Study: Conservatives and Liberals About Equally "Anti-Science"

That title is a bit misleading.  It might be better to say that conservatives and liberals are about equally distrustful of scientific claims that they hear reported in the media, according to The Christian Post.  Excerpt:  

Interestingly, liberals, moderates and conservatives were all less trustful of the science that was related to political debates compared to the ideologically neutral science. In other words, conservatives were less trustful of science related to fracking and nuclear power, though not as distrustful as liberals, compared to science related to ideologically-neutral astronomy and geology findings. And liberals were less trustful of science related to climate change and evolution, though not as distrusful as conservatives, compared to the ideologically neutral science.

 Conservatives and liberals were not equally likely to reject the science that was dissonant with their ideology. Conservatives were more likely than liberals to be distrustful. The authors attribute this to media coverage of the debates.

There has been much coverage of the scientific debates over climate change and evolution. By comparison, there has been little coverage of the scientific debates over fracking and nuclear power. Respondents, therefore, would be much more aware of controversies over climate change and evolution than fracking and nuclear power.
The researchers also found higher levels of anger associated with the distrust over climate change and evolution than the distrust over fracking and nuclear power.

The Early Church Pacifists: Not so Fast

Glenn Peoples on the Fathers and the Early Church

Selma is Now. No, not Really.

Some perspective from James B. LaGrand:

[I]n his acceptance remarks after winning the Oscar for Best Original Song, co-writer John Legend again connected past and present. He tried to set straight any viewers who might be thinking that 1965 was a long time ago. “Selma is now because the struggle for justice is right now.”

Statements similar to Legend’s “Selma is now” have been made many times in the months since Michael Brown’s tragic death at the hands of policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. In fact, Ferguson has become a Rorschach test – not just on the state of race relations today, but on the past as well through the power of historical analogy. Like John Legend, congressman and civil rights veteran John Lewis has compared Ferguson to Selma in 1965. On college campuses, analogies comparing Ferguson to 1950s Little Rock and Michael Brown to Emmett Till have been heard.

...

These statements and actions are all rooted in the belief that little to nothing has changed in race relations from the Jim Crow era of the 1890s-1950s to the present day. If one of the tasks of History is to assess the complex relationship between change and continuity over time, these voices suggest that on the issue of race and race relations, the answer is pretty simple. 2014 = 1965 or 1955 or the 1890s.

But in looking at the past, it’s hard to make these claims hold up. The Jim Crow era stands as a distinctly grim, brutal period in America’s history for its Black citizens. After the end of Reconstruction, Black men who had recently won the franchise had it effectively taken away. The promise that Black Americans would own the product of their labor too became a bitter lie. All public spaces in the Jim Crow South became divided by the color line.

This racial code was enforced through lynchings and other forms of brutal violence. The Equal Justice Initiative has recently documented 3,959 African-Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950. Lynch mobs cast a wide net. They targeted Black men accused of crimes, those accused or suspected of sexual relations with white women, and those seen as being “impudent to white man,” in the words of one lynching record. Lynchings were barbaric, often involving the ritualistic burning and dismemberment of dead bodies. Not for nothing do many historians refer to 1890-1920 as the nadir of African-American history

...

They see their motives are earnest. By their way of thinking, a continued insistence that little to nothing has changed in race relations will hold white Americans’ feet to the fire. This approach will confront and challenge them, and prevent them from becoming prideful or complacent. Some teachers and administrators on college campuses say that a focus on continuity in race relations will allow for “teaching opportunities.”

But what if such a determined focus on racial continuity from the 1890s to today doesn’t bring about these results? The discipline of History is based on a reasonable confidence about concrete, particular things, not just a fuzzy mood or spirit. Activists who tout continuity believe that their cause will result in “consciousness-raising” about a range of racial issues. But it’s just as likely to lead to cynicism and disengagement if it’s thought that events have been manipulated and comparisons over-drawn.

Read the rest here.

It's also worth noting that, as the NY Times mentions, in the decade between 2000-2010 more black Africans have voluntarily come to the U.S. "than were imported directly to North America during the more than three centuries of the slave trade."

"We've come long way, baby."  Are there still racists in the U.S.?  Of course, as there are in every country.  But how racist is the U.S.?  Adam Carolla thinks, not that racist:

"We shall be rid of the last vestiges of Goldsteinism when the language has been cleaned."

Fortunately (or unfortunately), activists will never be out of a job.

Frank

Frank is...unforgettable.  Can I recommend it to you?  It depends on who you are.  If you enjoy strange (as I do) and have a sense of humor, it might be worth less than two hours of your time (or if you're in a band or are thinking about being in one).  It kind of reminded me of Rubber only instead of a thriller-parody it's a Bildungsroman-Comedy.  This is not high art, folks, but it's certainly well above the average brain-drainer.  I never would have guess it, but it's based on (inspired by?) a true story!

Nietzsche and the New Atheists

MavPhil:

Nietzsche and the New Atheists

The following quotation from a very interesting Guardian piece by John Gray entitled What Scares the New Atheists (HT: Karl White):

[1] The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. [2] This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. [3]The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. [4] It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. [5] The question is which morality an atheist should serve.

Five sentences, five comments.

1. Yes.

2. Granted, the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. But this is consistent with their racism having other sources as well.  So it doesn't follow that it is an "unlikely tale" that the Nazis drew inspiration from Nietzsche.  I say it isvery likely.  See Nietzsche and Nationalism Socialism.

3.  Spot on!

4.  Agreed, atheists can be moral.  Indeed, some atheists are more moral that some theists — even when the moral code is the Decalogue minus the commandments that mention God.  The question whether an atheist can be moral, however, is ambiguous.  While it is clear that an atheist can be moral in the sense of satisfying moral demands, it is not clear that an atheist can be moral in the sense of recognizing moral demands in the first place.  It is an open question whether an atheist, consistent with his atheism, could have justification for admitting objective moral demands.

5.  Before one can ask which morality an atheist should serve, there is a logically prior question that needs asking and answering, one that Gray glides right past, namely,

Q. Is there any morality, any moral code, that an atheist would be justified in adhering to and justified in demanding that others adhere to?

Read the rest here.

The Police No Longer Work for You, Secret Chicago Interrogation Edition

That is the title of a not unreasonable piece admonishing Conservatives to resist a tendency to glorify the police force.  The author writes:

Without substantial reform, there is little we can do to fix this sad state of affairs in which police officers are flagrantly contemptuous of the law yet suffer no consequences. Police officers, like public school teachers, have strong unions; like public teacher unions, police unions often work for the benefit of their inept and inadequate members. The purpose of a union is generally not to make the world a better place but to enrich and insulate the people lucky enough to be a part of the union itself.

While I think that there has been an unreasonable, overreaction to certain recent police actions (e.g. that racism was the cause of the death of a strong-armed robber), that there are many fine, upstanding police officers, and that a police force is a necessary evil in any state; nonetheless, it is good to be reminded of the monopoly of force the state has over its citizens and that, as such, abuses of power which go unchecked strengthen that very monopoly.  (As well, one should also be wary of the Obama administration's recent militarization of the police force).  Police qua police are not saints; nor are soldiers.  Police and soldiers are public servants.

Here is another good article along the same vein.  Excerpt:

During the Great Depression, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia famously walked into a city welfare office to make an unannounced inspection and found one employee sprawled back in his chair, his feet on his desk, his hat on his head, and a sandwich in his hand. The mayor made an inquiry, and the welfare worker growled through his well-stuffed mouth that he was eating his lunch. LaGuardia strode over to him, knocked his hat off his startled head, and barked, “Stand up and take your hat off when you talk to a citizen!” To the reporter following him, he remarked, “There’s another son of a bitch who has no job.”

That always struck me as the perfect model of public-employee management. The city worker is the servant of the public, hired and paid by the public to do the job it appoints him to do. Citizens don’t work for government, but vice-versa—and in an age when public employees have better retirement packages than many of the taxpayers whose money funds them, that should be truer than ever. But in a world in which public employees have not only civil-service protection but also union protection—which even Franklin D. Roosevelt dismissed as a ridiculous idea—the opposite is ever more usually the case.

LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM

From Heather MacDonald:

Wesleyan University is now offering a “safe space” (formerly known as a “dorm”) for students of the LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM persuasions, or, for those who need things spelled out, for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism student acolytes. If you are so heteronormative as to see the word “FAG” in the center of that jumble [intentional?  or glaring oversight?], you will surely not be allowed into the “safe space,” known as Open House...With so many marginalized groups on campus, one wonders who is left to do the discriminating and oppressing.

We've really progressed a long way from the days of John and Charles Wesley, after whom the school is named. 

Calvin & Hobbes Take Leftwing Feminist Ideology to Its Logical Conclusion

Bill Watterson must have had something like this in mind when he came up with that strip.    Liberals are hilarious.

Check out the "Genderbread Man Person" by "social justice" author, Sam Killermann Killerperson, which was apparently a part of the material given to the teachers for their "training." (No, I'm not making that name up.)

Public tax dollars hard at work!

"The Dress Isn't Blue or Gold Because Color Doesn't Exist"

I didn't say that.  But Professor of Neuroscience, Beau Lotto, basically says as much:. 

Color is, quite literally, a figment of your imagination, Lotto said. It only exists in your head. Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College [where Hillary Clinton went], explained it this way: “Color is this computation that our brains make that enables us to extract meaning from the world.”

“A color only exists in your head,” Lotto said. “There’s such a thing as light. There’s such a thing as energy. There’s no such thing as color.”

So let's get this straight: Color only exists in your head.  It ain't on that thing you're looking at; it's a computation in your head. And there's no such thing as color--that is, color doesn't exist.  It exists in your head and it doesn't exist in your head because there is no such thing as color.  Got that?

That wall you painted blue, the blue was in your head.  You put paint on the wall but not blue paint.  As well, if you have ever seen a brain--presumably what you have seen are colors arranged in a certain brain-shaped pattern.  If you've seen a brain, the brain was in your head.  The brain was a computation in your brain.  (Except that the brain you've seen doesn't exist).

And you thought philosophy was nuts!

[A new liar's paradox? This statement is both blue and false.]

Goodbye Eric Holder

John Hinderaker's take on Politico's recent bootlicking interview of Holder:

Goodbye to Eric Holder, With One Question

Eric Holder is on his way out, thankfully. In a farewell interview with Politico, he demonstrated again why he was unfit to be Attorney General. He trashes his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales:

I had to take a Justice Department that was in shambles, you know, when I got here: political hiring, political firing, exclusion of career people from decision making for political reasons.

Someone in Gonzales’s Justice Department tried to bring a little diversity to the almost monolithically liberal department by hiring a few conservatives, and got slapped down for it. Holder continues:

And so, I had to rebuild the department, put in place people who I thought would share my — my view of what this department ought to be.

But wait! How is “put[ting] in place people who…would share my view of what this department ought to be” different from “political hiring”? In fact, it was Holder, not Gonzales, who brought an unprecedented degree of politicization to DOJ. But Politico’s Mike Allen, a fellow Democrat, fawns uncritically.
He asks Holder about the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin cases:

Jesus Was Married, Probably not Gay, But Might Not Have Existed

[UPDATE: At her own blog, Valerie Tarico has now added "(most likely a forgery)" to the sentence I mention below, but the article on Salon.com hasn't changed.  She has the inaccurate "2014" date both places.  Doesn't Salon have editors?]

...and a few other dumb things from Salon.com's Valerie Tarico. Actually, for a Salon article, it's not half bad; the author is able to stumble upon some truths in spite of herself and in spite of statements like these:

We have no record of anything that was written about Jesus by eyewitnesses or other contemporaries during the time he would have lived, or for decades thereafter.

Mostly true, but this is clearly stated to get the reader into skeptical mode; yet it's a red-herring, and an obvious one at that.  One needn't have writings by eyewitnesses to have knowledge of historical facts.  One needn't have documents written within less than decades of an event to have knowledge of the events.  Furthermore, one could say the same thing as our author in spades for virtually everyone in antiquity who we claim to know anything about.  In fact, we have more historical documents written within a close proximity of the time of Jesus (and about Jesus) than we do for anyone else in the ancient world.

Nonetheless, based on archeological digs and artifacts, ancient texts and art, and even forensic science, we know a good deal about the time and culture in which the New Testament is set. This evidence points to some startling conclusions about who Jesus likely was—and wasn’t.

So, let's basically ignore the massive amount of textual evidence available from the authors' writings which have been collected into the Bible, and let's speculate on what Jesus might have been like mostly from other evidence.  In other words, if the evidence counts in favor of Christian belief, we'll basically ignore it.  I'm not liking where we're headed...

1. Married, not single. When an ancient papyrus scrap was found in 2014 [sic] referring to the wife of Jesus, some Catholics and Evangelicals were scandalized. But unlike the Catholic Church, Jews have no tradition of celibacy among religious leaders. Jesus and his disciples would have been practicing Jews, and all great rabbis we know of were married. A rabbi being celibate would have been so unusual that some modern writers have argued Jesus must have been gay. But a number of ancient texts, including the canonical New Testament, point to a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. The Gospel of Phillip says, “[Jesus] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth.”

It's never good when you begin your "facts" with evidence from an "ancient papyrus scrap [that] was found in 2014 [2012!] referring to the wife of Jesus" that is probably a forgery, but if not, still proves nothing since it would date to the EIGHTH century and have its origins in Gnosticism. Valerie must be getting her news from The Huffington Post.

Okay, read the rest if you want to learn a few things ("or laugh").  I'll end by letting Ms. Tarico speak for herself:

That leaves each of us, from the privileged vantage of the 21st century, with both a right and a responsibility to consider the evidence and make our own best guesses about what is real and how we should then live. A good starting place might be a little more recognition that we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to think, and a lot of what we know for sure is probably wrong.

Do Black Lives Really Matter?

"Do black lives really matter, or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or a white policeman?"

That's from the testimony of Jamiel Shaw whose son was slain by, as he says, an "illegal alien," or what the Obama administration might prefer to refer to as "an American-in-Waiting."   I'll bet Al Sharpton is on his way to the Arizona border as we speak.  (This is all we're going to be hearing about on NPR for the next month).

Heartbreaking testimony:

Mr. Spock the Logic Man

"I find your arguments strewn with gaping defects in logic."

The Dress

What two colors do you see on the dress?

Serendipitous that I should come across this today.  We were talking about Descartes' skeptical arguments in Intro to Phil, and a student came up to me after class and presented me with an inverted qualia argument she had been thinking about. [I should add that "The Dress" doesn't seem designed to raise the inverted qualia argument in particular, though it certainly brings to mind issues about qualia more generally].

For what it's worth, the dress appears to me as gold and white (a bluish white to be exact and brownish gold).  In better lighting conditions it would appear to be white and gold.  Definitely not blue and black.

Predestination

I have a high threshold for great movies.  Predestination is not a great movie.  But it's interesting, well-acted, well-written, and technically proficient.  As J.F. remarked, "It is what Looper should have been."  I agree.  The film is based on a short story which I now have in my possession but have yet to finish reading.

More thoughts (and spoilers!) below the fold:

Obama to Ban AR-15 5.56 mm Ammo With Executive Action

Here and here.

But now [The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] says that since the bullets can be used in semi-automatic handguns they pose a threat to police and must be banned from production, sale and use...Federal agencies will still be allowed to buy the ammo.

Well, uh, that is sort of the point.  The Second Amendment wasn't put in place to make sure that hunters can still have guns for hunting--no 18th Century fool would have thought otherwise.  It was put in place because the Founders put the brakes on governments' tyranny and complete monopoly on the use of force.  The well regulated militia ain't the National Guard.

My Son Samuel & Augustine: Evil as Privation

Sam (6-yr-old): Daddy, why does Johno go up to your room in the middle of the night?

Me: Because he's a chicken.

Sam: Why is he a chicken?

Me: Because he's afraid of the dark.

Sam:  Why is he afraid of the dark?

Me:  I don't know, but I do know that you need to go to sleep.

Sam: OK.  I used to be afraid of the dark, but not anymore.  The dark is nothing.