For the last four years,

those of us on the left who saw this coming - and saw a hundred other issues coming, from abrogation of the wall between church and state to the ballooning deficit - we have spent the last five years being called every ugly, vicious name in the book because we tried to stop this, because we tried to warn the American people: haters, traitors, pussies, weenies, liars, partisans, hacks, wacks, radicals, commies, atheists, morally confused, mentally challenged and anything, anything except patriots who love this country and everything it stands for - or ought to stand for.

but in recent months, Andrew Sullivan and his ilk have been telling us that, although we were right all along we were right for the wrong reasons. The people who have really been betrayed are the ones who supported the war from the beginning but didn’t get the war they were expecting. Our anger was petty, partisan anger but

the anger of the betrayed and decent right and center is deeper.

Today is a momentous day. Today, finally, Sullivan concedes that we might have had a point all along

On these grounds, I have indeed come to see that many, many liberals are indeed my brothers and my sisters. And increasing numbers of conservatives as well, thank God. For some on the far left, Bush could never have done any right, ever. I’m not going to exculpate the hate-filled parts of the far-left. But many, many others on the left were right about these people in power; and I was wrong. I threw some smug invective their way and, in retrospect, I am ashamed of it. Sure, I recognized my error before the last election, but that doesn’t excuse it. Sure, some of it was just misunderstanding each other, in a climate of great fear, and some of it was just my arrogance that I was right. But that doesn’t excuse it all either.

Now, if the people of Texas would just draft a big letter of apology to the Dixie Chicks (”Sorry, chicks. Maybe we did overract just a little bit”) my faith in we the people will be restored.

Scott Adams makes an excellent case for why voting machines should be hackable;

Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish.

The big news for the last few days over at the Guardian is a UK government sponsored report on global warming along with some practical measures to tackle it.

Judging by our parking lot this morning, Blair and Brown will have plenty of allies in California. If Bob had got in a little earlier there would have been 4 Priuses parked side-by-side.

You don’t see that every day.

I have read about a million reviews now of The God Delusion. This was a tricksy one by Terry Eagleton in The London Review of Books.

It comes out fighting…

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

…but its real strength comes when he points out that Dawkins, like so many anti-religious writers, directs most of his criticism at the idea of a personal God rather than the transcendental idea of God that the reviewer believes in.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

The critic is of course right. Serious theologians in many Christian denominations describe God in transcendental terms that, without the benefit of several years of training in theology, escape all definition or meaning. Arguing against the man with a long beard sitting on a cloud is much easier than arguing against the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever and leaves you open to the criticism that you are not arguing in good faith.

It was amusing, then, to read a review that addresses the reviewer on his own terms. I love the way he draws a clear line from the unknowable God…

The previous excerpt, which defined God as “the condition of possibility,” seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves. A question like “Does `the condition of possibility’ exist?” would never set off innumerable overheated arguments, even in a notoriously contentious blogosphere.

… to the Man in the Cloud…

But — inevitably — Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe “out of love,” is capable of “regret,” and “is an artist.” That’s crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that “The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret”? Nothing at all. Certainly not anything better-defined than “My envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.” And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.

…in two easy steps.

It is of course futile to attempt to prove that God does not exist but it is useful to understand the various attempts to prove His existence and where they fall short. To this end, I highly recommend reading this deconstruction of Eagleton’s review. Here’s the link again, in case you missed it first time.

I especially enjoyed it because it supports an idea that I have had from time to time: that if an core concept in a theory seems to cause a paradox (e.g., phlogiston, ether, absolute time and space, souls, consciousness, free will) then there is probably a new and better theory that doesn’t require that concept (oxygen, relativity, er…still working on the others).

In fact, in this day and age the flaws in Aristotle’s cosmological proof (just to pick one) are perfectly clear. Our understanding of the inner workings of the physical world has advanced quite a bit since the ancient Greeks. Long ago, Galileo figured out that the correct way to think about motion was to abstract from messy real-world situations to idealized circumstances in which dissipative effects such as friction and air resistance could be ignored. (They can always be restored later as perturbations.) Only then do we realize that what matter really wants to do is to maintain its motion at a constant speed, until it is explicitly acted upon by some external force.

I don’t get to read David Brooks any more since TimesSelect made him premium content. I have to content myself with reading the letters to Mr Brooks. Like this one.

In “The Era of What’s Next” (column, Oct. 26), David Brooks posits that between 1980 and 2006, a conservative ideology held sway. This characterization of the chronology strikes me as unhistorical.

Does he really not see that instantly upon his inauguration in 2001 President Bush broke with longstanding foreign and domestic policies that had been supported by both parties, substituting a chaotic recklessness in every respect, a subversion of the Constitution, finally provoking with his ill-planned and maladministered actions in Iraq a universal disillusionment with America’s place in the world?

In the last six years, America has been led not by conservatives but by radical right-wingers, empowered by an astounding plutocratic machine, infused by a neoconservative ideology that believes in projecting American power — even in defiance of American interests and capacities.

Since 2001, genuine conservatives have seen the G.O.P. desert its basic principles; actually, the country is now in desperate need of leaders who truly represent the rectitude and realism associated with traditional conservatism.

Fritz Stern
New York, Oct. 27, 2006
The writer is university professor emeritus at Columbia University.

Just read George Will’s review of “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers” in the New York Times. I don’t know why I take so much comfort from Conservatives Who Make Sense (Brooks, Sullivan and Will foremost among them). Perhaps it is just the contrast with mainstream conservativism or perhaps it is the contrast with recent years where those same conservatives were saying things that were far from comforting.

Whichever.

When I recently cancelled my subscription to Newsweek about the only part of the magazine that I remotely missed was the opinion piece on the last page which was shared between George Will and Anna Quindlen. Between them they wrote a good deal of sense.

A book review is always more valuable if it is written by someone you know because you can cross-reference their biases with your own and calibrate their praise or their condemnation. And praise for a book that criticises the idea that the USA was founded as a Christian nation - from a prominent conservative writer - is high praise indeed.

I have added the book to my wishlist so, for now, I’ll limit myself to quoting a few snippets from the review that caught my eye.

When Franklin was given some books written to refute deism, the deists’ arguments “appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough deist.”

He would not kneel to pray, and when his pastor rebuked him for setting a bad example by leaving services before communion, Washington mended his ways in his austere manner: he stayed away from church on communion Sundays.

Madison, always common-sensical, briskly explained — essentially, explained away — religion as an innate appetite: “The mind prefers at once the idea of a self-existing cause to that of an infinite series of cause & effect.” When Congress hired a chaplain, he said “it was not with my approbation.”

In 1781, the Articles of Confederation acknowledged “the Great Governor of the World,” but six years later the Constitution made no mention of God. When Hamilton was asked why, he jauntily said, “We forgot.” Ten years after the Constitutional Convention, the Senate unanimously ratified a treaty with Islamic Tripoli that declared the United States government “is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

Jefferson, writing as a laconic utilitarian, urged his nephew to inquire into the truthfulness of Christianity without fear of consequences: “If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comforts and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.”

Adams declared that “phylosophy looks with an impartial Eye on all terrestrial religions,” and told a correspondent that if they had been on Mount Sinai with Moses and had been told the doctrine of the Trinity, “We might not have had courage to deny it, but We could not have believed it.”

I wonder which of these men would get elected if they were running for office today.

Looks like Kos has joined my bandwagon calling for the democrats to go down, not left. Actually, he goes further and says that the dems are already there.

For too long, Republicans promised smaller government and less intrusion in people’s lives. Yet with a government dominated top to bottom by Republicans, we’ve seen the exact opposite. No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian. But we’ve seen that one party is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while the other is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility, and—most important of all—individual freedoms are paramount.

It’s a fantastic essay and if you haven’t read it, you should.

It’s not all libertarian red meat though. There is one passage in the middle that makes the case for government intervention in spheres where it can make a difference.

But there are other reasons why this outpost of libertarianism works. The government has put in an infrastructure to support the region including, among many other things, roads, the Internet, government research grants, and the most important ingredient of all: education, from the lowliest kindergarten to the highest post-doc program. Such spending, while requiring a government bureaucracy that makes a traditional libertarian shudder, actually provides the tools that individuals need to succeed in today’s world. If our goal is to promote and champion individual liberty and the free market, we need government to help provide those tools to all Americans, not just a privileged few. This isn’t a question of equality, it’s one of opportunity. Some people will take advantage of those opportunities, and others will not. That will be up to each individual. But without opportunity, there is no freedom.

Well said, Kos. Well said.

‘Stay the course’ means keep doing what you’re doing. My attitude is, don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working — change. ‘Stay the course’ also means don’t leave before the job is done.”

[George Bush in the New York Times ]

I didn’t see him say that but I have this vision of him leaning on his lecturn saying

“Some mah ‘ponents say we should keep doin’ what we’re doin’. Stay the course. Mah att’tude is - f’it ain’t workin’ ya need t’ do somp’n else. Some mah ‘ponents don’ unnerstan that. The mercan people unnerstan that an’ ah unnerstan that. Ah’m the unnerstanner. hehehe.

[George Bush in my imagination]

I am listening to Penn (of Penn and Teller) interviewing Richard Dawkins as I type. Dawkins just used the phrase, quoting Dennet, “belief in belief” to describe the tone of many of the reviewers of his new book The God Delusion.

Belief in belief

That’s marvellous!

I have been keeping track of reviews (I have a half-finished blog that reviews the reviews) and I have been deeply saddened by the many that take a tone of “while I personally don’t believe I don’t think you should criticize other people’s beliefs”. In particular, the review in the New York Times was particularly sickening.

What Dawkins brings to this approach is a couple of fresh arguments — no mean achievement, considering how thoroughly these issues have been debated over the centuries — and a great deal of passion. The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy. Dawkins fans accustomed to his elegant prose might be surprised to come across such vulgarisms as “sucking up to God” and “Nur Nurny Nur Nur” (here the author, in a dubious polemical ploy, is imagining his theological adversary as a snotty playground brat).

I haven’t read the book yet (I ordered it form Amazon two weeks ago but I am still waiting) but, as I understand it, Dawkins has two aims with this book.

1. To persuade believers that they are wrong
2. To persuade atheists to stand up and be proud of their beliefs

Goal #1 is just plain misguided - but maybe Dawkins knows that and has some master plan that involves having people think its goal #1 even though it is not. Goal #2 is a worthy one though.

“mainstream opinion” in america is that atheists are crackpots and should be treated as such. I suspect (and Richard just said in the interview that he suspects) that a majority of well-educated people in america are atheist, or at least agnostic, but, because there is such a climate of distrust of atheists, they remain in the closet. So when a reviewer in the New York Times, or a reporter on NPR talks about The God Delusion they are careful to distance themselves from atheism because, to acknowledge having a naturalistic outlook, free from supernatural or mystical beliefs, is still a career-limiting move in most of america.

Many of my friends and family still have a lingering respect for the religion of their childhood - a belief in belief - which is itself worthy of respect. But the people in the media who disparage atheism while secretly not believing themselves…they remind me of the closet gays in the republican party who champion anti-gay legislation.

Much of The Brights propaganda is self-consciously modelled after the gay movement of forty years ago. The word bright itself is an attempt to hijack a positive word in the same way that gay no longer means what it used to mean. Maybe atheists should go one step further and try a little outing.

I wish I could figure out that newfangled way of embedding YouTube videos in my blog. Then I could embed this one - Battle of the Bands.

That reminds me. I caught Dylan singing Rock Lobster yesterday. Doing that jerky-punch-everyone-around-you dance is my fondest memory from Jacko’s 21st birthday party (what was that dance called?) where I first heard the B52s. My second favourite memory is the delicious selection of Yop-based cocktails that I invented that night - the most memorable of which was named Sunset over Lichtenstein - but for some reason I don’t remember anything after the cocktails.

Anyway. I was devastated when I realized that I had thrown out my copy of The B52s when I got rid of the convertible since it had the last cassette player I was likely to own. I only had a few cassettes but they will definitely all need replacing. I am ashamed to say that I no longer own Bat Out of Hell, Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits or anything by Simon and Garfunkel. Maybe someone who loves me will read this and buy me one for Christmas.

Oh. And while I am on the topic. How come every American my age knows all the words to The Love Shack but none of them have heard of Planet Clare or 6060842? What’s up with that?