Month: February 2010

by Andrew Sullivan

A rather moving and enlightening series of essays on why torture and enhanced interrogation are such profound assaults on the Jewish faith and tradition. Maybe Charles Krauthammer could respond to this one in particular.

by Patrick Appel

3QD posts an abstract:

Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to

persuade.

Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found.

by Jonathan Bernstein

There are lots of reasons that Senators like the filibuster (and it's cousin, the hold): bottom line is that in many cases, those rules and norms work well for individual Senators.

Unless, of course, they don't.  Shifting from a Senate in which the minority will use supermajority rules only to obstruct rare very important issues (pre-1970), to a Senate in which the minority will use supermajority rules to obstruct every major item on the majority's agenda (beginning in 1993), to a Senate in which the minority insists that almost every single item, controversial or not, needs 60 votes to pass (the new GOP standard in 2009) has changed the game. 

It's also true that as much as Senators and other political players act on incentives, they also may act — or at least be stirred into action — when they get annoyed.  No, really; there are lots of things that are in our self-interest to do, but we don't really notice them, or we don't bother dealing with them, until something happens that gets us annoyed, or offended, or outraged.  And so I think Ezra Klein is exactly correct about Jim Bunning's pointless filibuster against extending COBRA relief and unemployment benefits:

Senate reform, however, could have no better friend than Bunning. Last year, ending the filibuster was a quixotic blogger obsession. Now it's the subject of a petition by the Senate majority whip. Former Republican majority leader Bill Frist says his colleagues are "overdoing" the filibuster. This is how change begins, and without Bunning making clear exactly what the problem is, it would be impossible.

It's not just Bunning.  Richard Shelby's attempt to shut down every single nomination to make a point about local pork forced people to see how badly that norm (the hold is not a Senate rule) was working.  Republican insistence on forcing cloture votes on measures that then passed with overwhelming majorities demonstrated their lack of good faith (in other words, they did not appear to be using their leverage to bargain or to win, only to delay).  And the shenanigans over the health care bill in December, including forcing the reading of bills on the Senate floor and insisting on keeping the Senate in until Christmas Eve Day for, once again, no apparent reason, certainly annoyed and frustrated the Democrats. 

If the Republicans had filibustered the stimulus, the climate/energy bill, the health care bill, and a handful of other things (card check, a few nominations) that their constituents intensely oppose, then I think filibuster reform would have remained a minor issue — and the Republicans would be, as far as I can tell, not a whole lot worse off in terms of preventing legislation they actually care about.  In fact, I think they would have been better off in many ways. 

A cynic might conclude that the GOP actually wants the filibuster eliminated.  More likely, they've just overlearned the lessons of 1993-1994, and are operating under the mistaken impression that obstructing the majority is always good politics for the minority.  On top of that, Republicans do seem much more interested in the short-term reactions of conservative talk show hosts than they are in, well, anything else (and the incentives of those hosts is not necessarily to promote the success of the Republican Party).  The result: if Democrats do better than now expected in the 2010 election cycle, there's a good chance that filibuster reform will happen.

 

by Graeme Wood

The Guardian is running the latest piece about Yemen's impending qat Armageddon — the day when qat cultivation finally sucks dry Yemen's last drop of fresh water, and twenty-three million qat addicts wake up with a society-wide unfulfillable jones on a scale not seen since the Opium Wars.

Its enormous need for water is on course to make the capital, Sana'a, the first in the world to die of thirst. With the problem extending across the nation, the country is almost literally chewing itself to death.

From high on the scorched brown rock face that surrounds the Wadi Dahr valley, half an hour's drive north-west of Sana'a, the fertile carpet of vegetation below looks miraculous. Like most of Yemen, these northern mountains are a dry and barren land. But the irrigation needed to grow qat, coupled with an exploding population, means Sana'a's water basin is emptying out at a staggering rate: four times as much water is taken out of the basin as falls into it each year.

Water issues aside, qat deserves a better reputation than it has.  I chewed it multiple times in Yemen and Somalia.  It tastes terrible and bitter, a very shrubby flavor, and it made me extremely thirsty.  But it didn't addle my brain (too late for that, perhaps) or inspire any of the wild-eyed violence some say it causes.

The effect is more like nicotine than meth: it peps you up if you're sluggish, calms you down if you're anxious, focuses the mind, and makes the people you're chewing with just a little more interesting to be around.  In other words, it is a dangerously addictive substance, but with effects more subtle than is commonly appreciated.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of the best modern travel-writing on Yemen, is a huge qat-fiend:

After the noon prayer comes my other favourite journey, the five-minute walk to Sabri's qat shop in the Cattlemarket. Qat is a leaf that is mildly stimulant when chewed; it is to me what opium was to Coleridge. I go back and start munching. The effect is like a deep bowl of thoughts, connecting and concentrating. I look at what I wrote in the morning, and wonder what the problem was.

(Photo by Flickr user Island Spice under a Creative Commons license.)

by Chris Bodenner

The excavation of 11,500-year-old temples in Turkey – a discovery that "predates villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture" – has upended the consensus over human development:

[Lead archeologist Klaus] Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Regarding your recent post of one atheist claiming bemusement (and, if I'm reading him right, some annoyance) at the apparent contradiction between being an atheist and spending much of your time involved in religion, I must say that I find it a little surprising to see this classic accusation of dishonesty coming from an atheist. 

The post is startling in how well written it is as compared to how childishly bad his reasoning is. Apparently, once you don't believe in a deity, any and all earthly concerns about the real, observable effects of religion in the world we all share become irrelevant.

Since Harris does not believe in a god he should not concern himself over the trifling matter of jihadists flying planes into buildings. Since Hitchens is an atheist the murder of teenage girls at the hands of their fundamentalist fathers, brothers and uncles should be of no concern to him. How indifference towards religion should follow from non-belief in religion is not explained, probably because you can't get there from here.

Later in the post he makes the almost as ridiculous claim that though of course there are people who would like to force their religious views on the rest of us and this must be fought against (gee, I forget, who are the strongest voices against this sort of thing….Sam something, Christopher someone else) the underlying truth of the religious claims on which policies are formed is irrelevant to the discussion. How someone is supposed to make the argument that a religiously mandated death penalty for homosexuality can be argued against without touching the underlying theology and rationality he does not say.

Freddie doesn't care and that's his right, but if he wants to make the argument that none of the rest of us should care either, he's going to have to come up with a better argument than that.

by Patrick Appel

Stephen Barr unloads:

What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle.

 (Hat tip Joyner)

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I am so tired of these Christians who think they need to save the country for Jesus Christ and then they continue to misrepresent Him.

John 9:2-3

His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life."

Years ago, I was advised by another mother of a special needs child to find a verse in the Bible that I could reflect on throughout my daughter's life.  I chose Philippians 1:6, "being confident in this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it into completion until the day of Christ Jesus."

Bob Marshall gave me good cause to recite that to myself today.  He can say what he wants and think what he wants, but I will continue to serve God by raising the "good work" He gave me instead of carrying her as a burden or a punishment.

("Jesus Christ blessing the children" by Antoine Jean Joseph Ansiaux, 1820)

by Andrew Sullivan

Matthew Bloch comments on British evangelicals:

While David Cameron has defied the evangelicals on a few issues – to his credit, he supports civil partnerships, for example – he is poised to deliver them the biggest gift they will have received in generations. He will provide state funding for any group of parents who want to set up a school and can attract pupils. We know from Sweden – where this idea was taken from – that one sector is always waiting with the willpower and the organisation and the disgust with the existing schools system: religious fundamentalists.

As the National Secular Society has shown, Cameron's proposals will cause an explosion in fundamentalist schools. This will, over time, subtly alter the shape of Britain. Far more kids will be taught that abortion is evil, homosexuality is sinful, and evolution didn't happen. (Gay kids are 10 per cent more likely to be attacked in faith schools, a Stonewall study found.) And the horrible effects caused by New Labour's expansion of faith schools will get even worse.

This reads like fear-mongering to me. Are religious schools really that scary? They've existed in Britain for a very long time, funded by the government. Douthat, links to a FT article on evangelical Tories and  is – surprise! – more sympathetic to "a distinctively Christian approach to right-of-center politics" in Britain and suggests that "there are ways in which American conservatives — and social conservatives, obviously, in particular — might profit from their example." Many leading Tories are worried about this– because with open primaries, religious fundamentalists might start infiltrating the right in Britain, rendering them unelectable and easily mockable in a still mercifully secular British polity.