Libertarianism

In response to the two part post titled An Ideological Primer, I recently received a very well written clarification of the Libertarian position on social issues by a reader named Micah. It's very helpful, and I want to share it with the rest of our readership. Micah writes:

Mr. Cleary has already established where the Libertarian lies in the left/right economic spectrum. Now it is time to examine social issues. But when it comes to social issues, the Libertarian position is much harder to fit into a linear spectrum. This article explains how the Left, the Right, and the Libertarian view various social issues at the state and federal levels.

For argument's and simplicity's sake, I will deal herein with the social issues brought forth in the Ideological Primer, Part II. As a quick review, the Left/Liberals favor gay marriage, abortion, open borders, and gun control, while opposing capital punishment and public religion. The Right/Conservatives take positions opposite those of the Left/Liberals. Both the Left and the Right are so firmly convinced in the absolute correctness of their positions, that they have taken the federal government by storm in order to impose their views on the populace as a whole. But what about the Libertarian?

As an individual, a Libertarian may be either on the Left, the Right, or somewhere between the two extremes when it comes to social issues. The Libertarian is not characterized as much by their social stances as they are by the proper political sphere within which those stances are to be expressed. Since the United States Constitution is the “supreme Law of the Land,” we must turn to this document and its Amendments to ascertain the correct political sphere within which social issues are to be addressed. Recall, also, that the 10th Amendment clarifies and confirms the original understanding of the Constitution. Any power not specifically granted to the federal government has been reserved to the states and the people.

With this Constitutional foundation in place, it is time to search for the mention of social issues in the Constitution. Neither marriage nor abortion has been explicitly dealt with in the Constitution. These two issues, then, are rightfully delegated to the people and the states. This is the Libertarian position. Of course, the Libertarian puts these issues rather more with the people and less with the States. Notice that the Libertarian does not grant federal government influence over or interference in issues it has not been specifically tasked to be involved with.

Naturalization is the process by which citizenship is granted/acquired by a non-citizen of a nation-state. Congress is specifically delegated the power to establish a “uniform Rule of Naturalization,” meaning there is one standard for becoming a naturalized United States citizen. This is as close as the Constitution comes to mentioning border control, or lack thereof. Libertarians, while acknowledging the Constitutional need for a uniform standard, desire a reasonable and fair standard to be applied across the board with a minimal government bureaucracy supporting it.

Gun control is clear cut. The Second Amendment plainly states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Being that the Constitution and its Amendments are federal documents, this amendment plainly prohibits federal action when it comes to guns and their ownership. This, too, is an issue that is meant to be dealt with by individuals, local government, or by state government.

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” This is the extent to which the Constitution deals with capital punishment, via the Fifth Amendment. It only specifies the circumstances and procedure through which capital charges can be brought against a person. While grand juries operate without many of the constraints of the judicial system, they are still bound by the Constitution.

The matter of capital punishment is somewhat complicated by the prohibition of inflicting “cruel and unusual punishments” in the Tenth Amendment. Properly interpreted, the federal government is entitled to determine whether a punishment for a crime, including capital crime, is cruel and/or unusual. Take note that while the Constitution acknowledges the acceptability of capital punishment, it does not decree that such a punishment ever need be used, only that it may be used. As viewed by the Libertarian, capital punishment is an issue that government at all levels is able to weigh-in upon, provided each government does not overstep the bounds set forth in its founding documents.

Religion tends to be a particularly tender point in the land of politics. And yet, Congress has been prohibited from establishing a national religion and from interfering with an individual's free expression of their religious beliefs. Separation of religion and state was intended to prevent a religion from running the state and the state from running a religion. Both these ideas are equally valid, though their application in recent history has been toward the end of banning all religious activity, and removing all religious references, from public places and spaces. The Libertarian agrees with the individual freedoms granted by the lack of a national religion and the separation between religion and the state, provided such distinctions are not perverted by government.

The Left and the Right, while ideologically isolated from each other on social issues, nevertheless agree in practice that the federal government is the proper sphere for the dictation and enforcement of social norms, practices, and issues. Libertarians, on a personal level, may be on the Left, Right, or somewhere in between when it comes to social issues. In politics, the Libertarian believes that the Constitution should be followed, and that unless specifically mentioned otherwise, social issues were and are intended to be left up to the people and the states. This is in following with the Libertarian core belief of individual liberty, the free exercise thereof, and the avoidance of interfering with the individual liberties of others.

Kids' Books?

MSNBC has an acute case of PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome). You can't watch a single program on that network without at some point being subjected to a segment in which the whole point is to ridicule Sarah Palin. It reminds me of the two minutes hate in Orwell's 1984 where all party members in Oceania stop their work for two minutes while their country's enemies are shown on a television screen. For two minutes the party members work themselves into a frenzy, shouting their hate and loathing for the despised enemies on the screen. Then it's all over and they go back to work.

I don't know what the reason for the hatred of Palin is. She hasn't yet declared herself a candidate for President, but the left certainly seems to be as afraid of her as the Oceania apparatchiks were afraid of Emanuel Goldstein in 1984.

A humorous example of this occured on a recent edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, who never passes up an opportunity to laugh at Palin's intellect but who should himself be much more humble in such matters. His guest, one Richard Wolffe, scoffs at Palin's claim to derive inspiration from C.S. Lewis. The relevant portion starts at the two minute mark:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

All Wolffe knows about C.S. Lewis is that he's the "author of a series of kid's books"? He's never heard of Abolition of Man, On Miracles, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, Pilgrim's Regress, The Great Divorce, Surprised by Joy, A Grief Observed, The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves, the space trilogy, the Oxford debates, and so much more? And this uninformed man is chuckling at Sarah Palin for finding inspiration in Lewis? Does he not realize that millions of people have found inspiration in Lewis?

It gets worse as Matthews, who obviously doesn't understand how a guide works on a hunting trip, derides Palin for having people around her as she shoots a caribou (it wasn't a moose as Aaron Sorkin, who apparently can't tell the difference, mistakenly claims as he calls Palin a "witless bully").

These people would like everyone to think they're endowed with wisdom, erudition, and sophistication superior to that of the rest of us, but in their adolescent attempts to make Palin look foolish they instead make themselves look like a clique of unpopular middle school girls sneering at the attractive new girl of whom they're profoundly jealous.

Atta Boy

Here's some news to dampen your yuletide spirit. Investors Business Daily had conducted a poll of physicians last year that showed that almost half of them would leave the profession if Obamacare were enacted. Now another poll has come up with similar results. According to the more recent survey 40% of physicians are planning to leave the profession because of concerns over Obamacare. IBD comments:

When we said nearly half of U.S. doctors might close their practices or retire early rather than live under the Democrats' health overhaul, we were heavily criticized. The critics, though, were wrong.

Four in nine doctors responding to an IBD/TIPP poll sent out in August 2009 said they "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if Congress passed what has become known as ObamaCare. That means as many as 360,000 physicians have plans to be doing something other than treating the growing number of patients in this country.

The doctors also told us — 67% to 22%, with 11% not responding — that they expected fewer students to apply for medical school in the future if the plan became law.

Given these views, it's no surprise that 71% were doubtful that the government would be able to cover the 47 million uninsured Americans with better care at lower costs, which ObamaCare supporters have promised.

Other findings from our poll of 1,376 doctors included: six in 10 agreeing that the Democrats' plan would strip drug companies of the incentives they need to make lifesaving pharmaceuticals, and 65% believing that a government overhaul would lead to lower-quality care for seniors.

The critics said our poll was not credible, was "shabby" and "garbage." They accused IBD of being partisan, pursuing an agenda, trying to sway gullible readers with shameless journalism.

Now a Merritt Hawkins survey of 2,379 doctors for the Physicians Foundation completed in August has vindicated our poll. It found that 40% of doctors said they would "retire, seek a nonclinical job in health care, or seek a job or business unrelated to health care" over the next three years as the overhaul is phased in.

Of those who said they planned to retire, 28% are 55 or younger and nearly half (49%) are 60 or younger.

There's a lot more on this at the link. As you read you might want to send a big mental "atta boy" to Barack, Harry, Nancy and the gang. They're doing a heck of a job. It can't be easy to destroy the best health care system in the world with a single piece of legislation, but they seem to have managed it unless the Republicans pull us back from the brink of disaster by repealing it next year.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

Po-Mo Narcissists

Jason forwards an article from the WSJ titled Why Narcissism Defines Our Time. The piece is by a professor at USC named Elizabeth Currid-Halkett who argues that it was a mistake to drop narcissism from the list of personality disorders. Narcissism, she observes, is rampant in our culture:

Narcissism is one of the most obvious examples of a personality disorder. We see it everywhere in our culture. Narcissism can explain part of the motivation for participating in reality TV show antics, and Hollywood has always seemed a refuge for beautiful people who need to be the center of attention. We know that not much will change in Hollywood with this announcement. But will it change any other parts of our culture?

Most troubling about not including NPD as a personality disorder is that there is evidence of narcissism in all of our social lives. It’s alarming that in an age when narcissism is so evident, and with new ways for narcissists to get attention so apparent, that it would not be considered a personality disorder. The new world of democratic celebrities—on Facebook, reality TV and Twitter—where there are fewer traditional constraints on runaway narcissism, demonstrates the need to take this personality disorder seriously.

It’s almost tautological to say that celebrity favors narcissistic personalities. Michael Jackson is a tragic example: consumed with a desire to be loved, to stay young and to remain the “King of Pop,” he built a fantasy childhood kingdom at his house and subjected himself to disfiguring plastic surgery. He was particularly vulnerable and unsupported, but his quest for attention isn’t a million miles from Britney shaving her hair off or 80s-era Madonna and her endless and often sacrilegious desire to shock.

However, reality TV and the rise of the 24/7 news cycle (begetting the 24/7 gossip cycle) has enabled a very visual and real-time way to observe the dangers of narcissism. Like Jackson, Heidi Montag, former reality star from The Hills, is so pathologically obsessed with her physical appearance that she underwent plastic surgery multiple times while still in her early 20s. She and her husband, Spencer Pratt, appear to devote many of their waking hours to drumming up publicity for themselves. This past summer, Montag filed for divorce only to reconcile this November, admitting it was a stunt to make money. Pratt remarked in an interview with a tabloid, “Divorcing was the only way to keep Heidi’s career going.”

There's more at the link. It's a pretty good piece, but I had two thoughts as I read Currid-Halkett's essay, one important, I think, the other not so much.

The first was that I was a little disappointed, but not surprised, that the author didn't mention that narcissism is at bottom a moral problem, not just a kind of illness. Our infatuation with ourselves stems from an exaggerated view of our own self-importance and a failure to see others as equally important in the eyes of God. Unfortunately, one of the things our post-modern culture has deprived us of is the ability to make moral judgments. Thus, we'll say that things we think harmful are "disorders", they need "treatment", perhaps, but who's to say that they're actually wrong in a moral sense? That sounds so old-fashioned and judgmental.

Second, I wondered if the author's motivation for using a hyphenated name might not be just a little narcissistic itself.

Dihydrogen Monoxide

Some college students decided to have a little fun at the recent U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico. They stood by a water cooler and asked the delegates to sign a petition that would ban the greenhouse gas dihydrogen monoxide. Apparently, every delegate the students approached signed the petition. Dihydrogen monoxide is, well, see if you can figure it out:

It's understandable that someone with little background in chemistry might fall for this ruse, but these delegates are among those who have been trying to persuade us that the science behind anthropogenic global warming is indisputable. It hardly gives one confidence in either their scientific expertise or their judgment that they don't know enough science to realize that they were signing a petition to ban water.

On a side note, there were something like 1240 delegates at the Cancun conference. Last year's event in Copenhagen drew 45,000. What might we conclude from that about the state of the climate change movement? Wesley Pruden of the Washington Times offers some amusing thoughts on the matter here.

More details on the petition prank can be found here. Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

Temper Tantrum

Thousands of students are protesting, rioting, and assaulting the royal family with shouts of "Off with their heads" (Why do leftists always want to kill their perceived opponents? Why has every left-wing revolution been so bloody? How many millions of innocent men, women, and children were murdered in the French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions?), all because parliament has legislated a university tuition hike. Well, how much is tuition going to rise? It's been hard to find a news story that actually tells us. All one hears in most reports is that the cost of a college education is going to triple and that the bill passed in parliament by only 21 votes.

Nevertheless, this CBS News account gives us the figure. British students can now expect to have to pay the astronomical sum of $14,000 a year for their degree, up from about $5000 a year. For this they're rioting in the streets.

Perhaps they need a little perspective. There's no one in the United States, unless they're on some sort of financial assistance program or scholarship, who can get a year's worth of university education for $15,000. Even state funded universities charge more than that and private schools charge more than twice that.

The Brits are still getting a bargain, but when you're used to receiving something almost for free, I suppose you might resent it when the people who've been carrying you on their backs all your life decide they can't do it anymore.

So, to the barricades!

Record-Breaking Recession

Here's a chart that compares the depth and duration of all of the Post-WWII recessions we've suffered. Clearly, our current woes are far worse than anything we've seen heretofore. Each recession is plotted so that the low point of the recession (maximum job losses) is on the mid-line of the chart:

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air comments:

[The chart] demonstrates the folly of the Obama administration’s insistence that we have been experiencing a recovery and any sort of significant growth in job creation. After hitting the nadir of job losses relative to our peak inter-recession employment, we have essentially flatlined for far longer than any other post-recession period. Nothing in the data shows a hint that we will soon break out of that pattern either, and Ben Bernanke says we’ll probably go four to five more years on this same trajectory.

The only way to achieve recovery is to increase job growth. There are in theory two ways to do that. One is to stimulate it through government spending. The Obama team has tried that, and it hasn't worked. The other is by creating a business climate that will encourage employers to hire and invest. That means cutting taxes and easing stifling regulations on business. This the current administration is ideologically opposed to doing.

The words "tax cut" have the same effect upon them as holding a crucifix up to a vampire has on the vampire. So, unless there's a change of heart in the White House, look for that redline to pretty much stay where it is, and good luck to this year's graduating class.

Morrissey has some insightful things to say about this at the link.

Materialism and the Hard Problem

Michael Posner at The Globe and Mail writes an interesting piece on the current tiff between materialists and non-materialists over thye nature of human consciousness. The materialists believe that consciousness is simply a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain. For instance, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, says in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, that “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

David Chalmers, author of several books on the subject of consciousness, and one of the foremost authorities on the subject, disagrees. He points out that we need to distinguish between what he calls the easy problem and the hard problem of consciousness. Posner explains Chalmers' argument this way:

Easy problems tend to be phenomena that can be explained by computational or neural mechanisms – recoiling from unpleasant odours, for example, or simply declaring “I am hungry” or some other mental state. The hard problem relates to the subjective qualities of human experience.

For instance, let's say you run into your old friend Jack. You register a moment of physical recognition: “Oh, there's old Jack.” But meeting old Jack also may trigger a series of “Jack” memories, emotions and ideas, all percolating more or less simultaneously. You may perceive that Jack has aged and remember how he once looked. You may recall beautiful music that Jack enjoyed, or the brilliant shade of red of the rose in Jack's lapel. The specific presence of Jack, in short, catalyzes the non-specific emergence of a holistic range of associations, drawn from some hidden well of private experience. You and you alone know what it is like to experience this moment of reconnection. It is literally incomparable. “The hard problem is hard,” says Mr. Chalmers, “precisely because … the problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained.”

Science can document all the processes involved in vision – electromagnetic waveforms striking the retina and proceeding electrochemically along the optic nerve to the brain's occipital lobe. But where does the felt experience of what is seen – let's say the colour red – come from? Says Mr. Chalmers: “There is an explanatory gap between the functions and experience.”

There's more at the link. The article is a good summary of the differences between those who believe there is more to us than just our material body and those who don't.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken. The story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities are purely coincidental.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. Judy had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on his birthday she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

Why Are They Happier?

Polls and other studies in recent years have consistently found that conservative Americans are happier than liberal Americans. Lots of people have held forth on why this should be so, and Dennis Prager adds his thoughts to the mix in a column at the Washington Times. He writes:

Liberals respond [to the findings] this way: "If we're unhappier, it's because we are more upset than conservatives over the plight of those less fortunate than ourselves." But common sense and data suggest other explanations.

For one thing, conservatives on the same socioeconomic level as liberals give more charity and volunteer more time than do liberals. And as regards the suffering of non-Americans, for at least a half-century, conservatives have been far more willing to sacrifice American treasure and American blood (often their own) for other nations' liberty.

Both of these facts refute the liberals-are-more-concerned-about-others explanation for liberal unhappiness. So, let's look at other explanations.

Prager goes on to consider four possible reasons for the gap. Here's the fourth:

A fourth explanation for greater unhappiness among liberals is that the more people allow feelings to govern them, the less happy they will be. And the further left one goes, the more importance one attaches to feelings....

A couple of years ago, I gave a speech on happiness to the students and faculty of a prestigious high school in the Los Angeles area. The subject was the need to act happy even when one isn't feeling happy -- because it is unfair to others to inflict our bad moods on them and because we will never be happy if we allow our feelings to dictate our happiness.

From what I experienced that day and learned later, liberal students and faculty generally loathed my speech; conservative students generally loved it (there was no conservative faculty to speak of). Why? Because conservatives are far more likely to be comfortable with the idea that feelings are not as important as behavior.

Those who know that feelings must not govern us, but that we must govern our feelings, are far more likely to be happy people.

I think there's a lot to what Prager says here. When people measure their happiness by their feelings they're bound to be disappointed because our feelings are so mercurial. It's much better to act as if we're content with life, regardless of how we're feeling at the time, because our feelings tend to follow our actions. That is, our minds tend to make our feelings conform to our behavior. Unfortunately, we often choose to act according to the way we feel, but this, in my opinion, is not a good practice.

If we consistently allowed our feelings to dictate our behavior, fewer people would stay married, far fewer people would show up for work on Monday morning, fewer people would sacrifice to help people they don't know, and no one would perform acts of great courage. All of these things - staying married, going to work in the morning, sacrificing for strangers, acting bravely - are things people do even though they often don't feel like doing them. If they acted according to their feelings they wouldn't do them, so allowing our feelings to dictate our conduct tends to make us less virtuous than we otherwise might be.

We're a lot better off, and we'll live much more virtuous and happy lives, if we make our will the master of our feelings rather than making our feelings the governor of our will.

Anyway, Prager has more interesting ideas on the topic of why conservatives are apparently happier than liberals in the article. Check it out.

Good Bad News

The good news in this report is bad for the credibility of the climate change community, I suppose, but the bad news in the report may actually be pretty good for the rest of the world, at least I think so. Here's the good news:

Alarming predictions that global warming could cause sea levels to rise 6ft in the next century are wrong, it has emerged. The forecast made by the influential 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which would have seen cities around the world submerged by water, now looks ‘unlikely’.

A Met Office study also rules out the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s conveyor belt, which would trigger Arctic winters in Britain like those seen in the film The Day After Tomorrow.

However, the report says the IPCC was right to warn of a sea level rise of up to 2ft by 2100, and that a 3ft rise could happen.

Well, President Obama did tell us in his primary victory speech that that would be the day when the rise of the oceans would begin to slow, so maybe he was prescient.

In any case, this blow to the IPCC's credibility comes on the heels of news reports that the organization was sloppy in forecasting that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, so although it's good news for us, it's perhaps not so good for the credibility of the IPCC.

The report, however, also has what the Daily Mail article calls bad news. It says there is new evidence that the Arctic will become largely free of ice during most summers sooner than the IPCC warned, and that the Greenland ice sheet is more likely to melt in centuries to come than previously thought.

Now I don't know why we should assume that the melting of the ice, particularly in Greenland, will be a bad thing. Greenland is a vast, uninhabited land mass. If the ice which covers it melts away a whole new continent-sized territory will become available for colonization. The ice-free land might also prove to be rich in natural resources, and if Greenland thaws out so, too, will much of the rest of the near-arctic (northern Canada, northern Alaska, and Siberia). The Daily Mail might think this is bad news, but it sounds more like the kind of news that could, in fact, be a boon to the entire world.

Winning Through Fecundity

An interesting meme that has been circulating for a couple of years now is that secularism will die out not because religious folk defeat it either in the battle of ideas or by virtue of political power, but through the inexorable pressure of the demographic facts of life. Vjtorley at Uncommon Descent summarizes the thinking of Phillip Longman and a book by Eric Kaufmann, both of which address this issue.

According to Longman:

“[I]n countries rich and poor, under all forms of government, birth rates are declining across the globe. But they are declining least among those adhering to strict religious codes and literal belief in the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran.”

“Indeed, the pattern of human fertility now fits this pattern: the least likely to procreate are those who profess no belief in God; those who describe themselves as agnostic or simply spiritual are only somewhat slightly less likely to be childless. Moving up the spectrum, family size increases among practicing Unitarians, Reform Jews, mainline Protestants and ‘cafeteria’ Catholics, but the birthrates found in these populations are still far below replacement levels.

Only as we approach the realm of religious belief and practice marked by an intensity we might call, for lack of a better word, ‘fundamentalism,’ do we find pockets of high fertility and consequent rapid population growth.”

“When confronted with the fact that they are being outbred, secularists often respond that many if not most children born into highly religious families will grow up to reject the faith of their fathers,” but “[a]mong fundamentalist families, it turns out, the apple does not fall far from the tree. And the more demanding the faith, the more this rule applies. Only five percent of children born to the most conservative Amish, for example, move on to other faiths or lifestyles.”

Kaufman's book is titled, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. The product description of the book says this:

“Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward, but most people don’t read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often inoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists.

And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population; in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularization process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.”

Vjtorley points out the irony in these predictions that believers will swamp non-believers by out-reproducing them - a purely Darwinian strategy for biological success. He also believes that the secular elites are aware of this, but are in a bind, because they have only three options for combatting the rising percentage of believers. They can have more children themselves, they can seek to undercut the religious beliefs of believers' children, and they can prevent believers from having children.

The first is anathema to most secularists because they're generally among those who believe the earth is over-populated as it is, and that everyone should limit themselves to just two children.

That leaves the second and third options, and vjtorley lays out the measures that he thinks we might soon see advanced which, deliberately or not, will have the effect of diminishing the strength of religious belief both here and abroad.

Read what he thinks lies in store for religious folk in both the near and middle future at the link. It's both fascinating and chilling.

Darwinian Conservatives

John West, in an article at First Principles, identifies a somewhat surprising epiphenomenon in today's ideological culture wars - Darwinian conservatism. I say it's surprising because most conservatives, especially social conservatives, are very skeptical of the claims of the Darwinians. There are some, however, who are not. West begins by preparing the ground. Here are some excerpts:

“Darwinian” conservatives claim that Darwinism can be used to defend traditional morality, economic freedom, limited government and even religion. They further contend that the science behind Darwinism is so overwhelming that conservatives must embrace it or be doomed to irrelevance. I think they are wrong on all counts.

So do I. He continues:

It should be made clear from the outset that the term “Darwinism” does not refer merely to “change over time” or even to the idea that all living things share a common ancestor. Instead, in its modern formulation, Darwinism refers primarily to the claim that the mechanism of evolution is an undirected material process of natural selection acting on random mutations, and furthermore to the reductionist corollary of this view that seeks to understand mind, morality, and religion as fully explicable by such a blind material process.

In other words, the Darwinian holds that natural processes are all that's necessary to account for living things.

Charles Darwin thought he had explained the origin of the appearance of design throughout nature through a process that did not have the design of particular organisms or biological structures in mind. The only “purpose” of natural selection is immediate survival. Natural selection is blind to the future, and thus in no sense are particular organisms or biological features—say the wings of a butterfly—to be considered the “purposeful” result of evolution. This truth applies even to the development of human beings. In the famous words of Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

It is important to understand that the rejection of teleological evolution was Darwin's own view, not something grafted onto his theory by others. As Darwin himself emphasized: “No shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations . . . were intentionally and specially guided.” It is equally important to understand that Darwin thought his theory provided a reductionist explanation for the development of mind, morality, and religion, and that he believed his theory had implications for social policy.

Having clarified the meaning of Darwinism, we are ready to scrutinize the claims of Darwinian conservatives in five key areas: Does Darwinism support or subvert traditional morality? Does it erode or reinforce the basis of capitalism? Does it promote or undermine limited government? Does it nurture or weaken religious faith? Finally, is the evidence for Darwinism so overwhelming that all rational people must accept it?

In the discussion which follows West makes the case that naturalistic, materialistic Darwinism is incompatible with all of these and thus with conservatism. His treatment will be helpful to anyone who's interested in the impact of Darwinism on culture. It's worth close examination and study.

An Ideological Primer (Pt. II)

On Thursday we discussed the meaning of the terms left and right in the context of economic thought. We noted that the difference was really a disagreement over how much freedom should be accorded the individual in society. The left we maintained, tends to be statist, i.e. they see the state as the repository of power and rights.

The right tends to believe that the most just state, the one which produces the highest quality of life for it's citizens, is the one in which individual freedom is maximized.

We concluded that discussion by noting that when we apply the terms right and left to social issues it becomes harder to discern the principles which separate them. Nevertheless, there are certainly differences.

On issues like gay marriage, abortion, immigration, gun control, capital punishment, and free speech people on the right tend to be traditionalist and constitutionalist. They tend to be skeptical of human nature and change, and they believe that we're foolish to disregard the accumulated wisdom and experience of those who have gone before us. We're also foolish to change the ways we order our society simply because some practices and ideas are no longer fashionable among the cultural elites. Conservatives place a very high value on the authority of the Constitution and the religious traditions that have governed men's lives for ages.

The combined authority of the Constitution and tradition generally leads conservatives to oppose gay marriage, abortion on demand, and open borders. They also are unreceptive to attempts to limit the right to own firearms and to expand free speech to cover "art" and language which coarsen our social life and degrade us as individuals. They further believe that we have grossly misapplied Jefferson's metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state and have turned it into an excuse to suppress religious expression in public spaces.

Conservatives favor capital punishment for the same reason they oppose abortion on demand - they value innocent life. Capital punishment, properly applied, sends the message that society values innocent life so much that the severest penalty will be exacted from anyone who wantonly takes it.

Liberals generally take the opposite position on each of these issues.

Libertarians, for their part, often agree with conservatives on capital punishment and gun control, but tend to agree with liberals on gay marriage, abortion, and borders. They seem to be ambivalent on the matter of church/state separation. Here's a chart, perhaps a little simplistic*, of where people in each of these camps tends to stand:

                                            Conservatives        Libertarians         Liberals

• gay marriage                   oppose                 favor                favor
• abortion on demand        oppose                 favor                favor
• open borders                    oppose                 favor                favor
• gun control                      oppose               oppose             favor
• capital punishment           favor                    favor                oppose
• public religion                   favor                   -------              oppose

There are more issues confronting us than just these, of course. There are major differences, for example, between conservatives and liberals on how to address environmental problems. Even so, the above chart may be helpful in trying to determine whether one's sympathies lie more with the right of the left.

* The positions assigned to conservatives, libertarians, and liberals are general tendencies. In practice it's possible to find people who adhere to each of these ideologies aligning themselves with the other side on almost every issue.

Keynesian Stimulus

A young economist explains why Keynesianism, the economic model of choice in the Obama administration, simply doesn't work:

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

Double Hit

In the words of the old Buffalo Springfield song, "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear." The man put in charge of cleaning the Stuxnet worm out of Iranian computers has been assassinated in Tehran:

Prof. Majid Shahriari, who died when his car was attacked in North Tehran Monday, Nov. 29, headed the team Iran established for combating the Stuxnet virus rampaging through its nuclear and military networks. His wife was injured. The scientist's death deals a major blow to Iran's herculean efforts to purge its nuclear and military control systems of the destructive worm since it went on the offensive six months ago.

Only this month, Stuxnet shut down nuclear enrichment at Natanz for six days from Nov. 16-22 and curtailed an important air defense exercise. Prof. Shahriari was the Iranian nuclear program's top expert on computer codes and cyber war.

Another Iranian nuclear scientist, Prof. Feredoun Abbassi-Davani, and his wife survived a second coordinated attack with serious injuries. He is Dean of Students at the Beheshit Basijj Forces University, a key political appointment.

The Iranians are blaming the U.S. and Israel, of course, but as the Wikileaks documents have revealed, the Iranians have lots of enemies in the Middle East who want to see their nuclear program stopped. The Saudis, we learned from Wikileaks, have urged the United States to bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran. It wouldn't be surprising were they behind this double hit, but who knows?

The Universal Language

Mark Vernon writes an interesting piece at Big Questions Online that addresses why many thinkers have concluded that the beauty and power of mathematics points to the existence of an incomprehensibly brilliant architect of the universe. Here's part of his essay:

It’s not just the universal nature of mathematics that’s striking; it’s that mathematics works at all. The natural world is a complex place. It’s packed with variations and permutations, random events and patterns so complex they are far from obvious to the eye.

And yet, mathematics can capture so much of that intricacy. What kind of alchemy transforms the lead of messy reality into the gold of a simple equation? It’s a question that was famously asked by the physicist Eugene Wigner, in 1960. He wrote an essay with a title that says it all: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.”

Wigner notes the sense that many physicists have: mathematics seems to be discovered, not created. The reason to think this is that discoveries made about the physical world are often, first, discoveries made about mathematics....So, physics is about discovering the laws of nature, and those laws appear to be written in the language of math. Pi really is in the sky.

Wigner continues: “It is...a miracle that in spite of the baffling complexity of the world, certain regularities in the events could be discovered....It is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.”

Mathematics looks miraculous....And yet, is the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences really evidence for the existence of a deity? Is the language of math divine? There are good reasons to doubt it.

Vernon adduces two rather lame (at least to my untutored mind) reasons to doubt that mathematics is a compass needle pointing to God, but you can read what he says for yourself at the link. Meanwhile, if you'd like an example of the sort of mathematical order that pervades the cosmos and which fills mathematicians and ordinary laymen alike with a sense of wonder check out this discussion of something called the Fibonacci series.

Muslim Reformation

It has been suggested on occasion that one thing that distinguishes Christianity from Islam is that Christianity underwent a reformation and the subsequent challenges of the European Enlightenment which sharpened it's theological convictions, but that Islam has yet to undergo a similar process. Ibn Warraq is perhaps the latest voice in the West to call for such a reassessment and reformation.

His article is interesting, but is less compelling than it might have been had it come from a devout Muslim. Warraq is neither devout nor Muslim. At any rate, here's the opening paragraph of his piece:

I have often argued that one of the redemptive graces of Western civilization is self-criticism, a deeply ingrained habit that has enabled Western man to reflect, to adjust, to improve his beliefs, to correct and change his situation — in short, to reform. The West has been able to submit even its most cherished beliefs to scrutiny. By contrast, self-criticism remains an elusive goal in modern Islamic cultures. David Pryce-Jones argues that the “acquisition of honour, pride, dignity, respect and the converse avoidance of shame, disgrace, and humiliation are keys to Arab motivation, clarifying and illuminating behaviour in the past as well as in the present.”

The codes of honor and shame “enforce identity and conformity of behaviour.” In such a system of values, it is impossible to admit publicly that one is wrong, for that would bring shame on the individual, the family, the country, or even one’s religion. Western-style satire would be very difficult in Arabic society, for that would risk the humiliation of one’s own culture.

However, there are signs of change.

Two of these signs were the Arab Human Development Report of 2003, in which leading Arab intellectuals lamented the poor state of the Arab Muslim world in every field of endeavor — from the scientific to the cultural. Then, in October 2010, came “The Casablanca Call for Democracy and Human Rights,” a document published by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy urging governments and activists across the Middle East to continue working toward democratic reforms.

Warraq discusses these two measures and the prospects for reform in the balance of the piece. He's not totally pessimistic, although stories like this one underscore the depth of the difficulty.

An Ideological Primer (Pt. I)

From time to time one hears people refer to the political left and the political right. Sometimes these terms are confusing for readers not familiar with them, especially since they can mean different things in different contexts. Perhaps it would be helpful to offer a brief explanation of what is usually meant by them in our political discourse.

The most common political use of left and right is a reference to differing views of how much economic freedom individuals should be allowed to have in the state. Generally, the right tends to value free markets, property rights, and a concomitant small government with minimal interference in, and regulation of, the marketplace. The left, on the other hand, prefers an expansive, activist government, regulated markets, and reduced property rights. Another way to put this is that the right is generally more protective of individual freedom and the left is more concerned with using government to enhance the collective good of society.

These positions reside along a spectrum of opinion that ranges from no government control (true anarchism) on the right to complete government control (totalitarianism) on the left. The further to the left one goes the less individual freedom one finds. The further to the right one travels the more freedom the individual enjoys.

The ideological spectrum might look like this:

                             The Left                                                The Right

          Totalitarianism          Socialism          Liberalism           Conservatism         Libertarianism        Anarchism
(Communism &  Fascism)


Some will object to placing fascism on the left because it's usually considered an ideology of the right, but this is, in my opinion, an error. Fascism is a totalitarian system and as such entails massive government control and limited individual freedom. It's a form of socialism, which is why the Nazis, who were fascists, called their party the National Socialist Party.

Anarchists are often considered leftists, but this, too, is a partial error. Genuine anarchists want to do away with government altogether. This aspiration is not compatible with leftist ideology. One reason for the confusion, perhaps, is that many on the totalitarian left use anarchy as a means of achieving their goal of eliminating individual freedom. Indeed, totalitarians often masquerades as the party of freedom while they're competing for power, but once they acquire it freedom is always the first thing to disappear.

Another confusion stems from the fact that what is called conservative today - the emphasis on personal liberty - was called liberal in the 19th century. Thus classical liberalism is pretty much contiguous with modern conservatism. Today's Democrat party which is mostly comprised of liberals and socialists would have been considered very radical in the 19th century.

Of course, this applies mostly to economic ideology. If we wish to explain the difference between left and right on social issues like immigration, abortion, gay marriage, and gun control the picture becomes somewhat less clear. We'll try to explain those differences tomorrow.

True Lies

This sentence is false.

The alert reader will be a little perplexed by that claim for if it is true then it must be false, and vice-versa. Statements like this are called paradoxes. This particular paradox is a version of what's called the Liar's Paradox. It's hard to see how a paradox could be true or false and yet it's hard to say exactly what it is that's wrong with the sentence.

There are lots of different kinds of paradoxes. Some are verbal like the one above, some are visual, like the art of M.C. Escher :

And some are situational like the paradoxes of an ancient Greek named Zeno.

Philosopher Graham Priest has an interesting piece at The Opinionator blog on paradoxes and modern attempts to resolve them. It turns out that some people think that though a paradox involves a contradiction some of them are nevertheless true. I have serious reservations about this because it seems to violate a logical principle called the law of non-contradiction which is a bedrock of rational thought. Even so, the article is very interesting, at least for the logically minded, and may even be correct. Give it a look.

Sheer Genius

There's more here on the fascinating story of the Stuxnet virus that infected the computers which run the centrifuges in the Iranian nuclear weapons program. It seems that the people who wrote the code for this cyber weapon thought of just about everything. They must be geniuses which is more than a little scary because there's no reason to think that such a weapon could not be used against us as easily as against the Iranians.

It's not hard to imagine an enemy shutting down our electrical grid, our air traffic control system, our financial system, or our military communications systems with just such a tool. It could be catastrophic, and we wouldn't even know who did it.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Simply put, Stuxnet is an incredibly advanced, undetectable computer worm that took years to construct and was designed to jump from computer to computer until it found the specific, protected control system that it aimed to destroy: Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

The target was seemingly impenetrable; for security reasons, it lay several stories underground and was not connected to the World Wide Web. And that meant Stuxnet had to act as sort of a computer cruise missile: As it made its passage through a set of unconnected computers, it had to grow and adapt to security measures and other changes until it reached one that could bring it into the nuclear facility.

When it ultimately found its target, it would have to secretly manipulate it until it was so compromised it ceased normal functions.

And finally, after the job was done, the worm would have to destroy itself without leaving a trace.

That is what we are learning happened at Iran's nuclear facilities -- both at Natanz, which houses the centrifuge arrays used for processing uranium into nuclear fuel, and, to a lesser extent, at Bushehr, Iran's nuclear power plant.

Check out the article at the link.

Egalitarianism on Steroids

Nina Power at The Philosopher's Magazine argues for the counter-intuitive proposition that we should presuppose that everyone is equally intelligent. Here's an excerpt:

The work of Jacques Rancière, who never tires of repeating his assertion that equality is not just something to be fought for, but something to be presupposed, is, for me, one of the most important ideas of the past decade. Although Rancière begins the discussion of this idea in his 1987 text The Ignorant Schoolmaster, it is really only in the last ten years that others have taken up the idea and attempted to work out what it might mean for politics, art and philosophy.

Equality may also be something one wishes for in a future to come, after fundamental shifts in the arrangement and order of society. But this is not Rancière’s point at all. Equality is not something to be achieved, but something to be presupposed, universally. Everyone is equally intelligent.

But what does the axiomatic assertion of the equality of intelligence mean? Surely not everyone is as capable as each other? Doesn’t Rancière’s claim fall to pieces when you look at differential exam scores, degree results and the entire way in which intelligence divides up and separates out humanity in general?

Rancière takes his cue from the maverick nineteenth-century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot, whose simple question was “[w]ere all men virtually capable of understanding what others had done and understood?” What this means is that, as Peter Hallward puts it, “Everyone has the same intelligence, and differences in knowledge are simply a matter of opportunity and motivation.

On the basis of this assumption, superior knowledge ceases to be a necessary qualification of the teacher, just as the process of explanation – together with metaphors that distinguish students as slow or quick, or conceive of educational time in terms of progress, training, qualification, and so on – ceases to be an integral part of teaching.”

In other words, Ms Power wants us to believe that there are differences in knowledge but not in intelligence. Given the same educational opportunities and socio-economic background everyone could obtain the same knowledge.

This strikes me as egalitarianism on steroids. I've often been in the presence (perhaps too often) of people compared to whom I feel like a mental dwarf. Some of these people were not particularly well-educated, but they seemed to me to be far smarter than I am.

Not everyone is equally fast, equally strong, equally tall, or equally attractive. We don't all have the same personality or temperament. What reason is there to think that we're equally intelligent? Why would we be so obviously unequal in every way except in terms of intelligence? Why should we even think that in this one respect we are all the same? What is the empirical evidence for such a belief?

Indeed, it seems clear that we're not all equally intelligent. An adult is more intelligent than a toddler. Down's Syndrome children are less intelligent than "normal" children. You and I are less intelligent, probably, than Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. Intelligence is the ability to grasp concepts and meaning, and it seems undeniable that there are some who can do this much better than others.

In fact, it seems to me so manifestly true that I have to wonder what the point is of denying it.

Slandering the Tea Party

Jim Wallis is really beginning to concern me, I'm afraid. Wallis is the editor of Sojourners magazine, and he's one of the President's most committed supporters among those on the Christian left. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and I have a great deal of respect for the work he has done on behalf of the poor. Even so, when he says things like he did in a recent interview he really needs to be called to account.

In the interview Mr. Wallis criticized FOX News for smearing President Obama over the question of his religious identity, which, parenthetically, I don't recall having heard anyone on that network do, but then he proceeded to do exactly what he criticized FOX for doing: He smeared the character of millions of Americans by claiming that, "To be blunt there wouldn't be a Tea Party if there wasn't a black man in the White House...and that's a fact." Here's the audio:

Wallis hasn't a shred of evidence to warrant this slander on the millions of good people who've gravitated to the Tea Party, and for him to state, as though he knows it to be a fact, that the Tea party is a racist organization, or is motivated by racism, is irresponsible and baffling. Wallis has been at pains over the last few months to urge upon all of us a greater civility in our public discourse, but his words ring hollow when they're compared to his own example.

He seems unwilling to concede that many sincere Americans view Mr. Obama as the most radical and unqualified person ever to occupy the office of the presidency, and they fear, not without reason, that his policies are destructive to our economy, our status in the world, and our national cohesion. Their opinions of his impact on the nation have nothing to do with his race. Nevertheless, Mr. Wallis seems to draw the ludicrous inference that because Mr. Obama is black, and because Tea Partiers oppose him, therefore Tea Partiers oppose him because he's black. It's nonsense, but that's the sort of reasoning in which Mr. Wallis is apparently indulging in order to discredit the President's political opponents.

One hopes that having insulted a large percentage of American voters with what is nothing more than an unsubstantiated, partisan cheap shot he'll at least have the grace to offer an apology.

Another Mass Murder Attempt

By now you've heard of the Somali teenager arrested in Portland for attempting to detonate a massive car bomb at a gathering of thousands of Oregonians attending a Christmas tree lighting service. Go here for a video of what the crowd looks like at that annual ceremony. Here's a rather chilling excerpt from the accompanying story:

The Somali-born university student met with an undercover FBI agent in August at a Portland hotel and told him he had found the perfect location for a terrorist attack: the city’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud told the agent that he had dreamed of carrying out an attack for years, and the city’s Pioneer Courthouse Square would be packed with thousands, “a huge mass that will … be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays,” according to an affidavit.

On Friday, Mohamud parked what he thought was a bomb-laden van near the ceremony and then went to a nearby train station, where he dialed a cell phone that he believed would detonate the vehicle. Instead, federal authorities moved in and arrested him. No one was hurt.

We can be very thankful that our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have been so vigilant throughout the past nine years, but as has been frequently said, the FBI needs to be lucky every time, the terrorists need be lucky only once.

Let's do a little theorizing and ask this question: Suppose this Somali Muslim had been successful and had killed and maimed hundreds if not thousands of men, women, and children celebrating the advent of the Christmas season. What do you suppose would have been the reaction to this atrocity, not just by the government but by the American people? I invite your thoughts. You can use the Contact Us feature, and I'll post your responses in a few days.

Circular Firing Squad

It appears that internecine warfare has broken out among secular humanists who disagree on the proper approach to religious folk. Some, like the founder of a couple of major humanist organizations, Paul Kurtz, want to engage religious people in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Others, like Ron Lindsey and biologist P.Z. Myers, want the conflict between believers and unbelievers to be conducted more along the lines of open warfare. Kurtz has lost the debate and has been relieved of his duties as Chairman of the Center for Inquiry, an organization he founded and chaired for decades.

It was a sharp slap in the face to Kurtz, and it apparently made for a lively conference attended by 300 of the unfaithful in Los Angeles recently.

The L.A. Times has the details:

Such a debate "would have been incomprehensible 10 years ago," said Tom Flynn, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, which held its 30th anniversary meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. But the 9/11 attacks and a growing interest in atheism have emboldened the in-your-face wing of the movement and led to internal debate and dissension.

That rift cracked open recently when Paul Kurtz, a founder of the secular humanist movement in America, was ousted as chairman of the Center for Inquiry, a sibling organization to the Council for Secular Humanism. One factor leading to his ouster was a perception that Kurtz was "on the mellower end of the spectrum," Flynn said.

The tension was evident at the Biltmore, where about 300 nonbelievers from across the United States and Canada gathered for three days of lively and, at times, gleefully blasphemous debate. ("I have a personal commitment to committing blasphemy every day," biologist P.Z. Myers said.)

With that background, and with the legacy of 9/11 providing impetus to those who see religious fundamentalism as a threat, there was a sense of urgency at the Biltmore conference about finding the right approach. Should nonbelievers confront the religious or try to get along?

Even "accommodationist" atheists are not known for mincing words, and although there were periodic reminders that those at the gathering shared "99% of our intellectual DNA," as author Chris Mooney put it, the disagreements were not exactly gentle.

When Mooney, a leading voice for accommodation, said there was nothing to stop a nonreligious person from being spiritual, Myers' reaction was nearly physical. "Whenever we start talking about spirituality," he said, "I just want to puke."

Well, puking is one possible response, I suppose, when one is an intellectual bereft of intellectual arguments. At least it absolves one, temporarily, of the duty to respond to an intellectual challenge with a coherent reply. God bless him and let's hope he's seated in front of a bucket.

Rocks in the River

My friend Jason recommended that I read an essay by Jonah Goldberg at NRO on the Pope's views on condom use that received so much attention a couple of weeks ago. Jason noted that the essay is about that topic, of course, but about much more as well. He's right, and I, in turn, commend Goldberg's essay to you. Here's a glimpse:

In the spring of 2005, Pope John Paul II died. My father, who passed away that summer, watched the funeral and the inauguration of the current pope, Benedict XVI, from his hospital bed. My dad, a Jew, loved the spectacle of it all. (The Vatican, he said, was the last institution that “really knows how to dress.”)

From what he could tell, he liked this new pope too. “We need more rocks in the river,” my dad explained. What he meant was that change comes so fast, in such a relentless torrent, that we need people and things that stand up to it and offer respite from the current.

Further along Goldberg raises, no doubt unintentionally, an interesting ethical-theological question. Here's the salient passage:

What Benedict said in a book-length interview is that in certain circumstances using a condom would be less bad than not using one. To use Benedict’s example, a male prostitute with HIV would be acting more responsibly, more morally, if he wore a condom while plying his trade than if he didn’t.

The pontiff understands that not all harms are equal. Assault is wrong, for instance, but assault with a deadly weapon is more wrong than assault with a non-deadly one.

I think the Pope is correct that all harms are not equal, but this is by no means a universal view among protestant theologians. It's sometimes asserted, by those who devote themselves to such matters, that all harms, or sins, are equal, that no sin is less wrong or more wrong than any other. I think this is a mistake. if we take sin to be that which harms oneself or another then I think the view that all sins are equal is simply false. Murdering someone and wishing to murder someone are both harms, but one is much more harmful, and thus more sinful, than the other. It is much worse to lie in the witness stand and send someone to jail unjustly than to lie to one's wife about how nice a dress looks on her.

All men are sinners, but some men are worse sinners than others. Mother Teresa was a sinner but her sins were far less evil than those of Adolf Hitler.

Anyway, I love the metaphor of rocks in the river. If there are enough rocks perhaps the river of a depauperate culture that threatens to wash away everything good in its path can be dammed and stanched. Every rock helps.

Atheistic Darwinists and Begging the Question

In his book The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins makes the claim that "biology is the study of complicated things which have the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." He goes on to argue, however, that the appearance is only illusory, a result of the blind tinkering of natural selection over eons of time. Maybe, but this has about it the sound of whistling past the graveyard.

As Michael Behe and others have noted, "If life gives the overpowering appearance of having been designed, then one is rationally justified in adhering to one's intuitions [that it is designed] unless and until a compelling reason is given to suggest that the appearance of design is only apparent."

So, is there a compelling reason to abandon one's belief that life is designed? Well, no. Some will argue, of course, that Darwin showed that design is a by-product of the purposeless process of evolution, but actually he did no such thing. What Darwin showed was that there are good reasons to think that evolution was the means by which living things diversify, he did not show that natural forces are ultimately responsible for the astonishing engineering and design that is ubiquitous in everything from living cells to the cosmos itself.

The argument of naturalists like Dawkins amounts to this: We know that the design in nature is only apparent because we know there is no intelligent designer. And we know there's no intelligent designer because there's no evidence that there one exists. And we know there's no evidence that an intelligent designer exists because the "overpowering appearance of purposeful design" that's cited as evidence is really only apparent. And we know it's only apparent because....Well, you get the picture.

The only way for the Darwinian naturalist to break out of this vicious cycle is to show that blind, purposeless forces can indeed create the appearance of complex purposeful design, but so far no one has been able to do this in a way that's convincing to anyone but those already committed to the belief that there is no intelligent designer.

If one is inclined to believe that an intelligent designer of the world exists there's no reason that any of the New Atheists have presented as to why that view should be given up. On the other hand, there are lots of examples in nature which confirm it. Maybe the simplest explanation for why nature has "the appearance of having been designed for a purpose" is because it has been.

Defeating al Qaeda

Strategy Page has an interesting article on how U.S. forces discredited al Qaeda in the Islamic world and precipitated their defeat in Iraq:

Long term, the U.S. has found that you don't have to kill terrorist leaders to disable them. For example, when American troops drove al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan in late 2001, they captured large quantities of records dealing with al Qaeda administration. This was revealing. The al Qaeda leadership was constantly being criticized by subordinates for stupid mistakes, while the leaders were constantly monitoring their people for stealing and malingering.

The U.S. made sure a lot of this dirty linen was leaked, and eventually the media in Moslem nations began reporting on it. This paid off when al Qaeda in Iraq, despite vigorous objections within the organization, increased attacks that killed lots of civilians. This played a major role in al Qaeda going from an admired, to a despised, organization within the Islamic world. American intelligence leaked captured documents that made clear how uncaring the terrorist leaders were about these civilian deaths. The dead Moslem women and children were called "involuntary martyrs." This did not go over well in the Moslem world.

As al Qaeda's popularity declined, so did donations from the Moslem world. This forced the terrorists to resort to crime to raise money. This was publicized, along with details via captured documents, by the Americans. As a result, Moslems began to regard Islamic terrorists as criminals, as well as thoughtless killers. This was in sharp contrast as al Qaeda propaganda that tried to portray them as selfless fighters for the protection of Islam. This made al Qaeda look like hypocrites.

The final blow came from the mouths of captured terrorists. Most of these men tended to speak freely once captured, and often complained about how hard life was as a terrorist. This was especially the case with suicide bombers, who often had to be persuaded to do the deed. Then there was the use of the mentally ill, very young children (10-12, or even younger) and grief stricken widows. In most Moslem countries, widows faced a hard life under any conditions, and suicide among them is common.

The details of these recruiting methods were released, and by 2007, the Moslem media couldn't get enough of it. The callous treatment of young Saudi men, volunteering to "fight for Islam" in Iraq, was particularly effective in cutting off this source of manpower. The Saudi volunteers usually had no military training, and the Iraqi terrorist groups used most of them as suicide bombers, or in similar combat operations that were pretty much suicidal. Details of these policies were passed on to Saudi media, and parents began to regard a trip to Iraq, or even Afghanistan, as a form of murder (of innocent civilians as well as their sons).

Moderate Muslims in the West insist that Islamic terrorists are not "true" Muslims. Perhaps this message will catch on in the Middle East, and devout Muslims will stop financing the madrassas and mosques that teach and preach hate, jihad, and the glories of martyrdom. Until terrorism is discredited as an act of Islamic piety there's little chance that it will stop.

Droppers and Switchers

The conventional wisdom in the wake of the Democrats' electoral mugging three weeks ago was that much of their liberal base, minorities and young people, stayed home. The Wall Street Journal's Gerry Seib points to a number of studies, including research carried out by Democrat groups, that show that the conventional wisdom is not quite correct.

It turns out that what hurt the Democrats most of all was disaffection and lack of enthusiasm not among their base but among moderates:

A more direct study of these 2010 no-shows was undertaken by Third Way, a think tank for moderate Democrats, and Lincoln Park Strategies, a Democratic polling firm. They surveyed 1,000 Obama voters who abandoned Democrats in 2010. Half of them were "switchers" who moved their votes to the Republicans this time, while the other half were "droppers" who simply dropped out of the voting this year.

That survey found that, while the droppers were a bit more liberal than 2010 voters as a whole, they were split in almost precise thirds into liberals, moderates and conservatives. Moreover, just 42% identified themselves as Democrats, while 40% were independents and 8% were Republicans. Almost a quarter of them voted for Republican George W. Bush in 2004.

Nor were the droppers largely minority voters, as the popular stereotype might suggest. Eight in 10 were white, while just 7% were African-American and 5% Latino.

This is significant because it shapes how the Democrats will respond to their defeat over the next two years. If it had been the case that their voters stayed home because Congress and the President have not been liberal enough to suit them then we could expect the Democrats to move even further to the left to mollify their base's discontent. Since, however, they've lost the sympathies of moderate voters the party may move more to the center in the next couple of years to try to recapture their lost support among this group.

Another reason this is significant is that it bodes ill for the President's reelection chances. Had his base among minorities and young people stayed home it could be assumed it was because he wasn't on the ticket and that they'd probably turn out when he is up again in 2012. The fact, however, that his base did show up and that it was independents who stayed home suggests that Mr. Obama's path to relection is going to be more difficult since it will be harder to woo back disaffected moderates than it would be to rouse his base.

The Bottom of Their Shoe

It looks like there is a serious movement afoot to impeach Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Unfortunately, it seems that the impeachment may be for the wrong reasons. Reza Aslan reports on the story at The Daily Beast. One of the interesting aspects of his account is the utter economic shambles this oil rich country finds itself in:

The latest row between the president and the parliament comes at a time in which Iran's economy, already reeling from the steady success of President Obama’s targeted sanctions policy, is bracing for what many predict will be catastrophic consequences of Ahmadinejad's plan to end government subsidies for fuel, food, energy, and basic goods like milk, cooking oil, and flour. For decades, Iran’s presidents—from Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to Mohammad Khatami—have tried to amend the subsidies system, valued at about $100 billion a year.

But they were repeatedly deterred by the threat of massive protests. After all, in a country that has been isolated from the outside world for three decades, government subsidies are the sole means of survival for millions of poor and middle-class Iranians. According to a study by the International Monetary Fund, a typical Iranian household making about $3,600 a year receives an average of $4,000 a year in subsidies.

Although the subsidies program has yet to be fully terminated, the cost of basic goods and services in Iran already has skyrocketed. According to the Los Angeles Times, the price of a kilo of ground beef has jumped from $6, when Ahmadinejad began his first term as president, to $14.50 today. Meanwhile, as I reported last month, the cost of electricity has soared by as much as 1,000 percent for some Iranian households.

The irony is that Ahmadinejad is unquestionably doing the sensible thing in pushing ahead with the removal of government subsidies. Subsidies account for approximately 30 percent of Iran’s entire annual budget. That is simply untenable for an economy that just last month saw the value of its currency drop by a staggering 13 percent against the dollar. Iran’s oil industry, its most lucrative source of revenue, is in shambles after the recent departure of four oil companies— Shell, Total, ENI, and Statoil.

The carpet industry, once valued at $500 million, has disintegrated thanks to increased sanctions. The government claims that 22 percent of Iranians are unemployed (experts say the number is closer to 40 percent), three-quarters of them under the age of 30. Some 40 percent of Iranians live below the poverty line. Inflation is officially at 10 percent, though many economists believe it to be more like 24 percent. With the price of oil remaining stable and Iran’s international isolation increasing, the government simply cannot afford to keep paying out nearly a third of its entire budget in subsidies.

It's comforting, in a twisted sort of way, to know that Iran's economy is in worse shape than our own, at least for now.

In any event, here's another irony. We recently posted on a story which made the claim that American foreign policy under President Obama is pretty much the worst it has ever been, but according to Aslan much of Iran's economic difficulty is due to Obama's targeted sanctions on industries like carpet manufacturing. Perhaps our foreign policy isn't quite the muddled mess that it seems. It's tragic that ordinary Iranians are suffering, but it would certainly be a good thing, on balance, if our President were successful in getting Iranians to give the bottom of their shoe to Ahmadinejad and give up their nuclear ambitions before war breaks out in the region.

First Thankful Thanksgiving

Robin of Berkeley is back with a meditation on her first thankful Thanksgiving. Robin is a psychotherapist and former leftist atheist who had an ideological epiphany several years ago and has written a number of columns on what it has been like for her to move from the left to the right.

In this column she reveals some details of another epiphany which has made this Thanksgiving especially meaningful for her. She opens with this lede:

Thanksgiving was never a favorite holiday of mine. Now that I think about it, I never cared for any of them: 4th of July, Christmas, or Columbus Day (which, by the way, Berkeley long ago renamed "Indigenous People's Day").

If I'm being completely honest here, my main activities during the holidays were ranting and raving. For instance: Why should we celebrate Thanksgiving when the holiday marks the slaughter of Native Americans? Why do these cashiers keep cheerfully extolling me to "have a Merry Christmas!"? And if I hear one more [censored] Christmas song, I will lose my frigging mind.

Of course, I was just one of the progressive pack, parroting the party line. Being a Leftist means honing in on every possible injustice. Never-ending gripes and grievances are the glue that keeps progressives cemented together.

But then, three years ago, the bottom fell out of my life. Slowly but surely, it dawned on me that everything I had held as sacrosanct was a lie. I woke up -- and now I behold the world with fresh eyes. Consequently, I am celebrating my First Thankful Thanksgiving.

Read the rest at the link. It's pretty interesting.

Black Friday

Now that the day given to thanking God is over many will today be observing yet another, unofficial, festival known as Black Friday. It, too, is a religious observance albeit an exuberant, rather pagan celebration of the religion of consumerism during which the faithful feel impelled by the spirit of the day to spend oodles of cash on toys, trinkets, and other non-essentials for people who neither need nor want what's been purchased for them.

The extravagance, the prodigality, of it all is, for me at least, tawdry and dispiriting. Jim Wallis writes on his blog that:

The pressure we feel [to buy] doesn’t just come from the ads we get in our inboxes or see on television. All of us have family and friends who are going to be doing a lot of shopping. If a friend goes out and spends money on us, we feel guilty if we don’t reciprocate at roughly the same level. What’s worse is if someone gets us a gift and we don’t get them anything at all. The problem is not giving gifts. Giving gifts becomes a problem when the exchange of stuff replaces building relationships.

It also becomes a problem because we become preoccupied with material excess and often lose sight of why we celebrate Christmas in the first place. The day is simply the climax of an orgy of splurge shopping at malls which create their idea of an appropriately seasonal atmosphere by piping in music like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. Everywhere we turn we're encouraged to shop till we drop. We're like a person being urged to sample not just one piece of chocolate in the box, but to plunge ahead and consume the whole thing. As we work through the selections the sweets cloy and after a while they just make us sick.

My crotchety outlook on Black Friday notwithstanding, I have mixed feelings about the rite. The jobs of millions of people depend upon us wasting money today on things nobody really wants or needs. If people were to turn Black Friday into a buy-nothing-day it'd cause an enormous amount of hardship for those businesses and their employees who rely on our profligacy for their livelihoods.

Even so, I'm a non-combatant conscientious objector to the spectacle. Maybe there's a better way. Perhaps some of us could put a little perspective and meaning back into the Christmas season by sending a note to family members, friends, and co-workers, who are often stressed over trying to find a gift for someone who already has more than enough of life's goods, asking that no presents (or at least not as many presents) be bought for us this year, and that in lieu of the gift a donation be sent to a charity of our choosing. Perhaps the address of the charity could be appended to the note.

This would not only help avoid the embarrassment of being showered with items for which one has no need and can't use, but it would also be a gift to our loved ones inasmuch as it would take the pressure off them to come up with something meaningful to give us.

At our Christmas gatherings they might hand us a card saying that a gift has been donated in our name to the charity we requested. For some of us that would be the most wonderful gift we could receive, and it would be a step toward recovering, at least in our own circles, the original spirit and meaning of Christmas day.