When I saw that McCain was running for the Republican Nomination in ‘07, I thought to myself, “Hey, this could make the election interesting; McCain is an entirely different sort of animal from the rest of his party.”  I thought, “If he shows signs of returning to actual fiscal conservatism, I might vote Republican this time.”

Now, in ‘08, I can’t say that I feel the same way about the man.  I’m voting Obama now, incidentally.

The reason for my vote.

In 2000, 2004, and even as near as 2006, McCain had fundamental disagreements with the Bush Administration; he was respectful of his colleagues in the Senate, was incensed by the Republican’s “attack machine” method of political debate, and he generally had an excellent sense of humor. Strangely, though, the second he donned his “game face”
he aligned with the existing Administration, and adopted their attack machine as his own personal election winner.

His primary election success was based on his stance on the issues; a stance that, while it did alienate some of the conservative vote, appealed to centrists and even some liberals. That this stance was abandoned in favor of, essentially, the Bush Doctrine - this screams intellectual dishonesty. This screams, “I want the election, and I’m willing to swap my position to whatever it takes to get it”.

I understand the motivation: the Democrats have an inspirational candidate; it’s going to be hard to get any Democrat to defect, we’ll concentrate on solidifying the existing conservative base instead. Add to that, the republicans have a Nader-esque spoiler in the form of Bob Barr this year, when they rarely have to deal with spoilers of the Nader variety - at a time when a significant number of their base has been leaning towards the pre-McCarthy conservatism that the Libertarians have been appealing to. (The Ron Paul vote, around 2-3% nationally, IS significant when you’re considering the presidential race, which has been remarkably tight in the last couple of cycles). This is particularly damaging this year; much of the Green democrats have been both severely disillusioned by Nader and strongly attracted to Obama; Nader isn’t going to spoil the Dems nearly as badly as Barr is going to spoil the Republicans.

The problem with this campaign method - solidification of your base in light of internal attrition and the difficulty of oppositional attrition - is that it ignores the centrists that more or less make or break a campaign. The centrists, at the outset, agreed more with the even-handed McCain of ‘06 than the hamfisted McCain of ‘08. By attempting to pander to the moderate right, and by utilizing the Rovian political tactics against a candidate who’s platform rests partially on the idea that Washington’s politics are broken, he essentially lost the center and moderate left in one stroke.

At that note, McCain essentially helped Obama prove his point: every attack, every smear, was an opportunity for Obama to say, “Hey, see what I mean? This isn’t appropriate behavior for a politician. What happened here? We need to fix this. Help me fix it. Prove to the other politicians that this sort of appeal to fear and outright lying won’t win them an election.”

So, some of the smears that are kind of laughable.  The “Empty suit” rhetoric, for example.  Given that Obama appears to know what he’s doing, and McCain appears not to, this just looks like another typical example of Rovian transference tactic: get the public to scrutinize the other party on your faults, so that when it comes out that you have them, the effect is mitigated by the portion of the public that was convinced by your initial accusation.

It’s a brilliant - but entirely dishonest - tactic. I can’t think why the Dems don’t use it often, but the “moral” majority does. It couldn’t be because those with strong absolutist morals are relatively easy to emotionally exploit in that respect, now, could it?

The “Socialist” charge is equally ridiculous.  It essentially goes this way: Obama has been exposed to socialism, and has socialists’ support so he’s a socialist.  Now, the easiest failure of this argument is that exposure doesn’t equal agreement, nor has it resulted as such in Obama’s case - at least, not to any visible degree.

The implication is that an individual’s supporters dictate his politics. If you’re going to take this logical fallacy to its conclusion: Obama may have socialists / communists who agree on more points with him than with McCain, and thus support him - but McCain has Neo Nazi’s and other forms of fascists who agree with him on more points than they agree with Obama, thus supporting him.

Socialists are generally well thinking people with an idealistic flaw (that is, that people are selfless enough at the national scale to allow pure socialism to work - they just aren’t; pure socialism generally can’t work with anything but small populations for this reason - but in balanced hybrid with capitalism, it works rather well). Neo-nazi’s, on the other hand, are disgusting examples of the ideological danger involved in a eugenic mindset (that is, one race is superior, but in a way that nature apparently hasn’t caused to overtake the species).

In short, by invoking a sort of “guilt by association”, McCain’s campaign is playing a losing game, even if we play by his intellectually dishonest rules.

Below the fold are some points on the economy, and not really related to the election.  Read on if you’re interested.

(more…)

How I mourn:
If I liked, even loved the person, I’m glad that I was able to be a part of the life of a wonderful person, and to be enriched by that person’s existence.
If I didn’t like the person, I’m generally glad to see the back of them.

That’s it, really.

Addressing theists.

The accusation comes to light often enough that Atheists are immoral - even less moral than other religions that aren’t yours - because they don’t have a divinely inspired - or even a fixed - moral code.  In order to refute this, without actually defining the content of my moral code, I’ll now lead you down a quick logical pathway.

I will assume for the sake of argument that your religious text is divinely inspired.  It contains a moral code.

There are many other religious text - not divinely inspired, as per the assumption, but written by humankind - that also contain moral codes.  They may be inferior, for lack of divine inspiration, but they are serviceable for those that follow them.

These other religions are still around, sometimes for thousands of years.  So they must at least be serviceable enough to prevent societal collapse.

At this point, we can agree that it is possible for humans to write a moral code without divine inspiration that is at least sufficiently servicable to prevent societal collapse for societies following it.  This is exactly what the an atheist moral code would be.

So, no.  Atheists aren’t by definition immoral.  Sinful, by your standards, surely, but in no way immoral.

As I’d mentioned before, I see the term ‘Respect my beliefs’ as equivalent to ‘Follow my beliefs’.  This doesn’t mean I go around blaspheming at a religious person for the hell of it - I’m more inclined to respect someone’s feelings in this case.

However, I do take some offense at anyone who decides it’s their business to inform me of my ’sins’.  It’s bad enough that you assume moral authority without some form of objective justification - but to judge another person based on your arbitrary rules is decidedly rude.

And, yes.  To this, I respond in turn.  I live by a set of rules - one of which is intellectual honesty.  I am inclined to, and often do force people attacking me with accusations of iniquity to question how often they lie to themselves.

It’s, unsurprisingly, a lot - even if they won’t admit it.  Hell, even with the rule in place, I have the occasional self-deception going on.  It’s one of those things that takes constant vigilance - but is pretty rewarding in a real sense when it comes down to it.

That is, when you avoid lying even to yourself, you tend to get a reputation for almost superhuman honesty.  Such a rep is a valuable thing in a society that, primarily, is based on trust.  Such a rep also tends to excuse the almost immediate smile accompanied by a polite ‘No thank you’, when presented with things like offers to accompany another person to church, crosses, pamphlets, etc.  I may be a heathen, but at least I’m honest.

Title lifted from MC Hawking

When doing my debatey thing, I often come across the “Something can’t come from nothing” argument against Big Bang theory.  Here’s a few reasons it’s illogical:

1. Big Bang describes the events that occurred immediately after universal formation: planck, Unified fields, inflation, electroweak, quark, hadron, lepton, photon, and recombination.  Prior to that - the first Planck time after universal formation was kicked off, we don’t know anything - can’t know anything - because it occurred outside observable reference (that is, we can only derive the universe in reverse to a point; beyond that point, the laws of physics don’t work and the math fails).  So the first failure is in addressing that they think we’re talking about ultimate universal origin, rather than speaking about the universe’s history after that.  (sort of like telling one life story, but omitting the conception)
2. The arguer is assuming that there was ‘nothing’ before the events described by Big Bang.  As pointed out by (1), this isn’t necessarily true - is probably not true - because, as said, we don’t know the state of the universal system before the start of inflation.  If you’re going to assert that something can’t come from nothing, the only thing to say for it is that, obviously, something was there.  Don’t know what, but you asserted it.  Can be God if you like, but you, like me, would have to figure out what that something is made of - God included.
3. Generally, it’s followed up or used in support of, “so the only alternative is God.”  Leaving aside the false dichotomy here, we’re still claiming a something from nothing scenario: God speaking it into existence doesn’t change the fact that it’s still something from nothing - and reiterates the question: why doesn’t anything spring from nothing today?
4. It’s kind of fallacy that nothing can spring from nothing: virtual particle pairs spring from vacuum all the time, always in particle-antiparticle pairs.  I’m not a physicist, so I can’t really speak as to the application of this to universal formation, but I do find it interesting.  (I can say, however, that in Zero Point Energy, which is what describes this phenominon, the VPP’s are ‘borrowing’ energy from the baseline).

The below extension of a comment is my reaction to this video:
Mohammed Brand Condoms

Fundie Muslims demand respect for their religion - in itself a hypocrisy.  Muslims, like any other religion, are obligated to disrespect the religions of others.  ‘Respect my religion’ means ‘follow my religion’.

That is, to a follower of a religion, disagreement with the Dogma is disrespect of it.  You can’t disagree with what’s written in the Holy Bible!  It’s scripture!  It’s Holy!  It’s Biblical, even! As such, dissent - a generally rational and useful tool for wrenching out truth and action - becomes heresy. While the punishment for this has waned in these enlightened days, it still breeds a certain closed-mindedness.  Even an attempt at humorous dissent - as this video is (a bad attempt, rife with light-hearted bigotry) - becomes something to despise.

So, I am certain that someone will cast this video as hate - as certain as I am that most people will find it either funny or cringe-worthy.  But it does speak a couple of basic rules on human behavior to me.  Tenative though they may be, here is the list.

The phrase, ‘methinks thou dost protest too much’ applies here; as loudly as fundie Muslims demand respect, have they respect for their own religion?  Or do they see their often violent outbursts of ignobility as a way to forgive their own transgressions against Islam?  Rule 1: The more loudly a person complains, the more likely they are guilty of the subject of the complaint.

Additionally, the more fundie Muslims in particular have a recent history of being loud and confrontational about getting the respect they ‘deserve’ just for adhering to their flavor of bronze age desert fiction.  Rule 2: Those who demand respect the loudest, will receive the least.

Meanwhile, governments (not so much the US yet*, but Eurpoe and Canada have been bad with this) bow down to pressure for ‘respect’, by giving muslims special privileges.  Rule 3: The squeaky wheel gets the grease - even when it’d be better to get a new cart.

Of course, fundie muslims can’t see with the objective clarity that an onlooker can.  They don’t see themselves as protesting too much - they see themselves as righteous.  They don’t understand why we shun their incessent cries for respect as we would a child crying wolf.  They’re frustrated.  It’s rather clear to most that Islam will not spread over the whole world**; we’re simply not listening.  Rule 4: Frustration comes from aspired, but persistently unachieved goals.

We’re tying our best to let you live in our countries, chill with us, be cool humans - and a lot of your more moderate types are exactly that: quite cool.  I’ll admit they’re not mentioned much here - but frankly, they don’t cause problems.  Rule 5: The most visible members of a class will be the representation of that class.

We (speaking unworthily for the secular world) would love it if Afghanistan, to pull an example, turned into an idyllic mountain-ribbed nation of prosperity in whatever form its culture devised.  It’d be a place to spend our tourist money, take snapshots of, meet quality people, and tell our friends about.  Rule 6: It doesn’t matter how paranoid you are; you’re not so important that ‘they’ are out to get you.

Lastly, and this one’s a biggie, it always seems to me that insularity breeds conflict.  When a class of people makes themselves separate from everyone else, it’s unaviodable to start using distasteful pronouns like ‘us’ and ‘them’.  ‘Us’ has this connotation that whatever ‘we’ think, it’s better than what ‘they’ think.  ‘Them’ has a connotation that ‘they’ are a threat to ‘us’.  As such, the initator of this mentality forces it on those they strike out against. Rule 7: The initiator of the ‘Us v. Them’ mindset automatically becomes ‘Them’.  And ‘They’ always lose.

Wow.  Got a lot out of a really bad video.  Go figure.

* The reasons for this have more to do with Christian Fundamentalism in the US than proper secularism.  After all, Europe is mostly secular.  So yeah, we’re doing the right thing, but for the wrong reasons.  Meanwhile, Christians get special priveliges here because they have the voting power to make it so.  I don’t think this is right, but I’m no more in a position to dismantle the natural result of a democratic republic with a Christian pluarlity than I am of a mind to become a dictator.  Fascism just tastes funny to me.  I’d rather see secularism become a majority voice.

** As said before, respect for religion = adherence to religion.  Demanding universal respect, especially in Islam, is demanding universal worship - which, let’s not fool ourselves, is a goal OF Islam.

Hey, this happened on my birthday (Jul 14), so I decided to post a comment on it. I realize that given VFX’s history with comment censorship, it’ll never see the light of day on his page, but I thought, hey, why not post the comment on my blog?

You’re finally shutting down?

I’ll tell you, I had a lousy birthday: I got selected for a jury trial, which killed my birthday plans; I had to work on a Friday when I had specifically requested off for a nice long weekend with my fianceé; nothing went as planned - still we made the best of it.

Still, when a disinformationist such as your self shuts down; it’s an awesome birthday present.

Mind you the cause, death threats, not cool. But the results are nice.

Goodbye.

All the cool kids are doing it…

Please rate fairly and discuss on YouTube (not here).

Today, I address only theists.

I will not be attacking religion, nor shall I be harping on the fallacies of theism in general. No, today, I will be be philosophizing in an attempt to understand the need to believe.

In order to do this, I’m going to make an attempt to think like a theist; this requires me to assume that a God or Gods exist. I will be speaking in primarily that context.

I realize the tendancy to gravitate towards a strawman, or to derive cynical positions. I will attempt to restrict myself to some level of piety as far as it goes.

I also realize that it is impossible for me to completely remove my knowledge of reality and certain bits of information; as such, I’ll get that out of the way before I really get into the ’spirit’, as it were.

Often times, I hear that those who are indoctrinated into X-religion early are often X-religians. This ostensibly applies to Chrisitans, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc. While that rings true for the particular denomination, I don’t believe it also holds true for theism itself.

Once abstract thought kicks in in one’s teen years, it occurs to me that with the rebellious instinct, the ability to discern fact from fiction, and the knowledge that much of the scripture is in the form of parables, fables, and poetry, one might be easily able to reject theism without too much remorse.

Of course, only about a fifth of adherents diverge from theism entirely, and only another tenth rejects their particular denomination for a more deistic view.

In order to explain this, I was thinking of how God is defined: If we think heirarchically, we can think of God as the ultimate authority. If we think creatively, the master builder. If we think administratively, the primary resource.

Essentially, whatever God is, he’s responsible for all creation, and speaks for all mankind.

So, I’ll start small and work my way out.

In individual accomplishment, when something is done well, we often want to congratulate the person that did well on a job well done. Similarly, when something is screwed up, we usually want to give a stern talking to to the parties responsible.

In team accomplishment, when the team does well, not only is there external congratulations, but internal as well. If the team does bad, there is external judgement, generally focused on the team’s leader, as well as internal condolences and potentially punishment.

So, consider the team to be the human race, and the leader to be God: When we screw up, it’s God’s responsibility, and God’s punishment that must be faced, though we are remorseful for our error; when we do well, it’s to God’s glory and we may congratulate ourselves and each other.

Overall, you’ll notice, the balance is positive in life; we feel remorse at an error, but are not directly responsible for it - but individually, we get to enjoy our accomplishments and even feel good about praising God.

So, that seems a good deal, doesn’t it? Meanwhile, it gives us something else that we as humans seem to instinctively need: when we can’t - or are unwilling to - ascribe a win or failure to any individual - ourselves included - we get to praise or blame God. We have a target for our joy and frustrations, so that we can vent them - express our emotions. We can even bring a modicum of solace to ourselves as we know that an infallable God must allow these minor ‘failures’ as part of his plan.

Meanwhile, mostly in the Christian faith, is the idea that God loves each and every one of us. He created us as his special children, has a plan for all of us, and over all other things, loves us - loves you, personally.

Moving back to my secular home base, now.

On the first topic, that is, readily having a target for blame and credit: I feel the problem with this sort of thinking is that it denies intellectual rigor. The emotional need to find the source of success or failure is a driving force of investigation - the root discipline of police work, scientific endeavor, and everything down to high school homework. To subvert this primal need, rather than to tame and discipline it into curiosity, I see as a grave threat to the cerebral advancement of civilization.

As for the unconditional love of the most important character possible: Human beings are social creatures, and the idea that the source of all humanity - that special one that has been here and is responsible for all of it - is a wonderous and warm feeling, to be sure. I can see how it can be a strongly attractive force for belief - but it only truly works if one is either unaware or sufficiently convinced of the presence of this being.

In short, I think I see the point of the delusion of God for people; you need to hold someone responsible for all the good and bad things in the world, and better, you need to know that the bad things that aren’t your fault are also not something that is being done to you on purpose (they’re part of the plan). It’d also be nice if this ultimately responsible being shared a connection with you.

I understand. I get it. Knowing that what we call ‘good’ is an emergent property of interactions between members of a society may be hard to understand - as hard to understand as it is to fathom that what is refered to as ‘evil’ is an emergent property of competition for survival when resources are scarce. Shimming in God as the source of good and evil seems an easy, if poorly formulated patch.

Meanwhile, turning to an imaginary friend to act as a placebo for the need of love when one can just get out there to look for someone to love and be loved - you’ll think this is the ultimate in cynicism, but I see that as weak-minded and pathetic.

Just so you know, spammers:

Not only do I moderate my comments, and easily figure out what is spam and what is not, but I immediately submit ALL URLS to Adblock’s filterset.g, AdBlock+’s EasyList, and SpamCop.

I wrote a script to do this, in batch, to a list of URLs, as a Wordpress Plugin.  Thus, spamming my site is both fruitless and inherently damaging to your interests.

In short, fucking stop it, you moronic assholes.