Quoth Matthew Cob and Jerry Coyne
You suggest that science may bring about “advances in theological thinking”. In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism.
(h/t Pharyngula)
Category: Pondering Infinity
A Taste of my mind. Anything from Sociopolitics to Religion to Philosophy in general goes.
Gold medal of…doping
We interrupt our normal broadcast to bring you these hilarious news
Greece has been awarded the gold medal for doping (article in greek) from the president of the IOC Jacques Rogge. He has apparently named and shamed the Greek team as the most doped up team in the Beijing Olympics with the second and third places being taken by Bulgaria and Russia.
For a country that is so hell bent in maintaining a good image, they have managed to put yet another badge of shame on themselves (following the ban on computer games, suing lesbians and other funny stories)
You know what the sad part it? It’s the government itself that is promoting this kind of behaviour. After the recent shame came up, did anything happen? Was anyone fired or forced to resign? No.
Same as in the past where the doping of two Athletes was ignored and they were eventually not punished at all by the greek national sports comitee, only to have them 1 year later admit to the IAAF that, you know, they did dope themselves.
Pathetic.
But at least it makes this easily amused expartiate laugh at their antics.
Tyrrany of the Olympics
The Beijing Olympics are growing more and more ridiculous by the day. The International Olympic Committee seems to have a perverse idea of what it means to represent the event. They have the impression that it means total behaviour control of anything having even a remote connection to Olympics.
Witness them contacting the Swedish government to take down a wholly legitimate website by Swedish law, making the Chinese government cover up all brands not sponsoring the Olympics everywhere and promoting the suppresion of behaviour.
It really looks like for the IOC and the Chinese totalitarian government is a match made in Nirvana. It really goes to show how the IOC wants the rest of the world to act and how they would if they could…
Can I ask why people are falling over each other to host the damn things? It is simply an extravagance of corruption, steroids and shallow nationalism. The costs are extreme and the aftermath is a country’s economy in ruins.
You know what the Olympic games are? A parasite. They move into a country and start sucking the life’s blood of the nation, replacing it with cheap nationalist pride. Once bursting red with money, they detach and go hunting for their next victim, leaving their previous host’s economy in ruins and no t angible benefit.
All the while the parasite grows in power and starts pushing other hosts around to accomodate it.
Pah!
Why "our way of life" is not deserved
Recently, after my last argument on immigration, I ended up having a similar discussion with my girlfriend. While she is much more resonable in these debates, nevertheless she too had taken a protectionist stance on the whole issue of immigration. Most of the arguments were similar to the ones I mentioned before but there was one more thrown to the table that I think deserves refutation.
Recently, after my last argument on immigration, I ended up having a similar discussion with my girlfriend. While she is much more resonable in these debates, nevertheless she too had taken a protectionist stance on the whole issue of immigration. Most of the arguments were similar to the ones I mentioned before but there was one more thrown to the table that I think deserves refutation. It went as thus:
These immigrants, they know that in their own countries and under their own laws, the crimes they do here would be severely punished and this is why they come to our Germany and Europe. They know that here they will just get a “slap on the wrist” compared to where they come from.
If they commit crimes then it is only fair that we send them to the backward country they came from for we (Germans) have worked hard to have the kind of society we do and it’s not fair that they enjoy all the benefits we have achieved and ruin our system.[1. This is not an exact quote but rather the main gist of the argument as I understood it.]
On first take, one would be inclined to agree. Why should we tolerate immigrants who come to our developed countries in order to avoid the horrible societies they live in but yet they cannot respect our laws?
The answer is that this is begging the question. When one asks this, it is presupposed that the 3rd world society people live in is deserved and of their own fault and that when we, as Europeans or North Americans, have a good society, it’s because we are such great and hard-working people and we deserve our way of life.
This is false.
One has to have a very short memory or an ignorance of recent history to believe that the western or developed nations achieved this status by simply being more hardworking than the rest. The nasty truth is that the first world nations have achieved this through imperialism and shameless exploitation of other countries.
Similar to an Objectivist who deludes himself that his status in life is completely self achieved, without taking into account all the societal benefits and luck that allowed him to be who he is, so do the people who express such views completely fail to see that their nation’s status is intertwined irrevocably with the rest of the world and their history.
Great Britain would not have been so great if it didn’t have an India, Australia and Ireland to exploit. US America would not have been so united if the Indigenous population had not been systematically exterminated etc. and this of course does not stop just with history.
Even now wars are being waged by the first world nations, devastating whole societies just because the natural resources are too valuable. Brutal Dictators are being put into power just because they are friendly with the policies of the people in charge and agree to screw over their own countrymen so that first world nations can get the goods. Megacorporations are outsourcing their labour to 3rd world nations so that production, and thus costs, will be cheaper for us. I could go on…
When people from these nations flee their countries in search of a better life, we have to realise that their situation is not their own fault and our countries are partly to blame. Nobody lives in a vacuum and nobody deserves a bad life just because he has been born into it.
The only thing one can say is that they are partly responsible for their own status in life. I say “partly” because this is 90% luck as the where, how and when you were born plays the biggest role and you have no choice in this matter. Still, we have a modicum of control over our own life choices so one can feel at least a bit proud and deserving on what themselves have achieved.
But to extrapolate that and consider that one is deserving of the society one lives in is simply absurd. To further request that people who were not lucky enough to be indigenous in a western nation deserve to be treated worse (i.e. ostracized) is outright wrong.
Quote of the Day: Vulnerabilities
Quote of the day: Economics
I am no more impressed by the assertion that “The vast majority of economists agree that capitalism is the most sound system there is for producing wealth and responding to demand,” than I’m impressed by the equally true assertion that the vast majority of theolgians agree that religious belief is the most sound system of creating and maintaining social, moral and ethical socialization.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is exactly the same way I feel every time someone brings in the “vast majority of economists that support capitalism” or whatever.
Cthulhu Tract
If you’ve seen and hated the classic Chick Tracts or if you’ve read and loved Lovecraft, you’re going to love this Cthulhu Tract!
It’s brilliant and I want more goddamnit! We need a proper version for Dark Dungeons as well. Demonic Deviltry just wasn’t enough!
Pah, I got an apetite for some chick parodies >:D
Kicking the foreigners out
I had an intense argument yesterday afternoon with a friend, lets call her S. The argument started from how dangerous it is to talk back to the various immigrants when they make a sexist remark or something similar. The discussion moved to how the government is protecting them instead of punishing them, how they all know each other and how 90% of them are criminals and are only in Germany to exploit the social rights. All the while anecdotal evidence was used to back each point.
I had an intense argument yesterday afternoon with a friend, lets call her S. The argument started from how dangerous it is to talk back to the various immigrants when they make a sexist remark or something similar. The discussion moved to how the government is protecting them instead of punishing them, how they all know each other and how 90% of them are criminals and are only in Germany to exploit the social rights. All the while anecdotal evidence was used to back each point.
During the last and most heated part of the argument, S expressed the idea she thought would resolve this issue. Kick all the immigrants which do not speak the language and are not otherwise “integrated”, out of the country.
This is a sentiment that it seems people everywhere share. I’ve seen it in Greece (Albanians), I’ve heard it from US (Mexicans) and I see it now in Germany (Turkish mostly). The idea that with by kicking the immigrants out, things will magically become better.
There’s various ways one rationalises this. Others think that immigrants are taking over the jobs while others that immigrants do not integrate into a society and thus drag everyone down. I seem to keep running into the second case.
The line of thought seems to go like this:
- Immigrants come to our country
- Some of them do not care to work and abuse our social programs
- The government seems to protect them (insert anecdotal evidence)
- All the dangerous criminal gangs we run into are foreigners. Our countrymen would never act like that.
- Thus the solution is to kick the criminals out of the country since they do not want to be like us.
Now I understand how one can be exasperated with their government when they hear the anecdotes of how they always seem to take the side of the immigrant. I was told a specific example of a guy getting stabbed by some teen Russians because he tried to stop a fight and the government decided to not punish them because “their life would be ruined”. The guy went into the hospital apparently and he was told by the Russians that “they would finish the job when you get out” and the Government again didn’t do anything about it. Examples like these can really make your blood boil and lead one to espouse radical positions.
The underlying sentiments people express is that
- The Government should be on our side
- Foreigners are more dangerous and thus should have less rights.
The first point is wrong, not because the government should be on the immigrants side, but because the government should be fair and neutral to where one’s parents happened to fuck in.
I wholeheartedly oppose the Government falling over itself to please other cultures or religions. If a muslim woman wants to wear a burqa in their job where business clothes are the norm, then, tough. If the business is not prepared to allow other employees to wear whatever they want, then she should not be allowed either. Just because one comes from a culture where one thing is the norm, it should make the society where they go to, to conform to it.
On the other hand, if that muslim woman did a crime then the solution is not to judge her by islamic law or to kick her out of the country. The solution is to treat her exactly the same as any other person. No entitlement because she’s foreign but no extra punishment (like deportation) either.
The second point is the one that mostly annoys me however. It is something that passes into racism quite neatly. People do not realise what they are really advocating when they request that someone be treated differently solely because of their birthplace. When I called S out on it with “What you are advocating is racist” I got the immediate reply “I’m not a racist“. Good thing that I has seen this video just recently
[youtube]b0Ti-gkJiXc[/youtube]
But that’s exactly it. Whenever I tell S to do something about the problems her response is that “People who complain in Germany are called Nazis.”
When your solution to the problem is racist (kicking the foreign criminals out), then people will unfortunately come just to that conclusion. When I hear stuff like “All Russians know each other” or “The Turkish don’t want to integrate” then alarm lights start flaring in my head. Generalisations like this are the precursor to more nasty stuff.
But I can foresee one asking: “If indeed the majority of criminals are immigrants, wouldn’t it make sense to get rid of them?“. Why is this wrong? Because they are basing the argument on correlation. It is not an inherent characteristic of an immigrant that he’ll become a criminal in another country but it is a very likely outcome that a poor & desperate will. The reason that so many criminals are foreign is because so many foreigners are poor.
I do not know how the German society is, or how welcoming (and indeed my experience is that they can be quite hostile) but when your society does not accept someone as it would accept one of your countrymen, you lead them to povertry and desperation. Once you get a good number of such people, their mentality shifts to considering all of your countrymen as hostile bigots.
Once this happens, it starts feeding upon itself and things like ghettos start popping up. Convince a sufficiently large group of immigrants that your society is hostile and they will become an opponent. They will abuse your laws and form into criminal gangs in order to survive.
It is also because of how a society works that a class of people are impoverished and some of them turn to crime. Were you to kick all foreigners out, the same system would necessitate that part of your middle class be impoverished in order to keep the wheels turning. You would still have the same criminal elements, only now they would speak your language (in slang) as well.
When you tell me that “Germans do not always carry a knife on them” it is because all Germans you know are middle class and this is because the low class is now comprised from the impoverished immigrants. Kick them out, and you’ll start seeing Germans, Greeks or Americans in their place.
One final thing that annoys me is when I tell people to do something about the problems they have in their society. I tell them to speak, to be active, to think of solutions and I get the same response: “Nothing will ever change”. This kind of defeatism is exasperating especially because when you explain that nothing fixes itself and you have to fight against poverty or change the current system, I end up hearing “Kick the foreigners out”
Egalitarianism VS Freedom
In my recent conversation with a…err…”political moderate”, a fundamental difference in opinions surfaced which I think is what caused most of the friction. Specifically it is the classic collision that occurs between a free market libertarian and a Libertarian Socialist.
Our conversation started with me explaining if I am a supporter of personal freedoms and very soon I was being drilled on why I support them but I don’t support the freedom of people to amass capital. Even as I was explaining that such freedom creates inequality and exploitation I was indirectly being accused of hypocrisy (which was incidentally a trigger point to take this publicly).
There was a tacit understanding by my opponent that I was somehow as supportive of (the same type of) freedom as he was and thus, by not supporting economic freedom I was being hypocritical. Indeed, thinking about the way this conversation took place I get the impression tha Oolon was attempting to make me realize this perceived dissonance in my opinion and thus abandon such views.
However what Oolon and generally libertarians do not understand is that for me (and I guess for the rest of the left-libertarian movement – feel free to correct me on this) it is not liberty (or more accurately, negative liberty) that is my highest value or priority, it is egalitarianism or positive liberty and while I do consider negative liberty as a worthy goal and will be willing to cooperate with free market libertarians to achieve it, it will definitely take the back seat when it conflicts with egalitarianism.
Libertarians love to scream “bloody oppression” when such views are expressed and this is what really gets me annoyed. I can only take so many accusations that “I am trying to force my morality on others” or that I am trying to take away freedoms when I am attempting to achieve the exact opposite: Promote the most freedom for the largest amount of people.
Thus our fundamental difference once again comes down to the classic Egalitarianism VS Freedom or Positive VS Negative Liberty and if we are to have any meaningful discussion, it is this part that we need to argue for the rest of our argument stems from it.
There is no point in expressing my opinion on one policy and have the libertarian exclaim “Aha! But you’re taking away my freedom.” I.Don’t.Care. By allowing you that freedom it would mean that inequality would once again occur and people would suffer as a result. I do not care for your repugnant beliefs that the people are not entitled to escape suffering and if you call me authoritarian one more time I will smack you.
Our freedoms need already to be curtailed in some aspects in order to have a working society. Thus, among others, you do not have the freedom to pay people below the minimum wage and you do not have the freedom to freely pollute your own property. And finally, you do not have the freedom to relinquish your own freedom.
Incidentally this is similar to the classic disagreement between the BSD Licenses and GNU GPL. The BSDs are always accusing the Free Software movement that they are not as free as them because they do not allow the freedom to take away the freedom. GPL is about providing positive freedom while BSD is about proviging negative freedom. The type of freedom that BSD espouses is what enabled Microsoft to get and then grip the market with their Active Directory implementation of LDAP & Kerberos.
It is in a similar way that negative liberty is abused, even without the initiation of force. This is what free market libertarians fail to consider. Things like monopolies, worker exploitation etc are the results and they end up hurting everyone.
On the other hand, what Egalitarianism is about, is not making all people achieve the same (which is again a misunderstanding of the concept) but allowing all people the same freedoms no matter their abilities or social standing. Egalitarianism is not about putting overachievers down, but rather in making sure that inequality is not created because of it.
For example, it is of not unfair if a person making 1M a year is taxed at 80% in order to enable people making 20K to be taxed 10%. The former is still filthy rich and the later can have a comfortable life without struggling for subsistence.
But why is egalitarianism of higher priority than freedom? Because through egalitarianism people truly have a choice in their lives. It allows people to do what they do best even if under capitalism that is not profitable. It makes people happier and it allows people to discard fear which further serves as a catalyst for discarding religion. And most importantly, it is self-sustaining.
When people learn to cooperate in this manner it is difficult for it to change. Cooperative people have already the necessary mentality to unite and oppose creeping inequality and authoritarianism. Free Market Libertarians OTOH, classically with a “Every man for himself” mentality, are doomed to play the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
So dear libertarians and political moderates, if you’re going to debate me on such issues you’re better trying to convince me why Negative liberty is superior to Egalitarianism. Anything else can only end in frustration.
Debate with a libertarian in denial
By Zeus’ golden rain! Can anyone explain to me why I recently seem to attract all the crusaders of capitalism? It seems like every other post I make I’m battling with Objectivists, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and the like. Did someone stick a “Ask me about Communism!” sticker on my back when I wasn’t looking? Fuck, I don’t even enjoy talking about this stuff.
By Zeus’ golden rain! Can anyone explain to me why I recently seem to attract all the crusaders of capitalism? It seems like every other post I make I’m battling with Objectivists, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and the like. Did someone stick a “Ask me about Communism!” sticker on my back when I wasn’t looking? Fuck, I don’t even enjoy talking about this stuff.
So recently I’ve been having a lively discussion with a member of the Atheist Nexus who contated me via email and initiated a discussion by innocuously asking me some basic questions on freedoms (such as if I support ban on smoking or drugs). The nature of the questions was somehow suspicious as I’ve been very clear generally on my support for personal freedoms in the fora but I decided to answer anyway.
As I expected, soon enough the questions turned to accusations of me not allowing the same freedom for economy that I allow to persons and that somehow makes me a hypocrite and a “moral facist” [1. The later description is just my way to describe the classic accusation all libertarians seem to make, with annoying frequency, of “pushing our morality upon them”] and things only started getting downhill from there…
The main gist of Oolon’s “I’m not a libertarian” Colluphid was that absolutely unregulated freedom is the best thing that can ev4r happen. All my arguments were either equivocated or handwaved away as irrelevant or inconsequential.
- Positive Freedom? There’s no such thing. It’s “entitlement” and you’re stealing money to achieve it
- Wage Slavery? It’s not that. You always have a choice to switch jobs and just because you’re unhappy with your work it does not mean that you’re entitled to something better.
- Tragedy of the commons? It’s not really a problem and besides, Capitalism can deal with it…somehow.
- Hard working people being impoverished? Impossible! They’re just lazy. Prove it to me otherwise!
- Inequality? This will never change so we might as well look to ourselves.(why is this such a favorite response from capitalists?)
Generally the classic libertarian lollipop where the pertaining notion is that Free Market knows best and all concerns to the contrary are trivialized. I even had my example of one getting a work that exploits them because of desperation, compared to…taking out the garbage!
This is precisely the reason why I don’t enjoy these debates. Whenever I state my arguments, people seem to enjoy jumping on their high horse and calling me an authoritarian. I am accused of not understanding the “human nature” (which will of course, never-ever change) without them ever recognising that, without this “human nature” changing, their system is even worse.
For my part, I generally agree with Ebonmuse’s “Why I’m not a libertarian” series from which I often take many of the arguments whenever I’m faced with these discussions. I also have a few other arguments that Ebonmuse did not tackle, such as the possibility for monopolies to form in a libertarian environment (which another A|N member believes are only formed because of goverment intervention, as silly as that sounds).
In general this email debate covered all the bases: Poor people are lazy, I misunderstand economics, I am a moral fascist, capitalism is a natural as evolution etc.
It also touched on two issues I would like to tackle:
At some point in our discussion Oolon revealed his favorable future
Db0:
There’s no two ways about it. Either we follow the majority’s economic “ideals” or we follow the minority’s. I don’t see why it should be the later.False dichotomy. We can let the government set back, enforce basic laws and let society for itself. Nothing it stopping you from forming a commune and living a socialist lifestyle in my capitalist country however in a socialist country I can’t own and operate a private business
Why is forming a commune perfectly fine but if that commune becomes large enough to include the whole nation that is not fine? If a capitalist does not want to live in a commune he does not have to get in it, but if the majority of people in a country want to form a commune, they somehow can’t? What if that commune I form grows so much as to include all other citizens of the country? Wouldn’t that be the same thing?
Oolon, is not about allowing freedom, he is all about getting his own way. If somehow all other humans on the planet wanted to live in a grand planet-wide commune, then Oolon would feel that he is being oppressed.
That is, unfortunately, a classic sentiment I’ve seen libertarian express (which I’m just certain, Oolon isn’t). It should be either their way or nothing at all – and this is why I am always left with the impression that they’re just spoiled brats…
However Oolon has another conflict that he may have perhaps not noticed. He is supporting enironmental protections (and government checks on corporations to that end) and he’s also for Government protection. However I could very well use the same arguments he does, in order to argue against these concepts too:
Why should I pay for you protection Oolon? Why can’t I use my hard earned money to buy my own protection that would better serve me? Why should you be entitled to protection? Why do you want to curtail my freedom to build and use whatever I want? A coal plant will save me more money than a wind pylon.
Of course the obvious conflicts of supporting some socialistic policies (environmental and protection) because of the good consequences they will have, while on the other hand opposing others (like universal heathcare) is the classic schizophrenic nature of the right-libertarian beast. They subconsciously realize that common goals have a net benefit for everyone but are utterly incapable of seeing that it’s the same exact concept for the rest.
Unfortunately, once again, I find out that there is little point in having a conversation like these. Sooner or later we reach some fundamental difference in concepts and it then becomes a shouting match. And I have neither the time nor the inclination to participate.