Being interviewed by a social worker today, because I’m applying for disability benefits, I was asked to “define love”.

“Huh,”  I said.  “I left my Keats at home.”  No reaction.  I thought for about thirty seconds, and then said, “A relationship in which one cares about another’s well-being more than one’s own.”

Then she asked me to “define peace”.  I reflected for another half minute and settled on “A shared conviction that differences can be settled without resort to violence or cruelty.”

After a few more moments I said “I’m not sure those are very good definitions.”  But she seemed pleased.

Later I realized I probably wasn’t being tested on eloquence or insight, but rather being screened for answers such as “Them’s when I cut their eyes out so they don’t look at me so funny.”

From a discussion group called [arts-poetry-humanities]:

For starters, Tim, it’s clear that you’ve been immersed in a paradigm in which the English language has been subverted into a mode that requires more intensive decoding;  I recognize it from when I worked at Harbinger, where they elevated language to buzzwords that hid the actual meaning from the audience that might attempt to read it.

Emphasis added.  Of course.

Alternate Title: “Of all things po-mo // Let us have no mo’” — Geoff Nunberg

I had a rewarding email exchange with my brother about six months ago about charitable donations.  I quoted Benjamin Franklin, I cited specific numbers, I did other could-be-humble-but-could-be-self-aggrandizing things that I’m comfortable doing in private conversation with Dave.  He is, after all, both the most reflective person I know and the person most similar in thought to me (I believe the latter does not shade the former, although that may be hopelessly optimistic.)

So, parable about woman giving her farthings or whatever, I’m skipping the numbers and the hyperbole.  Basically — how do I divide my contributions?

Steven E. Landsburg wrote an article in Slate on this topic, wherein he argues that splitting your contribution is inherently flawed.  To his credit, he actually presents the calculus, and by “calculus” I don’t just mean “calculations”, I literally mean multivariate calculus.  Here is a link to the math page.  Go check it out.

That is one of the most ridiculous arguments I have ever read, but the reason why it’s ridiculous is (to be charitable to Landsburg) a bit subtle.  For his approximation to be valid, one has to imagine “good” to be a scalar; that is, everything else stripped away, a single number that can be compared to other single numbers.  But that’s not how charity works.  Charities define an n-space — a multidimensional mathematical world with very many dimensions — and we’re not trying to optimize a number, we’re trying to optimize a containing volume.  Follow?  If you think you glork from context, you probably do, regardless of the lingo.

So, that’s out the window.  And here enters the most frustrating thing about this argument, for me: this is a perfect AskMeFi question, and is precisely the single question I cannot ask there.  Google “metafilter givewell” and prepare to spend an arbitrarily large amount of time on the inner clockwork of a community you probably don’t care about.  It might be worth it, though, to add two useful terms to your vocabulary: astroturfing and sockpuppetry.

Dave provided CharityNavigator, which I know from the MeFi clusterfrak, and it is extremely useful for making fine-grained distinctions.  But I am interested — very, very interested, and I mean you — by your theories for optimal charitable giving.  Do you give it all to one charity?  One meta-charity?  Several charities?  Do you pay back all of the readers of your blog who’ve lent you money (another large number), and only worry about charity when you reach a zero balance (we’ll take that one as a given)?  I don’t care about your list (maybe I’ll do another post for that) — what I care about is your criteria and, generally, your theory.  If you’ve thought about it, I want to read about it.  And how do you donate?  My method of choice is an anonymous money order made out to the charity in an envelope with no return address.  I don’t want them to incur Visa charges; I don’t want them to send me free return address labels; in fact, I don’t want to waste a single penny — or a single sheet of paper — on an acknowledgment letter, no matter how nice it is or how much they mean it.  That’s the case even if they wouldn’t sell my address for other kinda-like-minded charities to use for mass mailings of expensive glossy press kits, and their likelihood of doing that, to their great shame, is essentially 100%.

Please comment.  I want this to be ultra-useful to people, especially if AskMeFi cannot.

Someone sent a follow-up to a spammy religious email (to which I had responded snarkily) explaining that he first “contact[ed] me by accident”.  He didn’t really, but never mind that.  The interesting line in the email was:

Not to get too personal but you mentioned on your site how you love spending time with your son.  You have to look at him and know that he and this whole world didn’t just happen for no reason, right?  [emphasis in original]

Usually I go on and on and on about this.  But maybe for the first time, I have something short and useful to show for it.  I responded:

The existence of the universe is an occasion for wonder and humility, no doubt.  It just isn’t evidence for a creator.  But awe is not the sole domain of religion: an atheist is able to look at the heavens and realize that, however they came into being, it wasn’t something I did.  This sort of humility in the face of the infinite (or near-infinite) I think is more flattering to atheists than to theists: Christians believe that the world was created specifically for them, their species, and their children, by a sometimes-jealous-and-sometimes-beneficent god.  Atheists have no illusions: the world is worth saving for the world’s sake, not my son’s sake.

As for “reason”?  I’m unsure whether you mean causal reason (i.e., what chain of events led to its creation) or some kind of “what it’s there for” reason.  I of course have an interest in the former, but I believe that the second is a non-question.  “Why did the whole world happen?”: just because you can phrase a proposition doesn’t mean it has an answer.  Dawkins’s great line is “Why are unicorns hollow?”  You have to unask the question to begin in a meaningful place: we can’t legitimately ask why unicorns are hollow because there are no unicorns; we cannot ask for the “meaning of the world” because there is no meaning.  We, as agents, have the ability — and, I believe, the imperative — to make meaning out of the void.

The Enlightenment took aim not at reverence but at idolatry and superstition; it never believed that progress is necessary, only that it is possible. … Why turn to the Enlightenment? There is no better option. Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake.  A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation.  If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you are committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.  … Scepticism and tolerance will not take us very far; while it’s possible they may prevent harm, it’s unlikely that they can inspire anyone to do good.

Reclaiming the Enlightenment must entail reexamining other values that derive from it, and these must include at least four.  One of them is the idea that human beings have equal rights to happiness on earth.  A second Enlightenment value is the commitment to reason – not as opposed to passion, which was as riotous during the 18th century as at any other period, but as opposed to blind authority and superstition.  A third value is more surprising, but equally important: reverence for Creation is a form of gratitude, and a sign of humility: whatever you think made the world, you had better remember it wasn’t you. Hope, a fourth Enlightenment value, is what drives all the others, but it is not the same as optimism.  Hope is not a statement of fact but a foundation of action.

Read it.  Read it now.  Right now.  Don’t bookmark the link and not get around to reading it.  Now.  Seriously, four minutes.

You didn’t click, did you?  Kudos if you have, but most people haven’t.  If you do not read this article, you self-label as a relgionist or a conservative, and you have a milligram of intellectual honesty — a fucking picogram — you need to admit that you never bothered to even attempt to understand what liberalism and secularism are about, and need to just shut the fuck up and stop voting, advocating, protesting, shouting, preaching, hating, and dicking around until you bother to spend four minutes at it.  If you object, figure out why you object.  If you dismiss this, have a reason.  Not what your mommy and daddy told you, not that “values” taste like warm milk with vanilla and just a little bit of Splenda, not what you’re afraid of after you die, not that the world is a big scary place, not that it’s really really fun to have lots of money and to have it because you are better than everyone else.  Four minutes.  Starting now.  You can consider me a self-righteous literally-damned espresso-sipping Walden-reading Frenchy fag for insulting you in this paragraph, or whatever you feel you need to, but just go.  Please go.

This robot controlled by a “rat brain in a jar” can’t possibly be real, can it?  I haven’t found any references in non-techie sources yet.  I also have yet to explain my unexpected nausea upon reading the alleged details — and I support human stem cell research.

Chinese Astrology’s dictates on my personality are laughable.  So are Western astrology’s.  Those each have 12 bins.  So the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, which itself has only 16 bins into which people are sorted, should be just as ludicrous.  Right?  I mean, I take a test, and it describes me extensively.  Yeah, right.  Like the following summation of the “INTP” type could in any way apply to me:

INTPs are pensive, analytical folks.  They may venture so deeply into thought as to seem detached, and often actually are oblivious to the world around them.

Precise about their descriptions, INTPs will often correct others (or be sorely tempted to) if the shade of meaning is a bit off.  While annoying to the less concise, this fine discrimination ability gives INTPs so inclined a natural advantage as, for example, grammarians and linguists…

A major concern for INTPs is the haunting sense of impending failure … expressed in a sense that one’s conclusion may well be met by an equally plausible alternative solution, and that, after all, one may very well have overlooked some critical bit of data.

Mathematics is a system where many INTPs love to play, similarly languages, computer systems — potentially any complex system.  INTPs thrive on systems. Understanding, exploring, mastering, and manipulating systems can overtake the INTP’s conscious thought.  This fascination for logical wholes and their inner workings is often expressed in a detachment from the environment, a concentration where time is forgotten and extraneous stimuli are held at bay.  Accomplishing a task or goal with this knowledge is secondary.

INTPs and Logic — One of the tipoffs that a person is an INTP is her obsession with logical correctness.  Errors are not often due to poor logic — apparent faux pas in reasoning are usually a result of overlooking details or of incorrect context.

Games NTs seem to especially enjoy include word games of all sorts….

The INTP mailing list … in its incipience … had trouble deciding on:

1. whether or not there should be such a group,
2. exactly what such a group should be called, and
3. which of us would have to take the responsibility for organization and maintenance of the aforesaid group/club/whatever.

(all emphasis in the original)

A list of famous INTPs includes Socrates, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, and Einstein.

This is just creepy.

Frequently atheist arguments, when simplified enough for a blog post, end up squarely in “Shut up, you’re not helping” territory.  And despite several misfires, I would recommend “It’s no mystery how Nonbelievers stay moral without God”, if only for the presentation of a false syllogism that seems to explain the believer’s logic:

1. If God does not exist, then there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail.
2. If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful.
3. If there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful, then people cannot be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
4. People should be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
Therefore,
[5]. God exists.

In these situations, I am often struck with the idea that I must be completely missing some subtlety — the conviction that in the argument, surely one of us is being a moron.  But the justifications for faith really do seem pervasively fear-based.  I run up against “If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful” all the time.  My response is, “So?!”  What bearing has an idea’s ability to comfort have on an existential claim?

I must — must — be missing something.  I know there are several devoted readers of my blog of an Abrahamic bent, and I would be indebted for an explication.

The reflexive claim of religionists seems frequently to be “without the fear of damnation, I surely would rape, torture, steal, and murder.”  Really?  Seriously, have you thought this through?  If it is only the fear of divine retribution that keeps you from commiting atrocities, would you be so kind as to stay the fuck away from me and my child?  Or, at the very least, comment on this post?

“Unconsumption is a word used to describe everything that happens after an act of acquisition.”

Would it be conspicuous concern — signaling — to mention that I intend to buy nothing new this year (save consumables, which I’m also trying to reduce)?  I’ll gamble on that not being the case, wager that the net positive effect for the planet, by publicizing this idea, will be significantly higher than the possible increase in esteem by readers.

(via Richard Eriksson)

There are plenty of people here, I estimate, who would think I completely support this article.  I am here to disown it.  It is poorly-written, confrontational, unhelpful, rude, offensive, supercilious, bitter, and useless.  You are not helping, Polly Toynbee.

A group of laborers who refuse to be paid in cash have attacked a community of space robots with purple vacuum cleaner heads.

I’m sure I got some of that right.

Less goofily: in college I read a book called Extraordinary Groups: An Examination of Unconventional Groups that covered, in the chapter with the greatest depth, the Rom community.  Not cool how they’ve been treated.  Their common name, itself an inaccurate slur (inaccurate because they are not from Egypt; slur because it means, in Europe, “y’aint from ’round here, are ya?”), carries connotations of thievery and fraud, and can be used pejoratively in casual conversation, frequently by people who don’t know they are doing it.  They survived persecution, marginalization, and, finally, murder in the gas chambers of the Third Reich, but (AFAIK) no one has built a museum for them yet.

So, please, no riots, OK?  No attacks.  No “gypsy cabs”, nor having someone “gyp” you.  In a sense, they are where Jews were before WWII, an allowed target of hate.  We needn’t hate.

But, you know, keep your wallet in your front pocket.  Just to be safe.

The book: as of this writing, there’s one for a penny.  It’s a good book.  You can afford a penny:

I’ve been reconsidering my positions on a few posts:

First, I made too big of a deal about a little girl wanting to go to heaven to be with her hamster.  While I’ve run this by atheists who agree with my premise, I should never have done so in a way that it would get back to Poppy or her mother.  I think belief in an afterlife is dangerous, but probably benign in a first-world well-off small child raised by a loving mother (and maybe a father) with plans to dispel the myth to her in a few years.

Second, I’ve reconsidered my claim that Kill Bill vols. 1 and 2 should have received NC-17s.  I think R is appropriate for the films.

Third, regarding the my quote of the article from The Guardian about George W. in early 2002 that said:

Sooner or later, Mr Bush, self-styled universal soldier for truth, will have to stop pretending that tragedy gave him a free hand to remake America and the world to fit his simplistic, narrow vision — or risk having voters and US allies end the pretence for him.

Turns out, there was an insufficient allotment of brains and balls worldwide, and Bush has been unnervingly and nauseating successful in remaking America.  So the paper and I were wrong.

Fourth, something really funny to lighten the mood.

OK, so you or a kid outgrows a garment — or, I guess, you come to loathe it and replace it, although I’ve never done that in my life.  Easy: craigslist, Goodwill, whatever.  Your choices are manifold.

Let’s say a seam opens on a perfectly functional garment, or a button comes off.  Again, easy: make sure that in every extended family there is at least one person skilled with needle and thread, and if that person’s not you, make sure you have no shame in asking for free tailoring.  No reason to get rid of a perfectly-fine bit of clothing for that.

But let’s say there’s a structural failure in the clothing.  For me, in denim jeans, it’s frequently a weakening around the seam at the seat of the pants, that begins as thinning and fraying, and finally opens.  It’s a structural failure of a whole panel, and would be very difficult to patch.  I suppose some people are skilled enough to remove and replace the panel, but I’m not.  What to do?

In a “use every bit of the walrus” sense, I hate throwing that stuff out.  In one long-distance sailing book I read, they talked about the ecosystem of a boat.  Textiles begin as clothes, then traverse the path of galley rag, deck rag, head rag, engine rag, overboard.  That’s wonderful.  Each time a piece of fabric is demoted, until it’s literally stiff with congealed grease, it has a new life, and then even after that, it presumably can be consumed by bacteria and oceanic microfauna.  But what do we, on land, do?  We throw it in the trash.

I had a book as a kid, a really fantastic, life-changing boy’s book entitled How To Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself.  It’s essentially a rambling train of though by a man, Robert Paul Smith, who grew up during WWI and the Roaring Twenties, writing a book for the children of the late 1950s about how easy they have it when it comes to commercial toys, unlike when he was growing up and they had to make their own.  Transposed another 30 years into the 1980s, it was even stranger for me, and Niall’s copy, in the second decade of this century, will probably strike him as alien as will Chaucer.  I’ll tell my own story regarding the book some time, but don’t wait for that: check the aftermarket: sometimes sellers don’t know what they have and you can pick up a copy of this treasure for ten or twenty dollars.  It should be in every boy’s library, but I’m sure there are not enough copies extant to make that possible, even, say, for California, and as far as I know, it’s never been reprinted, which is preposterous.

Anyway, that book implied that when a garment was worn out, his (Smith’s) mother would cut all the buttons off before discarding the garment and put them in a drawer, was sure the reader’s mother would be doing so, too, and just assumed there was a drawerful of buttons lying around, next to the Borax and dad’s wooden cigar boxes.  My mother, it’s probably obvious to say, did no such thing (unless I’m wrong?) and we never had a drawerful of buttons in our house (nor Borax, nor cigar boxes, much to my dismay.)

So we don’t even do that.  We don’t even save buttons.  Let alone natural fibers.

OK, so I have a terminally-ill pair of jeans.  What to do with them?  Surely the rag industry could use the fiber?  They’re dyed, the jeans, but so?

I’m amazed Jenn hasn’t killed me.  In the “Recycle, Reduce, Reuse” thing, I don’t tend to Reduce, I try to keep everything for its potential for Reuse, and I cringe any time I can’t Recycle what Jenn makes me throw out.  She would have a fit if I started cutting up my old trousers to use as kitchen towels, even though I think that’s completely sensible.  Ever see Jamie Hyneman’s warehouse on TV, with bins labeled stuff like “Bungee Cords”, “Action Figures”, and “Cardboard”?  That’s my dream, except I wouldn’t have the discipline to keep everything so nicely sorted.  I’d just know that I had kite string “somewhere in there”.

So what to do?  Anyone recycle denim?  Can we do something other than throw it out?  In the sci-fi novel I’m kind of writing, there’s a reference to the lucrative occupation of landfill-mining, with old landfills being some of the most prized property.  But we can’t wait for that renaissance, because the cotton will have decayed by then.

So, what to do?  Who wants it?  Is there anything other than overboard?

Chain Link 2.  You are reading this bottom-up, right?

This, too, was going to be one sentence in the following post, but it also grew out of hand.

It’s reasonable, I think, for people to be able to choose the words applied to them.

I grew up a gaijin.  That’s a Japanese derogatory racial epithet for foreigners.  What would I have preferred?  Well, I don’t really like American, as I don’t think one nation should get to claim the name of two continents containing 22 countries.  Westerner would have been OK.  Something descriptive, like he’s a U.S. Citizen would probably be best.

I weigh close to three bills.  That’s 21 stones if you’re British, 133 kilos if you’re from anywhere else, and two million grains if I’m fated to encounter an ungloved Midas.  Obese is unpleasant.  Morbidly obese especially so.  “Big Guy” is not a charming nickname (Bob Mike, do people call you “Slim”?  Do you like it?)  I prefer large.

I’m an atheist.  Calling me agnostic is likely to get you sneered at.  Calling me a Bright is liable to get you bitch-slapped.  Naturalist is comfortable.  Rationalist and Freethinker feel nice, but I imagine are offensive to many people, because they imply that if you rationally and freely thought about things you’d completely agree with me.  So I stick with atheist.

Now I’m venturing into unknown territory.  If I had very dark skin, I think I would still hate African-American.  It’s clunky.  It wrongfully suggests that all dark-skinned people are from Africa, which has to annoy Australians, yes?  And aren’t all Americans really, originally, African?  I think I’d like black, or even Negroe, with an e and capitalized.

I’m heterosexual.  That’s a fine term as far as I’m concerned.  I loathe straight (what’s the opposite of that?)  But if I were homosexual, I think I’d prefer gay (whether a man or woman.)  I know several practicing bisexuals, at least one of which self-describes as queer.  I think that’s mostly affect, but egads.  You’ve got to help me, people.  It this one of those rescued epithets, like nigger, that the “in” crowd is allowed to flaunt and outsiders can be murdered over?

But most sincerely — and this is my ultimate point — if I were significantly shorter in stature than the average person, I strongly believe I would like almost anything more than little person.  That sounds so bloody condescending to me.  Maybe not midget, but what — what? — is wrong with dwarf?

This will be relevant in Chain Link 3.

Well, I’ve thought myself pretty high-and-mighty for my public transport experiment.  Fantasies about selling my car and all that.  Bus to the light rail, light rail to Metrolink/Amtrak, Metrolink/Amtrak to the bus, then unwind the procedure on the way home.

What have I seen?  Sick people.  Lots and lots and lots of sick people, with active respiratory (and otherwise) infections.  Nurses still in their bodily-fluid-stained scrubs riding next to me.  A crazy lady with a metal bowl on her head who kept attaching and detaching a bandage and screaming at the conductor.  I’ve endured this, in addition to increasing my commute from 45 minutes to 2.5 hours.  I’ve rejoiced that I can now read, or work, or sleep on the way, and savored what it has done to increase my patience.

Today, I slept.  And some motherfucker stole my backpack.

My laptop is busted, so this is the first time I haven’t had it on me, which would increase the loss by about $1500.  Fortunately (fortunately?) my loss was only $920, in electronics and luggage and tools, including my trusty calculator that I actually considered a dear friend.

Let me let this sink in.  He stole my motherfucking backpack.  How empty did the train have to be for this to transpire?  Could I be dead now?  Could he have held me at knifepoint or gunpoint and asked for my wallet, phone, and keys as well?  Absolutely he could have.

Jenn tells me that my bag could just have easily been stolen out of the back of my car.  But my sample size is leading me to an opposite conclusion.  I’ve been driving to work for over a dozen years.  Nothing has ever been stolen.  I’ve been taking public transportation for a week.  And I cannot afford to replace $920 worth of stuff right now.

Yes, I’m privileged.  Yes, I’m wealthy.  Yes, I’m pretty spoiled.  I make a good living in a plush job in a nice office.  I drive a luxury car.  I have options.  I tried to take the train to reduce my environmental impact.  But is it worth it?  What do you think?

In 1908, the amateur mathematician Paul Wolfskehl, who had always been fascinated by Fermat’s last theorem, bequeathed a prize of one hundred thousand marks to whoever could prove the theorem. This generous prize greatly increased public awareness of the problem, with the result that the University of Göttingen, which was to administer the prize, was deluged with attempts at proofs. Eventually, Edmund Landau, the head of the mathematics department, resorted to sending printed cards acknowledging submissions and stating on which page and line the first error occurred, as it unfailingly did.  — Thomson Gale (I don’t know if that entity is a person, business, or other organization.)

I’m triaging philosophical works, and I keep coming back to Landau’s solution.  So, Lewis, Clive Staples.  Miracles, A Preliminary Study.  New York: Macmillan 1947.  Your first error occurs on page 21.

I’ll follow this up in my quest to find a place for agency in a naturalistic worldview.

It’s happening again.  I am getting a terrifying premonition of an imminent, terrible earthquake.  Like tonight.

Why am I writing this?  To freak you out?  Quite the opposite.  I’m just a normal guy, with normal fears, but almost no one reports their misses, and even fewer people remember them.  That’s why psychics seem to be so effective.  People recall the successful predictions and discard the ones that didn’t come to pass.  So here it is, the evening of the 11th of November 2007, in Southern California, and I’m predicting an earthquake.

I wouldn’t write this tomorrow, because I’d either be (1) embarrassed or (2) dead from an earthquake.  So here it goes on the record.  This website will be on Internet archives forever.  The web server is safely in Illinois.  Bookmark this page if you’d like.  And the next time someone reports a successful prediction, point them here.

Seriously, read (and seriously read) Atheist Ethicist.  He has far more patience than I, and where I tend to just be an asshole, he actually takes the time to take apart arguments step-by-step.

So I may end up referring you to that site, rather than my own, for explanations of:

1. why someone responding “it’s good” to a question of how food tastes drives me batshit
2. why I can comfortably dismiss the existence of ghosts without having seen your particular documentary program (on a fiction network or otherwise)
3. why I hit an absolute impasse with my sociology of religion professor when he decided to get down to brass tacks and said, “We all believe some things are good and some things are bad, right?”
4. why I look at you as if you were Martian when you make certain moral or theological assumptions, or conclusions, or, frequently, conclusions that are also your assumptions

I’m working on a new hypothesis.  My hypothesis is that philosopher Peter Singer is actually attempting to achieve flight by waving his hands so frantically in his arguments.  I’m reading Practical Ethics (maybe for not much longer).  He’ll plod, at a fifth-grade reading level, through obvious facts.  Occasionally, he will try to shoehorn in some extremely counterintuitive arguments, apparently hoping the reader doesn’t notice.  Then he will skip a couple steps in his argument and make grand pronouncement.  The Far Side is recalled.  “Then a miracle occurs.”

From the Cambridge press Second Edition:

[The] most important human interests [include] avoiding pain, … developing one’s abilities, … satisfying basic needs for food and shelter, … enjoying warm personal relationships, … being free to pursue one’s projects without interference.  p. 31

Let’s stop here a moment and divide these into three columns.  Food, pain avoidance, and shelter we’ll put in Column 1.  These are basic animal drives.  Warm personal relationships we’ll put in Column 2.  This is a social animal drive, probably requiring a complex nervous system.  The drive to develop one’s abilities and being free to pursue one’s projects without interference we’ll put way over in Column 3.  These are highly complex and abstract, probably requiring a cerebral cortex and a whole host of supporting drives.  A lyre bird cares not to develop its singing skills for the skill’s own sake.  It does so as a programmed behavior that predisposes it to having more grandchildren.  And pursuing one’s projects without interference?  He’s using a word with multiple meanings.  Who has projects, narrowly construed, but Homo?  I suppose one could call nest-building or mound-digging a project, and bless it into the Column 1, but that seems not to be what he is getting at, as he discusses drive, initiative, challenge, and what we would traditionally call calling.  So he has, rather haphazardly, combined three strata of “interests” into one paragraph.  Which is fine, so far as it goes, when we’re just talking about humanity.  But then:

Interests are interests, and ought to be given equal consideration whether they are the interests of human or non-human animals, self-conscious or non—self-conscious animals.  p. 74

Of course this is what he was aiming for all along, as he is the author of Animal Liberation.  But not only does he not get there, he’s not even aiming correctly.  Human interests admit all three Columns.  But a male lion does not yearn for warm personal relationships.  It does not study mycology for the sake of bettering itself.  It does not build an abode.  It may have a project, widely construed, to chase, subdue, kill, and devour an antelope, and may in fact be rather miffed if there is interference in this process.  But it is patently false that “Interests are interests”.  Human interests are not lion interests, and when there is non-conformity, we need to investigate.

It may be thoroughly unethical to use a nonhuman animal as a means to an end.  It may be thoroughly ethical to do so.  The question might not even have a truth value.  I’m putting that aside.  I’ve struggled with personal vegetarianism and veganism in relation to personal ethics since I was nine years old, but that’s not the point.  Interests are not interests.  Interests differ.  And basing an entire ethos upon a Benthamesque desire to decrease suffering, while it may be admirable, is not accomplishing one’s mission if one has axiomatically declared “developing abilities” and “pursuing projects” as core interests.  You need more.

Or, perhaps, you need less.  You identify human interests entirely with Column 1.  My guess is Singer probably started here, then was pressured by discussion with colleagues and editors to admit Columns 2 and 3.  But once those latter Columns are axiomatic, the barn door’s open and the horse has escaped.

This has, possibly, had beneficial effects on the horse’s interests.  But the interests of an airtight logical argument?  Not so much.

Hmmm.  Amazon: 92% reassuring, 8% not at all reassuring.

For several years, I have had a primary, private intellectual guiding principle.  I have called it Joshua’s First Law.  It goes as follows: “Everything is more complicated than it first appears.”  Or, with a nod to Hofstadter’s Law, “Everything is more complicated than it first appears, even when Joshua’s First Law is taken into account.”  And I’ve sometimes attached the revision, known as Joshua’s First Anti-Corrolary, which reads “Except when it isn’t.”  But never have I seen this expressed by another.  Until I read a version of it on MJD’s Blog.  He wrote, “Advice to people wishing to become smarter: Get in the habit of assuming that everything is more complex than you imagine.”  Kudos to him.

Zxaxgr is right.  There is something wrong with our eyes.  Interesting article on yellow as a perceptual problem.  I’ll note that near the top of my reading list is Hardin’s Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow, and I’m looking forward to it.

Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.

Absolutist barriers, like the Maginot Line, seldom do the work they were designed for….  Surely it would be better to try to foster an appreciation for the nonabsolutist, nonintrinsic, nondichotomized grounds for moral concern that can co-exist with our increasing knowledge of the inner workings of that most amazing machine, the brain. The moral arguments on both sides of the issues of capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, and experimenting on nonhuman animals, for instance, are raised to a higher, more appropriate standard when we explicitly jettison the myths…. — Daniel Dennett.

Discuss, if you are so inclined.

The Big Bird Theory of Education: “It’s easier to remember a new idea if it’s attached to an eight-foot yellow bird.”

There are lots of things that some people have a problem with that don’t bother me at all, even though I wouldn’t do them myself: gay sex, body piercing, first-trimester abortion, smoking marijuana, and promiscuity with careful protection, for instance. There are lots of things that I don’t personally approve of but don’t think should be illegal, such as heroin use, cigarette smoking, extreme body modification, Abrahamic religion, and S&M. There are even things involving death that fall into the latter category for me, such as suicide and properly documented euthanasia. I think the resources of society should be extended to help these people, should they want it, but in the end I believe people have a right to their own bodies and minds. But surely — surely — we have to have a law against one man offering himself for sacrifice and another man killing and eating him.  Right?  I mean — right?

Problem is, I can’t figure out how to justify this. If suicide is OK, and meat-eating is OK, and hurting and killing another person with his or her consent is OK, why is this behaviour different? Why am I so viciously opposed to this? Some people will surely claim this points to a failure of a life lived without a God-given moral code, so if you want to post and say something like this, that’s fine, go ahead. If you want to post a non-answer, such as “How can you approve of those things in the first list?” or “How can you oppose the things in the second list?” that’s fine, too. But I’m really hoping some fellow extreme lefties among my readers (Dave? Becca?) will help me tackle this. Is there something unique about human slaughter and human cannibalism among “consenting adults” (let’s be really clear here, there’s no way we’re not talking about severely fucked-up people with significant mental health problems) that makes it worthy of legislation, or do I need to bite the bullet and say that if people are free to their own bodies, they’re free to do this as well?

Product Warning, Epistemological Denotation:

The consumer must understand that due to the a-priori impossibility
of assuring a shared denotation amongst independent agents, none of
the advertising material, product literature, instructions, or safety
warnings (including this one), associated with this product may
contain what the consumer perceives to be factual information.

See this and more philosophy humour.

The cause of death for Camus was obviously the plague; Darwin was simply unfit to continue; Einstein, to his misfortune, diced with God.  Freud slipped, Decartes stopped thinking, Galileo stopped moving.  It was clearly Luther’s diet of worms that did him in, while for Rousseau it was a contract job.  For Sartre it was nausea, for Spinoza substance abuse.  And Anselm?  A disease no greater than which can be conceived.

A requirement for a philosophy degree might be for the candidate to get each of the 100+ jokes.

The following is taken from an excellent paper entitled Between Humanitarian Law and Principles: The Principles and Practices of “Rebellious Humanitarianism” by Fran�oise Bouchet-Saulnier, Director of Research at the Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders] Foundation.  I encourage you to read the entire paper, read their charter, and consider donating if you agree with their principles.

Humanitarian action and human rights

[The United Nations'] tendency to adopt a more global approach [toward humanitarian action] is an attempt to group humanitarian action together with peacekeeping, the restoration of democracy, and human rights.  …  However, this kind of approach blurs the nature of each organization’s responsibility.  …  Indeed, in a context in which human rights are an element of international diplomacy, giving confidential information to human rights groups might be regarded by the authorities as clandestine, suspicious and subversive.  …  With this approach … relief operations become a pawn in a power game that is perilous for humanitarianism.  …

Thus, a genuine conditionality of humanitarian aid has gradually taken hold, in the name of peace and human rights.  However, although the practice of conditionality may take refuge behind these noble objectives, it in fact violates the only absolute principle of humanitarian action: impartiality.

This principle dictates that humanitarian aid obey no other imperative than that of the needs of people, and it provides the foundation for humanitarian organizations’ right to access conflict areas.  …  Paradoxically, the most serious consequence of this approach becomes the subordination of humanitarian aid to non-humanitarian objectives.

Humanitarian law and human rights

Humanitarian law … is concerned with periods of armed conflict.  It is enshrined in four conventions signed in Geneva in 1949 and in two additional protocols of 1977.  These laws set out specific rules regarding protection and assistance to precise categories of vulnerable people (civilians, the sick and wounded, and those deprived of freedom) in situations of armed international or internal conflict.
Some NGOs see the law only as a source of constraint and limitation. Yet it is thanks to the specific provisions of humanitarian law that NGOs are able to claim independence in their actions with respect to governments; demand access to victims; assert control over the distribution of relief; enter a country’s territory without prior consent in order to bring medical relief to the wounded and the sick; and identify and denounce war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Humanitarian law does not, therefore, limit the concrete action of NGOs. On the contrary, it ensures that offers of relief made by independent and impartial humanitarian organizations may not be considered interference in a country’s internal affairs.

Rebellious humanitarianism

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the “rebellious humanitarianism” of Médecins Sans Frontières, the Nobel Committee chose to reward the sometimes controversial choices made by MSF, which sees acting and speaking as two inseparable elements of providing relief to endangered people.

Médecins Sans Frontières does not see itself as a cog in the machinery of international solidarity, responding to medical needs like some eager hired hand summoned to deal with the failures of states or of global privatization.  …

MSF is a member of the youngest generation of humanitarian organizations. Created after the Second World War, it is among those organizations questioning the role of humanitarianism with regard to genocide. It refuses to accept that silence is a precondition for its operational freedom.  …  This attitude was reaffirmed in the words of MSF upon the award of the Nobel Peace Prize: “We don’t know whether words save lives, but we know for sure that silence kills.”