dawkins logic, part 3

I'm all for criticizing religious thinking, and Muslims are religious, but attempts to set them apart from other traditional religions as uniquely backwards, evil, etc. follow the same pattern as Democrat attacks against Republicans and vice versa. In a two-party system, i.e., a false dichotomy, the case against the one is at the same time the case for the other. Like I was saying in advanced obamapology. The case against Muslims is the case for empire. Because the humans have some kind of tic, a heuristic shortcut that at some point perhaps enhanced odds of reproduction (or, if you will, its ontological mother category, repetition). And how much of human thought is based on an inside defined by an outside it's not?

dawkins logic, part 2

Here, I broke down how Richard Dawkins recently presented a dubious claim of causation as an indisputable fact. Specifically, the fact he presents is that people who call themselves Muslim do not win as many Nobel Prizes as members of such groups as Jews, Christians, and atheists. The mostly buried implications that accompany this fact, and that are inseparable from it, are that group affiliation/culture is causal in this process (i.e, being Muslim makes you more likely to be bad at science, being atheist makes you more likely to be good at it); winning Nobel Prizes is good because, science; and Jewish/Christian/atheist culture produces superior results to Muslim culture.

The framework he's using is hard to miss. Muslim culture is retrograde, barbarian. Christians and Jews are a few rungs up on the ladder. Atheists are at the top. The U.S., western Europe, and good, western-compliant Asians like the ones in Japan and South Korea have Presidents and Prime Ministers with all the misguided implications of humanistic freedom-loving rationality that tag along with those words, while Muslim countries have dictators or, when they're behaving, strongmen who use force to keep the unruly idiots in line. It's a defense of western culture all the way and fails to employ the fact-sorting methodology that gives science a heuristic leg up on its rivals. But if we were to do that we'd see that...

nominal Christians have killed considerably more humans, particularly via state-organized mass killings like the relatively recent ones in Korea, India, Vietnam, and Iraq than have nominal Muslims. Using Dawkins logic, Christians have a lotta splaining to do, at the very least. If Christians are so peaceful (borrowing Dawkins' question-begging formula), why are they so bad at not killing people? Look at the Muslims (again, Dawkins logic). They're relatively peaceful. Now Dawkins wouldn't concede the point, having presorted the data based on the tribalist identity of the actors (i.e., having failed to use scientific methodology), but if he did, he'd have to either say that non-murderousness isn't that important in comparison to science skills and perhaps other cultural excellence indicators or give up the argument. If religion helps cause sciencey behavior, it helps cause murdery behavior. If religion flavor is causally relevant (it's not -- certainly not when the religions in question are as broad, ill-defined, and overlapping as they are, as covered in part 1 -- but even if it were...), then by arguably the most basic measure of human decency there is -- the ability to not murder people for no fucking reason (aww, c'mon, you know what I mean) -- Christians lose.

dawkins logic, part 1

Dawkins being Dawkins:

"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."

"You can attack someone for his opinion. But for simply stating an intriguing fact? Who would guess that a single Cambridge College . . ." 

"Interesting concept: a simple statement of undeniable FACT can be offensive. Other examples where facts should be hidden because offensive?"

Along with the relatively minor failures of 

1. leaving the power relations that go into producing Nobel Prizes unanalyzed and 
2. implying that all facts are equally relevant and that the audience should assume they're being presented because the speaker finds them "intriguing" or some other unproblematic reason (imagine a milk salesman telling a shopper considering soy milk a true story about someone who died last week from drinking soy milk),

Dawkins amazingly claims that his own position on the issue is purely factual (particularly with regard to that first statement above). The Nobel Prize count is factual, sure, but look at the gigantic pile of presuppositional shit he tries to sneak in the back door. We're to believe that the intellectual achievement ("science") of large numbers of people cannot only be adequately compared by way of the Nobel Prize, and that not only is there a correlation between science skills and self-proclaimed Muzlitude or self-proclaimed whatever hazy intellectual metaphysical mishmash of brain things people imagine themselves to know and put under a too-convenient socially constructed umbrella, but we're also to believe that religion Z is causal with respect to science skills. 

Plausible, I suppose, but if he knew a damn worthwhile thing about history, religion flavor would be at most a last-ditch guess lying on a heap of failed hypotheses when trying to explain trophy distribution among local elites. 

So, anyway, this is Dawkins' idea of what a fact is: an entirely baseless claim about causality. "Leading western scientist fails to show basic fact identification skills," reads a headline. Take that, Muslims! 

And just in case it appears I might be strawmanning, yes, he is making a causal claim:

“If you [Muslims] are so numerous, and if your science is so great, shouldn’t you be able to point to some pretty spectacular achievements emanating from among those vast numbers? If you can’t today but once could, what has gone wrong for the past 500 years? Whatever it is, is there something to be done about it?”

Imperialism? Living on top of oil fields?

Allow me to keep the structure of Dawkins' argument (or is it merely a barrage of facts from a disinterested party randomly colluding?) while tinkering with the details:

If you Native Americans have such great cultures, why did Europeans destroy you so thoroughly? 

If you 19th century black Americans are so smart, why are your literacy rates so low? 

If you Belgians are so good at making beer, why don't you have more of a reputation for being heavy drinkers?

Or whatever.

And this:

I thought about comparing the numbers of Nobel Prizes won by Jews (more than 120) and Muslims (ten if you count Peace Prizes, half that if you don’t). This astonishing discrepancy is rendered the more dramatic when you consider the small size of the world’s Jewish population.

Why are oil company CEOs so rich?

Why are rich guys more likely to live in mansions?

Why are people born in the ghetto likely to die young, and in the ghetto?

Most importantly, and this is the one I'm most confident answering, having recently studied the random correlationist logic of an elite western scientist: why do white guys like baseball? 

Answer: because they have medium-sized penises. And that's a fact. I mean if they do, whoever they are. 

riley cooper

A pro American football human classified as white called Riley Cooper got caught saying what is known as the N-word, so now a bunch of people who have no problem with the ostensibly black Obama ramping up the U.S. government's easily quantifiable war on humans considered black (a war that destroys lives, by the way) are terribly upset, and Cooper's hold on NFL employment appears to be in jeopardy. Let's just say the Riley Cooper reaction takes place on a symbolic level that is rather strongly psychotic. He said the wrong words and has hell to pay (though yes, he's apparently a giant douche and blah blah disclaimer). Obama oversees racist policies and gets Jay-Z plaudits and whatforth.

The interesting part is the nature of the price Cooper has to pay. He is to undergo counseling. The word sensitivity training has also been bandied about. He needs to conform his words and actions to the proper symbolic structure. There is nothing more to the story than this. Which means that the NFL's response has nothing to do with systemic racism, i.e., racism, and everything to do with conformity for its own sake. If you say the right words, you are one of the good guys. That's where the story starts and that's where it ends.

vampire wisdom

 Pam, from True Blood:

I feel nothing. You humans love your pain don’t ya? You just love being in it, you even consider it a virtue. Cry the most at a funeral; you must be the best person.  You promise to never forget each other; you promise to feel the sting of a loss, forever, because for ya’ll forever is just the blink of an eye; you’re lives are pathetically brief. When we say forever; we have to mean it, so we move past our pain, we heal, we move on, because pain is a worthless emotion. For a time, my maker was everything to me; he released me; it hurt.  Now, I’m over it; he’s nobody to me.

slate analysis

I've been mostly staying away from politics the last few months, trying to take advantage of this little bubble I'm lucky enough to have. I ran 25 miles this week, I'm eating well, not drinking much at all, feeling good. Blogging is like going to therapy, and one isn't inclined toward such things in good times. But this morning, after running and lifting, making an elaborate breakfast, and welcoming back baseball after a terribly long four day All Star break, I saw this, posted by one of those many people I used to hate Bush with. There's clearly a demand for the brand of establishment cheese Slate serves. I never visit the site but surely it's aimed at a very smart bunch who get the ins, the outs, the realpolitik, the nitty gritty? So smart.

But how willfully stupid do you have to be to write an article in praise of Obama's race record without mentioning a single Obama race-related political act, or fact, while instead using a political speech as your source material, and taking it at face value? Obama has succeeded on the race question, we are told, because of the words he says about race. The end. That's your fucking analysis. Eat it up, Obamapologists.

I almost want to track down the details right now and post some links showing Obama's record on the drug war, immigration, incarceration rates, killing of brown people overseas, employment rates, etc., to demonstrate that Obama's record shows no improvement or attempted improvement of "black Americans" -- some things have gotten better, most have gotten worse, though none of that is related to good or bad presidential intentions, as such things are not real -- but right away the Obamapologist (the ones I know, anyway) will scurry over to the lesser evilism corner of the apologetics room or some other area where research has no bearing as the discussion turns to religion. They do not want a fact-based Obama/Bush comparison. Intentions become paramount because they're (seemingly) unfalsifiable.

So let me offer a(nother) parable in response to the lesser evilist notion that Obama is doing pretty much the best job anyone can do given the conditions in which Obama finds himself, what with the rethuglicans making him do bad things and the some people not getting it or whatever.

Let's say there's a ten year-old boy on your street who gets abused once a day, every day, by various local thugs. They use a taser-like electrical gadget that only has one burst a day, there's only one of them, and there's no other way to hurt the kid. So, if you, a well-intentioned neighbor, give him his daily shock, nobody else will. You can keep the thugs away by badly hurting a kid you have no reason to believe is a threat to anyone. What do you do? The first thought, it seems, should be, "is there any other way?" Can I, maybe, destroy the thing? If that's too dangerous, can I find some neighbors who will back me up, some strength in numbers? Can I find a way to help the kid avoid shocks in the future, a different way to school perhaps? The last thing that should come to mind is "how can I do precisely the same thing, but with good intentions?" Because good intentions don't take the pain away. And I would then be the source of pain. I would then be, by any standard that makes sense, every bit as wrong as the thugs, who have their own moralistic justifications for causing pain, their own self-perceived good intentions.

the status quo

Next stop, legal polygamy - if marriage is only about love, why not the love of 3 or more? What makes 2 a special number? 

What my social media acquaintance is saying, in response to recent gay marriage developments, is that if "we" make polygamy legal, "all hell" will "break loose," or some such. But along with there not being anything wrong with multiplicitous gamousness, per se, and the overrated ability of state force to bring about groin-related outcomes, what stands out for me is my acquaintance's not at all unusual acceptance of current law as a self-justifying status quo. As if making something legal involved doing something (crazy), as opposed to stopping doing something. To be clear, to make something legal is to stop doing something. While the burden of proof is widely thought to be on the one who would change the law, perhaps partly because change has always been dangerous to humans generally, perhaps partly due to the apparent mechanistic intransigence of large systems, perhaps due to some kind of stupidity I'm too stupid too identify, the law is, in fact, something that is actively carried out with force, and with terrible effects for most people, by real humans every day. Judges, cops, jailers, and lawmakers wake up every morning, put on their ass-kicking boots, then make the world, on average, a worse place. In an imagined better world, the status quo is leaving people alone and the burden of proof is on the one who wants to use force to prevent someone from acting a particular way.