely brilliant piece of crowd control policing I have heard of in my entire lifetime.

All of the cops who weren't busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfully occupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in. Downtown bicycle patrol cops had spent weeks coming to the Occupy St. Louis general assembly and working group meetings, paying respectful attention and engaging people in polite conversation, listening intently; who knew that they weren't surveilling protesters, as some of us paranoidly assumed, they were seeing what the protesters had to teach them about tactics! A few of the protesters stayed for a couple of hours, to maintain the stand-off; the police uncomplainingly and politely continued their occupation of the plaza, flawlessly turning Occupy St. Louis's tactics back against them.

By dawn, the protesters were licked. They weren't just licked Friday night, they're almost certainly licked permanently, too. When the park re-opened Saturday morning, a few protesters gathered, caught unprepared with no signs or other gear, quietly discussing what to do. One of them went right to the center of the plaza and set up a tent. A couple of officers came by, engaged him in quiet conversation, and once everybody was calm, they pointed out to him that nobody else was joining him. He took the tent down.

A couple of people on the Occupy St. Louis Facebook page are still promising defiance, but whether they know it or not, they're beaten. One thing that I've heard from everybody who's ever tried to organize St. Louisans to volunteer for anything as a group, from churches to political parties, from the VFW to anti-war groups, from the Bill Gothard Seminar to ACT-UP, is that it is almost completely impossible to get St. Louisans to show up for volunteer work. St. Louisans are available for work in the past tense. ("Oh, you did what? you should have called me, I would have helped!") St. Louisans are available for work in the future tense. ("The next time you do that, you should call me, I want to help out.") But they are never, ever available in the present. ("Sorry, I wish I could help.")* Occupy St. Louis benefited from the publicity of the national movement, and college students facing the prospect of graduating into an economy with high unemployment while carrying a quarter million in debt were highly motivated, but I think their momentum is broken now. On the off chance it's not, the city is dangling the carrot that maybe, if you patiently wait and don't violate the ordinances between now and then, maybe some day we'll repeal an ordinance or the court will rule in your favor, and you can have your camp back ... yeah, never going to happen, they just have to stall until the last of the momentum is gone. The city will get that polite obedience, too; St. Louis has near-Minneapolis levels of politeness about those kinds of things. And long before then, St. Louis' genuinely awful winter weather will have kicked in, the time of year when nobody leaves the house voluntarily.

In every town where the local cops thought that the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security knew what they were talking about, Occupy is roaring back bigger than ever; as Olbermann and others have pointed out, this is the historically inevitable automatic response of every American to police brutality and media censorship. Too bad for the 1% in other towns that their cops don't have St. Louis's long practice at appearing to ignore, and then effortlessly dissipating, liberal activist groups.

*Exceptions to the "St. Louisans don't do volunteer work" rule: the local Shriners are visibly no worse about showing up to volunteer than Shriners in other towns are, and St. Louis county's Jewish community organizations are legendary for the depth and breadth of their volunteer efforts.

Berlusconi and the ECB Riots

2011-11-14T05:56:00.000-07:00

Berlusconi and the ECB Riots

Italy [is] teetering on the brink of anarchy. And Berlusconi, the man who cannot legally step down because he and his friends stole half of the money that Italy owes Deutche Bank (and Deutche Bank knew it at the time)... is suddenly stepping down? And, oh, how conveniently, handing the government over to a bureaucrat, with the explicitly stated job of enforcing ECB austerity. Everybody who knows anything knows what will happen: ECB riots, maybe even a civil war. And Berlusconi still owns all the cable networks, which will, as surely as the sun shines, report: "As soon as Berlusconi, the man who saved us from anarchy after the Clean Hands scandals, stepped down, the country fell back into anarchy. Only Berlusconi can save us!"

Y'all really should be reading everything The Infamous Brad writes.

Delegated democracy

2011-11-13T06:18:00.000-07:00

We can identify, both theoretically and historically, some fundamental principles that underlie democratic communism. We have to add the qualifier "democratic" to distinguish democratic communism from "communism of the parties" (i.e. the specific instantiations of communism, especially in the Soviet Union and China) as well as Marxian communism (i.e. Karl Marx's specific conception of communism). Democratic communism is the union of the democratic political process to the communist economic system.

Modern political science tends to consider the contrast between democracy and republicanism as the contrast between direct democracy, where the citizenry is the legislature, and representative democracy, where the citizenry elects the legislature*. Since direct democracy seems at best unwieldy and at worst practically impossible, republicanism is held up as the only viable alternative. But there's another contrast possible, the contrast between the existing trustee model of representation and the delegate model.

*In a parliamentary system, the legislature (usually the majority party in the legislature) elects the executive; in most presidential and semi-presidential systems, the the citizens elect the president directly. The sine qua non of republicanism, therefore, is the election of the legislature.

In the existing trustee model, we elect individuals we trust to make the right decisions, even if those decisions are temporarily unpopular. Because we explicitly privilege representatives to make temporarily unpopular decisions, we must explicitly protect them from the consequences of unpopularity. Thus we elect representatives for fixed terms, and evaluate the totality of their performance at the end of their term. We also allow them to operate secretly or covertly. If we trust someone (and if we have no way of immediately overturning their decisions), it's more efficient to let them make decisions in secret, or make decisions we can discover only after substantial effort.

The trustee model is discussed at some length in the Federalist Papers. One justification for the trustee model was the protection of minorities: a trustee representative, because of his superior wisdom and the necessity of taking a somewhat longer view (at least to the next election) would, the Founders proposed, make "oppression" of the minority by the majority more difficult. Another consideration, perhaps more important, was that a trustee model would protect the position of the capitalist ruling class. (The code phrase, which appears both in the Federalist Papers as well as the Constitution), is a prohibition on the forgiveness of debts.) The trustee model was quickly abandoned as way of protecting against the "tyranny of the majority"; the inclusion of the Bill of Rights places this task firmly in the hands of the judiciary. In reality, the trustee model only protects the ruling class.

But using the trustee model brings up a more fundamental question: why involve the people (at least those people outside the ruling class) at all? If you're going to protect the ruling class, why not do so directly? A simple argument is just that the Founders believed that trustee representation would more efficiently legitimatize the new government. The colonies had, after all, been electing their legislatures for a century. But there's a deeper argument: the capitalist ruling class of the late 18th century did not trust the people, but they also did not trust each other. As much as they wanted to protect capitalism from the people, they wanted to protect capitalism from other capitalists. They did not want the (presently) richest capitalists to unconditionally acquire state power, and set themselves up as a politically, rather than economically, privileged elite. They did not want capitalism to degenerate into de facto monarchism. There was no internal way to avoid this degeneration, so they pushed the resolution of disputes within the capitalist ruling class to (some of) the people.

Lenin, whom I believe was at heart a democrat, favoring a democratic political process, made the fundamental error of not immediately making the legitimacy of members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, even as trustees, formally dependent on a democratic process. It is up to historians to determine whether or not his error was excusable or inevitable: he inherited a country compromised by imperialist exploitation, ruined by the First Imperialist War, he had to fight a savage civil war, and had nothing even approaching democratic popular traditions; it is entirely possible that a democratic process would have immediately doomed Russia. I don't think Mao Zedong was at heart a democrat, but the historical, material circumstances were perhaps even more dire in 1949 China than in 1917 Russia; if a democratic process really was untenable, we can fault Mao only for his lack of pious hypocrisy. But, regardless of the inevitability or exusablity of their errors, they did err, and we are not obliged to sanctify or repeat their errors.

It's not terribly difficult to correct the error without reproducing the class privilege inherent in the trustee model: the delegate model of representation.

In the delegate model, where possible, we handle matters of state power by direct democracy. Direct democracy works reasonably well for small groups of people, and we are "naturally" made up of small groups: e.g. neighborhoods, small businesses, interest groups. We can, for many matters, place some state power directly in the hands of the people themselves, and (with some limits) let the majority of the small group directly "rule" the group. This process has the twin advantages of being as "purely" democratic as possible; more importantly it habituates people to the techniques, skills, and special problems of exercising state power.

Where we cannot efficiently implement direct democracy, we resort to delegates. A delegate differs from a trustee in that a delegate's constituency does not trust a delegate to act in their interests. Instead, the constituency continuously evaluates their delegate, and ensures that she acts in accordance with their interests. Unlike a trustee, the delegate serves at the pleasure of her constituency, and therefore the constituency may recall and replace her at will. Second, a delegate must act absolutely transparently; the constituency must know, or be able to easily discover, exactly what she is doing at all times. Finally, the delegate must be absolutely free of conflicts of both personal and third-party interests: she must be beholden only to her constituency; her personal interests should be serving the will of her constituency.

The delegate model of democracy does not solve all political problems. Like any other democratic system, including republicanism, a theory of government that includes a delegate model must generally confront the philosophical and theoretical limitations of majoritarianism. The delegate model still leaves the issue of "tyranny of the majority" unsolved. But neither does the the existing republican model solve the problem; in almost all republics, maintaining the proper rights of the minority is a function of the judiciary. Because it does depend on the people, the delegate model shares the problems inherent to any democratic or semi-democratic system.

Perhaps more critically, the delegate model is by design not as stable as the republican model. We can count on a republican government having the same people in it for the shortest term of office (e.g. two years in the United States); in contrast a delegate government can change arbitrarily. As noted, the delegate model intentionally undermines legislative stability to prevent a minority class from monopolizing state power. An overall model of government that includes delegation must, however, directly address the issue of stability.

A governmental system is complex; it consists of many institutions. Indeed a government that consists of a single institution (such as communism of the parties, which had a single governing institution, the national Communist Party) has a single point of failure, which we engineers consider a Bad Thing. In a complex system, if one institution fails, the other institutions can mitigate the effects; they can also exert pressure to correct the failing institution. The delegate model of democracy specifies only one institution. I will be exploring other institutions of democratic communism in further posts.

Socialized medicine... in 1798

2011-11-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance - In 1798

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed - “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.