NO! FREE WILL DOES NOT EXIST!
Contrary to Dennett’s brilliant ratiocination about choice and free will, I still come down on the side that I am pretty much a robot. Dennett opens Chapter 8 with some serious considerations by scholars who also doubt that we human animals have free will. He even quotes himself:
“... those same decisions can also be seen to be strangely out of our control. We have to wait to see how we are going to decide something, and when we decide, our decision bubbles up to consciousness from we know not where. We do not witness it being made; we witness its arrival.”
Now isn’t that true, if we are honest with ourselves? Do we recall the moments of decision or the moments we are aware we've made the decisions?
Dennett quote’s Derk Pereboom’s book, “Living Without Free Will” (2001) in which Pereboom defends the view that “given our best scientific theories, factors beyond our control ultimately produce all of our actions, and we are, therefore, not morally responsible for them.”
Libet, the man who discovered and measured RP writes, “The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act.” (Libet 1999, p. 49) The argument for determinism traces back to Libet’s discovering and measuring “preconscious cognition” or the readiness potential, a measurable gap which exists between a decision and our conscious awareness of the decision which very strongly suggests a “moral void”. “When you think you’re deciding, you’re actually just passively watching a sort of delayed internal videotape, (the ominous 300-millisecond delay) of the real deciding that happened unconsciously in your brain quite a while before ‘it occurred to you’ to [act],” Libet writes.
MORAL DECAY? OR POVERTY? IS THERE A CHOICE?
Choice seems really important in the following matter. Conservatives love to blame America’s ills on the fact we don’t go to the Bible for our 3rd and nine plays, but couldn’t the wildness of some of our children also result from the increase in the numbers of those living below the poverty line in modern America?
In a report from Bush’s home state, “Counselors in Fort Worth and Arlington schools say today's kindergartners are experiencing more emotional and behavioral problems than their counterparts five years ago, according to a survey released in February. Several area educators contacted for this report expressed the same sentiment.
“More students are violent, lack discipline and show no respect for authority, according to the survey by the Partnership for Children and the Mental Health Connection of Tarrant County, Texas.
“The survey blamed the problems on issues including fractured families, a lack of structure for children and a growing incivility in public discourse.”
All well and good, but if we read further, we find a troubling fact: “The problem is widespread. National studies show that about 10 percent of preschool and young school-age children behave aggressively and that 25 percent of young, economically disadvantaged children do so.”
There it is—“economically disadvantaged children”! Can we use the word “poverty” to describe the situation at the bottom of our culture caused by Republican economic policies that favor the rich and harm the poor so that work is losing it’s meaning and it’s worth? Further, what if it’s true that some of us have little choice about how we’ll act after poverty conditions us to certain behaviors?
We truly need to sort out the chaff from the wheat on this one, for how can we doubly punish those who really can’t control their reactions to deterministic brain functions? What if poverty is determined by forces beyond a person’s control? Will we continue to blame them? If we blame someone for something he has no control over, then punishment is a futile way to alter behavior and a silly exercise in the first place. Could there be better ways of achieving good results?
Report by Cynthia L. Garza, Knight Ridder August 23, 2004 in our Spokesman Review.
___________________________________________________
"Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped." —Groucho Marx
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Monday, August 30, 2004
ALL I CAN DO IS PASS ON THE FACTS: KERRY EARNED HIS SILVER STAR
William B. Rood was there and puts an end to speculation about what did – and did not – happen.
"There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago – with three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on Feb. 28, 1969.
"One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened then. I am the other.
"For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election, with a group of swift-boat veterans and others contending Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for other actions.
"Many of us wanted to put it all behind us – the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service – even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work.
"But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have claimed that the accounts of what happened are overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.
"Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him, the attacks have continued, and in recent days, Kerry has called me and others who were with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.
"I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and never talk publicly about it again.
"I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.
"On Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three swift boats – the others were Kerry's PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz's PCF-43 – that carried Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a U.S. Navy demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep.
"The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats – each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesel engines and loaded down with six crew members, troops and gear – was no secret.
"Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.
"The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boat crews usually did to an ambush.
"We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.
"The Viet Cong had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and sending troops to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, the enemy was long gone by the time the troops got there.
"The first time we took fire – from the usual rockets and automatic weapons – Kerry ordered "turn 90," and the three boats roared in on the ambushers. It worked. We routed the attackers, killing three of them. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed a half dozen more Viet Cong, wounded or captured others and found weapons and supplies used to stage ambushes.
"Meanwhile, Kerry ordered my boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.
"It happened again – another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the "turn 90" maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 rocket launcher pointed at the boats. But it wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.
"We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a Viet Cong fighter behind a hooch – a thatched hut – maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site.
"Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.
"With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.
"Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he had chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.
"John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager" in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the Viet Cong usually wore.
"The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There also was firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and, at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.
"Our initial reports of the day's action caused an immediate response from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.
"Known over radio circuits by the call sign "Latch," then-Capt. and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, fired off a message congratulating the three swift boat crews, saying that the tactic of charging the attackers was a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers."
"Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry's and now says that what the boat crews did on that day demonstrated Kerry's inclination to be impulsive to a fault.
"However, our decision to use that tactic under the right circumstances was not impulsive but was the result of discussions well beforehand and a mutual agreement of all three boat officers.
"It also was well within the aggressive tradition that was embraced by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam.
"Months before that day in February, a fellow boat officer, Michael Bernique, was summoned to Saigon to explain to top Navy commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the Giang Thanh River, which runs along the Vietnam-Cambodia border. Bernique, who speaks French fluently, had been told by a source in Ha Tien at the mouth of the river that a Viet Cong tax collector was operating upstream.
"Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his crew went upstream and routed the Viet Cong, pursuing and killing several.
"Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had expected, Bernique was given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt ordered other swift boats, which had largely patrolled coastal waters, into the rivers.
"The decision sent a clear message, underscored repeatedly by Hoffmann's congratulatory messages, that aggressive patrolling was expected and that well-timed, if unconventional, tactics such as Bernique's were encouraged.
"What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders.
"Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at An Thoi off the southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver Star on Kerry and assorted Bronze Stars and commendation medals on the rest of us.
"My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we used, saying the Viet Cong were "caught completely off guard."
"There's at least one mistake in that citation. It incorrectly identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder that such documents often were drawn up in haste and sometimes authored for their signers by staffers.
"It's a cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There's no final authority on something that happened so long ago – not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.
"But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong. While they intend to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in the public eye.
"Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we charged the riverbank; Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat; and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun mount suppressing fire from the opposite bank.
"Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo River. That was just a few months after the birth of his only child, Tracy.
"The survivors of all these events are scattered across the United States now.
"Jerry Leeds lives in a Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his back yard.
"Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the Army.
"With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living that war another time."
William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune
August 24, 2004
_____________________________________________
With all this information (and more to come in other posts), we must ask why our Spokesman Review newspaper chose to "front page" reports which have the effect of making the lies by men who did not serve with John Kerry seem equal to the facts. A good job of reporting would help to serve the truth and point up all the lies which are coming out of these liars and also their personal craziness. I must question the Spokesman's Republican leanings when one of its editors admitted that the Spokesman has already made up its collective mind to endorse the lies of George Bush.
William B. Rood was there and puts an end to speculation about what did – and did not – happen.
"There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago – with three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on Feb. 28, 1969.
"One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened then. I am the other.
"For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election, with a group of swift-boat veterans and others contending Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for other actions.
"Many of us wanted to put it all behind us – the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service – even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work.
"But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have claimed that the accounts of what happened are overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.
"Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him, the attacks have continued, and in recent days, Kerry has called me and others who were with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.
"I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and never talk publicly about it again.
"I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.
"On Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three swift boats – the others were Kerry's PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz's PCF-43 – that carried Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a U.S. Navy demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep.
"The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats – each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesel engines and loaded down with six crew members, troops and gear – was no secret.
"Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.
"The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boat crews usually did to an ambush.
"We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.
"The Viet Cong had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and sending troops to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, the enemy was long gone by the time the troops got there.
"The first time we took fire – from the usual rockets and automatic weapons – Kerry ordered "turn 90," and the three boats roared in on the ambushers. It worked. We routed the attackers, killing three of them. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed a half dozen more Viet Cong, wounded or captured others and found weapons and supplies used to stage ambushes.
"Meanwhile, Kerry ordered my boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.
"It happened again – another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the "turn 90" maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 rocket launcher pointed at the boats. But it wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.
"We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a Viet Cong fighter behind a hooch – a thatched hut – maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site.
"Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.
"With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.
"Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he had chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.
"John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager" in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the Viet Cong usually wore.
"The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There also was firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and, at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.
"Our initial reports of the day's action caused an immediate response from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.
"Known over radio circuits by the call sign "Latch," then-Capt. and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, fired off a message congratulating the three swift boat crews, saying that the tactic of charging the attackers was a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers."
"Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry's and now says that what the boat crews did on that day demonstrated Kerry's inclination to be impulsive to a fault.
"However, our decision to use that tactic under the right circumstances was not impulsive but was the result of discussions well beforehand and a mutual agreement of all three boat officers.
"It also was well within the aggressive tradition that was embraced by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam.
"Months before that day in February, a fellow boat officer, Michael Bernique, was summoned to Saigon to explain to top Navy commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the Giang Thanh River, which runs along the Vietnam-Cambodia border. Bernique, who speaks French fluently, had been told by a source in Ha Tien at the mouth of the river that a Viet Cong tax collector was operating upstream.
"Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his crew went upstream and routed the Viet Cong, pursuing and killing several.
"Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had expected, Bernique was given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt ordered other swift boats, which had largely patrolled coastal waters, into the rivers.
"The decision sent a clear message, underscored repeatedly by Hoffmann's congratulatory messages, that aggressive patrolling was expected and that well-timed, if unconventional, tactics such as Bernique's were encouraged.
"What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders.
"Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at An Thoi off the southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver Star on Kerry and assorted Bronze Stars and commendation medals on the rest of us.
"My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we used, saying the Viet Cong were "caught completely off guard."
"There's at least one mistake in that citation. It incorrectly identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder that such documents often were drawn up in haste and sometimes authored for their signers by staffers.
"It's a cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There's no final authority on something that happened so long ago – not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.
"But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong. While they intend to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in the public eye.
"Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we charged the riverbank; Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat; and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun mount suppressing fire from the opposite bank.
"Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo River. That was just a few months after the birth of his only child, Tracy.
"The survivors of all these events are scattered across the United States now.
"Jerry Leeds lives in a Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his back yard.
"Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the Army.
"With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living that war another time."
William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune
August 24, 2004
_____________________________________________
With all this information (and more to come in other posts), we must ask why our Spokesman Review newspaper chose to "front page" reports which have the effect of making the lies by men who did not serve with John Kerry seem equal to the facts. A good job of reporting would help to serve the truth and point up all the lies which are coming out of these liars and also their personal craziness. I must question the Spokesman's Republican leanings when one of its editors admitted that the Spokesman has already made up its collective mind to endorse the lies of George Bush.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
SOAKING WET HEAD
As Doug MacArthur once said, "I have returned," or was that Jack Nicholson who said, "Here's Johnny!" that I'm thinking of? Anyhow, after soaking my head a few days at Ainsworth Hot Springs, me and my spouse are returned to the fray, rather the less frayed for wear and tear after a good soaking. Now, back to it, "out with my sword and to work withall!"
TROOP REALIGNMENT FITS CONSERVATIVE BIAS
Bushman Cheney’s conservative idea to realign American troops from Western to Eastern Europe makes sense to conservatives no doubt because they better understand the more primitive governments of Eastern Europe. Conservatives are comfortable there, and those nations are more likely to be their allies against Western Europe’s progressive mind sets which they still equate with communist leadership. Those nations most recently freed from dictatorial regimes will still be sympathetic to dictatorial and authoritarian mentalities in ways even they don’t understand. Look at how the Russian people threw over church and czarist authority only to accept Stalin’s authority. They’ll be quite comfortable with Bush’s authoritarian mentality.
Cheney’s rabid attack on governments which still feel responsible for their citizens’ welfare and which are still controlled a great deal by worker’s unions reflects his fear of nations which put their citizens ahead of their corporations. Such liberal governments are a threat to the authoritarian mentality of the bushmen whose only goal is an increase in the power of money over the needs of the citizens. This battle may be as important in the history of the globe as the battle against fascism of another sort was in the 20th century.
BOOKS KILL?
Newsweek’s “Taking Depression On” (about college student depression), in the August 23, 2004 issue (p. 59) reminds me vaguely of a segment in an ancient Saturday Review which discussed student depression long ago.
In the first place, maybe book reading is itself a depression causing activity because it has so little to do with the hunter gatherer mentality we’re still chained to. To a hunter/gatherer, sitting still, reading a book, might have been an unbearable restraint on freedom of activity and movement. All of us, even daily readers, can recall times when to sit still and read is almost maddening. I recall stories of non-modern people cracking up when confronted with modern civilization.
That long ago Review article mentioned the difficulty of coming into college and actually being asked to read hundreds of pages of homework, and, even more importantly, suddenly confronting uncomfortable ideas which are taboo in high school. Imagine! Being asked to consider that perhaps there’s no free will in the world or that religions go way back into prehistory and that each is a passing fad and each is no more relevant or true than another? Imagine learning that Popes are corrupt, that Abraham did not exist and is probably an heroic creation like the Greek epic heroes, meant to represent a tribe or city state?
Of course, if your parents and school system protected you from these facts, you’d be pretty depressed too, and suicidal, to find out that fairies and angels really don’t exist. It’s a shock that each of us must go through if we’re to really become grown up persons and sophisticated thinkers rather than blind followers of ideas really not our own, things fed to us with our fairy tales at bedtime. Yep! Growing up’s tough!
FREE WILL OOMPH!
If we are truly self-seeking, deterministic animals how do altruistic behaviors arise in such a way as to allow us to cooperate in larger social units? Evolutionary scientists are certainly measuring away to come up with explanations for free will mechanisms in the human animal. Many just believe we’re completely determined, that no free will exists.
First, let’s come up with an interesting finding with which to motivate us to try to be better altruists: “Altruists. . . do appear to do better economically: the experimental studies consistently find that altruistic behavior is positively correlated with socioeconomic status.” (Robert Frank’s, Passions Within Reason, p. 235.)
Can we tell if people are being “good”? “. . . Frank showed that people are surprisingly good—though far from perfect: between 60 and 75 percent accurate—at predicting who will [cheat] and who will cooperate.” (pp. 215-216)
Now back to Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves”: “Where does the oomph come from to overrule our own instincts? Tradition would say it comes from some psychic force called willpower, but this just names the phenomena and postpones explanation. How is ‘willpower’ implemented in our brains? According to Ainslie, we get it from a competitive situation in which ‘interests’ engage in what he calls ‘intertemporal bargaining.’ These ‘interests’ are temporary agents of sorts, homunculi representing various reward possibilities.”
I only intend to peak your interest with these paragraphs. Dennett’s arguments are subtle and lengthy, not easy for me to recap. (Specially today when I’ve got a slight sinus headache numbing my thoughts.) But, if we study the process of building a brain with altruistic wiring in it, Dennett finds that the processes of evolution are perfectly able to find a way to make it happen: “. . . if you want to get to genuine altruism, you should consider trying the evolutionary approach, sneaking up on it by gradual increments, with no Prime Mammals, and no skyhooks, passing from blind selfishness through psuedo-altruism to quasi-altruism (benselfishness) to something that may be quite good enough for all of us.” (p. 217)
As Doug MacArthur once said, "I have returned," or was that Jack Nicholson who said, "Here's Johnny!" that I'm thinking of? Anyhow, after soaking my head a few days at Ainsworth Hot Springs, me and my spouse are returned to the fray, rather the less frayed for wear and tear after a good soaking. Now, back to it, "out with my sword and to work withall!"
TROOP REALIGNMENT FITS CONSERVATIVE BIAS
Bushman Cheney’s conservative idea to realign American troops from Western to Eastern Europe makes sense to conservatives no doubt because they better understand the more primitive governments of Eastern Europe. Conservatives are comfortable there, and those nations are more likely to be their allies against Western Europe’s progressive mind sets which they still equate with communist leadership. Those nations most recently freed from dictatorial regimes will still be sympathetic to dictatorial and authoritarian mentalities in ways even they don’t understand. Look at how the Russian people threw over church and czarist authority only to accept Stalin’s authority. They’ll be quite comfortable with Bush’s authoritarian mentality.
Cheney’s rabid attack on governments which still feel responsible for their citizens’ welfare and which are still controlled a great deal by worker’s unions reflects his fear of nations which put their citizens ahead of their corporations. Such liberal governments are a threat to the authoritarian mentality of the bushmen whose only goal is an increase in the power of money over the needs of the citizens. This battle may be as important in the history of the globe as the battle against fascism of another sort was in the 20th century.
BOOKS KILL?
Newsweek’s “Taking Depression On” (about college student depression), in the August 23, 2004 issue (p. 59) reminds me vaguely of a segment in an ancient Saturday Review which discussed student depression long ago.
In the first place, maybe book reading is itself a depression causing activity because it has so little to do with the hunter gatherer mentality we’re still chained to. To a hunter/gatherer, sitting still, reading a book, might have been an unbearable restraint on freedom of activity and movement. All of us, even daily readers, can recall times when to sit still and read is almost maddening. I recall stories of non-modern people cracking up when confronted with modern civilization.
That long ago Review article mentioned the difficulty of coming into college and actually being asked to read hundreds of pages of homework, and, even more importantly, suddenly confronting uncomfortable ideas which are taboo in high school. Imagine! Being asked to consider that perhaps there’s no free will in the world or that religions go way back into prehistory and that each is a passing fad and each is no more relevant or true than another? Imagine learning that Popes are corrupt, that Abraham did not exist and is probably an heroic creation like the Greek epic heroes, meant to represent a tribe or city state?
Of course, if your parents and school system protected you from these facts, you’d be pretty depressed too, and suicidal, to find out that fairies and angels really don’t exist. It’s a shock that each of us must go through if we’re to really become grown up persons and sophisticated thinkers rather than blind followers of ideas really not our own, things fed to us with our fairy tales at bedtime. Yep! Growing up’s tough!
FREE WILL OOMPH!
If we are truly self-seeking, deterministic animals how do altruistic behaviors arise in such a way as to allow us to cooperate in larger social units? Evolutionary scientists are certainly measuring away to come up with explanations for free will mechanisms in the human animal. Many just believe we’re completely determined, that no free will exists.
First, let’s come up with an interesting finding with which to motivate us to try to be better altruists: “Altruists. . . do appear to do better economically: the experimental studies consistently find that altruistic behavior is positively correlated with socioeconomic status.” (Robert Frank’s, Passions Within Reason, p. 235.)
Can we tell if people are being “good”? “. . . Frank showed that people are surprisingly good—though far from perfect: between 60 and 75 percent accurate—at predicting who will [cheat] and who will cooperate.” (pp. 215-216)
Now back to Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves”: “Where does the oomph come from to overrule our own instincts? Tradition would say it comes from some psychic force called willpower, but this just names the phenomena and postpones explanation. How is ‘willpower’ implemented in our brains? According to Ainslie, we get it from a competitive situation in which ‘interests’ engage in what he calls ‘intertemporal bargaining.’ These ‘interests’ are temporary agents of sorts, homunculi representing various reward possibilities.”
I only intend to peak your interest with these paragraphs. Dennett’s arguments are subtle and lengthy, not easy for me to recap. (Specially today when I’ve got a slight sinus headache numbing my thoughts.) But, if we study the process of building a brain with altruistic wiring in it, Dennett finds that the processes of evolution are perfectly able to find a way to make it happen: “. . . if you want to get to genuine altruism, you should consider trying the evolutionary approach, sneaking up on it by gradual increments, with no Prime Mammals, and no skyhooks, passing from blind selfishness through psuedo-altruism to quasi-altruism (benselfishness) to something that may be quite good enough for all of us.” (p. 217)
Thursday, August 26, 2004
SITE SHUTDOWN
This site will shut down for a few days while I go soak my head, as in what my more polite conservative friends yell at me, "O go soak your head!" Ha, ha, though, on them, for it will be in Ainsworth hot springs in O Canada where the soaking will take place.
I hope they don't shoot Americans up there. I'm thinking of making up a bumper sticker that reads, "Yes, me too. I hate George Bush and everything he stands for!" But that's too long, damn it!
________________________________________________________
THINK ABOUT THIS!
"I have read your book and much like it." —Moses Hadas (1900-1966)
This site will shut down for a few days while I go soak my head, as in what my more polite conservative friends yell at me, "O go soak your head!" Ha, ha, though, on them, for it will be in Ainsworth hot springs in O Canada where the soaking will take place.
I hope they don't shoot Americans up there. I'm thinking of making up a bumper sticker that reads, "Yes, me too. I hate George Bush and everything he stands for!" But that's too long, damn it!
________________________________________________________
THINK ABOUT THIS!
"I have read your book and much like it." —Moses Hadas (1900-1966)
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
PORTER GOSS COMMENTS ON HIS OWN NOMINATION
“I couldn’t get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified.”
In his inimitably competent way, George Bush has selected a candidate for CIA director who has already told us what to make of his qualifications for the job. Porter’s own evaluation of himself was caught on tape in an interview with a Michael Moore production crew.
WHY KERRY IS RIGHT ON IRAQ
Fareed Zakaria offers us a sweet evaluation of why only the kind of “nuanced” thinking which Kerry is capable of can be effective in Iraq. (Newsweek, August 23, 2004, p. 35.) Zakaria introduces a book written for business operations to support his claim. (Remember when Republicans told us that business principles should be followed if we wanted to run government successfully?)
“Bossidy has written a book titled ‘Execution’, which is worth reading in this context. Almost every requirement he lays out was ignored by the Bush administration in its occupation of Iraq. One important example: ‘You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue—one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality,’ Bossidy writes. ‘Robust dialogue starts when people go in with open minds. You cannot set realistic goals until you’ve debated the assumptions behind them.’
“Say this in the business world and it is considered wisdom. But say it as a politician and it is derided as ‘nuance’ or ‘sophistication’. Perhaps that is why [Bush’s] Washington works as poorly as it does.”
We all know that Bush is not a man for discussion of policy or for open-mindedness. He’s not literate. He’s a rigid bull-ahead authoritarian personality, the kind of man who, in the wrong conditions, could become a dictator. He doesn’t like to read or discuss issues. He’s a “don’t bother me with the facts, my mind’s made up” sort of man. And, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this rigidity is part of the religious personality because they always bow to authority as the final arbiter for all decisions. They’re either looking to a hypothetical superbeing for leadership or an authoritarian personality to tell them what to do. In any country, the are a danger to freedom and individuality.
INGMAR BERGMAN, IN A RELIGIOUS HOUSEHOLD
In a collection of Ingmar Bergman (influential and powerful Swedish film director of the mid-20th century) interviews, called “Bergman on Bergman”, by Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns & Jonas Sima, Bergman reveals a few interesting things about being raised in his father’s house. Bergman’s father was a minister.
“Q: Your adolescence was unusually troublesome?
Bergman: .... As about near to a madhouse as anything could be.” (p. 24)
Earlier in the interview (p. 11), Bergman reveals other things about his being raised in a religious household:
“ My childhood and youth during the twenties and early thirties, in the environment where I was growing up, the sort of school I went to, the whole style of life, meant I was walking about half-asleep.... Emotionally I was confused. I was being brought up in an environment which, in relation to the world I was later to be thrown out into, was utterly naive.... [I’ve used the same word to describe my own, protected 50’s upbringing.] I went to a private school.... The home atmosphere was god-fearing. Everything was fifty years behind the times. I had [no one] to take me by the hand and lead me out of it. My schoolmates were just as dumb, just as debile, just as flabby, just as drifting as I was. There was absolutely nothing in our milieu which could wake us up or stimulate us. Outwardly, it was a protected world. Inwardly, it was grossly insecure.”
I think anyone overly protected is almost bound to grow up without a real moral compass. One must be tested to grow a value system of one’s own. Also, I think it’s very harmful to stuff a Bible book system of values into a child. It’s full of too much evil thinking and devilish behavior. It makes kids think the world is an evil place rather than the evolving human experimental station it truly is in which we can observe animals who are trying to grow up to be humans.
________________________________________________________
"I am an uncompromising pacifist . . . I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousnesss of belonging to the human family." —Rosika Schwimmer
“I couldn’t get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified.”
In his inimitably competent way, George Bush has selected a candidate for CIA director who has already told us what to make of his qualifications for the job. Porter’s own evaluation of himself was caught on tape in an interview with a Michael Moore production crew.
WHY KERRY IS RIGHT ON IRAQ
Fareed Zakaria offers us a sweet evaluation of why only the kind of “nuanced” thinking which Kerry is capable of can be effective in Iraq. (Newsweek, August 23, 2004, p. 35.) Zakaria introduces a book written for business operations to support his claim. (Remember when Republicans told us that business principles should be followed if we wanted to run government successfully?)
“Bossidy has written a book titled ‘Execution’, which is worth reading in this context. Almost every requirement he lays out was ignored by the Bush administration in its occupation of Iraq. One important example: ‘You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue—one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality,’ Bossidy writes. ‘Robust dialogue starts when people go in with open minds. You cannot set realistic goals until you’ve debated the assumptions behind them.’
“Say this in the business world and it is considered wisdom. But say it as a politician and it is derided as ‘nuance’ or ‘sophistication’. Perhaps that is why [Bush’s] Washington works as poorly as it does.”
We all know that Bush is not a man for discussion of policy or for open-mindedness. He’s not literate. He’s a rigid bull-ahead authoritarian personality, the kind of man who, in the wrong conditions, could become a dictator. He doesn’t like to read or discuss issues. He’s a “don’t bother me with the facts, my mind’s made up” sort of man. And, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this rigidity is part of the religious personality because they always bow to authority as the final arbiter for all decisions. They’re either looking to a hypothetical superbeing for leadership or an authoritarian personality to tell them what to do. In any country, the are a danger to freedom and individuality.
INGMAR BERGMAN, IN A RELIGIOUS HOUSEHOLD
In a collection of Ingmar Bergman (influential and powerful Swedish film director of the mid-20th century) interviews, called “Bergman on Bergman”, by Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns & Jonas Sima, Bergman reveals a few interesting things about being raised in his father’s house. Bergman’s father was a minister.
“Q: Your adolescence was unusually troublesome?
Bergman: .... As about near to a madhouse as anything could be.” (p. 24)
Earlier in the interview (p. 11), Bergman reveals other things about his being raised in a religious household:
“ My childhood and youth during the twenties and early thirties, in the environment where I was growing up, the sort of school I went to, the whole style of life, meant I was walking about half-asleep.... Emotionally I was confused. I was being brought up in an environment which, in relation to the world I was later to be thrown out into, was utterly naive.... [I’ve used the same word to describe my own, protected 50’s upbringing.] I went to a private school.... The home atmosphere was god-fearing. Everything was fifty years behind the times. I had [no one] to take me by the hand and lead me out of it. My schoolmates were just as dumb, just as debile, just as flabby, just as drifting as I was. There was absolutely nothing in our milieu which could wake us up or stimulate us. Outwardly, it was a protected world. Inwardly, it was grossly insecure.”
I think anyone overly protected is almost bound to grow up without a real moral compass. One must be tested to grow a value system of one’s own. Also, I think it’s very harmful to stuff a Bible book system of values into a child. It’s full of too much evil thinking and devilish behavior. It makes kids think the world is an evil place rather than the evolving human experimental station it truly is in which we can observe animals who are trying to grow up to be humans.
________________________________________________________
"I am an uncompromising pacifist . . . I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousnesss of belonging to the human family." —Rosika Schwimmer
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
COLLATERAL AIN’T GOT ANY
Saw Collateral with my wife. Okay, so it was good to see Cruise as a crook and having a nice cold look of bad guy, BUT....
Bang-bangs don’t work as good philosophy because even though Cruise’s character made nice statements of alienation and detachment, who can identify with a cold blooded killer? French New Wave was better and Ingmar Bergman. Which is what Collateral did: took a nice Bergmanesque bourgeois Swedish man and made him into an American killer. Don’t work.
People like short order cooks or like the Bill Murray character in “Lost In Translation” can act from existential motives too, and a story about an unarmed short order cook suffering his loneliness in a walk up room is very real, maybe too real for those who always want to escape. The only real escape from short order existential angst is to walk through the fire and get there by the shortest road possible which is circular and certainly not the straight and narrow. Once you arrive you’ll find that existential realism is the only happiness in town.
REPENTANT MURDERER IS FULL OF IT (SPIRIT)
Spokesman (8/15/04, p. A7) passes on the story of Richmond, Texas murderer who supposedly repented and confessed to murder after viewing “The Passion of the Christ”. I believe it, but I also know a secret. The guy was always a sad sack Christian with no self-worth or he wouldn’t have killed someone as he did. Have you ever wondered why so many death row dudes find Christ and repent right after they kill someone? Why don’t they discover how our Christian culture has shortchanged them and abandon the Christian culture for something more real before they commit the act of murder? In my point of view, simplistic religiosity is at the root of every murderer I ever heard of. When we no longer believe in sin we will no longer need murder to unloose our pent up pain.
PITY THE POOR HUMAN ANIMAL
Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves cites studies that show the human animal in evolving his value systems has had to deal with a tendency to reach for the grape near to hand rather than look ahead to the two grapes in the bush just around the next corner.
Dennett brings in Ulysses’s temptation by the Sirens as a case in point. Ulysses doesn’t trust himself to hold out against temptation so he prepares in advance for his trial, has his men tie him to the mast. Ulysses knows himself and “he knows what evolution has provided for him: a slightly second-rate faculty of reason that will cause him to take the immediate payoff... unless he takes steps now to distribute his decision-making over more favorable times and attitudes.” (p. 206)
Dennett quotes Robert Frank’s "Passions Within Reason": “It is important to stress that the experimental literature does not say that immediate payoffs get too much weight in every situation. It says only that they always get very heavy weight. On balance, that was likely a good thing in the environments in which we evolved. When selection pressures are intense, current payoffs are often the only ones that matter. The present, after all, is the gateway to the future.” (p. 89)
Of course, if the human animal now does demonstrate a semblance of free will and, therefore, a reliable level of trustworthiness, it’s important that it’s learned to delay gratification rather than be a slave to its emotions. It’s quite a balancing act, to get what you need in the present for surviving and to still get the benefits that cooperators get, to be trusted and not trusted at the same time.
Why does a human animal need to be trusted and not trusted at the same time? If competitors think you are an easy target who can be trusted to remain passive while he screws you, then you’re an easy target. Therefore, you must demonstrate an ability to fly off in a rage without actually flying off in a rage. If you are too rageful, then people who tend to cooperate with others will not trust you. Therefore, you will be able to hold off the aggressor, but you won’t be able to succeed like cooperators can succeed. You’ll survive, but your life won’t be as fulfilling, because alone. Doesn’t this answer all your questions about whether or not you’re a winner or a loser? This balancing act between being a member of society and an outsider and how that’s hooked into our animal nature? Get the balance too far to either extreme and you lose. Good reason for moderation in all cases?
How do we prove we’re trustworthy? Swearing on a Bible used to be an accurate indicator of our trustworthiness to other humans. What happened to that? We have to find ways to indicate that we are trustworthy to our fellow humans, but, as Dennett points out, “Swearing on a Bible is an empty ceremony that cannot convey usable information, since if it were to get started as a signal of reliability, it would immediately be copied and used by all the unreliable types, and hence lose its credibility and fall into disuse. You might try to save it by inflating the ceremony—I’ll swear on two Bibles, I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles—but the fruitlessness of this inflation is obvious, isn’t it? So here is the main problem: not just how can you make yourself into an agent that can be trusted in commitment problem cases, but how can you credibly advertise the fact that you are to be trusted?” (Dennett, pp. 204-205.)
This post grows too long. I hope I remember to get into the discussion later about how society is in a constant flux because of fake cooperators, trying to mix it up with the noncooperators and the cooperators.
_______________________________________________
"There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either." —Robert Graves
Saw Collateral with my wife. Okay, so it was good to see Cruise as a crook and having a nice cold look of bad guy, BUT....
Bang-bangs don’t work as good philosophy because even though Cruise’s character made nice statements of alienation and detachment, who can identify with a cold blooded killer? French New Wave was better and Ingmar Bergman. Which is what Collateral did: took a nice Bergmanesque bourgeois Swedish man and made him into an American killer. Don’t work.
People like short order cooks or like the Bill Murray character in “Lost In Translation” can act from existential motives too, and a story about an unarmed short order cook suffering his loneliness in a walk up room is very real, maybe too real for those who always want to escape. The only real escape from short order existential angst is to walk through the fire and get there by the shortest road possible which is circular and certainly not the straight and narrow. Once you arrive you’ll find that existential realism is the only happiness in town.
REPENTANT MURDERER IS FULL OF IT (SPIRIT)
Spokesman (8/15/04, p. A7) passes on the story of Richmond, Texas murderer who supposedly repented and confessed to murder after viewing “The Passion of the Christ”. I believe it, but I also know a secret. The guy was always a sad sack Christian with no self-worth or he wouldn’t have killed someone as he did. Have you ever wondered why so many death row dudes find Christ and repent right after they kill someone? Why don’t they discover how our Christian culture has shortchanged them and abandon the Christian culture for something more real before they commit the act of murder? In my point of view, simplistic religiosity is at the root of every murderer I ever heard of. When we no longer believe in sin we will no longer need murder to unloose our pent up pain.
PITY THE POOR HUMAN ANIMAL
Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves cites studies that show the human animal in evolving his value systems has had to deal with a tendency to reach for the grape near to hand rather than look ahead to the two grapes in the bush just around the next corner.
Dennett brings in Ulysses’s temptation by the Sirens as a case in point. Ulysses doesn’t trust himself to hold out against temptation so he prepares in advance for his trial, has his men tie him to the mast. Ulysses knows himself and “he knows what evolution has provided for him: a slightly second-rate faculty of reason that will cause him to take the immediate payoff... unless he takes steps now to distribute his decision-making over more favorable times and attitudes.” (p. 206)
Dennett quotes Robert Frank’s "Passions Within Reason": “It is important to stress that the experimental literature does not say that immediate payoffs get too much weight in every situation. It says only that they always get very heavy weight. On balance, that was likely a good thing in the environments in which we evolved. When selection pressures are intense, current payoffs are often the only ones that matter. The present, after all, is the gateway to the future.” (p. 89)
Of course, if the human animal now does demonstrate a semblance of free will and, therefore, a reliable level of trustworthiness, it’s important that it’s learned to delay gratification rather than be a slave to its emotions. It’s quite a balancing act, to get what you need in the present for surviving and to still get the benefits that cooperators get, to be trusted and not trusted at the same time.
Why does a human animal need to be trusted and not trusted at the same time? If competitors think you are an easy target who can be trusted to remain passive while he screws you, then you’re an easy target. Therefore, you must demonstrate an ability to fly off in a rage without actually flying off in a rage. If you are too rageful, then people who tend to cooperate with others will not trust you. Therefore, you will be able to hold off the aggressor, but you won’t be able to succeed like cooperators can succeed. You’ll survive, but your life won’t be as fulfilling, because alone. Doesn’t this answer all your questions about whether or not you’re a winner or a loser? This balancing act between being a member of society and an outsider and how that’s hooked into our animal nature? Get the balance too far to either extreme and you lose. Good reason for moderation in all cases?
How do we prove we’re trustworthy? Swearing on a Bible used to be an accurate indicator of our trustworthiness to other humans. What happened to that? We have to find ways to indicate that we are trustworthy to our fellow humans, but, as Dennett points out, “Swearing on a Bible is an empty ceremony that cannot convey usable information, since if it were to get started as a signal of reliability, it would immediately be copied and used by all the unreliable types, and hence lose its credibility and fall into disuse. You might try to save it by inflating the ceremony—I’ll swear on two Bibles, I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles—but the fruitlessness of this inflation is obvious, isn’t it? So here is the main problem: not just how can you make yourself into an agent that can be trusted in commitment problem cases, but how can you credibly advertise the fact that you are to be trusted?” (Dennett, pp. 204-205.)
This post grows too long. I hope I remember to get into the discussion later about how society is in a constant flux because of fake cooperators, trying to mix it up with the noncooperators and the cooperators.
_______________________________________________
"There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either." —Robert Graves
Monday, August 23, 2004
REPUBLICAN PLAN TO RETURN AMERICA TO 1910 SUCCEEDING
Following from the Spokesman Review, 8/17/04, p. A8:
“The growing disparity is even more pronounced in this recovering economy. Wages are stagnant and the middle class is shouldering a larger tax burden. Prices for health care, housing, tuition, gas and food have soared.
“The wealthiest 20 percent of households in 1973 accounted for 44 percent of total U.S. income, according to the Census Bureau. Their share jumped to 50 percent in 2002, while everyone else's fell. For the bottom fifth, the share dropped from 4.2 percent to 3.5 percent....
“New government data also shows that President Bush's tax cuts have shifted the overall tax burden to the middle class from the wealthiest Americans.”
There you have it, fellow Americans. The income gap between wealthiest top 20 percent of our citizens and the bottom 80 percent is growing, and if you study history, you’ll see that the Republican Party’s intellectual fringe, always calling liberals and the Roosevelts “socialists”, have been trying to return America’s economy to the early part of the 20th Century, before the reforms of Roosevelt made things fairer. I’ve pointed this out several times, and the facts continue to back me up. In 1910, 85% of our wealth was in the hands of 15% of us, while the the rest of us, 85%, battled over the remaining 15% of America’s wealth. Right now 50% of our wealth is in the hands of 20% percent of us. And whose labor created this wealth?
The situation is still a far cry from being as bad as it was in 1910, but the last two times I’ve come across these figures, they’ve been headed in the wrong direction. With the advent of Reagan, the Republicans openly began their tactic of creating huge deficits so that responsible Democrats have had to cut Roosevelt’s programs in order to bring the debt under control. It’s a callous and malicious Republican strategy, and so far, most Americans are blithely unaware of what’s happening to them and to America’s economic justice.
MY WRONG RIGHTED
Okay, a few post back, I called attention to my weak memory and to my wrong understanding of the terms of U.S. senators. Then, as if by magic, I came across another item in Newsweek, I think, that tells me where I got my wrong impression. It seems that U.S. senators used to be selected by each state’s legislature. Then in 1913, because of the corruption among senators that this system created, the Progressive’s of that era brought an end to that system and made the U.S. senator an elective office. Keyes, the conservative talk show host, made the a cornerstone of his drive to win elective office in Illinois. He wants to return us to the days when big business had even more control over our federal government than they do now. In those days, senators were actually owned by various rich individuals. The rich could much more easily control their state delegates than they could the population of any state. Why Keyes wants to return to that corrupt system, I don’t know, unless he sees that he can gain quite a lot of power and money for himself in the pockets of the rich as Senator from Illinois. But, now, I see why I got a wrong impression about that change in the early part of the 20th Century.
WHY DO REPUBLICANS WANT US TO RETURN TO THE DAYS OF OLD?
Both the previous news stories in this post have something to do with another story that appeared in the Spokesman Review of 8/15/04, p. A7.
When I was a kid and youth in the late 40s and the 50s, I never saw a bum in the streets. As I grew older, I learned about the Depression era hobos who traveled the country in search of work and who my grandfather used to invite in for a meal when he passed them along National Route 40 on his walk home from work. He never owned a car and always walked or took the streetcar.
Nowadays, we see hobos on every street corner near Interstate highways and some are venturing ever further into the cities and taking up stations at other corners and in mall parking lot entrances. Why is that? Is it truly because we have so many more “lazy” people? Or is it because under the Republican leadership of the last 20 years things are getting imperceptibly worse for the ones on the economic bottom? Republicans have removed so much of the safety net that the very most needy persons are falling through and onto public streets.
Some may say that they can go into shelters, but so many of the damn shelters these days are religious charity shelters. No one should be required to listen to lectures about faith in order to get help in America. That was my whole idea as a liberal—to create a system where those who needed help could find help when they needed it as a matter of RIGHT rather than as a matter of numbing charity. That’s my idea of a fair system. We all work and we all contribute as a matter of social policy and social fairness which makes for a stable society. As we all benefit by a stable society so we should all contribute to it. None of us minds contributing to the social stability a police force represents. Why should we complain of the social stability a safety net creates?
Anyhow, I’ve almost escaped the point. In those good old bad days of the Depression, I heard many of my elders say that they could understand and forgive a man who stole bread for his children to eat when they might not understand someone stealing money for drink and party. Well, here in Spokane, Washington, a man was arrested recently for trying to make off with about $100.00 worth of food. That’s right, he was stealing food. In the short entertaining tale of the battle between him and the security guard, we may have missed the point that the man was desperately stealing food and not panhandling for money for booze.
Yes, we’re ever getting closer to bushman’s world of the have and the have nots.
______________________________________________________
"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." —John F. Kennedy
Following from the Spokesman Review, 8/17/04, p. A8:
“The growing disparity is even more pronounced in this recovering economy. Wages are stagnant and the middle class is shouldering a larger tax burden. Prices for health care, housing, tuition, gas and food have soared.
“The wealthiest 20 percent of households in 1973 accounted for 44 percent of total U.S. income, according to the Census Bureau. Their share jumped to 50 percent in 2002, while everyone else's fell. For the bottom fifth, the share dropped from 4.2 percent to 3.5 percent....
“New government data also shows that President Bush's tax cuts have shifted the overall tax burden to the middle class from the wealthiest Americans.”
There you have it, fellow Americans. The income gap between wealthiest top 20 percent of our citizens and the bottom 80 percent is growing, and if you study history, you’ll see that the Republican Party’s intellectual fringe, always calling liberals and the Roosevelts “socialists”, have been trying to return America’s economy to the early part of the 20th Century, before the reforms of Roosevelt made things fairer. I’ve pointed this out several times, and the facts continue to back me up. In 1910, 85% of our wealth was in the hands of 15% of us, while the the rest of us, 85%, battled over the remaining 15% of America’s wealth. Right now 50% of our wealth is in the hands of 20% percent of us. And whose labor created this wealth?
The situation is still a far cry from being as bad as it was in 1910, but the last two times I’ve come across these figures, they’ve been headed in the wrong direction. With the advent of Reagan, the Republicans openly began their tactic of creating huge deficits so that responsible Democrats have had to cut Roosevelt’s programs in order to bring the debt under control. It’s a callous and malicious Republican strategy, and so far, most Americans are blithely unaware of what’s happening to them and to America’s economic justice.
MY WRONG RIGHTED
Okay, a few post back, I called attention to my weak memory and to my wrong understanding of the terms of U.S. senators. Then, as if by magic, I came across another item in Newsweek, I think, that tells me where I got my wrong impression. It seems that U.S. senators used to be selected by each state’s legislature. Then in 1913, because of the corruption among senators that this system created, the Progressive’s of that era brought an end to that system and made the U.S. senator an elective office. Keyes, the conservative talk show host, made the a cornerstone of his drive to win elective office in Illinois. He wants to return us to the days when big business had even more control over our federal government than they do now. In those days, senators were actually owned by various rich individuals. The rich could much more easily control their state delegates than they could the population of any state. Why Keyes wants to return to that corrupt system, I don’t know, unless he sees that he can gain quite a lot of power and money for himself in the pockets of the rich as Senator from Illinois. But, now, I see why I got a wrong impression about that change in the early part of the 20th Century.
WHY DO REPUBLICANS WANT US TO RETURN TO THE DAYS OF OLD?
Both the previous news stories in this post have something to do with another story that appeared in the Spokesman Review of 8/15/04, p. A7.
When I was a kid and youth in the late 40s and the 50s, I never saw a bum in the streets. As I grew older, I learned about the Depression era hobos who traveled the country in search of work and who my grandfather used to invite in for a meal when he passed them along National Route 40 on his walk home from work. He never owned a car and always walked or took the streetcar.
Nowadays, we see hobos on every street corner near Interstate highways and some are venturing ever further into the cities and taking up stations at other corners and in mall parking lot entrances. Why is that? Is it truly because we have so many more “lazy” people? Or is it because under the Republican leadership of the last 20 years things are getting imperceptibly worse for the ones on the economic bottom? Republicans have removed so much of the safety net that the very most needy persons are falling through and onto public streets.
Some may say that they can go into shelters, but so many of the damn shelters these days are religious charity shelters. No one should be required to listen to lectures about faith in order to get help in America. That was my whole idea as a liberal—to create a system where those who needed help could find help when they needed it as a matter of RIGHT rather than as a matter of numbing charity. That’s my idea of a fair system. We all work and we all contribute as a matter of social policy and social fairness which makes for a stable society. As we all benefit by a stable society so we should all contribute to it. None of us minds contributing to the social stability a police force represents. Why should we complain of the social stability a safety net creates?
Anyhow, I’ve almost escaped the point. In those good old bad days of the Depression, I heard many of my elders say that they could understand and forgive a man who stole bread for his children to eat when they might not understand someone stealing money for drink and party. Well, here in Spokane, Washington, a man was arrested recently for trying to make off with about $100.00 worth of food. That’s right, he was stealing food. In the short entertaining tale of the battle between him and the security guard, we may have missed the point that the man was desperately stealing food and not panhandling for money for booze.
Yes, we’re ever getting closer to bushman’s world of the have and the have nots.
______________________________________________________
"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." —John F. Kennedy
Sunday, August 22, 2004
MOST INTERESTING NRA VISION IN IRAQ
As we view photo after photo of angry Shiites in Iraq, waving their guns and defying their American occupiers, we get an idea of the sort of America the National Rifle Association hopes for with every angry man armed and ready to kill government officials they don’t agree with. Their vision is not of an America ruled by law, but of an America ruled by the force of guns. Hello, you “pry the gun out of my cold dead hands” Americans—is this truly what you want? An American culture like Iraq’s?
THE PHONY SMILE
I came across a priceless picture of Laura Bush smiling at the back of her husband’s head as he courts Nancy Reagan during a visit to Reagan’s home in Bel Air, California. In our Spokesman Review paper (August 13, 2004), the picture’s on p. A8, but it’s furnished from wire reports. I was unable to find a locus from which to link to my blog.
Laura stands behind and to the right, with blank eyes seemingly focused on her man. She stands the correct amount of steps behind her man that the obedient Bible wife needs to remain behind her man. She couldn’t be more posed and more phony. You’ll notice that the only public comments Laura makes are to attack her husband’s enemies. She has no real opinions of her own. This is what the weak, Republican Bible man needs from his woman, adoration and obedience. Sad, sad, sad....
THE MORAL ANIMAL?
In several postings, I’ve been passing on Dennett’s ideas that morality or religious feeling may very well have their roots in evolutionary genetics.
In thought experiments, Dennett discusses the idea that into every successful culture some “free loaders” make an appearance. There are several bird species, for example, who lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. A few free loaders make little difference to a culture, but what if they use the free ride to propagate themselves until they overwhelm the workers in the culture? But this overwhelming assumes there is no “reactivity” in the culture. By that, Dennett means no type evolves to “catch” the free loaders at their work and take measures to stop their increase.
If evolution is true, however, some reaction will always evolve to meet the conditions and to better fit the biological niche. Dennett distinguishes between two types in the original population which is being overwhelmed by the free loaders: the “benselfish” [good selfishness, Dennett’s coinage] and the “too pure altruists”, those who allow themselves to be used.
“So any mutations that permit the benselfish to distinguish themselves from pushovers will be favored, but then any freeloaders or pushovers who can disguise themselves as benselfish will tend to thrive, until the next phase of the arms race. A group’s evolution of the capacity for policing its members, by adopting the disposition among its members to punish violators (of whatever its other policies are), opens the floodgates to the social or cultural evolution of all manner of local norms.” (pp. 200-201)
“So far, then, our evolutionary story has suggested the sorts of conditions that could have brought us... to a prudent disposition for cooperation, reinforced by the disposition we share with our fellow citizens to “punish” those who don’t cooperate, but it is still a cold, robotic sort of mutually enforced nonaggression.... Broadly moral, but not purely moral. There is still no sign yet of treating the welfare of others as an end in itself....” (p.201)
“The very simplicity and relative rigidity of the abilities to discriminate the freeloaders from the good citizens, and the dispositions to ‘punish’ show that as far as this feature of culture is concerned, it could predate language and convention and ceremony. We’re not talking about trial by jury and public denunciation here; we’re talking about an unreflective, ‘brute’ inclination to channel some risky aggression against those of one’s group one has discriminated as norm-violators.” (pp. 201-202)
We can see, here, the rudimentary beginnings of morality and justice, based firmly in evolutionary processes of survival. Religion sneaks in by a side door. Groups will become the cultural repositories of this recently discovered “knowledge” that leads to conformity. The groups don’t have to wait for genetic accidents to improve the culture’s total but cautious “benselfish altruism”. They can begin to pass on knowledge from generation to generation.
“A price well worth paying for access to this brighter tempo of discovery is a certain vulnerability ot something like myth [religion], local misdiscoveries that nevertheless sell like hotcakes in the structured conformism of the group.” (p. 202)
____________________________________________
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." —H. L. Mencken
As we view photo after photo of angry Shiites in Iraq, waving their guns and defying their American occupiers, we get an idea of the sort of America the National Rifle Association hopes for with every angry man armed and ready to kill government officials they don’t agree with. Their vision is not of an America ruled by law, but of an America ruled by the force of guns. Hello, you “pry the gun out of my cold dead hands” Americans—is this truly what you want? An American culture like Iraq’s?
THE PHONY SMILE
I came across a priceless picture of Laura Bush smiling at the back of her husband’s head as he courts Nancy Reagan during a visit to Reagan’s home in Bel Air, California. In our Spokesman Review paper (August 13, 2004), the picture’s on p. A8, but it’s furnished from wire reports. I was unable to find a locus from which to link to my blog.
Laura stands behind and to the right, with blank eyes seemingly focused on her man. She stands the correct amount of steps behind her man that the obedient Bible wife needs to remain behind her man. She couldn’t be more posed and more phony. You’ll notice that the only public comments Laura makes are to attack her husband’s enemies. She has no real opinions of her own. This is what the weak, Republican Bible man needs from his woman, adoration and obedience. Sad, sad, sad....
THE MORAL ANIMAL?
In several postings, I’ve been passing on Dennett’s ideas that morality or religious feeling may very well have their roots in evolutionary genetics.
In thought experiments, Dennett discusses the idea that into every successful culture some “free loaders” make an appearance. There are several bird species, for example, who lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. A few free loaders make little difference to a culture, but what if they use the free ride to propagate themselves until they overwhelm the workers in the culture? But this overwhelming assumes there is no “reactivity” in the culture. By that, Dennett means no type evolves to “catch” the free loaders at their work and take measures to stop their increase.
If evolution is true, however, some reaction will always evolve to meet the conditions and to better fit the biological niche. Dennett distinguishes between two types in the original population which is being overwhelmed by the free loaders: the “benselfish” [good selfishness, Dennett’s coinage] and the “too pure altruists”, those who allow themselves to be used.
“So any mutations that permit the benselfish to distinguish themselves from pushovers will be favored, but then any freeloaders or pushovers who can disguise themselves as benselfish will tend to thrive, until the next phase of the arms race. A group’s evolution of the capacity for policing its members, by adopting the disposition among its members to punish violators (of whatever its other policies are), opens the floodgates to the social or cultural evolution of all manner of local norms.” (pp. 200-201)
“So far, then, our evolutionary story has suggested the sorts of conditions that could have brought us... to a prudent disposition for cooperation, reinforced by the disposition we share with our fellow citizens to “punish” those who don’t cooperate, but it is still a cold, robotic sort of mutually enforced nonaggression.... Broadly moral, but not purely moral. There is still no sign yet of treating the welfare of others as an end in itself....” (p.201)
“The very simplicity and relative rigidity of the abilities to discriminate the freeloaders from the good citizens, and the dispositions to ‘punish’ show that as far as this feature of culture is concerned, it could predate language and convention and ceremony. We’re not talking about trial by jury and public denunciation here; we’re talking about an unreflective, ‘brute’ inclination to channel some risky aggression against those of one’s group one has discriminated as norm-violators.” (pp. 201-202)
We can see, here, the rudimentary beginnings of morality and justice, based firmly in evolutionary processes of survival. Religion sneaks in by a side door. Groups will become the cultural repositories of this recently discovered “knowledge” that leads to conformity. The groups don’t have to wait for genetic accidents to improve the culture’s total but cautious “benselfish altruism”. They can begin to pass on knowledge from generation to generation.
“A price well worth paying for access to this brighter tempo of discovery is a certain vulnerability ot something like myth [religion], local misdiscoveries that nevertheless sell like hotcakes in the structured conformism of the group.” (p. 202)
____________________________________________
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." —H. L. Mencken
Friday, August 20, 2004
RELIGION AND EPILEPSY?
Science is beginning to zero in on a complex of genetic and cultural markers which may explain the evolutionary tendencies for religiosity (i.e. a capacity for the intense experience of religious feeling). A passage in “Freedom Evolves” triggered a memory in me of passages about religious conversion experiences from William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience” which I recalled from my youth. I hunted up a copy of James’s work and found the information I sought.
First, the passages in Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves”:
“Religion is ubiquitous in human culture, and it flourishes in spite of its considerable costs. Any phenomena that apparently exceeds the functional cries out for explanation.... From an evolutionary point of view, religion appears to be a ubiquitous penchant for somersaults of the most elaborate sort, and as such, it demands an explanation (p. 183).”
To simplify Dennett: religion doesn’t seem to have a good reason for existing. It’s so elaborate and requires so much effort and resources from its practitioners that it oughtn’t to have a function in human biology. Then Dennett goes on to list several reasons why religion might hang on so doggedly to the human imagination. Dennett ultimately suggests a genetic reason for religion. He’s not the only modern scientist to come up with possible genetic explanations for religion.
“There may, of course, actually be such things as genes for religion. For instance, heightened ‘religiosity’ is a defining symptom of certain forms of epilepsy, and it is known that there are genetic predispositions for epilepsy. It could be that cultural environments—sets of traditions and practices and expectations—become amplifiers and shapers of certain rare phenotypes, tending to turn them into shamans or priests or prophets whose message is whatever the local message is.... In just such a way the ‘gift of prophecy’ could actually ‘run in the family’—there would be a gene for it in exactly the same way there are genes for myopia or hypertension (p. 184).”
As I read the preceding passages in Dennett’s book, I recalled reading of conversion experiences described in William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, and I realized they could quite easily be described as epileptic fits. I had read James’s book about thirty years ago, and it’s a serious study of the religious experiences of major historical religious figures which he presented as a series of twenty lectures at the University of Edinburgh as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion in the early part of last century.
Additionally, I have also had a personal conversion experience about 28 years ago, but it did not land me in the Christian “born again” camp. It landed me in the believer camp for some time, but eventually, my practical nature took me back to skepticism and atheism, but I do understand what it feels like to think one has had a transcendental or spiritual experience such as religious peoples describe. My religious experience, though, in no way mimicked a seizure.
However, all these “spiritual” experiences are just as well described as emotional, psychological or psychic experiences. In fact, I don’t see how one can have a “spiritual” experience and recognize it as such since any spiritual experience which one “felt” would then be described in emotional terms. Many conversion experiences, after the discovery of electricity, are described in the terms of a felt electrical shock which, of course, would also describe a seizure. Once the meme for electricity entered our vocabulary, you would expect people to be able to describe the seizure and conversion experiences in those terms. Anyhow, let me give you two conversion experiences from James’s book which fall under the heading, I think, of “epileptic seizures” such as Dennett noted:
“The church of San Andrea [delle Fratte] was poor, small, and empty; I believe that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning before me as I mused. In an instant the dog disappeared, the whole church vanished, I no longer saw anything,... or more truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone.... I was there prostrated on the ground, bathed in my tears, with my heart beside itself, when M.B. called me back to life. I could not reply to the questions which followed from him one upon the other.”
Here’s a second conversion epileptic:
“I know not how I got back into the encampment, but found myself staggering up to [the] Holiness tent... and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I fell on my face by the bench, and tried to pray, and every time I would call on God, something like a man’s hand would strangle me by choking. I don’t know whether there were any one around or near me or not. I thought I should surely die if I did not get help, but just as often as I would pray, that unseen hand was felt on my throat and my breath squeezed off.... So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy, with the same choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of prayer for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I remember that time was falling back on the ground with the same unseen hand on my throat. I don’t know how long I lay there or what was going on.... When I came to myself, there were a crowd around me praising God.”
Both these describe a loss of consciousness one would expect in an epileptic event. So, if certain types of epilepsy have genetic and religious features, we can imagine that further study may find a genetic component to religious feeling.
_________________________________________________
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." —Napoleon
Science is beginning to zero in on a complex of genetic and cultural markers which may explain the evolutionary tendencies for religiosity (i.e. a capacity for the intense experience of religious feeling). A passage in “Freedom Evolves” triggered a memory in me of passages about religious conversion experiences from William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience” which I recalled from my youth. I hunted up a copy of James’s work and found the information I sought.
First, the passages in Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves”:
“Religion is ubiquitous in human culture, and it flourishes in spite of its considerable costs. Any phenomena that apparently exceeds the functional cries out for explanation.... From an evolutionary point of view, religion appears to be a ubiquitous penchant for somersaults of the most elaborate sort, and as such, it demands an explanation (p. 183).”
To simplify Dennett: religion doesn’t seem to have a good reason for existing. It’s so elaborate and requires so much effort and resources from its practitioners that it oughtn’t to have a function in human biology. Then Dennett goes on to list several reasons why religion might hang on so doggedly to the human imagination. Dennett ultimately suggests a genetic reason for religion. He’s not the only modern scientist to come up with possible genetic explanations for religion.
“There may, of course, actually be such things as genes for religion. For instance, heightened ‘religiosity’ is a defining symptom of certain forms of epilepsy, and it is known that there are genetic predispositions for epilepsy. It could be that cultural environments—sets of traditions and practices and expectations—become amplifiers and shapers of certain rare phenotypes, tending to turn them into shamans or priests or prophets whose message is whatever the local message is.... In just such a way the ‘gift of prophecy’ could actually ‘run in the family’—there would be a gene for it in exactly the same way there are genes for myopia or hypertension (p. 184).”
As I read the preceding passages in Dennett’s book, I recalled reading of conversion experiences described in William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, and I realized they could quite easily be described as epileptic fits. I had read James’s book about thirty years ago, and it’s a serious study of the religious experiences of major historical religious figures which he presented as a series of twenty lectures at the University of Edinburgh as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion in the early part of last century.
Additionally, I have also had a personal conversion experience about 28 years ago, but it did not land me in the Christian “born again” camp. It landed me in the believer camp for some time, but eventually, my practical nature took me back to skepticism and atheism, but I do understand what it feels like to think one has had a transcendental or spiritual experience such as religious peoples describe. My religious experience, though, in no way mimicked a seizure.
However, all these “spiritual” experiences are just as well described as emotional, psychological or psychic experiences. In fact, I don’t see how one can have a “spiritual” experience and recognize it as such since any spiritual experience which one “felt” would then be described in emotional terms. Many conversion experiences, after the discovery of electricity, are described in the terms of a felt electrical shock which, of course, would also describe a seizure. Once the meme for electricity entered our vocabulary, you would expect people to be able to describe the seizure and conversion experiences in those terms. Anyhow, let me give you two conversion experiences from James’s book which fall under the heading, I think, of “epileptic seizures” such as Dennett noted:
“The church of San Andrea [delle Fratte] was poor, small, and empty; I believe that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning before me as I mused. In an instant the dog disappeared, the whole church vanished, I no longer saw anything,... or more truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone.... I was there prostrated on the ground, bathed in my tears, with my heart beside itself, when M.B. called me back to life. I could not reply to the questions which followed from him one upon the other.”
Here’s a second conversion epileptic:
“I know not how I got back into the encampment, but found myself staggering up to [the] Holiness tent... and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I fell on my face by the bench, and tried to pray, and every time I would call on God, something like a man’s hand would strangle me by choking. I don’t know whether there were any one around or near me or not. I thought I should surely die if I did not get help, but just as often as I would pray, that unseen hand was felt on my throat and my breath squeezed off.... So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy, with the same choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of prayer for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I remember that time was falling back on the ground with the same unseen hand on my throat. I don’t know how long I lay there or what was going on.... When I came to myself, there were a crowd around me praising God.”
Both these describe a loss of consciousness one would expect in an epileptic event. So, if certain types of epilepsy have genetic and religious features, we can imagine that further study may find a genetic component to religious feeling.
_________________________________________________
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." —Napoleon
Thursday, August 19, 2004
THEY WILL STOOP VERY LOW
This latest attack on Kerry's record, orchestrated by ex-Nixon men and millionaire Republican fascists in America just goes to show how far toward fascism the Bush supporters have gone. They're falling behind on the issues and are desperate. Their goal, like good defense lawyers, is to cause just enough doubt to sway one or two jurors (percent of voters) to change their minds. Doubt and confusion are the tactics of fascists, and these bushmen bushwackers are good at it. Study Hitler's rise to power, the way fascists created confusion and broke up meetings with hecklers and beat up those who opposed them. Hitler was probably not even as good as these millionaire bushmen who received 75% of Bush's tax cut. Do you think they wouldn't do anything for their money, make up any lies?
But the answers to their ridiculous made up charges are so easy to come up with. The men on Kerry's boat are the ones who were with Kerry. They were there and stand with him. They know better than these other guys what went down. These other ex military men are staunch Republicans, every one. They're angry at Kerry for telling the truth about Vietnam. Now would these Republicans lie? You bet your damn bottom dollar they would. Every word they say reveals their motives.
Also, we must believe, to believe these Republican military men, that 40 years before he ran for President, Kerry talked a man into being blown into the water so that he could turn his boat back and pull him from the water and get a medal for it. Pretty far fetched, isn't it?
Next, if there was no small arms fire at the time or any exchange of gunfire, how did the man that Kerry rescued get blown into the water? Did he invent the fact that he was blown into the water? Did he jump in so that Kerry could be a hero? I think in and around the time that Kerry turned back to save the guy there was plenty of hot fire and potential for hot fire every minute. So what if a bullet didn't sing by at the very moment of rescue?
Another question to ask is why were the other boats leaving the scene when Kerry turned back. Were they just running from shadows?
Damn, these bushwackers are men without one stitch of conscience. And to new young voters, I say that this is what we protesters faced in the 60s. We knew the character of these men, and these men were angry about segregation ending, they didn't like women who didn't stay in the home barefoot and pregnant, they were racists and misogynists and illiberal haters of mankind. That's why they could shoot down college students without a qualm. That's why Nixon could spy on Americans and create his own secret police force and use the government to hound down private citizens who opposed his war. Now you can see their tactics right before your very eyes. These are not true Americans who love a country of laws. These are men who will do anything and say anything to force their will on the rest of us and increase their wealth and power. These are the kind of men who create concentration camps, if given enough power, to put any body into who gets in their way.
MORE ON FOX, OUTFOXED
Bill O’Reilly never shows much capacity for sustained thought. He’s a knee-jerk talking head, the kind of father no one would wish on any son. He’s a shouting, posturing, thoughtless bully, actually, and even if he weren't a knee-jerk Republican front man, he’s a “jerk” for sure.
The most damning moment in "OutFoxed", the movie exposing the sham operation Fox News is, occurs when the respected journalist, Walter Cronkite, says that he has never, in his professional life, seen a reputable news outfit run like Fox News is run.
Fox News, under Republican Aisles, is a top down operation, the tool of Rupert Murdoch who has plans to be the next Imperial Wizard of the World. He tells everyone in his Fox propaganda department what to do, what to think, what to report and who to attack and who to support, but first he checks with George Bush to find out what the daily talking point is to be. There’s actually no news of Fox, only Rupert’s opinions all the way down.
Rupert Murdoch was not raised in America. Australian Rupert’s corruption of our American news process is probably one of the most dangerous things ever to occur in recent American news history. He’s corrupting the whole process. He has no sense of what the job of the American press should be. He’s taking us back to the days of the worst sort of yellow journalism in the Hearst papers.
DICK CHENEY, ANOTHER O’REILLY CURSING HEAD
Remember in 2001 when Dick Cheney dissed conservation as nothing more than a “personal virtue”, essentially useless? According to Amory Lovins of he Rocky Mountain Institute, “Some 40 percent of the nation’s energy needs since 1975 have been met purely through using energy more intelligently,” reports Jane Bryant Quinn in Newsweek, August 16, 2004, p. 65.
Whereas Kerry promises investment in alternative fuels and to raise vehicle mileage standards and to subsidize energy efficiency, bushman Bush continues to cut research in energy efficiency and to gut efficiency standards for autos, appliances and air conditioners.
SPEAKING OF BUSH’S ENDLESS SCREW UPS
As Bush said in a speech last week, he’s doing everything in his power to harm the United States. Let’s look at another way his war in Iraq is harming us and the world. Fareed Zakaria in an article in Newsweek, August 16, 2004, p. 33, discusses the problems Europeans are having in trying to deal with Iran’s rising interest in atomic weapons.
“Having burst into action last fall, it [Europe] does not seem to know what to do now that Iran has rebuffed its efforts. It is urging negotiations again, which is fine. But what will it tell Iran in these negotiations? What is the threat that it is willing to wield?” says Zakaria.
The truth is that Iran has no reason to stop developing weapons. It’s seen what happens to weaker nations at the hands of a dictatorial world leader like George Bush. What small, unarmed nation would not be better off armed to the teeth with atomic missiles in Bush’s cutthroat world? Bush demonstrated to the world that America can no longer be trusted to show restraint in the use of its arms. Not only that, Bush showed that an ignorant American president can’t even attack the right country. If ignorant Americans can elect an ignorant president like Bush who thinks he has the right to attack any nation he considers dangerous (who decides who is dangerous?), then the whole world has a right to stand back and let America fend for itself. They must be thinking, “What in hell will that jackass be doing next?”
TERRORISTS HAVING TROUBLING SUCCESS
The terrorists are enjoying a mighty success over America when you think about it. It’s pretty scary. In our little city of Spokane, Washington, as alerts rise and fall, many man hours are lost in placing and removing barrels and barricades around federal buildings. And permanent guards are now in place in our city, county and federal buildings. Imagine our expenses duplicated all over the U.S.
America must be losing billions of dollars every year in this effort to stop terrorists. Terrorists really don’t have to do anything now but keep signal “traffic” high, and they’ll be weakening America’s economy, impoverishing the impoverished, destroying subsidized housing, weakening Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, putting a further strain on our dollar, lifting gas prices, and undermining the equity markets. Budgets everywhere are strained and the prospects are for everything to get worse. I’d say the terrorists are having a mighty damaging effect on America, wouldn’t you? And they don’t even need to attack us again for five or ten years to be effective in their damage.
Imagine if that idiot Bush had stuck to his guns in Afghanistan and kept after bin Laden! The whole world would still be behind us and in sympathy for our loses and trying to help us in any way they could. Instead, dunder headed Bush got the cowboy bit between his teeth and ran off with the apple cart, overturning it and getting us all into a thick applesauce.
________________________________________
"I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future." —George Bush [If only that were so, I could breeze easier. Speaking reflects how well one thinks.
Pretty scary, eh?]
This latest attack on Kerry's record, orchestrated by ex-Nixon men and millionaire Republican fascists in America just goes to show how far toward fascism the Bush supporters have gone. They're falling behind on the issues and are desperate. Their goal, like good defense lawyers, is to cause just enough doubt to sway one or two jurors (percent of voters) to change their minds. Doubt and confusion are the tactics of fascists, and these bushmen bushwackers are good at it. Study Hitler's rise to power, the way fascists created confusion and broke up meetings with hecklers and beat up those who opposed them. Hitler was probably not even as good as these millionaire bushmen who received 75% of Bush's tax cut. Do you think they wouldn't do anything for their money, make up any lies?
But the answers to their ridiculous made up charges are so easy to come up with. The men on Kerry's boat are the ones who were with Kerry. They were there and stand with him. They know better than these other guys what went down. These other ex military men are staunch Republicans, every one. They're angry at Kerry for telling the truth about Vietnam. Now would these Republicans lie? You bet your damn bottom dollar they would. Every word they say reveals their motives.
Also, we must believe, to believe these Republican military men, that 40 years before he ran for President, Kerry talked a man into being blown into the water so that he could turn his boat back and pull him from the water and get a medal for it. Pretty far fetched, isn't it?
Next, if there was no small arms fire at the time or any exchange of gunfire, how did the man that Kerry rescued get blown into the water? Did he invent the fact that he was blown into the water? Did he jump in so that Kerry could be a hero? I think in and around the time that Kerry turned back to save the guy there was plenty of hot fire and potential for hot fire every minute. So what if a bullet didn't sing by at the very moment of rescue?
Another question to ask is why were the other boats leaving the scene when Kerry turned back. Were they just running from shadows?
Damn, these bushwackers are men without one stitch of conscience. And to new young voters, I say that this is what we protesters faced in the 60s. We knew the character of these men, and these men were angry about segregation ending, they didn't like women who didn't stay in the home barefoot and pregnant, they were racists and misogynists and illiberal haters of mankind. That's why they could shoot down college students without a qualm. That's why Nixon could spy on Americans and create his own secret police force and use the government to hound down private citizens who opposed his war. Now you can see their tactics right before your very eyes. These are not true Americans who love a country of laws. These are men who will do anything and say anything to force their will on the rest of us and increase their wealth and power. These are the kind of men who create concentration camps, if given enough power, to put any body into who gets in their way.
MORE ON FOX, OUTFOXED
Bill O’Reilly never shows much capacity for sustained thought. He’s a knee-jerk talking head, the kind of father no one would wish on any son. He’s a shouting, posturing, thoughtless bully, actually, and even if he weren't a knee-jerk Republican front man, he’s a “jerk” for sure.
The most damning moment in "OutFoxed", the movie exposing the sham operation Fox News is, occurs when the respected journalist, Walter Cronkite, says that he has never, in his professional life, seen a reputable news outfit run like Fox News is run.
Fox News, under Republican Aisles, is a top down operation, the tool of Rupert Murdoch who has plans to be the next Imperial Wizard of the World. He tells everyone in his Fox propaganda department what to do, what to think, what to report and who to attack and who to support, but first he checks with George Bush to find out what the daily talking point is to be. There’s actually no news of Fox, only Rupert’s opinions all the way down.
Rupert Murdoch was not raised in America. Australian Rupert’s corruption of our American news process is probably one of the most dangerous things ever to occur in recent American news history. He’s corrupting the whole process. He has no sense of what the job of the American press should be. He’s taking us back to the days of the worst sort of yellow journalism in the Hearst papers.
DICK CHENEY, ANOTHER O’REILLY CURSING HEAD
Remember in 2001 when Dick Cheney dissed conservation as nothing more than a “personal virtue”, essentially useless? According to Amory Lovins of he Rocky Mountain Institute, “Some 40 percent of the nation’s energy needs since 1975 have been met purely through using energy more intelligently,” reports Jane Bryant Quinn in Newsweek, August 16, 2004, p. 65.
Whereas Kerry promises investment in alternative fuels and to raise vehicle mileage standards and to subsidize energy efficiency, bushman Bush continues to cut research in energy efficiency and to gut efficiency standards for autos, appliances and air conditioners.
SPEAKING OF BUSH’S ENDLESS SCREW UPS
As Bush said in a speech last week, he’s doing everything in his power to harm the United States. Let’s look at another way his war in Iraq is harming us and the world. Fareed Zakaria in an article in Newsweek, August 16, 2004, p. 33, discusses the problems Europeans are having in trying to deal with Iran’s rising interest in atomic weapons.
“Having burst into action last fall, it [Europe] does not seem to know what to do now that Iran has rebuffed its efforts. It is urging negotiations again, which is fine. But what will it tell Iran in these negotiations? What is the threat that it is willing to wield?” says Zakaria.
The truth is that Iran has no reason to stop developing weapons. It’s seen what happens to weaker nations at the hands of a dictatorial world leader like George Bush. What small, unarmed nation would not be better off armed to the teeth with atomic missiles in Bush’s cutthroat world? Bush demonstrated to the world that America can no longer be trusted to show restraint in the use of its arms. Not only that, Bush showed that an ignorant American president can’t even attack the right country. If ignorant Americans can elect an ignorant president like Bush who thinks he has the right to attack any nation he considers dangerous (who decides who is dangerous?), then the whole world has a right to stand back and let America fend for itself. They must be thinking, “What in hell will that jackass be doing next?”
TERRORISTS HAVING TROUBLING SUCCESS
The terrorists are enjoying a mighty success over America when you think about it. It’s pretty scary. In our little city of Spokane, Washington, as alerts rise and fall, many man hours are lost in placing and removing barrels and barricades around federal buildings. And permanent guards are now in place in our city, county and federal buildings. Imagine our expenses duplicated all over the U.S.
America must be losing billions of dollars every year in this effort to stop terrorists. Terrorists really don’t have to do anything now but keep signal “traffic” high, and they’ll be weakening America’s economy, impoverishing the impoverished, destroying subsidized housing, weakening Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, putting a further strain on our dollar, lifting gas prices, and undermining the equity markets. Budgets everywhere are strained and the prospects are for everything to get worse. I’d say the terrorists are having a mighty damaging effect on America, wouldn’t you? And they don’t even need to attack us again for five or ten years to be effective in their damage.
Imagine if that idiot Bush had stuck to his guns in Afghanistan and kept after bin Laden! The whole world would still be behind us and in sympathy for our loses and trying to help us in any way they could. Instead, dunder headed Bush got the cowboy bit between his teeth and ran off with the apple cart, overturning it and getting us all into a thick applesauce.
________________________________________
"I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future." —George Bush [If only that were so, I could breeze easier. Speaking reflects how well one thinks.
Pretty scary, eh?]
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND ART
Camille Paglia shows her ignorance of science and the current state of knowledge about consciousness when she says on page 232 of Sexual Personae that “His [Rousseau’s] narcissism evolves into Romantic solipsism, doubt about the reality of things outside the self.” She’s being negative of course. Paglia, like so many Republicans and their religious right, deplores the 60s and 70’s for their Romantic unreality, disorder and disregard for authority.
The truth is that anyone who doesn’t question “the reality of things outside the self” is sadly out of touch with reality. Another way to consider Paglia’s case is to think of “appearance versus reality” as Dennett does in his book, Freedom Evolves. Quite accidentally I happened to read in both these books one night and came across these contrasting views of reality. Let me quote from Dennett:
“The recognition of the difference between appearance [what we think is out there] and reality [what’s really out there] is a human discovery. A few other species... show signs of appreciating the phenomena of ‘false belief’—getting it wrong.” But animals lack the capacity of “reflection” which allows humans to understand the problem of appearances. “That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality is a wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered.
“We are the species that discovered doubt,” Dennett writes. (At least some of us have, the non-religious among us.) “Is there enough food laid by for winter? Is my mate cheating on me? Is it safe to enter this cave? [Why should I believe there’s a god?] “[Animals] cannot actually ask themselves these questions.... They are stuck in a world of appearances, making the best they can of how things seem and seldom, if ever, worrying about whether how things seem is how they truly are. We alone can be racked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth seeking methods.” (Dennett, pp. 164-165)
Doubt about reality can be a good thing, Camille.
HUMANISTS WORK TO GOOD EFFECT
“On May 6, 2004, the FDA rejected the request to make Plan B emergency contraceptives available over-the-counter. Plan B is currently obtainable only by prescription despite the fact that increased availability would drastically reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancy after unprotected sex or contraceptive failure. To counter this attack on reproductive rights, the American Humanist Association released a statement condemning the FDA’s pronouncement. Now the AHA is supporting a move to investigate the political pressures around the decision.” (FreeMind magazine, August/September, 2004, p. 9.)
I believe, when we look deeply enough for political pressure, we’ll find another case of certain congresspersons’ religion being promoted over scientific objectivity. Now how can that be in a nation in which we supposedly have a wall of separation between church and state? Who is breaching this wall and why?
OUTFOXED (Buy It!)
The recent study of Fox News Network contained in the VHS production, “Outfoxed”, comes up with some very enlightening information. Did you know that if you watch Fox News exclusively, you are three times more likely to have wrong information about Iraq than if your news source was some other media outlet? These figures were derived from asking viewers after the facts were established what they believed the facts to be. By a number of three to one, Fox viewers believed false information.
Also, it may not surprise you to know that Bill O’Reilly is a nut case of the worst variety, an almost pathological liar. The powerful pundit slandered a young man for almost a year after he came on O’Reilly’s show to speak of his father’s death on 9/11 in the Trade Towers. O’Reilly continually made up statements that the young man did not say and totally distorted the young man’s position.
Since the young man was not a public figure and could, he did look into suing O’Reilly for slander. However, the lawyer who listened to the situation opined that before a case of slander can be made, the young man must first prove that Bill O’Reilly knew that he was speaking falsely, but since O’Reilly is notoriously misinformed and lies so frequently, it would be difficult to prove that O’Reilly does know truth from falsity. In short, if you lie pathologically as O’Reilly does, you can’t be sued for lying.
Also, it should be noted that on the day of the original broadcast, O’Reilly was so enraged and out of control that staffers for his show made sure that the young man got out of the building safely and quickly because they were afraid for the young man’s continued health. A fascist figure for sure is this Bill O’Reilly. It’s bad enough being an honest man in O’Reilly’s Foxdom. I definitely wouldn’t want to be a Jew in his Germany.
_______________________________________
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination." —Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) [They had fundamentalists too.]
Camille Paglia shows her ignorance of science and the current state of knowledge about consciousness when she says on page 232 of Sexual Personae that “His [Rousseau’s] narcissism evolves into Romantic solipsism, doubt about the reality of things outside the self.” She’s being negative of course. Paglia, like so many Republicans and their religious right, deplores the 60s and 70’s for their Romantic unreality, disorder and disregard for authority.
The truth is that anyone who doesn’t question “the reality of things outside the self” is sadly out of touch with reality. Another way to consider Paglia’s case is to think of “appearance versus reality” as Dennett does in his book, Freedom Evolves. Quite accidentally I happened to read in both these books one night and came across these contrasting views of reality. Let me quote from Dennett:
“The recognition of the difference between appearance [what we think is out there] and reality [what’s really out there] is a human discovery. A few other species... show signs of appreciating the phenomena of ‘false belief’—getting it wrong.” But animals lack the capacity of “reflection” which allows humans to understand the problem of appearances. “That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality is a wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered.
“We are the species that discovered doubt,” Dennett writes. (At least some of us have, the non-religious among us.) “Is there enough food laid by for winter? Is my mate cheating on me? Is it safe to enter this cave? [Why should I believe there’s a god?] “[Animals] cannot actually ask themselves these questions.... They are stuck in a world of appearances, making the best they can of how things seem and seldom, if ever, worrying about whether how things seem is how they truly are. We alone can be racked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth seeking methods.” (Dennett, pp. 164-165)
Doubt about reality can be a good thing, Camille.
HUMANISTS WORK TO GOOD EFFECT
“On May 6, 2004, the FDA rejected the request to make Plan B emergency contraceptives available over-the-counter. Plan B is currently obtainable only by prescription despite the fact that increased availability would drastically reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancy after unprotected sex or contraceptive failure. To counter this attack on reproductive rights, the American Humanist Association released a statement condemning the FDA’s pronouncement. Now the AHA is supporting a move to investigate the political pressures around the decision.” (FreeMind magazine, August/September, 2004, p. 9.)
I believe, when we look deeply enough for political pressure, we’ll find another case of certain congresspersons’ religion being promoted over scientific objectivity. Now how can that be in a nation in which we supposedly have a wall of separation between church and state? Who is breaching this wall and why?
OUTFOXED (Buy It!)
The recent study of Fox News Network contained in the VHS production, “Outfoxed”, comes up with some very enlightening information. Did you know that if you watch Fox News exclusively, you are three times more likely to have wrong information about Iraq than if your news source was some other media outlet? These figures were derived from asking viewers after the facts were established what they believed the facts to be. By a number of three to one, Fox viewers believed false information.
Also, it may not surprise you to know that Bill O’Reilly is a nut case of the worst variety, an almost pathological liar. The powerful pundit slandered a young man for almost a year after he came on O’Reilly’s show to speak of his father’s death on 9/11 in the Trade Towers. O’Reilly continually made up statements that the young man did not say and totally distorted the young man’s position.
Since the young man was not a public figure and could, he did look into suing O’Reilly for slander. However, the lawyer who listened to the situation opined that before a case of slander can be made, the young man must first prove that Bill O’Reilly knew that he was speaking falsely, but since O’Reilly is notoriously misinformed and lies so frequently, it would be difficult to prove that O’Reilly does know truth from falsity. In short, if you lie pathologically as O’Reilly does, you can’t be sued for lying.
Also, it should be noted that on the day of the original broadcast, O’Reilly was so enraged and out of control that staffers for his show made sure that the young man got out of the building safely and quickly because they were afraid for the young man’s continued health. A fascist figure for sure is this Bill O’Reilly. It’s bad enough being an honest man in O’Reilly’s Foxdom. I definitely wouldn’t want to be a Jew in his Germany.
_______________________________________
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination." —Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) [They had fundamentalists too.]
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
A DOG MAKES COLONS OF US ALL
“ ‘Use it or lose it’ is a motto with many applications in the animal world. For instance, the brains of domesticated animals are significantly smaller than the brains of their nearest wild kin, and this is not just a by-product of selection for large muscle mass in animals raised for food. Domesticated animals can afford to be stupid and still have lots of offspring, for they have in effect out sourced many of their cognitive tasks to another species, us [humans], on which they have become parasitic. Like the tapeworms that have ‘decided’ to trust us to handle all their locomotion and food finding tasks for them so that they can drastically simplify their nervous systems, which they no longer need, domesticated animals would be in tough shape without their human hosts to live off. They are not endoparasites, living inside us, but they are still parasites.” —Daniel Dennett in Freedom Evolves, pp. 163-164
Lo, how the humble dog has come up in the world! Parasite that he is, he makes us feed him and take care of him and some of us spend thousands of dollars to keep him alive when he grows old and feeble. The dog without elaborate language skills has indeed studied and mastered us.
BUSH STIRS UP A HORNET’S NEST
A Spokesman Review story (August 9, 2004, p. A8) tells us about multiplying “al Qaeda franchises”: “The emergence of these groups is making the fight against terrorism more challenging.... It’s like McDonald’s giving out franchises..,” said Dia’a Rashman, an Egyptian expert on militant groups. These bin Laden al Qaeda franchises “pose a ‘catastrophic threat’” to the United States and its friends and allies.
Thank Bushman for brilliant planning and foresight and nuanced thinking. All kinds of groups of Islamic terrorists are arising from a common hatred of America, and they are only connected by that common hatred. You can kill all the bin Ladens you want, and these new groups will go on. Bush has loosed the hydra-headed beast.
BUSH STIRS UP OIL PRICES
Whereas oil supplies in Iraq keep being disrupted by Bush’s war while demand rises and whereas Bush and Republicans have always been unsupportive of increasing automobile fuel efficiency, we know who is responsible for stirring up oil prices, don’t we?
PILOT SHOT DOWN
(Spokesman Review, 8/10/04, p. B1). I see that the shot down pilot, Scott O’Grady, visited Spokane, Washington recently (where he no longer lives) to support Bush for president. O’Grady claims to admire Bush because he “says what he means and means what he says” whatever Scott means when he says that Bush ‘means what he says’...? I mean... who doesn’t mean what he says—even when he means to deceive? It’s what Bush means when he says what he means that’s the trouble. I just wish bushmen could speak clearly and intelligently.
DECLARATION ON SIN, HUMANIST STYLE
From “FreeMind”, the Humanist Magazine, (August/September 2004, p.6):
“We, the members of the American Humanist Association assembled at the organization’s sixty-third annual convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, wish to declare to a candid public that there is no sin. We say this because sin is a theological concept, not a moral one, and as Humanists, we have no theology.
“Therefore, while recognizing the existence of ethical wrongs, unwise personal behaviors, and socially harmful practices—all of which should be discouraged—we see nothing legitimately warranting the epithet, ‘sinful’. Nor do we judge a whole person as a ‘sinner’ for wrong acts.
“This outlook causes us to look at each so-called sinful behavior or practice in a fresh way, unbiased by traditional prejudgment, so as to independently assess whether it is or isn’t harmful to individuals or society. We then respond accordingly. Because we hold such an approach to be the most consonant with compassion and reason, and because we anticipate significant public and personal benefits if such a view were widely adopted, we further recommend it to all.
It’s why my current bumper sticker says: ATHEISTS DO NO EVIL.
__________________________________________________
Speaking of "without language": "It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." — that's right, you guessed it, it's —President Bush (1750-1810)
“ ‘Use it or lose it’ is a motto with many applications in the animal world. For instance, the brains of domesticated animals are significantly smaller than the brains of their nearest wild kin, and this is not just a by-product of selection for large muscle mass in animals raised for food. Domesticated animals can afford to be stupid and still have lots of offspring, for they have in effect out sourced many of their cognitive tasks to another species, us [humans], on which they have become parasitic. Like the tapeworms that have ‘decided’ to trust us to handle all their locomotion and food finding tasks for them so that they can drastically simplify their nervous systems, which they no longer need, domesticated animals would be in tough shape without their human hosts to live off. They are not endoparasites, living inside us, but they are still parasites.” —Daniel Dennett in Freedom Evolves, pp. 163-164
Lo, how the humble dog has come up in the world! Parasite that he is, he makes us feed him and take care of him and some of us spend thousands of dollars to keep him alive when he grows old and feeble. The dog without elaborate language skills has indeed studied and mastered us.
BUSH STIRS UP A HORNET’S NEST
A Spokesman Review story (August 9, 2004, p. A8) tells us about multiplying “al Qaeda franchises”: “The emergence of these groups is making the fight against terrorism more challenging.... It’s like McDonald’s giving out franchises..,” said Dia’a Rashman, an Egyptian expert on militant groups. These bin Laden al Qaeda franchises “pose a ‘catastrophic threat’” to the United States and its friends and allies.
Thank Bushman for brilliant planning and foresight and nuanced thinking. All kinds of groups of Islamic terrorists are arising from a common hatred of America, and they are only connected by that common hatred. You can kill all the bin Ladens you want, and these new groups will go on. Bush has loosed the hydra-headed beast.
BUSH STIRS UP OIL PRICES
Whereas oil supplies in Iraq keep being disrupted by Bush’s war while demand rises and whereas Bush and Republicans have always been unsupportive of increasing automobile fuel efficiency, we know who is responsible for stirring up oil prices, don’t we?
PILOT SHOT DOWN
(Spokesman Review, 8/10/04, p. B1). I see that the shot down pilot, Scott O’Grady, visited Spokane, Washington recently (where he no longer lives) to support Bush for president. O’Grady claims to admire Bush because he “says what he means and means what he says” whatever Scott means when he says that Bush ‘means what he says’...? I mean... who doesn’t mean what he says—even when he means to deceive? It’s what Bush means when he says what he means that’s the trouble. I just wish bushmen could speak clearly and intelligently.
DECLARATION ON SIN, HUMANIST STYLE
From “FreeMind”, the Humanist Magazine, (August/September 2004, p.6):
“We, the members of the American Humanist Association assembled at the organization’s sixty-third annual convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, wish to declare to a candid public that there is no sin. We say this because sin is a theological concept, not a moral one, and as Humanists, we have no theology.
“Therefore, while recognizing the existence of ethical wrongs, unwise personal behaviors, and socially harmful practices—all of which should be discouraged—we see nothing legitimately warranting the epithet, ‘sinful’. Nor do we judge a whole person as a ‘sinner’ for wrong acts.
“This outlook causes us to look at each so-called sinful behavior or practice in a fresh way, unbiased by traditional prejudgment, so as to independently assess whether it is or isn’t harmful to individuals or society. We then respond accordingly. Because we hold such an approach to be the most consonant with compassion and reason, and because we anticipate significant public and personal benefits if such a view were widely adopted, we further recommend it to all.
It’s why my current bumper sticker says: ATHEISTS DO NO EVIL.
__________________________________________________
Speaking of "without language": "It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." — that's right, you guessed it, it's —President Bush (1750-1810)
Sunday, August 15, 2004
BUSH DIRECTS US MILITARY TO HAVE NO COMMENT ON. . .
silencing the Press in Iraq. They've shut down Sadr's newspaper, al Jazeera's TV station and now all newsmen are forbidden to be in Najaf. Does this remind you a bit of something like Hitler or Stalin would do? Or the British during the American Revolution? Does this sound like democracy in action? Well—I guess—this would be democracy in a Bushman type democracy, if and when he gets finished with Iraq and America.
BUSH WAR IN IRAQ FREES NORTH KOREA TO CONTINUE. . .
to mess around with atomic bombs. Bush has made America and the entire world less safe by building up terrorists forces and allowing nuclear development to continue in countries like Iran and North Korea. He's spread us so thin we look like toilet paper to our enemies and ass wipes to our friends. What more can we do? Fundamentalist American Christian bushmen care nothing about Bush's ignorance as long as he sticks to their faith.
______________________________________
"One murder makes a villain, millions a hero." —Beilby Porteus (1731-1808)
silencing the Press in Iraq. They've shut down Sadr's newspaper, al Jazeera's TV station and now all newsmen are forbidden to be in Najaf. Does this remind you a bit of something like Hitler or Stalin would do? Or the British during the American Revolution? Does this sound like democracy in action? Well—I guess—this would be democracy in a Bushman type democracy, if and when he gets finished with Iraq and America.
BUSH WAR IN IRAQ FREES NORTH KOREA TO CONTINUE. . .
to mess around with atomic bombs. Bush has made America and the entire world less safe by building up terrorists forces and allowing nuclear development to continue in countries like Iran and North Korea. He's spread us so thin we look like toilet paper to our enemies and ass wipes to our friends. What more can we do? Fundamentalist American Christian bushmen care nothing about Bush's ignorance as long as he sticks to their faith.
______________________________________
"One murder makes a villain, millions a hero." —Beilby Porteus (1731-1808)
Saturday, August 14, 2004
IT’S SO SIMPLE AND OBVIOUS
For the thousandth time, let me explain. We’re animals trying to learn to be human. Doesn’t that explain everything? The seeming insanity, the murder, the war? What perfect supernatural creature would create such a cockeyed world? Huh? He’d have to be a sadistic nut case to make a world like this, but if we accept evolution, then everything becomes natural, sensible and understandable. Our instincts still make us survival oriented animals while our consciousness makes us aware of what we do. There are no more things than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. Our consciousness does make humans of us all when we surrender, at last, to it and the truth.
ON/OFF SWITCHES LEAD TO FREEDOM
Yep, we’re back to the book Freedom Evolves where Dennett writes about maple trees and the switches which turn on the coming of leaves in spring and the falling of leaves in autumn. He says a chain of simple on/off switches controls it all. Determinism clearly, but even at this level of unconscious activity he spies the beginning of freedom. Let me quote from page 162:
“But even a simple switch, turned on and off by some environmental change [onset of winter], marks a degree of freedom, as the engineers say, and hence is something that needs to be controlled, one way or another. A system has a degree of freedom when there is an ensemble of possibilities of one kind or another, and which of these possibilities is actual at any time depends on whatever function or switch controls this degree of freedom. Switches (either on/off or multiple choice) can be linked to each other in series, in parallel, and in arrays that combine both sorts of links. As arrays proliferate, forming larger switching networks, the degrees of freedom multiply dizzyingly, and the issues of control grow complex and nonlinear. Any lineage equipped with such an array confronts a problem: What information ought to modulate passage through this array of forking paths in a multidimensional space of possibilities? That is what a brain is for.
“A brain, with its banks of sensory inputs and motor outputs, is a localized device for mining the past environment for information that can then be refined into the gold of good expectations about the future. These hard-won expectations can then be used to modulate your choices—better than your conspecifics can modulate their choices. Speed is of the essence, since the environment is always changing and teeming with competitors, but so is accuracy... and so is thrift. These conditions on evolution generate a set of tradeoffs, with a premium on swift, high-fidelity, high relevance sensory attention....”
These two passages should serve as just a hint of the spicy flavor in Dennett’s book as he works hard to soften the impact on the determinism which surely lies at the genetic, atomic level of human existence.
KOKO ASKS FOR DENTAL CARE: AN EVOLUTIONARY TALE
Koko the gorilla who may have mastered as many as 1000 bits of sign language “began telling her handlers at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside [CA] she was in pain.” Dentists were called, a tooth was removed and Koko doesn’t have to tell her handlers she’s in pain anymore.
However, all was not painless. When Koko learned that her vocabulary of a thousand words was barely more than President Bush's vocabulary she was crestfallen and felt she'd let down her simian ancestry.
EVIL IS AS EVIL SEES
The evil world of the religious continues unabated. It’s the religious who make an evil world real. How do I know this? Because they tell me so. Bush calls his enemies evil and his enemies call Bush evil. Why would I question the judgment of experts in evil when they judge each other as evil? If they see evil in their world, let them. Meanwhile, I’ll just keep living in a sane, rational natural world....
___________________________________________
"Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father—an act which made a deep impression on me at the time." —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
For the thousandth time, let me explain. We’re animals trying to learn to be human. Doesn’t that explain everything? The seeming insanity, the murder, the war? What perfect supernatural creature would create such a cockeyed world? Huh? He’d have to be a sadistic nut case to make a world like this, but if we accept evolution, then everything becomes natural, sensible and understandable. Our instincts still make us survival oriented animals while our consciousness makes us aware of what we do. There are no more things than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. Our consciousness does make humans of us all when we surrender, at last, to it and the truth.
ON/OFF SWITCHES LEAD TO FREEDOM
Yep, we’re back to the book Freedom Evolves where Dennett writes about maple trees and the switches which turn on the coming of leaves in spring and the falling of leaves in autumn. He says a chain of simple on/off switches controls it all. Determinism clearly, but even at this level of unconscious activity he spies the beginning of freedom. Let me quote from page 162:
“But even a simple switch, turned on and off by some environmental change [onset of winter], marks a degree of freedom, as the engineers say, and hence is something that needs to be controlled, one way or another. A system has a degree of freedom when there is an ensemble of possibilities of one kind or another, and which of these possibilities is actual at any time depends on whatever function or switch controls this degree of freedom. Switches (either on/off or multiple choice) can be linked to each other in series, in parallel, and in arrays that combine both sorts of links. As arrays proliferate, forming larger switching networks, the degrees of freedom multiply dizzyingly, and the issues of control grow complex and nonlinear. Any lineage equipped with such an array confronts a problem: What information ought to modulate passage through this array of forking paths in a multidimensional space of possibilities? That is what a brain is for.
“A brain, with its banks of sensory inputs and motor outputs, is a localized device for mining the past environment for information that can then be refined into the gold of good expectations about the future. These hard-won expectations can then be used to modulate your choices—better than your conspecifics can modulate their choices. Speed is of the essence, since the environment is always changing and teeming with competitors, but so is accuracy... and so is thrift. These conditions on evolution generate a set of tradeoffs, with a premium on swift, high-fidelity, high relevance sensory attention....”
These two passages should serve as just a hint of the spicy flavor in Dennett’s book as he works hard to soften the impact on the determinism which surely lies at the genetic, atomic level of human existence.
KOKO ASKS FOR DENTAL CARE: AN EVOLUTIONARY TALE
Koko the gorilla who may have mastered as many as 1000 bits of sign language “began telling her handlers at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside [CA] she was in pain.” Dentists were called, a tooth was removed and Koko doesn’t have to tell her handlers she’s in pain anymore.
However, all was not painless. When Koko learned that her vocabulary of a thousand words was barely more than President Bush's vocabulary she was crestfallen and felt she'd let down her simian ancestry.
EVIL IS AS EVIL SEES
The evil world of the religious continues unabated. It’s the religious who make an evil world real. How do I know this? Because they tell me so. Bush calls his enemies evil and his enemies call Bush evil. Why would I question the judgment of experts in evil when they judge each other as evil? If they see evil in their world, let them. Meanwhile, I’ll just keep living in a sane, rational natural world....
___________________________________________
"Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father—an act which made a deep impression on me at the time." —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Friday, August 13, 2004
GETTING THE WORD OUT, ONE TORTURE AT A TIME
In a Newsweek (August 9, 2004, p. 37) report about abuse of prisoners in Iraq, we read the following: “Some on the commission also believe that Rumsfield and senior officials failed early on to set up clear, baseline rules for interrogations—an ethical ‘stop’ sign, in a sense. This opened the way to abuse in an atmosphere in which President George Bush and senior officials were demanding better intel and were openly questioning the Geneva Conventions.”
Why do neocons always undermine safeguards against the torture and abuse of prisoners everywhere and uphold the death penalty? What is it in the conservative nature that makes them so eager to harm others in their paranoid seeking to control and dominate everyone around them? Let’s hope that the conservative temperament isn’t the best survival mechanism and that their maniacal genetic makeup will die out.
Many of us think it’s all right to torture someone else until we realize that if our intelligence services can devalue any human life, they can also devalue your life. Once into the business of torture, torture becomes perfectly natural and acceptable. Then comes the day your government decides you might be the enemy and it’s your turn to be tortured for information. Now the rights which defended you are gone because you wanted your enemy to be tortured, and you didn’t foresee that, did you?
How do you explain what the South African intelligence forces did to their own citizens except by a slow loss of compassion for the humanity in each of us? They became like the American poultry workers who smash birds against the wall. By the time it’s your turn to take the water torture, to be smashed against the wall, it’s too late. You should have spoken up to protect the law before your turn to be tortured arrived.
GUARDSMEN WHO REALLY GUARDED
Spokesman Review story in August 8, 2004 paper: I say, “hurrah” for Oregon troopers in Iraq who stopped the beatings of prisoners by Iraqi policemen! Glad for that, but also aware, now, of the third incident which shows that my prediction is accurate, that, soon, ex-Saddam policemen will be beating up the same people under the new government that they beat up under Saddam’s. Everything changes but everything remains the same. I don’t really believe that, but in this one instance, in Bush’s Iraqi mess, it’s true.
Let me slip this in here: if we return Bush to office, we make all Bush’s stupidity America’s stupidity. If we vote him out, we repudiate bushman tactics and show that America has rejoined the human race and is part of the world once again. Not only that, Bush out/ Kerry in will give us the flexibility and excuse to try anything new. Kerry won’t be beholden to Bush’s pride and stubborn resistance to declaring his mistake. Kerry will have a clean slate.
EVERYBODY MUST BE ARMED!
Spokesman story tells us (August 9, 2004) about a Bristow, Oklahoma man who shot himself in the ass when he stuck a 22 pistol in his belt. Why did he stick a 22 pistol in his belt? Paranoia.... He’d heard that somewhere in his community a fugitive was on the loose. He wanted to be able to take a pot shot, we must suppose, at the fugitive if he showed himself in the neighborhood. Now... how he’d be able to recognize a fugitive if he saw him I don’t know, unless he planned to stop every stranger in his neighborhood or just take a shot at any strange auto passing through.
Imagine if we all carried around concealed weapons as many neocons suggest. Multiply this one accident by thousands a week. How long do you suppose before accidental gun deaths superseded auto accidents in the number of deaths reported? Can you imagine the day in, day out carnage of accidental shootings, not to mention the homicides caused by angry men pulling guns on one another.
Besides, the everyday carrying of guns has been tried once in American history, back in the days of the wild West. The bushman's favorite historical period. The only way that carnage was halted and the West tamed was when sheriffs forced anybody entering their towns to turn in their guns while they were in town. Eventually, these temporary confiscations of guns mutated into laws about carrying weapons. These laws have been around for a long time, and nobody seemed to be bothered too much about them until the N.R.A. made a bunch of paranoid males even more paranoid. The danger with paranoids is that they are the kind who shoot first and ask questions later.
Bush’s failure to stop the purchase of automatic weapons in America shows either that he’s secretly in sympathy with the terrorists who are shooting up Iraq and thinks that Americans need also to be armed with automatic weapons and ready to shoot up Americans he doesn’t agree with or that he’s just plain stupid. The choice is yours, dear reader.
______________________________________________________
"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." —mathematician, atheist, social activist, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
In a Newsweek (August 9, 2004, p. 37) report about abuse of prisoners in Iraq, we read the following: “Some on the commission also believe that Rumsfield and senior officials failed early on to set up clear, baseline rules for interrogations—an ethical ‘stop’ sign, in a sense. This opened the way to abuse in an atmosphere in which President George Bush and senior officials were demanding better intel and were openly questioning the Geneva Conventions.”
Why do neocons always undermine safeguards against the torture and abuse of prisoners everywhere and uphold the death penalty? What is it in the conservative nature that makes them so eager to harm others in their paranoid seeking to control and dominate everyone around them? Let’s hope that the conservative temperament isn’t the best survival mechanism and that their maniacal genetic makeup will die out.
Many of us think it’s all right to torture someone else until we realize that if our intelligence services can devalue any human life, they can also devalue your life. Once into the business of torture, torture becomes perfectly natural and acceptable. Then comes the day your government decides you might be the enemy and it’s your turn to be tortured for information. Now the rights which defended you are gone because you wanted your enemy to be tortured, and you didn’t foresee that, did you?
How do you explain what the South African intelligence forces did to their own citizens except by a slow loss of compassion for the humanity in each of us? They became like the American poultry workers who smash birds against the wall. By the time it’s your turn to take the water torture, to be smashed against the wall, it’s too late. You should have spoken up to protect the law before your turn to be tortured arrived.
GUARDSMEN WHO REALLY GUARDED
Spokesman Review story in August 8, 2004 paper: I say, “hurrah” for Oregon troopers in Iraq who stopped the beatings of prisoners by Iraqi policemen! Glad for that, but also aware, now, of the third incident which shows that my prediction is accurate, that, soon, ex-Saddam policemen will be beating up the same people under the new government that they beat up under Saddam’s. Everything changes but everything remains the same. I don’t really believe that, but in this one instance, in Bush’s Iraqi mess, it’s true.
Let me slip this in here: if we return Bush to office, we make all Bush’s stupidity America’s stupidity. If we vote him out, we repudiate bushman tactics and show that America has rejoined the human race and is part of the world once again. Not only that, Bush out/ Kerry in will give us the flexibility and excuse to try anything new. Kerry won’t be beholden to Bush’s pride and stubborn resistance to declaring his mistake. Kerry will have a clean slate.
EVERYBODY MUST BE ARMED!
Spokesman story tells us (August 9, 2004) about a Bristow, Oklahoma man who shot himself in the ass when he stuck a 22 pistol in his belt. Why did he stick a 22 pistol in his belt? Paranoia.... He’d heard that somewhere in his community a fugitive was on the loose. He wanted to be able to take a pot shot, we must suppose, at the fugitive if he showed himself in the neighborhood. Now... how he’d be able to recognize a fugitive if he saw him I don’t know, unless he planned to stop every stranger in his neighborhood or just take a shot at any strange auto passing through.
Imagine if we all carried around concealed weapons as many neocons suggest. Multiply this one accident by thousands a week. How long do you suppose before accidental gun deaths superseded auto accidents in the number of deaths reported? Can you imagine the day in, day out carnage of accidental shootings, not to mention the homicides caused by angry men pulling guns on one another.
Besides, the everyday carrying of guns has been tried once in American history, back in the days of the wild West. The bushman's favorite historical period. The only way that carnage was halted and the West tamed was when sheriffs forced anybody entering their towns to turn in their guns while they were in town. Eventually, these temporary confiscations of guns mutated into laws about carrying weapons. These laws have been around for a long time, and nobody seemed to be bothered too much about them until the N.R.A. made a bunch of paranoid males even more paranoid. The danger with paranoids is that they are the kind who shoot first and ask questions later.
Bush’s failure to stop the purchase of automatic weapons in America shows either that he’s secretly in sympathy with the terrorists who are shooting up Iraq and thinks that Americans need also to be armed with automatic weapons and ready to shoot up Americans he doesn’t agree with or that he’s just plain stupid. The choice is yours, dear reader.
______________________________________________________
"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." —mathematician, atheist, social activist, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Thursday, August 12, 2004
JUST NATURALLY DIVISIVE AND AUTHORITARIAN
Anyone wondering why our culture has become so splintered has only to look to Christian fundamentalism. Christian conservatives, by definition, can be no other than biased, undemocratic, authoritarian, unable to compromise and divisive in their views. Why would I say that, you ask?
The core of liberalism is to be impartial and all inclusive in its views of the world, to spread the benefits of democracy to everyone, to, for example, treat all religions equally, topple kings, free women from drudgery, blacks from segregation and gays from bigotry. By definition, by its stated purpose to be progressive and impartial, liberalism’s relativity can only be the enemy of those who think there is but one inflexible moral path, their Bible way. That’s why democracy’s fairness and inclusiveness is considered liberal and evil by conservatives.
Since good reportorial work always tries to present the facts of an issue without assigning moral values to it, conservatives will always see an impartial, nonjudgmental media as being liberal. They will only accept conservative exclusiveness as true and, of course, conservative exclusiveness naturally leads to biased world views. Once we understand the authoritarian necessity in fundamentalism, we can see why religious conservatives are the enemy of democracy and freedom. Their world view is by necessity undemocratically discriminatory.
FITZCARRALDO! FITZCARRALDO! I PRAISE THEE
Just rented from our library this old Werner Herzog directed movie about a madman compulsively interested in opera, whose goal is to bring opera to a backwoods settlement in Brazil. A laughing stock in his community, first he needs money. Already a failure as a railroad magnet, Fitzcarraldo embarks on an economic adventure which needs for its success to tote a huge steamboat over a mountain. Full of bizarre cinematic visions, comedy, tragedy, surprise and surrealism, and unbelievable non-special effects, it’s a must see. Wait till you see a boat climbing a mountain! Wait till you hear opera echoing through a jungle wildscape! Klaus Kinski’s manic hair is enough to make the movie wonderfully cinematic! To love a madman might be its subtitle. How the whole adventure comes out, I’ll leave for your viewing.
WHAT? ME WORRY?!
Why do neocons from the bushman party try to worry us about the fate of Medicare so that they can cut benefits and help destroy yet another liberal benefit to America? Neocon Bible fundamentalists try to tell us that because of declining population it will soon take 2 1/2 Americans to support each member on Social Security, yet, in a recent article in the Spokesman Review (August 8, 2004, p. B4), we read that the 18-24 year old New Millennium Generation is larger than the Boomer Generation. I’d say we’ve got many decades before Medicare and Social Security will be threatened.
BUSH STAND-INS CLOSE TV STATION IN BAGHDAD
Iraqi police recently silenced Al-Jazeera for a month in Baghdad. With America’s closing down of Sadr’s radio station two months ago and now America’s stand in Iraqi government following in America’s footsteps with Al-Jazeera, we see ominous signs that democracy is being stifled in Iraq. Bush is only too happy to see freedom of expression crushed in Iraq so we must ask, since he obviously hates the media in America (except for his hand picked men at Fox News) would he gladly see the same thing in America? Many of his American followers, if you read letters to the editor or listen to the Limboland types, seem also to equate dissent from the party line with betrayal of America. We’re not even going to state the obvious Constitutional argument against their fascist hatred for debate. But, obviously, the only news allowed in Iraq is going to hew to the party line. Another case of the Republican Party supporting dictatorial leadership anyplace in the world they want to control.
______________________________________________
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." —President Theodore Roosevelt
Anyone wondering why our culture has become so splintered has only to look to Christian fundamentalism. Christian conservatives, by definition, can be no other than biased, undemocratic, authoritarian, unable to compromise and divisive in their views. Why would I say that, you ask?
The core of liberalism is to be impartial and all inclusive in its views of the world, to spread the benefits of democracy to everyone, to, for example, treat all religions equally, topple kings, free women from drudgery, blacks from segregation and gays from bigotry. By definition, by its stated purpose to be progressive and impartial, liberalism’s relativity can only be the enemy of those who think there is but one inflexible moral path, their Bible way. That’s why democracy’s fairness and inclusiveness is considered liberal and evil by conservatives.
Since good reportorial work always tries to present the facts of an issue without assigning moral values to it, conservatives will always see an impartial, nonjudgmental media as being liberal. They will only accept conservative exclusiveness as true and, of course, conservative exclusiveness naturally leads to biased world views. Once we understand the authoritarian necessity in fundamentalism, we can see why religious conservatives are the enemy of democracy and freedom. Their world view is by necessity undemocratically discriminatory.
FITZCARRALDO! FITZCARRALDO! I PRAISE THEE
Just rented from our library this old Werner Herzog directed movie about a madman compulsively interested in opera, whose goal is to bring opera to a backwoods settlement in Brazil. A laughing stock in his community, first he needs money. Already a failure as a railroad magnet, Fitzcarraldo embarks on an economic adventure which needs for its success to tote a huge steamboat over a mountain. Full of bizarre cinematic visions, comedy, tragedy, surprise and surrealism, and unbelievable non-special effects, it’s a must see. Wait till you see a boat climbing a mountain! Wait till you hear opera echoing through a jungle wildscape! Klaus Kinski’s manic hair is enough to make the movie wonderfully cinematic! To love a madman might be its subtitle. How the whole adventure comes out, I’ll leave for your viewing.
WHAT? ME WORRY?!
Why do neocons from the bushman party try to worry us about the fate of Medicare so that they can cut benefits and help destroy yet another liberal benefit to America? Neocon Bible fundamentalists try to tell us that because of declining population it will soon take 2 1/2 Americans to support each member on Social Security, yet, in a recent article in the Spokesman Review (August 8, 2004, p. B4), we read that the 18-24 year old New Millennium Generation is larger than the Boomer Generation. I’d say we’ve got many decades before Medicare and Social Security will be threatened.
BUSH STAND-INS CLOSE TV STATION IN BAGHDAD
Iraqi police recently silenced Al-Jazeera for a month in Baghdad. With America’s closing down of Sadr’s radio station two months ago and now America’s stand in Iraqi government following in America’s footsteps with Al-Jazeera, we see ominous signs that democracy is being stifled in Iraq. Bush is only too happy to see freedom of expression crushed in Iraq so we must ask, since he obviously hates the media in America (except for his hand picked men at Fox News) would he gladly see the same thing in America? Many of his American followers, if you read letters to the editor or listen to the Limboland types, seem also to equate dissent from the party line with betrayal of America. We’re not even going to state the obvious Constitutional argument against their fascist hatred for debate. But, obviously, the only news allowed in Iraq is going to hew to the party line. Another case of the Republican Party supporting dictatorial leadership anyplace in the world they want to control.
______________________________________________
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." —President Theodore Roosevelt
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
DR. PHIL BEATS AROUND THE BUSH
I hear tell that Texan, Dr. Phil, is going to help the Texas Bush-league team by interviewing Laura and George about parenting. I can’t wait to learn the secret of how a couple of average or below average Texans can raise two daughters to be empty-headed, inarticulate, tongue-sticker-outing, hard-drinking party girls while another couple on the front pages these days manage to raise two articulate, intelligent, informed and interesting young women. Can you?
STRENGTH AND WISDOM ARE NOT OPPOSING VALUES
Enough said?
Now... if we can only get someone in the oval office who has the second to go with the first.... On second thought, since “strength” is the military’s purview, actually, we only need the second in the oval office. Will we get it come November?
THIS ‘SPLAINS BUSH P’URTY GOOT
In a USA Today article on literacy (August 3, 2004, p. 50) you can find why the bushman is what he is. In the top ten most literate cities, nine are northern states. Denver, not a southern state, is #7.
In the bottom ten, five cities are in Texas. Now do we understand why Laura Bush has to read and digest the papers for George? Now do we understand why Texas was number one in murder a few years back, why the whole South is poverty stricken and backward, why the Southland is the home of the Bible Belt, why compassion, as demonstrated in the welfare system, is so lacking in the South, why Republicans under master dunce Bush are able to hoodwink the entire undereducated southern populace and gain political ascendancy, why prejudice and integration persisted so long in the South? I still don’t know why we didn’t let the South secede.
By the way, I was born and raised in Ohio. Akron, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland came in high among older, industrial cities. That’s why I’m such a smart a--—I mean—intelligent fellow.
VOTERS NOT SO DUMB?
In a Robert Samuelson article in this week’s Newsweek (August 9, 2004, p. 35), Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, is reported as saying “that people’s party identities, their views on issues and the economy still determine far more than 90 percent of voting decisions.”
In my own case, that’s true enough.
GOOD OLD SOPHOMORIC DAYS....
STILL IN VOGUE?
Back in the mid-Sixties, when I was attending grad. school in Carbondale, Illinois, one of my buds came up with a sure fire way to demoralize our Soviet friends and possibly set them up for failure. He said we ought to “bomb the hell out of Scotland. Sad,” he added, “to lose all that good scotch whiskey, but,“ he winked, “we’ll make everyone think we’re so crazy they'll steer clear of us.”
As far as I know, my old buddy doesn’t work for the bushman’s regime in Washington, but someone sure as hell thought like him when we propelled ourselves into Iraq as an answer to Saudi-inspired terrorism.
ONCE MORE, PLEASE
The battle is over as far as evolution is concerned, but just as the average European in the Dark Ages didn’t know that the world wasn’t flat so the average Bible literalist doesn't know that evolution is here to stay, along with psychoanalysis, a round globe, the Big Bang and the wheel.
Their failure to live in the real world causes literalists to misrepresent so many things to themselves. It’s why they see “liberals” everywhere they go. Since evolution is a fact and is presented matter-of-factly in NPR shows and other modern media, literalists call NPR and other media “liberal”. They still believe, on ever-fallible faith, that evolution is an opinion, open to debate.
The bad fact of their ignorance, however, is that no matter how far backward the media bends to present politics in a fair and balanced way, the media would have to lie about science in order not to be called “liberal” by literalists. Literalists are so far out of step with knowledge that I don’t know if they can ever be in the mainstream again unless they take over America and force dogma and falsehood on us as the Catholic church did in historical times. Then they’d make the media be their way even if not the factual way.
________________________________________________
"I have had just about all I can take of myself." —S.N. Behrman (1893-1973) on reaching the age of 75
I hear tell that Texan, Dr. Phil, is going to help the Texas Bush-league team by interviewing Laura and George about parenting. I can’t wait to learn the secret of how a couple of average or below average Texans can raise two daughters to be empty-headed, inarticulate, tongue-sticker-outing, hard-drinking party girls while another couple on the front pages these days manage to raise two articulate, intelligent, informed and interesting young women. Can you?
STRENGTH AND WISDOM ARE NOT OPPOSING VALUES
Enough said?
Now... if we can only get someone in the oval office who has the second to go with the first.... On second thought, since “strength” is the military’s purview, actually, we only need the second in the oval office. Will we get it come November?
THIS ‘SPLAINS BUSH P’URTY GOOT
In a USA Today article on literacy (August 3, 2004, p. 50) you can find why the bushman is what he is. In the top ten most literate cities, nine are northern states. Denver, not a southern state, is #7.
In the bottom ten, five cities are in Texas. Now do we understand why Laura Bush has to read and digest the papers for George? Now do we understand why Texas was number one in murder a few years back, why the whole South is poverty stricken and backward, why the Southland is the home of the Bible Belt, why compassion, as demonstrated in the welfare system, is so lacking in the South, why Republicans under master dunce Bush are able to hoodwink the entire undereducated southern populace and gain political ascendancy, why prejudice and integration persisted so long in the South? I still don’t know why we didn’t let the South secede.
By the way, I was born and raised in Ohio. Akron, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland came in high among older, industrial cities. That’s why I’m such a smart a--—I mean—intelligent fellow.
VOTERS NOT SO DUMB?
In a Robert Samuelson article in this week’s Newsweek (August 9, 2004, p. 35), Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, is reported as saying “that people’s party identities, their views on issues and the economy still determine far more than 90 percent of voting decisions.”
In my own case, that’s true enough.
GOOD OLD SOPHOMORIC DAYS....
STILL IN VOGUE?
Back in the mid-Sixties, when I was attending grad. school in Carbondale, Illinois, one of my buds came up with a sure fire way to demoralize our Soviet friends and possibly set them up for failure. He said we ought to “bomb the hell out of Scotland. Sad,” he added, “to lose all that good scotch whiskey, but,“ he winked, “we’ll make everyone think we’re so crazy they'll steer clear of us.”
As far as I know, my old buddy doesn’t work for the bushman’s regime in Washington, but someone sure as hell thought like him when we propelled ourselves into Iraq as an answer to Saudi-inspired terrorism.
ONCE MORE, PLEASE
The battle is over as far as evolution is concerned, but just as the average European in the Dark Ages didn’t know that the world wasn’t flat so the average Bible literalist doesn't know that evolution is here to stay, along with psychoanalysis, a round globe, the Big Bang and the wheel.
Their failure to live in the real world causes literalists to misrepresent so many things to themselves. It’s why they see “liberals” everywhere they go. Since evolution is a fact and is presented matter-of-factly in NPR shows and other modern media, literalists call NPR and other media “liberal”. They still believe, on ever-fallible faith, that evolution is an opinion, open to debate.
The bad fact of their ignorance, however, is that no matter how far backward the media bends to present politics in a fair and balanced way, the media would have to lie about science in order not to be called “liberal” by literalists. Literalists are so far out of step with knowledge that I don’t know if they can ever be in the mainstream again unless they take over America and force dogma and falsehood on us as the Catholic church did in historical times. Then they’d make the media be their way even if not the factual way.
________________________________________________
"I have had just about all I can take of myself." —S.N. Behrman (1893-1973) on reaching the age of 75
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
BLOWING WHISTLE ON SELF
I think I’m so damn smart! But, memory is such a strange faculty. The more I study the brain the more I see how memory always plays tricks on everybody. And here’s one on me. Someplace I got the idea in my head, I clearly recall reading it, that at one time in the history of America, U.S. senators served for a lifetime. I clear as hell remember reading that piece of info in conjunction with the idea that reforms in America during the Populist era reduced the term of a Senator to 6 years. At the time, Senators were in the hip pockets of rich capitalists and that’s why their terms became limited.
Now isn’t that strange? I’ve been saying this and passing it along in letters to the editor for the longest time. Now, through a show on PBS, I’ve been corrected. Where did I get this idea, that’s what I want to know? When did it start? How long have I been wrong? Was it a state senate I read about? Was it an idea the founding fathers discussed? I didn’t just make the idea up out of whole cloth because I can recall reading about a senator’s length of term. I can see myself looking at a page discussing some battle between progressive and conservative forces. Maybe it was the British system I was reading about! Fascinating!
BLACK BOXES AND OTHER ILLUSIONS
The Feds are calling for black boxes in all cars so that they can study causes of motor wrecks. (And keep track of where every citizen of interest is driving her car?) They also want to know what you’re reading at the public library. Can you imagine the power of Bush’s proposed combined foreign and domestic intelligence service? Remember when the census only counted people? How about the Feds playing fast and loose with our Social Security information? Glad I won’t be around long enough to watch the final end of America as we all knew it back in the Fifties. I picture the Fascist States of Fundamentalist Christianity within 50 years.
THAT’S A LIE!
What I just wrote above is a lie, based in my own fears. Actually, it’s the super religious who won’t survive. They sense their demise right now. That’s why they fight so hard, whether they’re fundamentalist Moslems or Christians. They know that their way of thinking is going extinct in the modernity of the globe. That’s why they’re withdrawing from the world, trying to deny the realities of the modern world. They don’t fit into it.
I heard a word of mouth rumor that Southern Baptists have all but given up on the schools. They equate education and intelligence with an attack on them. In other words, they equate ignorance with godliness. And, we must admit, the Bible is full of warnings about being intelligent. To be too intelligence is to put yourself on a par with the god. But who can control the intelligence genes they’re born with?
Fundamentalists are dooming themselves to a quicker end by ignoring the culture which surrounds them. Some will wise up. Some will go mad and kill themselves. Some will kill others (like the terrorists), but in the end, super religious ideas, out of touch with reality, will be blown away like summer clouds after a rain shower.
Science is the wave of the future because it has the only demonstrable truths. Fundamentalist religions will soon be as extinct as the dodo bird.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
On my drive to the library today, I passed a church sign that read WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I understand I can read that two ways. Is my conduct of my life taking me toward misery and emptiness? Or where will I end up: in heaven or hell?
Of course, like most people who go around thinking like that, the people who put up the sign are telling me more about themselves and their fears than they are telling me about reality. My heart goes out to them and the terror that haunts their subconscious.
I know where I’m going. I’m going to die and sleep and never dream or think again. It’ll be heavenly, but I won’t know it. The entity called George will be vanished forever. Now I know that it is the very finality of death with which the religious are not able to cope, so they invent heavens and hells as a sort of addictive mental system to protect themselves from the truth. Then the Christian writes his signs to try and frighten others to join his cause as if the numbers who believe as he does will protect him from his final fate—DEATH.
Nighty-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite....
___________________________________________________
"For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off." —Johnny Carson
I think I’m so damn smart! But, memory is such a strange faculty. The more I study the brain the more I see how memory always plays tricks on everybody. And here’s one on me. Someplace I got the idea in my head, I clearly recall reading it, that at one time in the history of America, U.S. senators served for a lifetime. I clear as hell remember reading that piece of info in conjunction with the idea that reforms in America during the Populist era reduced the term of a Senator to 6 years. At the time, Senators were in the hip pockets of rich capitalists and that’s why their terms became limited.
Now isn’t that strange? I’ve been saying this and passing it along in letters to the editor for the longest time. Now, through a show on PBS, I’ve been corrected. Where did I get this idea, that’s what I want to know? When did it start? How long have I been wrong? Was it a state senate I read about? Was it an idea the founding fathers discussed? I didn’t just make the idea up out of whole cloth because I can recall reading about a senator’s length of term. I can see myself looking at a page discussing some battle between progressive and conservative forces. Maybe it was the British system I was reading about! Fascinating!
BLACK BOXES AND OTHER ILLUSIONS
The Feds are calling for black boxes in all cars so that they can study causes of motor wrecks. (And keep track of where every citizen of interest is driving her car?) They also want to know what you’re reading at the public library. Can you imagine the power of Bush’s proposed combined foreign and domestic intelligence service? Remember when the census only counted people? How about the Feds playing fast and loose with our Social Security information? Glad I won’t be around long enough to watch the final end of America as we all knew it back in the Fifties. I picture the Fascist States of Fundamentalist Christianity within 50 years.
THAT’S A LIE!
What I just wrote above is a lie, based in my own fears. Actually, it’s the super religious who won’t survive. They sense their demise right now. That’s why they fight so hard, whether they’re fundamentalist Moslems or Christians. They know that their way of thinking is going extinct in the modernity of the globe. That’s why they’re withdrawing from the world, trying to deny the realities of the modern world. They don’t fit into it.
I heard a word of mouth rumor that Southern Baptists have all but given up on the schools. They equate education and intelligence with an attack on them. In other words, they equate ignorance with godliness. And, we must admit, the Bible is full of warnings about being intelligent. To be too intelligence is to put yourself on a par with the god. But who can control the intelligence genes they’re born with?
Fundamentalists are dooming themselves to a quicker end by ignoring the culture which surrounds them. Some will wise up. Some will go mad and kill themselves. Some will kill others (like the terrorists), but in the end, super religious ideas, out of touch with reality, will be blown away like summer clouds after a rain shower.
Science is the wave of the future because it has the only demonstrable truths. Fundamentalist religions will soon be as extinct as the dodo bird.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
On my drive to the library today, I passed a church sign that read WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I understand I can read that two ways. Is my conduct of my life taking me toward misery and emptiness? Or where will I end up: in heaven or hell?
Of course, like most people who go around thinking like that, the people who put up the sign are telling me more about themselves and their fears than they are telling me about reality. My heart goes out to them and the terror that haunts their subconscious.
I know where I’m going. I’m going to die and sleep and never dream or think again. It’ll be heavenly, but I won’t know it. The entity called George will be vanished forever. Now I know that it is the very finality of death with which the religious are not able to cope, so they invent heavens and hells as a sort of addictive mental system to protect themselves from the truth. Then the Christian writes his signs to try and frighten others to join his cause as if the numbers who believe as he does will protect him from his final fate—DEATH.
Nighty-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite....
___________________________________________________
"For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off." —Johnny Carson
Monday, August 09, 2004
BLACK LOCUST TREES AND HOMELESSNESS
The Spokesman Review reported on Tuesday, August 3, 2004 (p. A7) that a single mom heard her car being demolished when a black locust tree blew down in a wind storm and crushed it. Working a part time, minimum wage job at Tesoro, she will not be able to replace her little steed she called “Girl”. Now the question in my mind is how far must she go to get to work, how much is bus fare and can she afford it, can she walk to the job and other questions of financial import. Back of my mind lifts the thought, “Not very much separates any of us from potential homelessness. A windstorm, a minimum wage job in expensive America, a broken tree and voila! Maybe you next.... I’m retired, but unfortunately in a time when retirees are about to come under the Republican gun. I could also be next....”
KATHLEEN PARKER SPEAKS ON TWO SIDES OF AN ISSUE
The Spokesman Review, our local rag, gives Kathleen Parker entirely too much space. She’s much too hypocritical.
This week in early August, Kathleen wrote a mocking portrayal of strong, independent Democrat first ladies and compared them to shrinking violet, Republican first housewives. The housewives get the better of it. I don’t get her drift. Kathleen allows herself to be sarcastic, abrasive, critical and stupid without condemning herself. But here’s my bottom line.
Teresa Heinz speaks her mind, not always in agreement with her husband, and is definitely her own woman. I respect that, and such a woman I do not fear. The kind of woman I fear is the one who suppresses her true nature and beliefs until she explodes and leaves her husband. The poor sap usually doesn’t know what hit him.
Now what about Laura Bush who silenced a gathering of poets a few years back because she found out that many poets she’d invited to a Gray House gathering didn’t support her husband’s Iraq folly. It’s typical of priggish Southern women to support the “ah’ts” until they realize that the vast majority of artists (in the all inclusive category) are liberal by nature, free spoken, difficult, defiant to authority or totally apolitical.
I lost all respect for “librarian” Laura when I saw how easily she’d censor free speech and bend over for her husband’s wrong-headedness and go along with the death of so many young Americans. Most librarians are not at all like Mrs. Bush Junior. They defend our right to read and to free speech. But like all such women housewife Bush “stifles” herself for her husband’s sake. Why do Americans who supposedly honor America’s freedom to speak have anything but contempt for the Laura Bushes of the world? Is it that conservatives really don’t honor free speech?
PASSING ON SOME INFO FROM “HANDFUL OF SALT”
Haiti’s Aristide seems to have lost his way by surrendering to America’s refusal to allow much socialism in his country. Aristide was popular with his people when he promised to redistribute the wealth of Haiti. But America would have none of that helping the poor of Haiti so Aristide lost his popular base and had to leave office, and Haiti lost constitutional rule.
Read more about another American blunder in “Handful of Salt” (July-August, 2004, p. 9). Or go to the source: Bill Fletcher, Jr. in “Dollars & Sense #253” (May/June 2004). Fletcher can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org.
________________________________________________
"Death is nature's way of saying, "Howdy!" —Unknown, but how about giving it to Alvy Singer?
The Spokesman Review reported on Tuesday, August 3, 2004 (p. A7) that a single mom heard her car being demolished when a black locust tree blew down in a wind storm and crushed it. Working a part time, minimum wage job at Tesoro, she will not be able to replace her little steed she called “Girl”. Now the question in my mind is how far must she go to get to work, how much is bus fare and can she afford it, can she walk to the job and other questions of financial import. Back of my mind lifts the thought, “Not very much separates any of us from potential homelessness. A windstorm, a minimum wage job in expensive America, a broken tree and voila! Maybe you next.... I’m retired, but unfortunately in a time when retirees are about to come under the Republican gun. I could also be next....”
KATHLEEN PARKER SPEAKS ON TWO SIDES OF AN ISSUE
The Spokesman Review, our local rag, gives Kathleen Parker entirely too much space. She’s much too hypocritical.
This week in early August, Kathleen wrote a mocking portrayal of strong, independent Democrat first ladies and compared them to shrinking violet, Republican first housewives. The housewives get the better of it. I don’t get her drift. Kathleen allows herself to be sarcastic, abrasive, critical and stupid without condemning herself. But here’s my bottom line.
Teresa Heinz speaks her mind, not always in agreement with her husband, and is definitely her own woman. I respect that, and such a woman I do not fear. The kind of woman I fear is the one who suppresses her true nature and beliefs until she explodes and leaves her husband. The poor sap usually doesn’t know what hit him.
Now what about Laura Bush who silenced a gathering of poets a few years back because she found out that many poets she’d invited to a Gray House gathering didn’t support her husband’s Iraq folly. It’s typical of priggish Southern women to support the “ah’ts” until they realize that the vast majority of artists (in the all inclusive category) are liberal by nature, free spoken, difficult, defiant to authority or totally apolitical.
I lost all respect for “librarian” Laura when I saw how easily she’d censor free speech and bend over for her husband’s wrong-headedness and go along with the death of so many young Americans. Most librarians are not at all like Mrs. Bush Junior. They defend our right to read and to free speech. But like all such women housewife Bush “stifles” herself for her husband’s sake. Why do Americans who supposedly honor America’s freedom to speak have anything but contempt for the Laura Bushes of the world? Is it that conservatives really don’t honor free speech?
PASSING ON SOME INFO FROM “HANDFUL OF SALT”
Haiti’s Aristide seems to have lost his way by surrendering to America’s refusal to allow much socialism in his country. Aristide was popular with his people when he promised to redistribute the wealth of Haiti. But America would have none of that helping the poor of Haiti so Aristide lost his popular base and had to leave office, and Haiti lost constitutional rule.
Read more about another American blunder in “Handful of Salt” (July-August, 2004, p. 9). Or go to the source: Bill Fletcher, Jr. in “Dollars & Sense #253” (May/June 2004). Fletcher can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org.
________________________________________________
"Death is nature's way of saying, "Howdy!" —Unknown, but how about giving it to Alvy Singer?
Sunday, August 08, 2004
PRE- AND POST-FREUDIAN HUMANS
Most modern thinkers realize that the human race has entered a new era of evolution, in that we are in a position to control our own evolutionary destiny. We’re in an age of consciousness, of reason and science that we could never before imagine. However, many human animals lag far behind, dragging their religious chains behind them, like so many Joseph Marleys.
We Americans should look to the Europeans as our leaders in this. They’ve been living within the artificial walls of conscious civilization for far longer than us. We’re still primitives in this, still down home types, still bound in the chains and boxes of religion. Europeans are farther along toward the freedom of atheism and/or at least secularism and into the freedom that modern science opens the door to.
America remains divided unevenly between those who are becoming modern and those still in primitive religious chains, those still looking for a philosophy or a superbeing to enslave themselves to. We progressive, forward-looking Americans must hope that our science malingerers don’t find an earthly being (yes, like Hitler or Stalin) to bind themselves to before they can find true freedom of will. We should never forget that it was the religious psychologies of the Russians and Germans which made them vulnerable to world leaders who inspired them to hatred, violence and revolution.
As an aside, I just wonder if African-Americans stay faithful to the freedom struggling Democratic party rather than the conservative, mentally enslaving, religious Republican party because of their history in slavery. Even though African-Americans count among their number so many Baptists of deep religious dye, they sense, I hope and imagine, the slavery which lies under conservative religious fundamentalist beliefs. They sense that old time religion in Republicanism which had no trouble enslaving them because of Bible beliefs.
FREEDOM EVOLVING
Let me pass on another thought from Daniel Dennett’s book, “Freedom Evolves”. It’s a fascinating book and I come across so many ideas that I want to pass on. Only a reader of the full book can enjoy its treasures:
“Free will is like the air we breathe, and it is present almost everywhere we want to go, but it is not only not eternal, it evolved, and is still evolving. [Like earth’s atmosphere] the atmosphere of free will is another sort of environment. It is the enveloping, enabling, life-shaping, conceptual atmosphere of intentional action, planning and hoping and promising—and blaming, resenting, punishing and honoring. We all grow up in this conceptual atmosphere, and we learn to conduct our lives in the terms it provides. It appears to be a stable and ahistorical construct, as eternal and unchanging as arithmetic, but it is not. It evolved as a recent product of human interactions, and some of the sorts of human activity it first made possible on this planet may also threaten to disrupt its future stability, or even hasten its demise. Our planet’s atmosphere is not guaranteed to last forever, and neither is our free will....
“What happens... when we try to imagine living in a world without the atmosphere of free will? It might be life, but would it be us? Would life be worth living if we lost our belief in our own capacity to make free, responsible decisions? And is the ubiquitous atmosphere of free will in which we live and act not a fact at all, but just a facade of some sort, a mass hallucination?
“There are those who say that free will has always been an illusion, a pre-scientific dream from which we are now awakening. We’ve never really had free will, and never could have had it. Thinking we’ve had free will has been, at best, a life-shaping and even life-enhancing ideology, but we can learn to live without it.” (Freedom Evolves, pp. 10-11)
Hey! Do these passages take your breath away as they do mine? Do they make you tingle with thought and emotion? Do they make you feel freer or more imprisoned? Do they frighten you as they once did me? I’m the sort who’s willing to think I don’t have free will, but who actually lives as if I do, one who accepts the illusion and who continues to live mindlessly mindful, untroubled by the intellectual ramifications of the matter.
An interesting companion read to Dennett’s book might be Robert Wright’s “The Moral Animal” (Buy It!) which traces many moral behaviors to other animal kingdoms.
_______________________________________________________________
"Perhaps there is no life after death. . . there's just Los Angeles." —Rick Anderson
Most modern thinkers realize that the human race has entered a new era of evolution, in that we are in a position to control our own evolutionary destiny. We’re in an age of consciousness, of reason and science that we could never before imagine. However, many human animals lag far behind, dragging their religious chains behind them, like so many Joseph Marleys.
We Americans should look to the Europeans as our leaders in this. They’ve been living within the artificial walls of conscious civilization for far longer than us. We’re still primitives in this, still down home types, still bound in the chains and boxes of religion. Europeans are farther along toward the freedom of atheism and/or at least secularism and into the freedom that modern science opens the door to.
America remains divided unevenly between those who are becoming modern and those still in primitive religious chains, those still looking for a philosophy or a superbeing to enslave themselves to. We progressive, forward-looking Americans must hope that our science malingerers don’t find an earthly being (yes, like Hitler or Stalin) to bind themselves to before they can find true freedom of will. We should never forget that it was the religious psychologies of the Russians and Germans which made them vulnerable to world leaders who inspired them to hatred, violence and revolution.
As an aside, I just wonder if African-Americans stay faithful to the freedom struggling Democratic party rather than the conservative, mentally enslaving, religious Republican party because of their history in slavery. Even though African-Americans count among their number so many Baptists of deep religious dye, they sense, I hope and imagine, the slavery which lies under conservative religious fundamentalist beliefs. They sense that old time religion in Republicanism which had no trouble enslaving them because of Bible beliefs.
FREEDOM EVOLVING
Let me pass on another thought from Daniel Dennett’s book, “Freedom Evolves”. It’s a fascinating book and I come across so many ideas that I want to pass on. Only a reader of the full book can enjoy its treasures:
“Free will is like the air we breathe, and it is present almost everywhere we want to go, but it is not only not eternal, it evolved, and is still evolving. [Like earth’s atmosphere] the atmosphere of free will is another sort of environment. It is the enveloping, enabling, life-shaping, conceptual atmosphere of intentional action, planning and hoping and promising—and blaming, resenting, punishing and honoring. We all grow up in this conceptual atmosphere, and we learn to conduct our lives in the terms it provides. It appears to be a stable and ahistorical construct, as eternal and unchanging as arithmetic, but it is not. It evolved as a recent product of human interactions, and some of the sorts of human activity it first made possible on this planet may also threaten to disrupt its future stability, or even hasten its demise. Our planet’s atmosphere is not guaranteed to last forever, and neither is our free will....
“What happens... when we try to imagine living in a world without the atmosphere of free will? It might be life, but would it be us? Would life be worth living if we lost our belief in our own capacity to make free, responsible decisions? And is the ubiquitous atmosphere of free will in which we live and act not a fact at all, but just a facade of some sort, a mass hallucination?
“There are those who say that free will has always been an illusion, a pre-scientific dream from which we are now awakening. We’ve never really had free will, and never could have had it. Thinking we’ve had free will has been, at best, a life-shaping and even life-enhancing ideology, but we can learn to live without it.” (Freedom Evolves, pp. 10-11)
Hey! Do these passages take your breath away as they do mine? Do they make you tingle with thought and emotion? Do they make you feel freer or more imprisoned? Do they frighten you as they once did me? I’m the sort who’s willing to think I don’t have free will, but who actually lives as if I do, one who accepts the illusion and who continues to live mindlessly mindful, untroubled by the intellectual ramifications of the matter.
An interesting companion read to Dennett’s book might be Robert Wright’s “The Moral Animal” (Buy It!) which traces many moral behaviors to other animal kingdoms.
_______________________________________________________________
"Perhaps there is no life after death. . . there's just Los Angeles." —Rick Anderson
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