On Offensiveness

I don't mind being offensive myself, nor do I mind offensiveness in others. It takes a degree of skill, however, to ensure that you offend the intended target.

My views on giving and taking offense are very tightly bound by considerations of the intended and actual targets of the offense. I generally do not approve of offending ineluctable characteristics: Being gay, being black, being a woman: all of these are not only inappropriate targets for offense, but also stupid: One gives offense to try to change that which offends; ineluctable characteristics are by definition unchangable.

I disapprove of giving offense when the offense is patently false. Calling liberals treasonous is inappropriately offensive, not because it's a negative characterization, but because it is patently false. If, on the other hand, you want to call liberals "fuzzy-headed", I'll probably bite the bullet and take it, since it's true often enough to be apt.

A good case study is my recent spat with Simon. I don't call Simon an asshole just because he's offensive, I call him an asshole because he makes a attack on my personal character--and Timmo's character. He aims, I think, to put down atheism and postmodernism, but he missed. Not only did he miss his (presumably) intended target, but his offensiveness is also egregiously inaccurate and entirely unsupported.

Had he made the exact same philosophical points in a respectful, non-snotty manner, even though I definitely consider his position to be mistaken, I would have engaged him on the merits. Likewise, had he (somehow) managed to offend only my philosophical positions, I also would have engaged him on the merits, albeit perhaps more stridently. Since he did neither, I simply dismiss him as an asshole.

If you try to give offense, make sure you at least hit the right target. Hit it, and I'll probably engage you on the merits. Miss it, and I'll just call you an asshole. On the other hand, if you take care to be non-offensive, then even if you're unskilled, ignorant or just plain stupid, I'll probably engage you respectfully--so long as you consider a straightforward rebuttal of your logic and sensibility to be respectful. It's your call.

Secularism and Anti-Religious Atheism

I am an atheist. I'm an anti-religious atheist. But I'm also a secularist.

I'm a secularist in the First Amendment sense:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

No law. Full stop. No conditions, no exceptions.

Furthermore, I'll go the First Amendment one better: I do not support any coercion regarding religion beyond rational, critical analysis and my personal disapproval. I won't boycott an organization because of the religious beliefs of its management or ownership. I won't refuse to trade, I won't march, demonstrate or picket on purely religious grounds.

Of course, I distinguish religion from politics. I consider "religion" to be unfalsifiable beliefs about the nature of God. I consider politics to be any attempt to control, regulate, promote or discourage actual behavior. I'm not against controlling behavior per se (I definitely think that we should control and discourage the behavior of those who would rob, steal, rape and murder), but as a citizen in a democracy, I'm going to fully participate in our moral and legal discourse, and use whatever means permitted by law and custom, coercive or not, to advance my views.

But I am anti-religious. I do in fact consider religion to be not only false, but malignantly false. I don't consider all (or even most) religious people to be evil, but I do consider all of them to be mistaken in a way that does in fact promote evil to some degree. Since my argument is indirect and subtle, and since I myself might well be mistaken, I call only those people evil who are directly malicious.

I'm direct and blunt in my speech. I call God-belief the equivalent of belief in an invisible sky fairy. I'm not stupid, though, nor am I poorly-read: I understand that many people have a construction of God considerably more subtle than that. On the other hand, I think that such subtle constructions are vacuous, and therefore philosophical bullshit.

Piling on Dinesh D’Souza

When the conservatives start calling someone "intellectually dishonest", you know they've sunk to a new low. With all the new assholes being ripped into this guy, he'll be able to take a shit in three seconds, tops.

Breaks my bleedin' little liberal heart, yes it does.

(h/t to Matthew Yglesias)

David Simon on the End of the American Empire

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

(h/t to A Tiny Revolution)

A Theist asshole

Simon, an (apparently) Theist asshole (He might be a Buddhist, but they're generally not so obnoxious) comments on Atheism, Religion and Spirituality:

Nicely poetic but when one steps back and remembers that people have different definitions of the word "love", "god", "humanity" and "spirituality" itself...this post has no practical meaning.
And that makes it kind of amusing to me...that an atheist who talks of mystical mumbo jumbo would post something as equally airy and emotional, with no concrete rationality behind it.

Carl Jung, often accused of being too mystical, said in his autobiography that in all his experience, people who talk about love generally have no idea what they're talking about.

I've been reading several posts of yours and I notice you talk about suffering once in a while, but it always seems to reference something distant...a "could happen" but generally seems to happen to other people. So I ask you this: what use is this flowery writing about love-for-all to a woman who has been gangraped and must now get an abortion? What use is it to someone born into abject poverty in a socialist regime, who struggles daily with hunger and malnutrition. What good is your proclamation of universal love for all, from your comfortable home in the United States, -to these people? Why should they care about your love? You talk the talk but how much do you walk the walk?

I meet far too many people, both atheist and theist alike, who would rather pompously contemplate their navels and throw around philosophical names than actually get into the reality. While you brag about your love and compassion, other people are joining the Peace Corps or doing other things to actually SHOW their love. Ghandi and the Mother Teresa spent their lives DOING things for other people, not just pontificating.

And there is the fact that atheists have yet to show anything for themselves as amazing as Tibet...beautiful monasteries, entirely peaceful, and inhabited by monks with a serious commitment to their faith. I remember reading about a monk who immolated himself in the face of Chinese authority, to demonstrate where his loyalty stood and how absolute that was. He inflicted upon himself, a very painful death, and even sat quiet and still as his body burned, until it gave up it's life. That's the sort of thing that shows how useless and empty postmodernism is...a pretentious, ungrateful philosophy for bored, wealthy people. Bleh.

Talk is cheap. Without personal sacrifices and concrete works for the benefit of another, nothing anyone has to say about spirituality has any meaning or value. So I ask you: behind all this talk, where are your works?

I don't spend a lot time talking about myself here, but since you ask...

I adopted my sister's children when she was unable to raise them, and I spent fifteen years of my life taking care of them. I spent five of those years also taking care of my mother before she got her lung transplant.

I used to work as a rape counselor. Special circumstances, don't ask.

I rescued the woman I love from Islamic oppression, at no small personal sacrifice.

I work every Saturday for the National AIDS Marathon Training Program, which raises money for research, education and eradication.

I vote, I contribute to charity, I work and I pay taxes. I give money to panhandlers.

What I don't do is spend my Sunday mornings praying to an invisible sky fairy.

If Simon would like to set himself on fire to prove the sincerity of his convictions, I'll spring for the gasoline. Until then, he can take his sanctimonious assumptions and shove them up his ass... sideways.

Keeping Our Demons at Bay

Keeping Our Demons at Bay:

We should not have been in Vietnam. The Vietnamese didn’t want us there. That’s why we lost the war. We should not be in Iraq. The Iraqis don’t want us there. That’s why we lost the war.
...
That’s not to say that the Iraqis aren’t there [in David Finkel’s "hagiography" of battalion commander Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich], in every line of text, in every paragraph, in every turn of phrase. They are there ... as the backdrop on the stage, as the amorphous danger against which these young men must undergo their rite of passage into the death-cult of imperial masculinity. And because this othering of the Iraqis is so consistent, so perfectly fitted to existing cultural and entertainment conventions, there is little doubt that Finkel used the Iraqis in exactly this way —as a racialized reduction, as expendable extras on his set.

For this reason, I accuse. David Finkel, no less so than Judith Miller during her apprenticeship under Ahmad Chalabi, is not merely a journalist. He has become part of the war machine. There is blood on his hands, and just as with Judith Miller, Finkel will have to bear that Macbethian stain.

Articles like this are one reason why I think Postmodernism really matters.

I suspect too that our own soldiers are being just as "othered", just as marginalized, as the Iraqi people. They are the "troops", not individual human beings, honored not for their individuality but for the exact opposite: their willingness to abandon everything individual and human, and then tossed aside when they are no longer useful.

Pelosi’s folly

poputonian has an excellent summary of John Nichols' essay, Pelosi's Disastrous Misstep on Iran in The Nation.

By stripping the Iran provision from the legislation that is now under consideration by Congress, Pelosi has handed Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney -- no believer he is [in] the separation of powers -- exactly what they want. They can and will say that, when the question of whether Congress should require the administration to seek Congressional approval for an attack on Iran, Pelosi chose not to pursue the matter.

Anyone who thinks that Bush and Cheney will fail to exploit this profound misstep by Pelosi has not been paying attention for the past six years. The speaker has erred, dramatically and dangerously.

Phil on Radical Materialism

Phil weighs in on Radical Materialism, "a significant—perhaps neglected—aspect of postmodernism."

God's dupe duped

Michael van der Galien responds to Sam Harris's article, God's Dupes, and pretty much proves Harris's point.

Harris makes a very basic point: "The problem is that wherever one stands on this [religious] continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism."

Now, Harris might be wrong, but by merely labeling criticism of religion as "irrational", "extreme" and "wandering"--without any sort of substantive argument--van der Galien just reinforces Harris's point. If even the moderates hold religion itself above criticism, on what basis are we supposed to criticize the fundamentalists? Must we criticize them for having the wrong attitude about invisible sky fairies, without being able to say that having any attitude at all about invisible sky fairies is fantastically stupid?

What is Postmodernism?

Since Postmodernism is an emerging topic here at The Barefoot Bum, I thought I would contribute a definition of 'postmodern' from the The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995):

Postmodern philosophy is therefore usefully regarded as a complex cluster concept that includes the following elements: an anti-(or post-) epistemological standpoint; anti-essentialism; antirealism; anti-foundationalism; opposition to transcendental arguments and transcendental standpoints; rejection of the picture of knowledge as accurate representation; rejection of truth as correspondence to reality; rejection of the very idea of canonical descriptions; rejection of final vocabularies, i.e., rejection of principles, distinctions, and categories that are thought to be unconditionally binding for all times, persons, and places; and a suspicion of metanarratives of the sort perhaps best illustrated by dialectical materialism... one often finds the following themes: a critique of the neutrality and sovereignty of reason -- included insistence on its pervasively gendered, historical, and ethnocentric character; a conception of the social construction of word-world mappings; a tendency to embrace historicism; a critique of any ultimate contrast between epistemology and sociology of knowledge; dissolution of an autonomous subject; insistence on the merely historical status of divisions of labor in knowledge acquisition and production; an ambivalence about the Enlightenment and its ideology.

To be sure, this is a very large, technical rubric for what might be considered 'postmodern'. Many different thinkers might be thought to march under the banner of postmodernism: Dewey, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, Quine, Heidegger, Saussure, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Nussbaum. Thus, under this definition, one can be postmodern in some ways, but not in others. I, for example, am skeptical with Quine about foundationalism as an adequate account of how we can be justified in our beliefs, but I am not in the least ambivalent about Reason or the Enlightenment.

While there are many philosophical strands that might be considered "postmodern", we can reasonably ask what the heart of postmodernism is -- what makes a thinker a true-blue, full-blooded postmodernist? I understand postmodernism to be primarily a critical reaction to Enlightenment values, and its esteem for Reason as an impartial judge of facts. Postmodernists reject the optimistic view that the development of science and the cultivation of Reason improves human life, and rejects the notion of sustained progress towards an objective truth about the world through rational and scientific thinking.

This is a fine opportunity to begin a short series here at The Barefoot Bum on various postmodernist thinkers. I will try to give a fair and accurate overview of what I take to be their most important postmodern views -- perhaps you, dear reader, can make sense of the whirlwind of thought dubbed 'postmodernism'.

[Timmo is the proprietor of The Remarks of a Fish. This essay is original to The Barefoot Bum. --ed.]