Month: July 2009

by Patrick Appel

John Derbyshire gives an interview to the Economist. A list of his favored policies:

As much as I disagree with him most of the time, Derb is never dull, I have to give him that.

by Patrick Appel

The Economist tries to understand what when wrong:

But a broader change in mindset is still needed. Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst. For in the end economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world.

by Chris Bodenner

Ahmahdinejad's pick for VP bows out after three days. Nader Uskowi reacts:

Mashaie’s appointment came under harsh criticism by the conservatives, normally allies of Ahmadinejad. They objected to a remark he had made last year saying the Israeli people were friends of the Iranians. The appearance of nepotism (Mashaie’s daughter is married to Ahmadinejad’s son) also did not help his case. […] The last thing he needed was being attacked by Shaiatmadari and the conservatives on the very first appointment to his new cabinet. He should have expected the reaction from the right to this nomination, but it seems that he may be loosing touch with the realities on the ground.

Or perhaps it was a shrewd ploy to appear moderate, knowing from the onset that the pick would never be accepted? Why else would Ahmadi give in so quickly?

Update: Mashaie is denying reports and says he is staying on.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I understand where you are coming from when you say, "Atheists are much more likely to be ostracized for their beliefs, but that does not excuse incivility on their part." Even as an atheist, I get annoyed by many of the tactics of hardlined atheists and do wish for more civility in the discussion, but one has to realize that its incredibly hard to be an atheist and even the best of us have days where we can't bite our tongues. Surely as a gay person Andrew has had those moments where he just snapped at someone's homophobia.

Most people are aware that admitting to atheism pretty much bars you from political office, immediately makes your patriotism suspect, can ruin friendships, families, and careers. For reasons of self-preservation, we're often compelled to live "in the closet". In some ways, its tempting to make parallels with other minorities that have been discriminated against over the years, be it based on gender, race, sexual preference, etc. But unlike those groups, we're not forbidden to vote, get married, buy houses, eat at the same restaurants, or any of the other rights other groups had to fight for. In some ways, even I, as an atheist that has been discriminated against time and time again feel like maybe I don't really have any right to complain. But I am treated very differently, and very unfairly, and in a country where "all men are created equal" its time we put an end to that. But what is there to end?

There are no real battles to be fought and won other than general acceptance. Laws about religion are already on the books. There are no acts of Congress that can alleviate the acts of discrimination we face. It is almost purely a battle of intangible social constructs. There are no equivalents to the marches against Prop 8 or riots against faulty elections. There are very few ways to channel the anger, sadness, and frustration of our discrimination.

Every atheist is bound to have a day just bad enough where they explode on some poor believer who pushes too hard and every atheist has felt at time that even the most accepting of believers is tacitly agreeing to the discrimination we face. Sure, I disapprove of many of the less civil tactics some of the more well-known atheists engage in, but I can't say that I don't understand what pushed them to that point. But, in the grander scheme of things, as a group we've yet to do anything as "uncivil" as Stonewall, or the riots we saw during the civil rights movement. Many of these acts are not only forgiven, but celebrated as reasonable responses in the face of discrimination, yet we're screamed at any time an atheist acts like a jerk on TV, writes something a bit testy on a website, or files the occasionally dumb lawsuit.

I dare say that in the history of discriminated groups in this country, atheists have been the most civil and with plenty of room to spare, yet still, we're told that its too much and that we need to calm down and scale it back a notch.

So no, I don't like the incivility some bring to the discussion, but if they didn't, would anyone even be talking about this issues? If everyone remained "civil" it'd get swept up under the rug like it always has in the past. Their incivility might not solve the problem, but it sheds enough of a spotlight on the subject to open a door for the civil conversations that need to happen. Without them I strongly believe the conversation would never happen at all.

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, 7.28 pm

by Chris Bodenner

"It's wonderful for her to go pursue adulation in the far corners of Alaska and do precisely what she said she wasn't going to stay in office for — which is to spend state money to go around and be a lame duck," – state Rep. Jay Ramras (R), in an ADN piece entitled, "Palin wraps up term with bears, bills, travel and tweets."

by Chris Bodenner

"Nobody should have hurt feelings. My goodness, this is politics! Politics is rough-and-tumble, and people need to get thick skin – just like I've got," – soon-to-be-ex Gov. Sarah Palin, in a Nov. 5, 2008 interview recently uploaded to Vimeo.

(Hat tip: Mudflats)

by Robert Wright

I know I’m late to the Walter Cronkite reflections party, but since this is my first day of guest blogging for Andrew, I haven’t had a microphone until now. I think one reason Cronkite looks so appealing compared to today’s anchors is that he got into TV news at a time when everyone who was getting into TV news had come from some other medium (both print and radio in Cronkite’s case). As a result: (a) they, and he, hadn’t been admitted to the journalistic profession on the basis of looks, and so didn’t have the oddly credibility-sapping attractiveness of some modern anchors; (b) having come from radio, Cronkite looked like a guy who was just un-self-consciously reading the news, as opposed to a guy doing a slightly oversized impersonation of someone reading the news. Of course, he had a quasi-captive audience–he was one of only three choices in the known universe (and the one always chosen in my household)–and that probably made it easier to feel secure in his authenticity. If you missed the Dish’s earlier post of Cronkite reporting—with refreshingly low melodrama and commensurately high gravitas–the assassination of Martin Luther King, it’s worth a look. 

by Conor Friedersdorf

Try to guess where these sentences appeared:

IT wasn’t that long ago that a bar advertising a weekly tequila night — and the customers attracted to it — would plainly be asking for trouble.

You know what I’m talking about. Lime, salt, squished-up faces, the

punctuating thunk of drained shot glasses hitting the bar. And then the predictable aftermath, which the late George Carlin characterized thusly: “One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.” Tequila specials were like petri dishes for misdemeanors.

On Monday, at the Lower East Side bar and restaurant Allen & Delancey, there was tequila aplenty, but no one needed scooping from the floor. A young man at the end of the bar, his head topped with a Harris tweed driver’s cap, appeared to be discussing philosophy with his date. Mayhem was definitely not in the air.

Prose like that could only appear in The New York Times "Style" section. Particularly amusing is the locution that a young man and his date "appeared to be discussing philosophy." Was his date wearing laurels?

Of course, there is a long history of tequila producing the appearance of philosophical discussion, as anyone who's attended the parking lot party prior to a Jimmy Buffett concert can attest. This is evident nowhere so clearly as outside the inevitable "shooters for hooters" booths set up by shameless young men who engage female college students in what appear to be Socratic dialogues about how they should not worry about the video camera being held as they barter for Jose Cuervo shots. (Equivalent "shots for cocks" booths also appear, though less frequently.) The effect is a subset of the audience that is particularly enthusiastic when Professor Buffett takes the stage and appears to engage in his own philosophizing. "This is a song about a little island that's nowhere except in your mind or at the bottom of a Cuervo bottle," he's long noted during concerts. "People ask me, 'Where the hell is Margaritaville?' I say, It's anywhere you want it to be."

Having been to my share Jimmy Buffett concerts and Lower East Side bars, I'd wager that dialogue on Margaritaville is every bit as profound as whatever was uttered by the man in the Harris tweed driver's cap.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

For all its cattiness, the conflict has raised some worthwhile questions. Most importantly, the debate over what constitutes respectful religious criticism is underlined by the question of whether religion's uniquely privileged status in society is justified, and to what extent it should be honored. Another issue, one where I completely agree with Dennett, is that "belief in belief" is often a patronizing attitude: "You and I, wise intellectuals that we are, have no need of a belief in God, and it's obvious to those as smart as us that no such god exists. But those other fools could never get along without their little pretend parent, so don't criticize God too harshly!" is a good compression of many such arguments. There's also a dispute regarding where to set the political limits of science activism. For example, many atheists have criticized the National Center for Science Education for bending too far backwards to appease the religious, in its quest to fight off creationist challenges to school science programs: By going out of its way to point out the possibility of theistic evolution and its compabitility with Christianity, has the NCSE crossed the line and endorsed a particular religious doctrine? Are its appeasement tactics–successful ones–bordering on unconstitutional? I'd say no, but the debate goes on.

If you're interested in this sort of back-and-forth, there are a few things worth looking at. First of all, you can watch Dawkins read the new preface to The God Delusion, in which he responds to his (atheist) critics.

And if you're really a glutton for punishment, at this very moment there is a Blog-O-War going on, in which PZ Myers at Pharyngula and the folks at The Intersection are embroiled in a personal and sometimes nasty spat over the role of tone, appeasement, and atheist activism in science education and outreach. Be warned.

 But I think the bottom line is that Dennett's remarks, while not especially clear in the context of the article you linked to, should be considered in the context of this intellectual conflict. I didn't read any intolerance or narrowness of vision into Dennett's article; he's just firing yet another salvo at the apologetic atheist camp, with which he has several legitimate differences of opinion.