From a Times article about the possible causes of the Polish air disaster:
[A Russian] official said that the pilot was aware “well in advance’ that he was headed to an airfield without a modern aerial navigation system. One possibility, he said, was that the pilot was not aware that the plane, a TU-154, loses altitude faster than usual when it is descending at more than 20 feet per second.
With thanks to my friend Yaniv Sarig, here are some fantastic photos of Eyjafjallajokull.
Of all the conceptual tar-pits into which discussions of Darwinian naturalism often sink, none smothers its victims so prolifically as the concept of “design”. We reserve it jealously for the foresightedly purposeful efforts of conscious agents, which leaves us fumfering about for a word to describe the beautiful machinery of living things, and the powerful (but itself purposeless) process that has shaped them so perfectly to the uses to which they are put. Writers of books about evolution must squirm and fidget to avoid the word, lest they give the impression of telos in discussing natural selection’s mindless action. When they do use it — which is natural enough, as the raison d’etre of, say, a bird’s wing is obviously that it allows the bird to fly — they must baffle it with scare-quotes and disclaimers.
It’s a pity. This narrow, anthropocentric definition of “design”, a categorical relic of a prior era of human understanding, leaves us with no proper term for the difference between a rock, which obviously is not “for” anything, and an eagle’s eye, which obviously is.
My view (see here, for example) has always been that we ought to broaden the definition of “design” to include not only the products of conscious agency, but also the creations of the mindless, but stupendously productive, engine of natural selection. I unapologetically see the human heart, for example, as having been designed to pump blood (so unapologetically, in fact, that I can say so without scare-quotes).
Today, however, I ran across an article at American Scientist that, after a nod in the direction of the tar-pit, argues that we should not broaden, but further restrict our ascription of design. The authors suggest that even a great many of the things we uncontroversially regard as designed — can-openers, airplanes, and so on — are not really “designed” at all, but are themselves products of the same sort of selection-by-trial-and-error that generates the design of living organisms.
The argument is interesting in that if you carry it far enough, it really holds the materialist’s feet to the fire: if the human mind is itself the product of, and operates strictly according to, the lawful processes of the material world, then we may arrive at the conclusion that there is none of what we traditionally mean by “design” to be found anywhere. In other words, while I have been willing to make a conventional distinction between the products of conscious agency and the products of natural selection, but think that the meaning of the word “design” should be applicable to both, it can fairly be argued, if materialism is true, that the distinction is ultimately meaningless.
Read the essay here.
Last week my old friend Jess friend sent me, as a birthday gift, a book by Eric Hoffer. I’d known about Mr. Hoffer for years, but had never read him. I wish I had done so sooner.
Eric Hoffer, for those of you who don’t know of him, was a most unusual autodidact. Born in the Bronx sometime around 1900, he lost his mother when just a boy, and his father when still a very young man. He also mysteriously lost his sight from age seven until fifteen, perhaps due to the aftereffects of the accident (a fall down the stairs, with the five-year-old Eric in her arms) that killed his mother. Upon the death of his father, he moved to Los Angeles, and spend ten years on Skid Row before taking work as a farm laborer, and ultimately as a longshoreman in San Francisco. The harbor work suited his temperament, and he worked on the waterfront until retiring at 65. He died in 1983.
Hoffer was a profoundly gifted observer and thinker, and despite his lack of formal education, became a widely admired writer of social criticism and political philosophy. He was also, as I am finding out now, an extraordinarily acute and prolific aphorist.
Is it just me, or does the Earth’s crust seem awfully fidgety these days? There have been earthquakes all over the place lately, it seems, and now air travel throughout Europe has been paralyzed by ashfall from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano.
It might be getting worse. Apparently, as bad as the current eruption is, the real threat comes from Katla, another volcano nearby. According to this item in USA Today, should Katla let loose the cataclysm “would likely send the world, including the USA, into an extended deep freeze.”
(That would be bad, I guess, by most people’s lights, though with another New York City summer staring me in the face (see, for example, here, here, here, and here), it sounds to me like a pretty sweet deal.)
Meanwhile, if you’re starting up an End Of Days seismic-catastrophe pool at the office, I think the smart money is on the Cascadia Subduction Zone up in the Pacific Northwest. We’ve had a lot of action all around the eastern Pacific lately, and my sources tell me that sucker’s ready to rip.
In Tuesday’s post about the puzzle of consciousness (I was off duty last night, celebrating my 54th at an Argentine steakhouse on the Lower East Side), I mentioned having seen an item in the paper that day that I thought seemed timely. It was a piece in the Times about growing interest in the use of psychedelic drugs for the treatment of various psychological afflictions.
Of particular relevance were these passages, which describe the experience of a dissolving of the “self” that hallucinogens can produce:
“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,’ [a subject] recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.’ …
In interviews … subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished.
These experiences are very much like those achieved by various meditative disciplines, and esoteric adepts have long used hallucinogenic drugs to give beginners a glimpse of the road ahead. The correspondence, it turns out, is not just subjective:
Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.
In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.
That these substances can induce mental states that are both subjectively and objectively similar to, or perhaps indistinguishable from, “genuine” religious or mystical experiences, has led to the coinage of an excellent word for them: entheogens. And that these ineffable subjective experiences can be brought about by such “material” causes as the use of drugs, or even brain trauma (watch this extraordinary video, if you haven’t seen it before) is, it seems to me, more grist for the materialist’s mill.
Read the article here.
A correspondent (and occasional commenter) and I have been exchanging emails over the past few days about the mystery of consciousness — a topic that used to occupy a fair amount of space around here, but which has been bumped off the page lately by political rants and screeds.
My friend and I make fundamentally opposite assumptions. For him, consciousness and purpose are bedrock features of the world, while I suppose that consciousness emerges, somehow, from the substance and activity of our brains. (It’s worth noting that he is a theist, and I’m not.)
My interlocutor asked me:
Do you think there is such a thing as raw consciousness, awareness, an Observer; or do you think there is just an incredibly complicated causal mental chain that somehow includes self-awareness, somehow generated by the same process?
Some time ago, while the lovely Nina and I were visting our daughter at college in Ann Arbor, we went to a local comedy club. The featured act was a very funny fellow by the name of D.C. Malone, who told us, after he was intoduced, that he had just quit drinking a few weeks ago.
He paused, then picked up a glass containing ice and Irish whiskey, took a long, loving draught. After an appreciative smack of his lips, he sighed, and said: “…it isn’t going all that well.”
I know what he means; I had sort of stopped blogging about politics, too. Oh well. Maybe just tonight…
Today’s mail-bag held a potpourri of postworthy tidbits. Here they are.
First, another step for the U.K. along the path to dhimmitude. It appears that female Muslim hospital staff will be exempt from the requirement to keep forearms bare and scrubbed to reduce the transmission of pathogens. In this latest capitulation, we see once again that there is no good — not even protecting the safety of hospital patients by the practice of basic hygiene — that trumps multiculturalist appeasement, and in particular, appeasement of Islam. How sad it is to see the great British people, recent heirs to the greatest empire in the history of the world, reduced to such pitiful enfeeblement. Story here.
On a related topic, another item that is causing rather a stir is the announcement that the US now considers one of its own citizens — the fundamentalist firebrand Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico but now lives and foments in Yemen — fair game for assassination. That the US has authorized such measures against one of its own is, to many, the beginning of a very slippery slope. We shall see where this leads.
Back to the UK: it appears that the atheist gadflies Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will be lurking in the bushes when Pope Benedict pays Britain a visit in September. Despite the fact that the Pope has vowed to bring pedophilia down to “acceptable levels“, Messrs D & H are arranging to have the Holy Father clapped in irons for his part in the global child-molestation coverup. Grab some popcorn.
Finally, if you’re getting the impression that I think religion has brought the world nothing more than conflict, jihad and pederasty, you’re wrong. Yes, to be sure, religion has given us all that and more — but our innate sense of the sacred, finding its clearest expression in the world’s great religions, has also inspired mankind, again and again, to lift itself above the mundane, and to create timeless works of sublime and ennobling majesty.
Like this.
Here I am again, toiling away in the office on a Friday night, just to earn a crust.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain, though; for all I know I could soon be replaced by one of these.
I’m still feeling a bit blogged-out this week, and tonight, after a long day of working and teaching, I haven’t anything of substance to write about. I’ll just leave you, then, with an uplifting little news item about the discovery of a new species in the Philippines. (It is most unusual in this day and age to find new species of large animals, and according to the story this event ranks right up there with the discovery in 1992 of the Saola, a bovine creature of the Indo-Chinese forests.)
The honoree in this case is a man-sized monitor lizard, and it is unusual in at least two respects. First, unlike its relatives in Indonesia, it eats no meat; we are told that it is “entirely peaceable” and dines on fruit. Second, it is equipped with not one, but two penises — and apparently it makes up for its gustatory meekness with some mad skillz in the sack:
The two penises are often used in alternation, and sometimes contain spines or hooks that serve to anchor the male within the female during intercourse.
“In alternation”! Just imagine.
Learn more here.
Spring is upon us with startling suddenness this year; it will be, they tell us, 88° tomorrow. All over the city the daffodils and Callery pears are in bloom, and the pretty girls have shed their scarves and boots for skirts and sandals.
For the first time I think Eliot may have been right about April. I’ll be 54 a week from today, and as I watch the living world spring joyously back to life once again, I can’t help feeling that this time it’s running ahead of me, looking back and laughing.
It won’t look back for long, of course. Why would it?
Sojourning in Wellfleet for a few days. Back in a bit. Happy Easter, Passover, etc. to all.
Well, it’s been kind of an eventful morning. My response to a form letter from President Obama’s political strategist David Plouffe has led to a truly mind-expanding back-and-forth exchange, and, frankly, I guess I have to say the scales have fallen from my eyes.
I’ve been a pretty harsh critic of the whole Democratic political agenda — the provision of state-supported health-care for all, the benevolent regulation of the nation’s largest industries in the interests of stability and compliance with the American people’s compassionate long-term social and fiduciary goals, the restructuring of the world’s economy to reduce inequality and combat climate change, the expansion of our nation’s workforce and social capital by the importation of tens of millions of new Americans (and with it the long-overdue transformation of a cold, white-dominated society into a vibrant rainbow of diversity), and the general levelling-off of three centuries of headstrong American individualism, with all the damage and misery that has caused both here and around the world — but after these conversations I’ve seen the light, and it suddenly became clear to me that I have spent long and wasted years in the grip of a selfish and destructive right-wing ideology.
I realize now that it’s time America started setting, finally, a good example for the world — a world that is really just an inclusive community, of kind and caring people of all races and religions; a world that has done so much for us all these years. It’s high time we gave something back, and the Democratic leadership — Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and above all, our wise and loving President — are doing everything they can to make that happen.
It’s time we got out of their way!
At various times I have written (here, for example) about whether, under a naturalistic view, there can be objectively existing moral truths. I have argued that there cannot. There can be “facts of the matter” about what our moral intuitions tell us, and how they came to be what they are, but there is no external, objective standard (no “truth-maker”, as the philosophers would say) against which the “truth-value” of our moral propositions can be measured. We can say that if we want X, then we ought to do Y — and as evolved, living organisms we certainly have a great many interests that lead naturally to us wanting some things and not wanting others — but there is nothing in nature that tells us what we ought to want. Nature just is; it doesn’t care.
Sam Harris disagrees. I think he is mistaken. He made his case, briefly, at the most recent TED conference. Here’s a video of his talk.
With work and other demands piling on a little bit just at the moment (it’s Sunday at 10 p.m. and I am still at the office), I must take a brief time-out from blogging.
Meanwhile, please feel free to browse our archives (try the View A Random Post button at the right).
Thanks as always for visiting. We’ll be back shortly.
Well, here I am, not writing about politics, or the accelerating decline of civilization, or any of that old stuff. It’s much harder than I thought it would be, because there are all sorts of post-worthy stories bouncing around the media and the blogosphere today, like xxx xxxxxxx‘s adventures up in xxxxxx, the “xxxxx-xxx” story out of xxxxxxxxxxxx (which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with xxxx), and of course the ongoing dispute over the xxxxxx-xxxx xxxxxxxxxxx.
But I know there are all sorts of other interesting things to think and write about, and that there are plenty of able writers out there who will man the cultural and political ramparts while I’m de-toxing. And I know that the first few days are always the hardest.
So, then! There’s so much else to discuss. Let’s get going!
ummmm…
hmmm…
How’s the weather where you are?
Enough politics for now. I’m tired of it all, and I’m going to lay off it for a little while at least, as difficult as that may be (well, maybe just the occasional link now and then). When I started this blog, 5 years and 1,688 posts ago, I almost never wrote about such things, and life was perhaps more agreeable for it. And while I know my outspokenness on these matters has attracted some new readers, I also know I’ve put a few old ones off, as well.
I do think there are important things to be said — our nation and our culture, which have stood against the storm so proudly for so long, are imperiled as never before, this time from within — but other, stronger voices than mine are sounding the call loud and clear, and I’m going to give it a rest.
So for now, back to other things — and there are so many of them — for a spell. I’ll probably post a bit less frequently for a few weeks as well.
Well, as we might expect, the events of Sunday night have provoked quite a Festschrift on the right.
Here’s Mark Steyn, at National Review Online, on the decline of great nations.
Here’s Dennis Prager, also at NRO, who sees this ideological conflict as nothing less than a bloodless civil war.
Here’s George Will, on “America’s teetering tower of unkeepable promises”.
Here’s a particularly pungent item from Roissy.
And here something less up-to-the-minute, but every bit as timely: James Madison’s hope, expressed in Federalist #10, that a large Union that took the form of a democratic republic would provide a bulwark against the ancient ills of political faction. He assumed that there would always be at least some commonality of purpose between the representatives appointed to conduct the legislative affaors of the Union, but this assumption appears to have broken down; so diametrically opposed are the aims of the two factions at war in this latest struggle that even the ingenuity of Jemmy and the rest of the Framers appears to have been unequal to the challenge.
“Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!'”
The fell deed is done. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel gives us a peep beneath the blanket.
“Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept
All by the name of dogs.”
Well, it’s looking like this grotesque health-care bill is about to pass: the biggest expansion of the power of the federal government in my lifetime.
Here’s Dennis Prager on the dehumanizing, emasculating, infantilizing effect of an ever-expanding State:
The philosopher and “New Atheist” Daniel Dennett, working together with clinical psychologist Linda LaScola, has undertaken an interesting project: a series of interviews with pastors who have lost their belief in God. Dennett and LaScola have presented the results in a paper now available online. Here is an introductory excerpt:
1) Alka-Seltzer: directions for use.
2) What I generally do at parties.
As often happens on Thursday evenings, I’m home late from class, with very little gas left in the tank. So for tonight, here’s an interesting website I ran across the other day: Floating Sheep. They count things, and make maps.
Last night, unable to decide what I wanted to listen to, I stuck my hand into the CD cabinet and pulled a record out at random. It turned out to be one I hadn’t listened to in a while, and one that brought back quite a few memories — some very sad, and one that was rather amusing. Here’s the amusing one.
The statist machinations of the new kings of the hill in Washington inspired me a little while ago to read The Federalist Papers, which previously I had only sampled, more or less at random. They are, if you have never read them, a series of 85 essays, published pseudonymously in 1787-88 by John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, that explain the proposed U.S. Constitution, and advocate its ratification. The essays consider the document in great detail, and attempt to meet the many objections that had been raised against its general aims and specific formulations. To the patient and curious reader they offer a fascinating tour of the Constitution, with three of the brightest of the Founding Fathers as your guides.
In the penultimate entry, number 84, Hamilton considers at last the charge that the federal government might simply be too expensive. I have excerpted a long passage below that illustrates the scale of government this Framer had in mind. As you read it, try to keep in your own mind, if you can, that what is being described here is the same United States Government that, having just disbursed the better part of a trillion dollars for “stimulus”, is now hard at work on Obamacare. Italics are my own.
We are now waiting at the airport, finally, for a flight home that will likely not be canceled. Back to normal soon, I hope.
On the other hand, when it comes to the fate of the West, hope can be hard to come by. In case you missed them, here are an extraordinarily depressing article at Gates of Vienna, and a long thread at Mangan’s, that make the argument that the accelerating demographic changes in England and Europe — which are taking place with the full support and encouragement of the Socialist and multiculturalist political establishments of those communities — are arguably a form of ethnic cleansing directed against Northern Europe and Britain’s indigenous peoples.
We’ve been off the air for a few days: the lovely Nina and I flew down to central Florida on Wednesday evening to spend a few days with our son, who pitches for his college baseball team and is down here for an early-season tournament. (He goes to school some distance away from our home in Brooklyn, so we rarely get to see him play.)
The weather, we are told, was lovely until we got here. As soon as we arrived, though, a vaporous and malevolent weather-system moved in, and rain poured down continuously until sometime before dawn today. All games were cancelled. (If you have ever wondered what it is like to spend three days in Lake Mary, Florida, in a monsoon, drop me a line, and I will describe the experience for you.)
Today was pleasant enough, though, and there will be baseball tonight at last, starting at 7 p.m.
Unfortunately, Nina and I were booked on a flight back to New York at 7:15 p.m., and now we are at the airport in Orlando.
It now turns out that there is a ferocious nor’easter pummeling the New York region, with torrential rain and savage gales. At the moment, though, our flight, according to the departures board, is merely “Delayed”. We shall see.
Update: We never made it out. That appears to have been one hell of a storm back home. I’ve never seen the airlines so backed up; we are stuck in FL till at least Monday evening.
I’m back in town briefly, but having got home after midnight from a 13-hour day at work, I have no time for writing. But…
Remember our piece a while back about the “Monty Hall problem”? Well, reader J. Kapok has now sent along a dispiriting item about the relative mathematical capabilities of people and pigeons. Here.
We’re off again shortly. Back to normal next week.
Starting tomorrow morning, I will be traveling a fair amount for a week or so, and things may be quieter than usual around here.
For tonight: an essay from Mark Alexander on the Second Amendment case now making its way through the Supreme Court. Here.
Also, there is a new website, Alternative Right, that has been attracting a fair amount of attention in the conservative blogosphere. I haven’t had a chance yet to look it over, but here are some discussions of it, over at Mangan’s and at Reflecting Light.
Meanwhile, in a hopeful sign of a long-overdue cultural awakening, the Dutch political party PVV, led by the increasingly popular Geert Wilders, has just won some decisive political victories in Holland — though you’d never hear about it by reading the Times. More than anyone else in Europe right now, Mr. Wilders is, to borrow a favorite phrase of the Left, “speaking truth to power” — and for daring to speak his mind about the existential threat posed to Western Europe by Islam and unchecked immigration, he is under indictment on what amounts, effectively, to a Sharia-charge-by-proxy of blasphemy against the Prophet. The government’s shameful persecution of him may be beginning to backfire, though, as the PVV now seems to be attracting widespread support, and is on the march. Learn more here.
The big political question at the moment is whether the Democrats will try to force their health-care bill though Congress using a procedural shortcut called “budget reconciliation”. This parliamentary loophole was put in place in 1974 for the sole purpose of making it easier to legislate the many adjustments that go into harmonizing a budget bill amongst various committees. When it began to look as if the new procedure would be routinely abused, it was braced against such misapplication by a set of rules introduced by Senator Robert Byrd in 1985.
Orrin Hatch wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post yesterday excoriating the democrats for considering this option to pass their health-care package. (You can read it here.) Here’s a wee sample:
This use of reconciliation to jam through this legislation, against the will of the American people, would be unprecedented in scope. And the havoc wrought would threaten our system of checks and balances, corrode the legislative process, degrade our system of government and damage the prospects of bipartisanship.
Less than a year ago, the longest-serving member of the Senate, West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, said, “I was one of the authors of the legislation that created the budget ‘reconciliation’ process in 1974, and I am certain that putting health-care reform . . . legislation on a freight train through Congress is an outrage that must be resisted.”
For his trouble, the liberal TV host Rachel Maddow gave Mr. Hatch an earful on her show last night. (You can see it here.) She did not mince words, and said many times, quite without equivocation, that Mr. Hatch was lying. (Not “mistaken”, or “being misleading”, mind you, but lying.) She listed, as evidence of his hypocrisy, all the bills that Mr. Hatch had helped to pass using reconciliation. There were more than a few, although Ms. Maddow seemed not to notice that they were all, arguably, exactly the sort of bills that the reconciliation procedure was intended by its creators to apply to, unlike the one presently at hand.
Apparently the feud has now spilled over into Twitter, if you are interested in following that up. (I’m not.)
So who’s right? Seems to me that both may be overstating the case a little, but my own sympathies are with the conservative opposition, as readers will already know. I realize, of course, that statecraft occasionally requires taking a principled stand in defiance of transient popular passions, but in this case the bill is so bad, the expansion of government so egregious, the tactics so underhanded, and the general sentiment of the polity so willfully disregarded, that I rather find myself hoping that the Democrats attempt this brazen ploy, fail spectacularly, and are gutted at the polls in November.
It would be nice to be able to cite some utterly impartial authority as regards the competing claims made by Mr. Hatch and Ms. Maddow, but so polarizing is this health-care business that disinterested parties are hard to come by. But if you would like to read an in-depth examination of the matter from someone who can speak with “unimpeachable” authority on matters of Congressional procedure, Newt Gingrich — the former Speaker of the House, and himself an enormously polarizing figure — today issued a detailed essay on the matter, peppered with informative links. Have a look here.
Small changes in the relative timing and rates of growth of an animal’s parts — a concept called heterochrony — can make an enormous difference in the adult animal’s morphology. For instance, crabs and lobsters are built of essentially the same parts, but in the development of a crab the carapace broadens quickly, while the abdomen grows slowly, while in the lobster the timing is reversed. These differences may require only tiny changes in the genome, but can have big results. A similar source of variation is neoteny, which is the retention of juvenile features in the adult. (Indeed, we modern humans are a good example of that, with our big heads, small jaws, and hairless bodies.)
It seems clearer and clearer that much of the diversity in the living world is due to little variations in important rules, and to tiny adjustments of powerful control systems. Now a group of researchers at Harvard have advanced our understanding by teasing out, from a study of — what else? — Darwin’s-finch beaks, a powerful mathematical generalization of morphological variation, with only three parameters.
Here.
Amphibian populations have been declining sharply for years now, around the world. An item in today’s Science Daily suggests that the cause may be a enormously popular weed-killer, atrazine, which apparently “chemically castrates” most of the males that come into contact with it, and turns the rest into females.
You can learn more here. (I will also take this opportunity to pre-empt any waggish comments about how handy a jug of this stuff might be on a Friday night.)
Here’s an interesting item: Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson claims to have demonstrated conclusively that playing shoot-’em-up video games “increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior.”
This is, of course, what various concerned sorts have been saying all along, although I had for some reason thought that the idea had been shown, generally, to be false. These games are hugely popular, and are the focus of an enormously profitable industry, so you can bet that the usual battle lines, easily predictable and tiresomely familiar, will soon be drawn.
I have no expertise whatsoever to bring to bear here — all I can say, from my own wholly unscientific sampling of the phenomenon, is that I used to play a fair amount of Doom with my son Nick when he was a boy, and he turned out to be as amiable a fellow as you could ever hope to meet.
Whenever there’s a new result in the social sciences, can some new laws be far behind? Indeed, the good professor is already looking forward to some benevolent social engineering:
The researchers conclude that the study has important implications for public policy debates, including development and testing of potential intervention strategies designed to reduce the harmful effects of playing violent video games.
“From a public policy standpoint, it’s time to get off the question of, ‘Are there real and serious effects?’ That’s been answered and answered repeatedly,” Anderson said. “It’s now time to move on to a more constructive question like, ‘How do we make it easier for parents — within the limits of culture, society and law — to provide a healthier childhood for their kids?'”
Ah yes, those pesky limits. Well, in the meantime, Dr. Anderson has some advice for anxious parents:
But Anderson knows it will take time for the creation and implementation of effective new policies. And until then, there is plenty parents can do to protect their kids at home.
“Just like your child’s diet and the foods you have available for them to eat in the house, you should be able to control the content of the video games they have available to play in your home,” he said. “And you should be able to explain to them why certain kinds of games are not allowed in the house — conveying your own values. You should convey the message that one should always be looking for more constructive solutions to disagreements and conflict.”
Geez, I dunno. When a bunch of those Hell Knights pop up out of nowhere, I’m pretty sure I’m still going for my BFG. Let Satan sort ’em out.
As you all know, the global-warming community has been under a great deal of pressure lately. Its Pontifex Maximus, Albert A. Gore, published a lengthy riposte in the Times today. You can read it here.
It is about what you would expect: a reminder that even if the scientific claims of the global-warming industry are wrong, it shouldn’t matter, because the things they want us to do are for our own good anyway; some hand-waving about the objections lately raised by skeptics, and assurances that the subjects of those objections — which include such things as the CRU scandal, the disappearance of primary data, the unreliability of the latest GISS report due to the removal of many of the reporting stations from the data set, and a great deal more — are negligible trivialities; an insistence on referring to carbon dioxide, which we exhale with every breath, and which Earth’s food-chain depends on for its very existence, as a “pollutant”, including a metaphorical comparison of CO2 to feces; castigation of the media as pawns of scurrilous corporate and conservative interests for not serving as compliant propaganda outlets; characterization of public skepticism and free debate as “hatred and divisiveness”, and so forth.
But what stood out above all was this:
From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.
Well, that certainly puts the cards on the table. This is perhaps the clearest expression yet of the liberal worldview as a kind of secular religion, in which, having rejected the prospect of salvation through God, we must instead achieve salvation here below, by becoming Divine ourselves.
Al Gore, then, is the Redeemer. If we will just come to our senses, smite the unbelievers, and place the flaming sword of Justice in his hands, we shall all be saved.
If you had any lingering doubt that this man is a dangerous megalomaniac, this ought to settle the matter.
Meanwhile, the inquiry into the Climate Rearch Unit’s malfeasance continues. Here is the memorandum just presented to Parliament by the independent Institute of Physics.
Here’s a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:
The sovereign extends his arms over the whole society; he covers its surface with a web of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls are unable to emerge in order to rise above the crowd; it does not break wills but softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces men to act, but constantly opposes itself to men’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from coming into being; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it presses down upon men, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and it finally reduces each nation to no longer being anything but a herd of timid and industrious animals, whose shepherd is the government.
I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the exterior forms of liberty.
Now read this.
After working all day, teaching class this evening, staying after to practice a little Iron Wire, trudging home in a blizzard, and shoveling the walk and stoop, I’m whipped.
So for tonight, then, here’s a pungent little rant about the sorry state of my former homeland, from Mark Steyn.
In a post over at VFR, Lawrence Auster comments on an essay by Stanley Fish in which Professor Fish remarks on the inability of pure “secular” reason, bereft of normative bedrock in the Divine, to provide any “oughts”. This is catnip to Mr. Auster, who is, despite having various admirable qualities, a crusading anti-Darwinist.
The argument made by both is that if the world is, as secular-humanist types are inclined to suppose, an elaborate causal clockwork and nothing more, then it is inconsistent for us to speak, in any context whatsoever, in normative terms. In their view, if I, a Darwinist, say something like “I really ought to get this sutured up” or “you shouldn’t fire that thing in the house”, I am being dishonest; I am “smuggling” in a teleological stance that is inconsistent with my metaphysics.
What both fail to grasp is that they insist upon a false dichotomy: that teleology either exists in the world absolutely, at the level of metaphysical bedrock, or it doesn’t exist at all. What they cannot, or will not, do is to consider the possibility that purposes can enter the world as an emergent property, or by-product, of living systems. This view is of course unavailable to Mr. Auster, given that the only mechanism yet proposed by which such emergence can occur is the one first described by Darwin — but it should be accessible, I should think, to Dr. Fish.
lich: southern dialectal survival of O.E. lic “body, dead body, corpse,” cognate with O.Fris. lik, Du. lijk, O.H.G. lih, Ger. leiche “dead body,” O.N. lik, Dan. lig, Goth. leik, from P.Gmc. *likow.
As far as nifty gadgets go, it would be hard to top the computerized anti-mosquito laser cannon we showed you a few days ago. But a German tinkerer has certainly come up with an impressive little toy. Video here.
There’s a lively chat going on over at Mangan’s about how people react to the growing body of data about the diversity of various human groups with regard to IQ and general intelligence. That such differences actually do exist is at this point uncontroversial amongst those who study psychometrics, but it is of course a radioactive topic in public discourse; in Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example, Jared Diamond ruled it off-limits as a “loathsome” explanation for the differential success of various groups. That human groups vary in conspicuous ways is a plain fact — nobody would have any trouble, say, sorting out a mixed group of Afars and Inuits, no matter how thoroughly you jumbled them up — but to suggest that long-separated populations, developing in very different environments, may have systematic cognitive differences as well is to violate a strongly defended taboo. And by making such a suggestion, no matter how sensible it may be, or how well supported by evidence, one invites the nastiest sort of opprobrium. (Indeed, I have no doubt that some of you are forming dark, excommunicatory thoughts about me as you read this.)
A week from tomorrow begins the Jewish festival of Purim, which celebrates the success of the Jews living under the ancient Persian Empire in reversing a plot to annihilate them.
The tale is told in the Book of Esther, also known as the Megillah. Summing up briefly:
During a feast, a drunken King Ahasuerus [likely Xerxes] commands his wife, Vashti, “to show the people and the princes her beauty” (by dancing naked for them, this is generally interpreted to mean). She refuses. Ahaseurus, wrathful, and concerned as to the precedent this will set, gets rid of her, and there Vashti’s part in the story ends. The king, seeking a new wife, then has an assortment of fair young virgins gathered before him, and selects one named Esther. Esther is in fact a Jew, whose real name is Hadassah; she calls herself Esther so as to conceal her true origin.
Having got home rather late from teaching class, I’ll leave you this evening with a brief but truly uplifting item: about the implementation, finally, of a technological fantasy I’ve been entertaining for decades.
Seriously, this is outstanding. Have a look here.
I’ve been so busy of late spewing vile, reactionary, hate-filled, racist poison (or simple common sense, depending upon your point of view), that I have neglected another topic of critical import and urgency: butt-ugly deep-sea fishes.
No longer. Tonight I invite you to contemplate the stupefyingly unlovely Psychrolutes marcidus, known to bathypiscophiles the world over (you know who you are) as the incomparable Blobfish. Here he is:
We note with sadness the death, at age 57, of Doug Fieger, leader of the New Wave rock band The Knack, who had an enormous hit back in 1979 with the song “My Sharona”.
I got to know Doug (and even met Sharona!) back in 1981, when I assisted in the mixing of the band’s third album, Round Trip, at Power Station Studios. I never saw him after that, but you get a good sense of what a person is really like during the long and confining process of mixing an album together, and I will say that Doug Fieger was a very likeable fellow indeed. I’m sorry to hear he is gone.
You can read his obituary here.
In an article just published in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria argues that sympathy for al-Qaeda, and for the most extreme forms of terrorist jihad, is diminishing throughout much of the Muslim world — due in large part to al-Qaeda’s violent excesses against Muslims themselves, particularly in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Certainly the relentless campaign by the West to deny them safe haven since 9/11 has been an important factor as well.
Certainly a welcome trend, for what it’s worth. Read the article here.
It’s TED Time again. Most of the current talks haven’t been posted as videos yet, but a few of them have. Here’s one that shows what Microsoft is working on for Bing Maps.
When singers sing, or players of string or wind instruments sound a note, they almost always apply some vibrato — that familar effect in which the pitch is varied slightly, and rapidly — if the note is to be held for long. It is particularly unusual (in modern times at least) to hear singers who don’t do this, and when they don’t it has a tense, unsettling effect. I was just listening to some Chet Baker an hour or so ago, and it dawned on me that part of the haunting quality of his singing was that he used very little vibrato. (Even he didn’t avoid it altogether, though.)
In the essay linked to in our previous post, historian Gerard Alexander discussed the opinion, common amongst liberal critics, that Republicans lack the temperament, or perhaps even the basic intelligence and necessary habits of thought, for focused, critical examination of complex social, political, and philosophical issues. We are pleased tonight to offer a devastating counterexample, which ought to lay to rest any doubts about the intellectual qualifications of America’s conservative leaders. Here.
Once again it’s been a busy few days, with little time for brooding and writing. For now, then, here’s an essay that has been making the rounds for a week or so: Why Are Liberals So Condescending? It’s by one Gerard Alexander, who teaches politics at the University of Virginia. In it he identifies, and analyzes, four aspects of the withering contempt with which liberals regard conservatives.