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Category: foolishness (page 7 of 14)

How to persuade? And who?

16 August 2009 / / 1 Comment

I ran across two similar articles the other day. One’s about religion, one’s about politics, and both are taking me to task.

Must science declare a holy war on religion?

The so-called New Atheists are attacking the mantra of science and faith being compatible. Others in the science community question the value of confrontation.

Ooo, confrontation. Sounds confronting. It seems that atheist scientists are being mean, publishing books, and loudly declaring that God probably doesn’t exist. Doing science, in other words.

And then there’s this article:

Are liberals seceding from sanity?

The left is crazy to insult white Southerners as a group

which takes liberals to task for South-bashing, and the only example offered is Kevin Drum. But never mind. The article warns us:

They are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked.

At which point I ask: Is it too much to ask for both?

Let’s examine the question that ties these two articles together: how do we act toward people who disagree with us? And there are at least two possible answers:

  1. Be nice, keep quiet, persuade them with reason, and sooner or later they’ll come around if we don’t hurt their feelings and (all together now) alienate them.
  2. Be loud and proud, combat the ridiculous with ridicule, the error with truth, and don’t worry overmuch about stepping on toes.

Now let’s see: where have I heard this conflict before? Ah, yes. It was Amy Sullivan, who warned us that Democrats needed people of faith to win elections. She couldn’t have known how badly that would work for Republicans, who herded the faithful into their tent, only to find that they couldn’t get rid of them. Now the delusional folk are wanting to run the whole show, with predictably disastrous consequences.

So let’s address the religion article first. And just for perspective: these articles ran on the same day as these news stories:

Dozens of rabbis fly over Israel praying to defeat swine flu

The aim of the flight was to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it,” Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying in the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

“We are certain that, thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us,” added Batzri.

Mayoral Candidate Mary Falling Wants Creationism Exhibit

TULSA, OK — A mayoral candidate has resurrected a controversy over Creationism at the Tulsa Zoo.

A push to exhibit the Christian story of creation at the Tulsa Zoo failed four years ago. Republican candidate for Tulsa mayor, Anna Falling, is bringing the issue front and center.

It’s the same exhibit and the same arguments, but now it is given from the bully pulpit of a candidate running for mayor.

“Some may ask why this issue during a Mayoral campaign? And I say why not?” said candidate Anna Falling.

For Anna Falling, the road to city hall runs through the Tulsa Zoo. She’s made her Christianity central to her platform and now the exhibit depicting the Christian story of Creationism is her first campaign promise.

“Today we are announcing that God will be glorified in this city. He shall not be shunned. Upon our election, we hereby commit to honoring Him in all ways that He has been dishonored,” said Anna Falling.

These people live in the same century as we do. They have access to all the same knowledge that we do. The Enlightenment was 400 years ago. Sweet reason has had all that time to do its work. The non-confrontational approach has failed. They’re still here, dumber than ever, and trying to take over the world that science has created. By not confronting them, by not speaking out, we will let them win.

On the other hand, by speaking out, by coming out and being heard, by being loud and obnoxious and, yes, confrontational, we have seen our numbers grow. More people now identify as non-religious than at any time in recent history.

If my reading is representative, most of these gains are coming from people who haven’t been religious for a long time, but were reluctant to call themselves atheists or agnostics. For these people, all the noise about religion has forced the issue, and pushed them to re-examine their beliefs. It may have pushed some other people the other way, this is true, but those people probably weren’t convincible anyway. The only people I see complaining about noisy atheists are Fundamentalist Christians — and why wouldn’t they.

See, when you’re in a religion, it’s like you’re in a bubble. A big cushy bubble where it’s nice and soft, and everyone reaffirms your beliefs. And it feels goood. Now someone comes and gives your bubble a push. You have two choices. If you’re a confirmed believer, you retreat further into the bubble. That makes the noise stop. Drat those noisy people! Why must they challenge you? It certainly didn’t make you change, but then what were the odds of that happening? On the other hand, if you’re someone who makes reality your guide, that noise (plus the cognitive dissonance you already have floating around in there) may be just the thing that forces you to see how the facts conflict with what’s going on in your bubble. And when that gets loud enough, you might decide to burst your bubble and change your thinking.

But that only works when it’s obvious that there’s a disconnect between your bubble and the real world. So I’d say that when you have the facts on your side, your cause can only benefit from pushing the facts.

Now what about the South-bashing? This is trickier because while the US South has a definite inclination toward the most dangerous kind of lunacy, I’ve read comments from loads of people in the South who are progressive, and who feel annoyed and embarrassed by the attitudes of their neighbours. So I don’t engage in South-bashing. I’m not a big fan of stereotyping. Not very accurate. But I’ll gladly take on the lunacy. People who are convincible aren’t too crazy about the crazy anyway.

And this is what I think both authors miss: people are different. That is, some people are crazy, and some people are convincible, and they are not the same people.

You can take on the crazy with mockery and ridicule. They won’t like it. But the convincible will notice that you’re making sense. They’ll thank you for it. And all you have to do is tell the truth and tell it loud.

Astroweed lobbying

15 August 2009 / / 2 Comments

When political action committees pay to create the semblance of a public groundswell, it’s called ‘astroturfing‘. It looks like a grassroots movement, but it’s fake.

To extend the metaphor, here’s a neologism that surely deserves a place in the political lexicon: astroweeds. It comes to us courtesy of Salon’s Alex Koppelman.

[W]hat we are seeing falls somewhere between, and essentially combines the worst part of both grass-roots activism and astroturfing — that is, it pairs the slick coordination of elites coupled with the raw, unfiltered advocacy of the masses. What happens when a set of elites coordinate, fund and foment public expression, but encourage just about anyone — whether informed or not, whether skilled communicators or not, whether dedicated to the particular issue under discussion or merely dedicated to resistance for “Waterloo”-style resistance’s sake — and send them into the public arena to express their opinions? We get ugly signs, incoherent questions and blood-curdling screams about the coming end of America as we know it.

Astroweed lobbying has been a terrible distraction in the American discussion on health care. Insane people are getting townhall airtime — and in some cases, subsequent TV appearances — despite being poorly informed, unfocused, and incoherent.

It’s almost enough to drive you to Whorfianism; maybe we do need more words to describe right-wing reality distortion, just by virtue of its prevalence.

Mom and Dad pray while sick daughter dies

3 August 2009 / / 3 Comments

Here’s another guy who really believes in his religion. In this case, that means someone ended up dead.

A US jury has found a man guilty of killing his sick 11-year-old daughter by praying for her recovery rather than seeking medical care.

The man, Dale Neumann, told a court in the state of Wisconsin he believed God could heal his daughter.

She died of a treatable disease – undiagnosed diabetes – at home in rural Wisconsin in March last year, as people surrounded her and prayed.

Neumann’s wife, Leilani Neumann, was convicted earlier this year.

The couple, who were both convicted of second-degree reckless homicide, face up to 25 years in prison when they are sentenced in October.

Reckless homicide is a good way of putting it. Having a child means you have to take care of them. They can’t do it themselves; they count on you. When you instead subject that child to a horrible and unnecessary death, there ought to be legal consequences.

And that goes for people who use alternative medicine instead of giving their child real medicine. If that child is harmed through a parent’s inaction, there should be consequences.

Why sue a genie? He’ll just conjure up a really good lawyer.

15 July 2009 / / 5 Comments

Back in my Mormon days, I believed in angels. By that I mean, I believed the stories about angels visiting Joseph Smith, and I agreed that angels could probably exist in theory somewhere. If someone claimed they’d actually seen an angel, I’d have been extremely skeptical. But they were characters in scripture, which I believed, so how skeptical could I have been.

But I never believed in genies — that was just storybook stuff. (At the time I saw no contradiction.)

Imagine my surprise to find genies treated as real beings in the Qu’ran. And now it would appear that someone is trying to sue one.

A family in Saudi Arabia has taken a genie to court, alleging theft and harassment, according to local media.

The lawsuit filed in Shariah court accuses the genie of leaving them threatening voicemails, stealing their cell phones and hurling rocks at them when they leave their house at night, said Al-Watan newspaper.

Cell phones. Voice mail. I’m tempted to say that these people don’t deserve the technology that they have. And the same goes for some Christians — today I saw someone smear a woman with cooking oil in an attempt to convince a supernatural being to heal her. That these people can even use a phone is amazing to me.

Pre-deconversion, I’d have thought that suing an angel was crazy, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some Muslims think that suing a genie is equally crazy. Then again, if you think that angels and genies are real beings, it makes perfect sense to sue them like anyone else. This family’s unquestioning faith in their scriptures looks like insanity. Doesn’t it?

So here’s an interesting continuum. On the one side are people who are rational, don’t believe in supernatural beings, and live in the real world. On the other side, you have people who believe in angels and genies, and may try to sue them. They’re the ones who really believe their religion, but they’re (quite frankly) nuts. Someone in the middle of the continuum, like me back then, claims to believe in those things, but doesn’t really. These people can exist in the real world, but that means they believe in their religion somewhat less. This suggests that one is insane to the extent that they believe in the unreal beings presupposed by their religion.

Popes don’t do science

30 June 2009 / / 1 Comment

Zeus, this is dumb.

Pope Benedict XVI said scientific tests confirmed shards found in the underground chamber at the church of St Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls in Rome were from the apostle.
…
Pope Benedict XVI announced the findings during a service at the basilica, as Rome prepared to celebrate the Feasts of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

“This seems to confirm the unanimous and undisputed tradition that these are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul,” he said.

And what scientific tests did they do, you ask? Oh, well, obviously they compared the DNA from the shards to another DNA sample that was known to have come from Paul… oh wait. There’s your problem right there. There aren’t any.

I wish the Pope would quit molesting science like it was some kind of child or something. I wish he’d just said he’d prayed about it and got the answer that way. It would still fool the believers, and it would be just as immune to critical scrutiny.

Dogma keeps you in the dark

20 June 2009 / / 1 Comment

Orthodox Jews don’t turn on the lights on the Sabbath. They tie it back to Exodus 35:3, which prohibits lighting fires.

But what about when a sensor turns the lights on automatically?

A couple have taken legal action after claiming motion sensors installed at their holiday flat in Dorset breached their rights as Orthodox Jews.

Gordon and Dena Coleman said they cannot leave or enter their Bournemouth flat on the Sabbath because the hallway sensors automatically switch on lights.

The couple’s religious code bans lights and other electrical equipment being switched on during Jewish holidays.

They have now issued a county court writ claiming religious discrimination.

My religious background instilled in me an ability to weasel my way around arcane rules. I can think of all kinds of ways around this, and if they can’t, it means they’re not trying.

First, isn’t there any leeway for intentionality? If you don’t trigger the light on purpose, are you really turning on the light? Or how about compartmentalising? You’re triggering the sensor, but it’s really the sensor that’s turning on the light. It’s not your fault if your action instigates a chain of events that results in a light going on.

And, in my experience, religious people are really fond of attributing all technological advances to a god, as in “God made modern medicine and the Internet.” Why not capitalise on that? It’s not their fault that the light; it’s actually God that invented the sensor that’s turning the lights on. “Oh, Lord, if you do not want the lights to go on, you have the power to stop them.” Guess it’s okay by him.

But if they can’t come up with any of these rationalisations on their own, then I say they can just sit in their flat in the dark. Perhaps they could use the time to ponder the idiocy of adopting a stupid and unworkable philosophy.

They may be onto us already! Memorise this URL and then destroy it!

18 June 2009 / / 5 Comments





English gets its infinitieth word, right now.

10 June 2009 / / 3 Comments

Language Log has done a much more thorough beatdown of this story than I could, but it’s still worth mentioning.

English contains more words than any other other language on the planet and will add its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created.

It is a silly claim, especially when you realise that English already has an infinite number of words right this instant. You can paint a fence, and then you can re-paint the fence, and then if you have any paint left, you can re-re-paint the fence. In fact, you can keep adding re- as many times as you like, on to infinity, and each one of those will be a separate word.

Or you can have a great-grandmother, and a great-great-grandmother, and a great-great-great-grandmother, on and on to infinity.

That’s one of the things about English morphology: it allows some prefixes to be used recursively. Recursion is why English (or any other language, pace Everett) can have an infinite number of sentences. You can walk and walk, or you can walk and and walk and walk, making the sentence longer and longer and longer, on to infinity.

Quibble about hyphens, if you like. I could argue that a hyphen, not being whitespace, does not constitute a word boundary, and thus words containing them are kosher. If you wanted to push it, you could even consider multi-word expressions as words themselves. After all, ‘ice cream’ contains a space, but it represents just one thing. It can be found variously with a space, a hyphen, or all smashed together. Your definition of ‘word’ will influence your count.

Theologian and linguist of the week

6 May 2009 / / 7 Comments

I’ve done my best to ignore Not-Joe the Not-Plumber all these months because I’m hoping he’ll go away. Unfortunately, he keeps poking his head into the public discourse, and I’m going to comment this time because ignoring dangerous things can get you hurt somewhere along the line.

Joe’s used to speaking outside his expertise — he’s opined about politics and economics, badly — but now in his recent interview with Christianity Today, he takes a hatchet to gay people, and along the way, he makes a truly strange argument about language.

Interviewer: In the last month, same-sex marriage has become legal in Iowa and Vermont. What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?

Joe: At a state level, it’s up to them. I don’t want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it’s wrong. People don’t understand the dictionary—it’s called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It’s not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we’re supposed to do—what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we’re supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they’re people, and they’re going to do their thing.

If I understand his argument, he’s saying that being queer is “strange and unusual”…because the dictionary says so. And there’s only one dictionary. You know — the dictionary! That one.

People have all kinds of attitudes about language, but it takes an especially obtuse individual to insist that a dictionary definition is the true meaning of a word. Words have different senses, as with ‘queer’. It’s hard to make the argument that the dictionary definition for one sense of a word should determine the meaning of a completely different sense. It’s like going to the bank for some cash and being surprised not to find a river there because ‘the dictionary’ says that a bank is ‘sloping land by a river’.

There’s a lot more to the article: his “state’s rights” trope that was used to justify racism in the South. And his admission that he’s ‘had some friends’ who are gay. (Why do they always say that?) But of course he won’t let his friends near the kids. Feel the Christian love.

A fool for his doctor

2 May 2009 / / Comments Off on A fool for his doctor

An article in the New York Times gives a clue as to why the Swine Flu is killing so many people in Mexico.

Mexicans may have been hit by a different, deadlier strain, or the flu may have infected more people who had other health problems, researchers speculate.

But one important factor may be the eclectic approach to health care in Mexico, where large numbers of people self-prescribe antibiotics, take only homeopathic medicine, or seek out mysterious vitamin injections. For many, only when all else fails do they go to a doctor, who may or may not be well prepared.

By now, the message should be out there: homeopathy doesn’t work. It’s had two hundred years to make its case, but we still have no reproducible studies that show that it works any better than a placebo.

In most circumstances, the consequences of using homeopathy (and indeed, any so-called alternative medicine) are not very serious, except for the waste of money. You take the pills, they do nothing, and you eventually get better on your own. But world-wide pandemics are not to be messed with, and relying on junk medicine can kill you.

Natural selection is great and all, but I’d rather not see it work this way.

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