new atheism, progress, rationality

The new atheist view of human history is progressive. Unthinking violent religious fundamentalists belong somewhere on the left of the page and rational nonviolent atheists over on the right. Any good progressive can tell you that history moves from left to right on a line that represents time, and the future is better than the past because, duh, science. On the new atheist view, some religions are more primitive than others. Way the hell over on the left (not the political left; that's a different model) is Islam, for example. Beheadings, supposedly a Muslim thing, are primitive. And barbaric.

Which makes a nice segue to another new atheist model that goes hand-in-hand with the progressive one. There's an inner circle, a glorious heavenly space mostly free from irrationality and other impurities (other forms of barbarism), populated by true atheists. Next circle out is nice, reformed religions like Judaism and Christianity. On the way-outside are the super-barbaric Muslims. Does that look to you like the standard white supremacist scheme repurposed to match current geopolitical power arrangements? Hey man, alligators look like crocodiles but they're not the same! Not the same!

A third model combines the first two to put "now" in an inner circle along with atheism. The whole thing is rolling left to right towards gloriousness. You might be tempted to call it a redemption narrative but atheism is no religion, dammit! It's in the word. "A" means "not" while theism means "god-belief." How could that possibly be a religion?! How could something be different than the thing it claims to be? "Impossible!," says a millionaire preacher. Anyhow, the pure center is already more glorious than anything that's ever been but it will become purer and purer still and its white light will some day -- if we, the good guys (hey, how did we get in here and why are there so many Calvinists in here with us?), do it just right -- kill off the dark influence of the barbarism that surrounds it/us. And then we'll have heaven on earth. Heaven in heaven is for religionists. Heaven on earth is for atheists.

Sarcasm aside, this is the inside/outside structure at the foundation of cognition itself. As such, I don't have a great answer for it. I try to be more aware of it and avoid its worst pitfalls. That's all. Like the new atheists, I try to be better tomorrow than today, aim to win, aim for perfection, consider myself to have won the Magical Belief Lottery, and think negative thoughts about people who disagree with me. I also think I'm a ridiculous bastard. Which makes me better than people who don't realize they are. Which makes me more ridiculous. And back. And forth. (Though tu quoque "saves" me. My hypocrisy is beside the point.)

Speaking of back, back to the thing about atheism and rationality. I started writing this post because I saw a story about three Muslims who were killed by an atheist yesterday. Should I click on the story? Do I owe the victims my sorrow? A series of unanswerable questions that expose me as an asshole (impure!) later, I move to an easier line of thinking: don't expect any Dawkins tweets to the effect that liberals need to stand up to atheism and the violence intrinsic to it. Classic ingrouper that he is, Dawkins and friends use anecdotes as support where convenient, as exceptions otherwise.

From there, a recurring observation that Japan is as atheist as any country you can name, arguably as rational/sciencey as any, and also, though I'm admittedly going off anecdotes, quite possibly the least critically thinking population of humans ever. The easy point is that atheism doesn't cure stupid. Or that atheism is a new form of that. See above. Beyond that, what's fascinating is the way a certain kind of stupidity dovetails so perfectly with a certain kind of rationality. Call it constricted rationality. "Robotic" also comes to mind. This rationality takes the easiest path. Questions that challenge authority are punished so routinely, so severely, that they fade to the background as non-questions. There's an unspoken consensus that the way things are is natural and unchangeable, even as it changes, even as the human is in the process of being shrink-wrapped. The game is pushed to the outside, becomes the frame. The possibility space shrinks. The answers to questions such as "how do we not drive ourselves to extinction?" exclude the only solutions that might work, the solutions that walk back the presuppositions to the point where we're not making trolley dilemma choices between well-intended shitty-consequence-having action A and well-intended shitty-consequence-having action B. If you're opposed to killing civilians for empire, don't become president, in other words.

From a broader human perspective, 21st century technopower is stupid. It will let you have your stupid beliefs about blood type determining personality. It loves when you go to power spots. It has no problem with your lucky charms. It does not love when you use your brain to question its frame. It will drive you into the ground and the humans to extinction, because it's not selecting for your well-being or for long-term human survival. It's selecting for short-term, narrow-frame, localized gains millions and millions of times. What we're seeing is the cumulative effect.

good american

A good American is someone whose emotive responses to the names of characters in the international American drama (e.g., Putin, Israel, Ukraine), on a scale from us ("if you so much as harm a hair on that child's head...") to them ("destroy it like Babylon"), reliably covary with those characters' portrayal in American media as innocent victims (or other good-by-definition notions) or monstrous killers thereof (or other bad-by-definition notions). Whether those characters are portrayed as innocent victims or monstrous killers thereof reliably covaries with American geopolitical interests, as determined by a handful of higher-ups in the empire business, which, as a feature, not a bug, kills innocent victims. American geopolitical interests are determined by who has what, who helps who get what, who stands in the way of who (and to hell with whom) trying to get what, and so on. They are not in any way the product of an assessment of who does what violent thing to who to get what and how often, with virtue on the side of non-violence and villainy on the side of violence, where the most violent humans are assessed villain points so that steps may be taken to reduce the amount of violence they carry out. No, geopolitical interests are not that. Not even a little bit. Not even the hypothetical space between your preferred political party and its rival. A good American does what's best for America, as determined by a handful of actors that no one, not even their own mothers, trusts, and whose every known behavior suggests a desire to redistribute the whats of the empire business, which, as a feature, not a bug, kills innocents, to themselves. A good American supports the killing of innocents so that a small group of professional wealth redistributors can take what from who and pass it back to...who else? A good American opposes the killing of innocents, and may anyone who touches a hair on that beautiful child's head suffer the wrath of God. A good American supports the slaughter of innocents, and may anyone who opposes the slaughter of innocents suffer the wrath of God.

introducing the norm family

Existence is power. Given basic laws of physics, everything that exists does so at the expense of something else. At every fork in the road, world became this and not that. I reckon forks in the road are either always or never. I prefer always.

Expense is a loaded word. Is existence good? Humans act as if it is. It's a part of the programming. I'd say existence of the local (a human body, for example) is the foundation of the word "good." Of course it's nothing more than that, nothing stand-alone transcendent. But if we're to describe it, we're describing something very real, as this is simply the way those natural systems called "humans" function.

Yesterday, I wrote about normativity in language. Words like "ought" I'll call Little Norm. On the other hand, existing locally, in opposition to the world, I'll call Big Norm. The question there is how local, how wide the net gets cast. Little Norm is logical, Big Norm is ontological. In my scheme, Little Norm is a part of Big Norm. Descriptive statements fall back into normativity because there's always something thinking it. Things that exist have power. Things that think think about the things they're thinking about, and those thoughts exist in some form or other. Oh fuck. I stand by that sentence, but...apologies.

To speak descriptively, on the other hand, means to stand outside the world, if only illusorily. So as to stand against it, normatively. So that the information gained can be exploited to further the repetition of the local same. The descriptive falls back into Little Norm, always was Big Norm. But again, that net can be wide.

Now let me introduce Extensive Norm, who is some kind of hippy. He's a widener of the local. Sees himself in other humans, perhaps in everything. OK, maybe he belongs to an eastern religion. Of course, he has to eat -- he exists at the expense of other possible worlds! -- so he's a hypocrite. He wants to extend his way of being to everything, wants being empathic to take over. Not empathic? Get out of the way!

Then there's Intensive Norm, a psychopath who will destroy anything that interferes with his narrow self-interests. Someone's gunna slaughter that village and enjoy the spoils, may as well be him. He thinks he really does stand outside the world, an unnatural creature. He preaches determinism, claiming he's doing description. Whereas that argument itself is Big Norm standing against the world, acting. I reckon everything is either free or determined. I prefer free.

In any case, those villagers he's slaughtering are him. Absent post hoc rationalization, that is. After they're slaughtered, he can say he's the winner, they're the losers, therefore they're different. Issues of idiosyncrasy aside, he just killed himself, and moved some words around to rationalize it. Whether he felt guilt or not is beside the point. He's a hypocrite. Imagine the psychopath being brutalized, then saying on his death bed, "it is as it should be." Approving of one's own death after having tried to live is just more post hoc rationalization. Rationalization is power disguising itself. Not unrelated to, see first paragraph, power being a death threat. For deathbed psychopath, power was him, then it wasn't, and when it wasn't, he told power's story that non-existence is good, when we know that word "good" means the opposite.

it's straight description, but take it how you will

As soon as you start reciting well-established facts about American history using plain English, you're going to come across all sorts of resistance. You can take out all the rhetoric that people tend to use when talking about ingroup member victimization like "atrocities" and "sickening." Just use terms like "kill," "war," and so on, along with some names and numbers. Purely descriptive statements cause outrage. The statement "the U.S. killed X million civilians in aggressive war Y" is an affront to decency just as the video of Eric Garner's murder, not the murder itself, was an affront to decency.

Apologetics vary in sophistication, depending on the believer (potential unbeliever). For most, simple moral condemnation will probably do. One potential unbeliever hints, merely hints, at "well, we did kind of invade them and I can understand why they'd want to kill members of an invading army..." and a true believer responds with something that amounts to "traitor!" and, realizing that that anger is the anger of the tribe, the potential unbeliever mutters "just saying," and doesn't bring it up again. There are more sophisticated apologetics for more sophisticated unbelievers. Get far enough outside and they stop trying. "You win," they say, "but there are only, like, 10 of you." Which isn't to say it's hopeless so much as it's been hopeless. Predictively, oh shit! Prescriptively, act as if the opposite?

Some very sophisticated apologetics have served to thwart some very smart potential unbelievers. These include leveraging an equivocation on the terms descriptive and normative. My solution is a doctor analogy...

It's perfectly possible to make descriptive statements without any further commitments to them. A doctor has the "right" diagnosis of cancer, for example, but does she tell her patient? Is she glad about this diagnosis or upset? Is she numbed to such things after years of experience? The diagnosis is the description. The doctor's assessment of the diagnosis and subsequent actions stand independently. If the doctor dies, the patient still has cancer. To suggest otherwise is tu quoque.

But why would the doctor care enough to tell the patient the accurate diagnosis? Maybe because extending the patient's life with expensive treatments is good for business. Maybe the doctor didn't mean to tell the patient but the patient overheard it. Etc. Doesn't matter. Tu quoque.

If the doctor also cares about helping patients, though, doesn't that poison the purely descriptive well? Well, bias is a factor in everyday life, in politics, in science. Bias is at work in any description of anything. Imagine if we ask: "If a scientist cares about being right, doesn't that poison the purely descriptive well?"

There are ways to check for bias and those ways should mainly involve analyzing results. Same in politics as in science. "But everyone who talks politics has an agenda." Same as everyone who talks science. Perhaps a person who's talking politics has an agenda to make an accurate description, which would be like having an agenda to do solid science (make accurate scientific descriptions). In both cases, the results should tell the story.

Recently, I made the doctor analogy and had my claims to an accurate political description (diagnosis) taken as claims to have described the way things actually are. But saying a description is accurate needn't involve any such commitments. It can simply mean "by the typical standards one uses when talking about flowers and data." The descriptive/normative distinction here is not metaphysical or epistemological, it's logical. So watch out for that.

Imagine the doctor says "You have cancer. The best course of action is to get chemo." Built in to this statement is the idea that the patient being healthy would be a good outcome. If the patient undergoes chemo, she'll have a better chance at good health. Normativity is all over the place here. Even the word "healthy" comes with a built-in normative meaning. Where health is a noun, one can distinguish between good health and poor health (normative). Where healthy is an adjective, it's assumed to be good, while its outside (e.g., unhealthy, death) is taken as bad. One can try to get around this by saying "a smart person acts in such a way that she'll increase her chances of living a long life with such and such body chemistry (and so on)," but here the normativity is simply shifted to the word "smart."

On the other hand, simply using conditional statements can work. "If you want to live a long time, get chemo. If not, don't." Alternatively, consider "getting chemo would extend your life." Most people don't want to die young, so it might be said these statements are normative. Well most people don't want to die, so if you suggest they won't live forever, is that normative? Yes and no. All statements have normative implications, insofar as they're interpreted by creatures with agendas (like living). Not wanting to die young gets particularly strong reactions. Along the same lines, saying "the U.S. regularly kills children in their own neighborhoods" is perfectly descriptive. That most people are troubled by the thought of killing children where they live is what lends that sentence its normativity.

There's all sorts of wiggle room, though, because we mix the two all the time, and it's unavoidable. If I tell the wife, "I washed the dishes," maybe I mean "I know you were thinking you had to wash the dishes which would impact your plans but now you can do something different." Agenda free. Or maybe I mean "so don't complain about how little housework I do." Agenda. The statement itself is descriptive. By any meaningful interpretation, it also has normative implications. But it may or may not have an agenda.

(More on this topic to follow, for better or worse.)

brady's heroization

The post hoc heroization of Russell Wilson turned into the post hoc heroization of Tom Brady thanks to a single data point that Tom Brady had nothing to do with.

power, power, power

Some terms:
POWER -- the strong side of an imbalanced power relation
power -- the weak side of an imbalanced power relation
power -- neutral sense
---

What's worse, a 100 kg man hitting a 60 kg woman or the same man hitting a 30 kg child? This has the structure of a lesser-evilist question, a form of apologetics serving to make one case of abusive behavior appear less bad by referencing another, which is how, to give an example, Dick Dawkins downplays the misogyny experienced by Western women. It's also a key tool in the apologist's toolbox that allows for the transformation of a civilian-bombing arms dealer like Obama into a humanist champion. (You think Romney would have been better?)

Lesser evilism aside, though, last year, two 100 kg-ish NFL players made headlines for hitting smaller people. Ray Rice hit a woman. Adrian Peterson hit a small child. Both cases involved violence of a sort that everyone, including the perpetrators, agreed was intentional (as opposed to accidental). Both fit the formula "big person intentionally harms little person."

Hitting children is undoubtedly less socially condemned, carries less of a stigma, than hitting women. Adrian Peterson went too far in using a switch but a little spanking would not have cost him his season. Ray Rice went too far in trying to physically harm Janay at all (though his punishment changed from a few games to a season for NFL PR reasons when the extent of the violence became public knowledge). On the other hand, Americans tell their friends, relatives, even acquaintances, that they hit their kids. They can make the case (in spite of all reliable evidence pointing the other way) that hitting kids is good for them and retain "respected member of society" status. If you make the case that hitting women is good for them, you'll take a much bigger social status hit.

Kids have less power to defend their own interests than women. Are kids likely to be more completely molded in the image of POWER, to conform to POWER's expectations? I think so, but the results wouldn't necessarily be better or worse for one or the other. Each will be pushed close to a limit at which further pushing would backfire for POWER. And being close to that limit is what accounts for the shittiness of living in POWER's expectational sphere.

There are likely several distinct heuristics POWER uses to solve power but all of them can be understood in terms of how power meets the expectations of POWER. A cute baby conforms to the narcissistic interests of its parents, a phenomenon easily understood in evolutionary terms. POWER protects power to protect itself (its DNA). Simply existing is the main way power, in this case, meets the expectations of POWER. A crying baby may cause dissonance where POWER expects a baby to be uniformly appreciative of POWER, where crying is interpreted as complaint. Crying may be a challenge to POWER's mainly nonconscious expectations regarding its own godliness, godliness being the default mode of human cognition. Or in other cases, perhaps POWER is so godly it can't be threatened by a baby's crying.

Cuteness is not a term restricted to human babies. For something to be cute, it needs to leverage baby love. It should be symmetrical and roundish, but most importantly, it needs to be non-threatening to POWER's expectations. Japanese kawaii culture is what happens when power exploits POWER's baby-love heuristic to survive, then gets caught in a superstimulus feedback loop for what seems like an eternity.

When an infant becomes mobile, it gains power. It gains a new ability to upset POWER's expectations. The baby's newfound mobility is a source of unpredictability and a destabilizing, disruptive force for POWER. The parent is reading an article about how to be a good parent but has to keep an eye out for the crawling baby hurting itself, fails to stay on constant alert, is annoyed by inevitable baby danger. When exactly the baby will put itself in danger, that is, run afoul of parental expectations, is unpredictable. ("Let me finish this goddamn article about how to be a good parent, you little fuck!") Until, for example, you buy a plastic cage with Winnie the Pooh all over it. Baby in a cage, problem solved. The parent gets back to that article. When finished, takes care of baby's needs. Fast forward a few years, you've got kids standing and sitting at the ring of a bell. A few more years and they're punching in at work, obeying traffic laws, etc.

The sun is powerful, but predictable. Its predictability makes it part of the frame, not the game, when it comes to ethical decision making. As daily ethical concerns go, it doesn't offer difference-making differences, in Scott Bakker's terms. Somewhat unpredictable, unaccounted-for iterations of inhuman POWER, such as natural disasters, are spared human moralizing thanks to the futility of directing moralistic anger their way. On the other hand, we get angry at humans who cause us harm (well, when that harm is accurately diagnosed) because anger has evolved for that. Anger can be effective when directed at humans, often enough for it to have offered survival benefits.

illusions

Humans aren't the only animals to use illusion to their advantage. Butterflies, bullfrogs, facebook users, and PR departments exploit the heuristic shortcomings of other cognizers as well. Consciousness came late to the game and added complexity. Scientific method and technology added some more, along with sheer volume. While illusion can involve conscious processing, it doesn't have to (chameleons). While it can involve awareness on the deceiver's part, it needn't involve awareness that it's an illusion (selfie-uploading teenagers), or anything else outside what's necessary to pull off the trick.