Month: October 2007

He said this after Sean Hannity tried to broker a truce between him and Christianist-in-Chief, James Dobson:

I don’t particularly care to have a conversation with him. If he wants to call up and apologize again, that’s ok with me. But I’m not going to dance to anybody’s tune.

You have to give him points for consistency:

For Buddhists, the best response to the situation in Burma is to try to keep a clear mind and extend compassion to all of those who are suffering–especially those who are inflicting violence. Even in America, we can do a lot of good by not dehumanizing the repressors, which creates a general feeling of mistrust and hatred. The circumstances that brought the junta to the place where they could commit these atrocities must have been profound, and they, too, are worthy of our compassion. If we could hold such a view, our response would be a positive cause and create conditions that might yield long-lasting good.

I have some confidence that the monks would agree that unbounded compassion must be the first step in helping change things in Burma.

So why has it not changed in almost half a century?

"Operationally, British forces have performed poorly in Basra. Maybe it’s best that they leave. Now we will have a clear field in southern Iraq," – a "senior White House foreign policy official" (Hadley?) to the Daily Telegraph.

From the moment before the war when Rumsfeld said he didn’t need the Brits to the comment yesterday that the Brits are no good anyway: this is one reason why the Atlantic alliance is in such disrepair. The lesson is clear: if you want to be an ally of the United States, be prepared to be dumped on by this White House.
 

In the immortal voice of Peter Sellers:

An enjoyably time-wasting diversion:

In theory, the planet has 24 time zones. Actually, there are about 39, and they are still hotly debated. Within the past month, President Hugo Chavez has talked of moving Venezuela’s clocks forward half an hour, and Indian scientists have urged their government to do the same.

India is currently the most significant part of the world with a half-hourly time zone – five hours behind Greenwich. This has a curious advantage for British journalists there worrying about deadlines, because you can get GMT by the simple trick of turning your watch upside down (trust me, it works). Nepal and the Chatham Islands actually have quarter-hour zones, which is really confusing.

… The Chinese force the entire country, even the far west, to observe Beijing time.

Carbon-belching cars are environmentally damaging enough, but have you ever thought how much space is taken up by parking? Ahem:

Early indications point to a lot of asphalt out there. If a single parking space averages 9-feet by 19-feet, then Tippecanoe County’s 355,000 spaces translates into two square miles of pavement, the equivalent of about 1,000 football fields. If Tippecanoe is typical, that would mean the US has paved over roughly 6,000 square miles – an area larger than the state of Connecticut – to accommodate cars or trucks.

Sam Harris gave an address to the recent atheism conference that, as is his wont, challenged his audience. Money quote:

Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as "non-racism" is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.

Another problem is that in accepting a label, particularly the label of "atheist," it seems to me that we are consenting to be viewed as a cranky sub-culture. We are consenting to be viewed as a marginal interest group that meets in hotel ballrooms. I’m not saying that meetings like this aren’t important. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was important. But I am saying that as a matter of philosophy we are guilty of confusion, and as a matter of strategy, we have walked into a trap. It is a trap that has been, in many cases, deliberately set for us. And we have jumped into it with both feet.

While it is an honor to find myself continually assailed with Dan [Dennett], Richard [Dawkins], and Christopher [Hitchens] as though we were a single person with four heads, this whole notion of the "new atheists" or "militant atheists" has been used to keep our criticism of religion at arm’s length, and has allowed people to dismiss our arguments without meeting the burden of actually answering them. And while our books have gotten a fair amount of notice, I think this whole conversation about the conflict between faith and reason, and religion and science, has been, and will continue to be, successfully marginalized under the banner of atheism.

So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves "atheists." We should not call ourselves "secularists." We should not call ourselves "humanists," or "secular humanists," or "naturalists," or "skeptics," or "anti-theists," or "rationalists," or "freethinkers," or "brights." We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

It’s an argument for intellectual honesty over labels. To that extent, at least, he’s surely right. That means also, I think, distinguishing between those non-believers who treat religion with forceful clarity and criticism and those who treat religion with unvarnished, unlettered contempt.

Or "9,814 times E". Ben Vershbow explains here.

Why would conservatives and liberals reach completely predictable ideological conclusions about simple factual testimony – like the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas sexual harassment dispute? Ilya Somin suggests an answer. It’s

a consequence of the all-too-common assumption that our ideological adversaries are not only wrong but also evil – or at least far more likely to be so than those who agree with us. If you believe that liberals are, on average, likely to be morally corrupt, then it would be rational for you to assume that a liberal is more likely to be lying than a conservative and thus to automatically believe Thomas over Hill even in the absence of clear proof. And vice versa if you hold the reverse view.

But Hill, at the time, was a conservative appointee! These nuances are lost in the culture wars, of course. Or, rather, they have to be denied. And so the partisan right subsequently insisted that Hill was actually a closet-liberal (and mediocre at her job to boot), as well as a liar. Thomas – about as mediocre a justice as one could imagine – was nonetheless touted by Bush I as the best candidate for the job regardless of race. Yes, many conservatives claimed that with a straight face – and still do!

I remember the hearings vividly. I was much more comfortable within the conservative world back then. I still thought it was obvious that Hill was telling the truth. In sexual harassment suits, I tend to believe the women. And I couldn’t see Hill’s motive for putting herself through all that for no reason. I also believed Paula Jones, of course, and most of the other victims of Bill Clinton’s petty, ugly abuses of power. But the Clinton sexual harassment wars merely confirm Somin’s argument, don’t they? All the conservatives believed the women in Clinton’s case. And almost all the liberals – and the feminists – trashed the abused women. In the cycle America has been in since the sixties, the truth is barely relevant.