Month: July 2009

by Chris Bodenner

John McWhorter warns against conflating the recent reaction of Henry Louis Gates with the reaction of Cornel West to Larry Summer's criticism back in 2001. While McWhorter calls the latter a "misguided cry of racism":

That sort of thing has not been typical, however, of Gates. He has even been assailed by black writers lefter than him of being what used to be called an accommodationist, such as by Reverend Eugene Rivers, and Houston Baker – best known as one of the “Duke 88” professors raking subsequently acquitted lacrosse players over the coals for raping a black stripper — assailing assorted black public intellectuals. Gates has never been a rabble-rouser.

McWhorter, a so-called "black conservative," then launches into a thoughtful lament against racist cops:

The relationship between black men and police forces is, in fact, the main thing keeping America from becoming “post-racial” in any sense.

Here is where many will object with statistics about residential segregation, disparities in car loans and health care, and most recently, the dumping of subprime mortgages in black communities. These, however, are more news stories than things felt on a visceral level among ordinary people as evidence that racism is still virulent in this country, a defining experience of being black.

[…W]e cannot call people like Gates drama queens for treating the invasion of their privacy by the fuzz as a symptom of something larger and vocalizing accordingly. I maintain that racism is no longer the main problem for black America – but have always said that when racism rears its ugly head it must be stomped upon.

Read the whole thing. McWhorter and Ta-Nehisi are the sharpest and most engaging writers on race today, IMHO. Watch them spar on Bloggingheads to see what I mean.

by Conor Friedersdorf

by Chris Bodenner

Videosift features a scene-by-scene review of "I Gotta Feeling." In sum:

Mixing Yiddish phrases with autotune skanks is something only the fabulous Black Eyed Peas could attempt. You know – just like rhyming 'up' with 'up' and 'cup' with 'mazel tov'.

Lake Crescent, Washington, 5.58 pm

by Chris Bodenner

NIAC reports:

The 50 year old grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, Sayed Hassan Khomeini, has reportedly left Iran rather than bow to recent pressure that he attend Ahmadinejad’s upcoming inauguration ceremony. Sayed Hassan is a mid-level cleric who is also in charge of the beautiful and vast (5,000 acres) Mausoleum of his grandfather.

Sayed opposes the violent crackdown against protesters of this year’s election, claiming that violence is not a revolutionary value that his grandfather promoted in 1979.

by Patrick Appel

A few readers asked me to respond to Dennett's point about Denmark's happiness being related to their secularism. This post by Eric Weiner complicates the argument:

Happiness studies are always more complicated than they appear (check out this piece by the Atlantic or the musings of Will Wilkinson for more in that vein), and I'm wary of anyone who purports to definitively determine causality on a national scale. There are also studies that show that religion correlates with happiness, so the evidence is mixed, and I'm not sure that the answer is knowable.

Update: I missed this old Will Wilkinson post where he addresses this question directly. Worth pondering.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In The New Republic, Anthony Wright laments health care budget cuts in California:

Democracy in America reacts:

That's a liberal view, of course. If you're looking at the situation from a conservative perspective, you're seeing a state that incrementally added more and more programmes to cover its residents. That caused it to run out of money more quickly and created dangerous dependencies amongst groups of citizens who counted on coverage that was unsustainable. The crisis (and voter unwillingness to back new taxes) is now forcing the state to raid local governments for money, which is what conservatives see happening to Medicare if Democrats pass national health-care reform.

Liberals might respond that even limited government can't work without stable revenue sources, and they'd have a point. Neither side is exactly right, but as the larger debate over health-care reform heats up, both parties could do well by leaving Washington for a few days to survey California's wreckage.

My reaction is different. What vexes me as a Californian are all the better ways the state could reduce its expenditures were the legislature only willing to rein in the most egregious giveaways to its most reliable cash cow lobbies. Pension obligations could be radically reduced by changing the formula that allows all public safety employees, broadly construed, to receive 90 percent of their salary for life upon retirement. State prison costs would decrease if the state decriminalized drug possession and stopped prostrating itself before the prison guard union. School reform could cut administrative costs higher than in most states without affecting money being spent in the classroom — for example, by reversing a state of affairs where school districts pay problem teachers millions of dollars to stay out of the classroom, for starters. Repeat offenders would decrease if the state identified illegal immigrants in its jails and ensured their deportation at the conclusion of their sentence, rather than releasing them back into the populace. A state in need of revenue might reconsider workers' compensation laws that are among the costliest in the nation for taxpayers and businesses — and a business climate that is generally less friendly than that of its neighbors, so that tax generating enterprises stop relocating elsewhere.

This isn't to discount arguments that California's ballot measures produced structural problems in budgeting, or that illegal immigration imposes burdens on the Golden State that are greater than what many other jurisdictions face, or that perhaps short term tax hikes are needed, any of the other explanations commonly offered to explain the state's troubles.

It is to say that voters are loath to raise taxes or reverse ballot measures they approved in the past when the legislature stubbornly refuses to make even the most commonsensical reforms left up to its discretion. That is, after all, the job of a legislature, isn't it? To do what is best for the state given constraints on its power?

Alas, the California legislature is so busy complaining about the things voters or minority Republicans won't allow it to do that it ignores the numerous ways that it can improve matters, if only it abandons its dogmas and the interests of the deep pockets who fund its bids for reelection. One consequence of this attitude is deep cuts in health care for kids. If Republicans who refuse tax hikes bear partial responsibility for the consequences of those cuts, so do a generation of Democratic law makers who marshaled their sizable majority to pass unsustainable social spending, take on unsustainable public employee burdens, and otherwise put California on the path to fiscal ruin — refusing to reverse course even after it became apparent that things would end in the disaster we now see.

by Patrick Appel

Nate Silver sizes up the latest Palin mini-scandal:

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

This email is my response to the atheism posts that have been popping up, especially these two. And most especially the last reader comment at the second link above, which concludes: "modern philosophy of religion (when not simply Christian apology), leads at most to a measured reassurance than some kind of vague conception of the divine cannot be dismissed as simply irrational – but it is cold comfort for anyone who values such things as eternal life, a God who is knowable, or a universe in which good deeds are ultimately rewarded."

Though I would like to believe that I am a tolerant, open-minded person, it seems likely that I fall into the "anti-theist" category of atheists. I would not choose that label for myself, but it describes my attitude more or less. My strong feelings on this matter come from two main observations:

1) All the philosophical/theological work on god's existence or non-existence that I've seen doesn't actually prove very much. Pace Plantinga's sleight of hand with modal logic (the premises of which I tend to think are meaningless in a way that eviscerates the coherence of the argument), all the "proofs" I've been exposed to end up concluding that it is possible that some god-like force or being exists. Even Plantinga's modal work merely concludes that some sort of maximally excellent being must exist–but makes no specific assertions about what this being would actually be like in any concrete way.

2) Most of my day-to-day contacts with religious believers, in the context of policy debates and family dinners, center pretty closely on concrete suggestions that religious people make for my life and the policy of this nation. They base their certainty on the contention that their religious persuasion is undoubtedly correct in these matters.

This has been said by other readers, but I hope to add to the conversation mainly by pointing out the gap between what is proven in point 1 and what is asserted at point 2. When I assert that there is no just reason for gay people not to be allowed to marry, or for a woman to be forbidden from aborting her pregnancy regardless of circumstance, I am answered by people who say "it is forbidden because it says so in the bible," not people who say, "it is possible that a maximally excellent being exists."

Just because something is possible does not make it probable. I believe that it's possible advanced aliens exist somewhere in the universe, but I don't base my policy recommendations on that. I base them on observable evidence from the world, on my limited ability to reason, and on my hope that discussion with others will help refine and ameliorate my ideas. I guess what really rankles is being called virulent and strident when my only crime is not believing that another person's faith should trump my reason.

Another reader:

As an agnostic who sees all sides of this issue – brought up in a conservative Christian household, against which I rebelled, only to try to understand where they're coming from, I can say that the main thing I object to is the New Atheists' use of the term "religion".  If you're criticizing young-Earth creationism, or any specific belief or set of beliefs or set of behaviors that are identifiably harmful to our society, then yes, these are fair game and deserve criticism.  I don't think any of us "accomodationists" would dispute that, or try to argue that we should somehow just let fundamentalists roll over us in the public sphere with their archaic religion-based social norms. 

The problem is, the scope of the argument that they New Atheists make extends far beyond mere criticism of a given specific set of religious claims, and attempts to encompass all "religion".  So, the arguments they're making would seem to apply not just to "religion" as it is most commonly encountered in the public sphere in the U.S. (ie, evangelical Christianity), but also: Hinduism? Buddhism? Sufism? Taoism?  What are we talking about here, when we talk about religion?  Are all religious people of all stripes equally deluded?  What does it mean to be religious?  These are questions to which the New Atheists seem to believe there are easy answers, and here I protest: the picture is more complex than that, and I would expect, as well-educated members of the scientific community, that they might take an interest in being more specific with the language they use before making such generalizations.  Stop using the word "religion" when what you really mean is "fundamentalist followers of Abrahamic faiths", and we're getting somewhere.

Another:

So do atheists "weak man" Christians?  Perhaps, but it's because the "weak man" in Christiandom is actually a very powerful and frightening group of people.  Look at Bush's presidency, where abstinence education was pushed to the forefront despite all evidence of its negative effects.  Look at Dover, PA, where a group of Christian nutjobs tried to do away with scientific consensus to teach children the intellectually bankrupt "theory" of intelligent design.  Look at the Pope's failure to condemn the excommunication of those who were involved in an incredibly young girl's abortion after she was raped by her own father.  Look at the Vatican's efforts to protect child molesters.  Look at the Mormon church's concerted efforts to derail homosexual rights.  I think it's incredibly absurd, in that light, to say that atheists are "weak man"ing the religious, when their "weak men" are leaders of hundreds of thousands of religious followers and when those leaders are believed to be in direct communication with the LORD, and that their word is infallible.

The fundamentalists are a real danger to this country and to the world at large.  Could such a danger exist in a vacuum of religion?  Perhaps, but the problem right now is with religious fundamentalists, and the ignorance that such fundamentalism breeds, so we direct our attention thusly.

Second to last:

Far from ignoring these moderates, I have read their arguments and have responses.

"I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church.  They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything.  The idea that I could possibly 'brainwash' them into believing anything is specious."

I am sure this reader's children are immune to indoctrination, but many aren't.  Google the Moonies, the Krishnas, David Koresh, cults, de-programming, et cetera.

One of my nephews went through a similar questioning phase, and happened to open the Bible at random and saw something he interpreted as a sign from God telling him to shape up and get with the program.  In science, this is known as fooling yourself into seeing a pattern in random events.  It happens all the time, but in science one is taught to be wary of it.  In religion, such things are called signs and wonders and miracles.

"Religion deals with symbols, myth, archetypes and believing what you cannot see.  These are intellectual skills that cross over into non-religious contexts. How much of science depends on believing in unseen forces?"

Uh, none, unless you insist upon unaided human vision as the only way to obtain evidence.  All the forces in science which are accepted have good evidence for them, and can be demonstrated in controlled, repeatable experiments.

The observation about the English teacher's ability to distinguish religious from non-religious students by their ability to understand symbols is interesting, but is an example of an uncontrolled and unverified experiment, which could never be accepted in a peer-reviewed science journal, since the risk of bias is too great.

To all those moderates from the previous post in this series (who don't believe in hell, would have no problem voting for an atheist, and so on), thank you all for your support.  Keep up the good work keeping creationists off school boards, insisting on federal funding for family planning which goes beyond abstinence counseling, supporting federal funding for stem-cell research, and electing at least one atheist for every two Christian Conservatives.  Okay, that devolved into snarkiness, but seriously I expect without them things would be a lot worse.  Trying again, sincere thanks to the Ken Millers and Judge Jones out there.

One more:

I think your statement about both sides using the 'weak man' argument against each other gets it just about right. I would very much like to see more spirited debate between the new atheists and the religious non-fundamentalists.

Take my own personal story. I was raised a Catholic, but after several major events I stopped believing in both the institution and the god. But back while I was hovering between belief and non-belief, I went to see a priest for spiritual guidance. Part of me wanted to be assured that God indeed existed. But another part of me wanted to bring some New Atheist fire upon the priest to satisfy the anger that I had because of the complete and utter disappointment that the idea of God has been.

Then I got there and things didn't turn out the way I expected. Here was someone who did not believe that the world was created in literally 7 days, did not believe that the world was 6000 years old, did not believe Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 were God's judgment because of the gays, and so on. Suddenly a lot of the 'easy' New Atheist invective that I had readied fell by the wayside, and I was forced to have a more measured conversation about the merits of the idea of God with this non-fundamentalist priest. And of course, it was a lot more civil than your standard Internet comment debate. It's a lot easier to be an asshole to a screen than it is to someone sitting right in front of you.

While I still don't believe in God, I learned that day that the 'weak man' argument was ultimately a copout. It doesn't raise the level of the debate but instead lowers it so that one can stomp all over it. And it doesn't work unless your opponent is an extremist.

If you haven't read it, Andrew's debate with Sam Harris is an excellent example of what can come from engagement between atheists and moderate believers.