Month: November 2009

Tanner Ringerud passes along a video:

A group of Christian rappers extol the virtues of the “Christian side hug”. Because you will definitely go to Hell if your genitals get anywhere near other peoples' genitals.

Razib Khan ponders the similarities between Islam and orthodox westerners:

On issues such as abortion and the marriage of homosexuals the orthodox will part ways with the conservative. The orthodox Westerner may see in the Muslim a closer adherent to the true tradition. This is one reason why the Traditionalist philosopher Rene Guenon converted to Islam. But, I believe that the orthodox underestimate the implicit cultural commonalities which are unspoken and unelucidated, and which bind societies and civilizations together even more than adherence to a metaphysic. “My Country, Right or Wrong” is at once a profoundly unintellectual idea, but at the same time so is the assumption that one would sacrifice one’s own life for one’s child. Instincts have their limits, but at some point human flourishing is contingent upon [admitting] that life depends on implicit instincts for proper functioning, and that reflection is an exceptional avocation, islands in a sea of reflex.

A reader writes:

About Sarah Palin, you've written that "All we know for sure is that whatever she says isn't true. It never is."

I'd argue that what she says has no relation whatsoever to the truth – you can't count on it to be false anymore than you can count on it to be true. What you can generally count on is that it will be hastily conceived and self serving. I know you've invested a great deal of time proving her to be a liar, but to my mind Palin's a bullshitter, as defined by Harry G. Frankfurt in his book, On Bullshit.

According to Frankfurt, a bullshitter is the greater enemy of truth than a liar. The liar, by acting in opposition to truth, at least has some sense of what it is. The bullshitter, on the other hand, says only what he or she thinks will serve their immediate agenda and therefore pays little attention to what actually "is." Over time their ability to recognize truth becomes attenuated.

Sound like anyone you've seen in shorts on the cover of Newsweek lately?

I always found the term "liar" a little crude or insufficient for her, hence the use of the term "odd lies" to characterize a very particular form of delusional thinking. Having now read the book, I have to say I feel, yes, sadness. The same sadness I felt in a huge wave at the beginning of September 2008. For the innocent people dragged into this whole farce. And the damage yet to come.

A piece in today's L.A. Times tries to determine how much escalating in Afghanistan will cost. Ackerman summarizes:

[According to a memo from the Pentagon’s own comptroller], a 40,000-troop increase would cost an additional $30 to $35 billion annually. That’s on top of current war costs — which, as the piece reports, are rather hard to determine with precision. But if we take the memo’s reported calculation of at $750,000 per soldier/sailor/airman/marine annually, then we’re looking at an existing cost of $51 billion before an escalation.

My column plumbs the amazing powers of a certain someone:

Palin is indeed a feisty Alaskan and a genuine triumph of red-state feminism. But her narrative is embellished and embroidered to such an extent, it resembles not so much a memoir as a work of magical realism.

If you treat it as a factual narrative you will soon falter. Among the few early reactions were those of Nicolle Wallace — a McCain campaign staffer — who said of one passage: “It is pure fiction. No such discussion took place.” A reporter Palin says targeted her daughter Piper after a press conference was never at the press conference cited. Palin’s claim that she was personally billed $50,000 for vetting is point blank denied by the McCain campaign. Palin’s account of her record in the Exxon Valdez lawsuit was described last week by the chief lawyer for the case as “the most cockamamie bullshit”. I could go on.

None of this is particularly surprising. Palin has a long and documented record of saying things that are empirically untrue but asserting them as if her own imagination is the only source of objective reality. So you simply read the book as if it is fiction and enjoy it. Or you read it as non-fiction and believe that Palin is a magical mythical figure who defies the laws of time and space and normal human nature.

Take one story that every mother will relate to: the drama of her delivery of her fifth child, Trig.

She tells us that at eight months pregnant with a child she knew had Down’s syndrome and would need special care at birth, she got on a plane from Alaska to Dallas, Texas, to attend an energy conference. Most airlines won’t allow this but Alaska Airlines did. Palin then tells us that at 4am on her first night in Dallas, “a strange sensation low in my belly woke me and I sat up straight in bed”. In an interview she gave with the Anchorage Daily News just after Trig’s birth, she confirmed that she had amniotic fluid leaking at that point.

So she was a mother eight months pregnant with a special-needs child thousands of miles from home. She wakes up in the middle of the night with contractions and amniotic leakage and she tells her husband she doesn’t want to call her doctor because it would wake her up at 1am. And she is the sitting governor of a state and her doctor is a close personal friend. Not only that, but she gives the speech as planned in the afternoon, during which she makes a rather good joke. She then tells us what happens next: “Big laughs. More contractions.”

After the speech, does she then go to a local hospital to get checked out? Nah. She gets on two separate aeroplanes all the way back to Alaska, with a stopover in Seattle, because she is determined to have the child in her home town and she just knows that the contractions and amniotic leakage are not signs of imminent delivery. She has had four previous kids so she has experience. “I still had plenty of time … It was a calm, relatively restful flight home,” she explains of the next 15 hours.

You might imagine that an airline would have some qualms about letting a woman in some sort of labour at eight months, and pregnant with a Down’s syndrome child, get on a long transcontinental flight. What if the baby were born in mid-flight? The plane would have to be diverted. What if something happened to the baby? The airline could be liable. Palin never told the flight attendants. Couldn’t they tell, one might innocently ask. In the Anchorage Daily News story about the birth, Alaska Airlines said: “The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress.”

Palin makes Xena, the warrior princess, seem fragile.

The full column here.

Razib Khan builds off the arguments in Michael Specter's new book:

[S]erious problems emerge when our intuitive prejudices push themselves into the scientific domain. Natural science has over the past few centuries has proven itself to be a marvel not by extension of our intuition, but contravention of that intuition resulting in an even closer fit to reality (contrast Newtonian physics with "folk physics").** Humans have always had engineering in the form of tinkering with technology. But the last two centuries of productivity growth through mechanical improvements have been based in part on the rise of science as a theoretical framework which allows for more than trial & error experimentation guided by intuition. Science allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive their theories are, because they are judged not on plausibility but predictivity.

A fascinating way to look at it:

No visualization of American power yet. But look how quickly empires tend to implode. Neo-empires can too.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

John McWhorter asks Obama to end the drug war:

[P]erhaps the unemployment crisis, the real estate crisis, the health care crisis, and even global warming are more urgent matters in the grand scheme of things just now.

Now, that is. However, how about in 2014, when Obama has just two years to go and other things are presumably taken care of to the extent that they can be (and assuming that John Thune, Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin will not turn out to be the GOP’s secret weapons three years from now)? By then Obama will not be facing re-election, nor will he likely be mired in a sex scandal to distract him from real work.

For now, maybe we have to face things like what happened in the Bronx Monday as a weekly kind of event. But what kind of a nation are we to treat episodes like that one as business as usual? The War on Drugs stands as an obstacle to people becoming the best that they can be. It is, in its way, un-American.

Clay Shirky ponders trust on the web:

Authority…performs a dual function; looking to authorities is a way of increasing the likelihood of being right, and of reducing the penalty for being wrong. An authoritative source isn’t just a source you trust; it’s a source you and other members of your reference group trust together. This is the non-lawyer’s version of “due diligence”; it’s impossible to be right all the time, but it’s much better to be wrong on good authority than otherwise, because if you’re wrong on good authority, it’s not your fault.