God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven’t figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don’t believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don’t think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out. Richard Feynman
It must be obvious… that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. Alan Watts
I believe the Republicans when they say they are confident that by 2012, the march off socialism will come to the end of its road, and, that they’ll be able to repeal and replace the Health Care bill. Wait, I’m guessing if they ever get the chance, they’ll repeal and not replace it. So, we’ll be returned to an amplification of the death-making socialization of risk and privatization of profits.
Ha! Not bloody likely. What amazes me is that no Republican has walked away from his own government health insurance and other bennies paid for by you and me. It’s a weird set-up too because unlike a company where managers and employees each participate in company health plans, congresspersons who work for, and serve, the American people get health coverage as our so-to-speak employees, whereas, until now, millions of their bosses–we, the people–didn’t enjoy the same benefit.
During the Lebron era the Cavs have most often described by courtside commentators and b-ball media as being something like the King and his sub-stellar crew. This is a way of depicting secondary cast to be nothing more than a setting for the peerless one. So, as the NBA seasons rolls toward the end games, I’d like to wonder out loud how many other NBA teams would swap two or three starters for their choice among the four off the Cavs’ bench, Z, DWest, Varejao, Boobie? The point could be that having LeBron on your team tends to lead to his surrounding crew being discounted. It’s also seemingly the case, Mike Brown’s schemes elevate tightly defined roles and dial down the potential for a player to break out career-wise.
It also seems the Cavs just wear their opponents down. I like the odds.
My suggestion for the King is simple: it’s a-okay to realize the aspiration to be the greatest athlete to ever put on Cleveland colors. It’s just you and Jim Brown and Bob Feller at this point. (Žydrunas Ilgauskas is already the greatest Lithuanian athlete to ever play in Cleveland.) Go for it, King James.
In the comments to the B-roll, a youtube commenter wrote:
And the cherry picking on the left just keeps on rolling. Excellent editing skills. Bring the fringe elements and the ones incapable of coherently articulating an argument to the forefront and then keep harping on the notion that they’re all morons, racists, and terrorists. I admire your propaganda skills NewLeftMedia. Goebbels would be proud of how effective you are demonizing a legitimate element of society with legitimate concerns about taxation and the growing discontent of the governed.
If you go to the Tea Party web sites and peruse their hand-selected videos, you won’t find any thorough coherent articulations. Given that I’m familiar with several of the basic arguments for minimal taxation and elimination of all social and corporate welfare (handouts,) it would be enough to see memorably acute arguments videotaped and presented somewhere on Tea Party Planet. I’d post the video, and offer comments in agreement and disagreement.
Otherwise, I’m left with abject mash-ups, with their not-so-hidden desire for ‘patriotic’ compliance at the end of what is expressed in terms of a Manichaean struggle for the soul of America–where the the ‘Tea Party Patriotic’ version of America’s soul is supposed to ‘win out.’ (*)
Mash-ups like this one:
I continue to wait for the appearance of the something like a ‘best’ appeal this legitimate element has to offer.
The Tea Party movement seems almost completely befuddled by early American history.
A question I’d pose to a Tea Party Patriot is:
What could you tell me about how specific values and principles and ideas were contested among various founders, and how this eventually came to be temporarily played out in the election of Thomas Jefferson as the third President of the United States of America?
I have witnessed beautiful tubes twice in my life. The first I saw was in 1962, at Point Santa Clara in Panama. I was seven and my dad bravely went body surfing. I vaguely recall he wasn’t out in the shore break for long, for the ripe barrels aggravated a fierce undertow. The rest of the family watched from the beach.
The second time was during the first summer of my two season surfing ‘career.’ My cousin took me to Makaha, on the west coast of Oahu. We had our boards, but the surf, running about 6+ feet was beyond my nascent skills, so we looked but did not paddle out. Yet, the break was gorgeous. Sometimes it pops up in my dreams.
I did manage to insert myself into the tube of a wave exactly once, on a lucky takeoff on a nice playful wave at a break called Ones and Twos off of Waikiki. But, young goof foot couldn’t keep the ten foot fiberglass and redwood Hobie there for long, and so I chopped through to the bottom to scoot out through the wash.
Bill Vallicella writes a very fine, thought provoking, blog, The Maverick Philosopher. It’s one of the handful of blogs I read top-to-bottom, which is to say I read every post as they land in my rss reader. I read it for several reasons. One, Mr. Vallicella is a fine writer,and he moves through knotty subjects carefully. Two, he’s got a very rigorous perspective, yet he’s chosen to offer ideas and reasoning rather than polemics and ideology. Three, he’s interested in areas I’m interested in, such as metaphysics, and traditional ways to frame philosophical problems. Except, I’m interested in such things, and he’s a dedicated expert.
He also readily admits when his arguments are tentative or provisional. His is an attractive humility in contrast to a whole raft worth self-satisfied “I know I know” types of rationalists and religionists blogging in the philosophere.
A few days ago he offered a fascinating look at meditation, Mental Quiet and Enlightenment/Salvation. His particular starting point determines his viewpoint, yet he’s forthright in framing his view as being provisional, while he writes with a neat turn of phrase:
There is a passage somewhere in al-Ghazzali where he points out that a person who climbs to the top of a minaret is more likely to feel a cooling breeze than one who remains on the ground. Similarly, the gusts of divine favor are more likely to reach one who has made the right preparations, entry into mental quiet being one such preparation. This image suggests that salvation cannot be caused by the seeker, but must be graciously received. ‘Own-power’ is not enough; ‘other-power’ is needed. Mental quiet is thus a state of mental receptivity or passivity, a state of interior listening in which one opens oneself to a possible communication from beyond one’s egoic consciousness.
For a phenomenologically-minded Jamesian fallibilist like me, The Maverick Philosopher is a counter-intuitive choice for a mental workout, yet I’ve learned a bit, and enjoyed the mostly graceful presentation.
Lisa Miller. (My elderly mom didn’t laugh when I joked Ms. Miller ‘looks like she could have graduated from Bryn Mawr,’ my mom’s alma mater.)
In this clip, Ms. Miller argues for a return to charity, responsibility and rights. when I saw this, I was reminded of Sarah Palin speaking of solving the country’s problems by leaving it to the genius and innovative spirit of the regular Americans. Michelle Bachman has many times spoken of the country’s need to restore the values of self-reliance and personal responsibility.
This got me to thinking about the personal responsibility meme as a proposition of the Tea Party Patriots, (and their ilk.)
I went out and did some research and learned a lot. There are a variety of propositions, but these do not vary much from each other. The basic structure is unremarkable:
(1) To practice personal responsibility, one must be self-reliant,
(2) To be self-reliant one must live within their means.
(3) To live within these means, one must plan ahead to withstand what life throws at you
(4) To plan ahead, means one must sock away the funds necessary to being self-reliant,
It’s a loop. Charity figures into this ethic. When it comes about that self-reliance is stretched beyond the breaking point, this same ethic supposes the individual may appeal for help from “one’s own,’ from one’s community, from one’s church. This superficially commonsensical ethic is not without a context, for its proponents advocate its sources are (variably) found in Christianity, the ethics of the Founding Fathers, and the thought leaders of libertarianism. In noting this, I didn’t discover any writing seeking to anchor this notion of self-reliance in any actually coherent ‘thought-leading’ philosophy; (as might be found in Hayek, for example.)
Arrayed against this notional ethic is the “Other,” and this Other is characterized as anybody and everybody who has their hand out to any entity not comprised of family, one’s own, church, community. …for any reason whatsoever. Advocates of this version of the ethic of self-reliance excoriate, then, all instances of social welfare spending, whether it pays out to householder or company.
At times, this ethic’s social critique roars against other stuff too; against: the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking, credit cards, big government, socialists cum fascists, immigrants, the poor, the irreligious, humanism, social justice, and, modernity. Etc.
The truism, “you know how to spend your money better than the government does” underwrites their criticism of government and the popular Tea Party motto ‘Don’t Tread On Me.’ Then it gets plugged into notional ideas about the nature of liberty and freedom.
We are dedicated to the principles of constitutionally limited, transparent and accountable government, self-reliance and self-determination and free-market capitalism. (Outer Banks Tea Party)
How far can this notion be extended? You don’t have to read deeply into the copious literature of Tea Party Patriotism to discover this notion underpins conceptions for literally ending the political valency of any contravening ideas. This come to the fore as if the enforcement of self-reliance could both amplify liberty, and, at the same time dash all gainsaying. This is to suggest this brand of aspiration-for-freedom seems to carry with it, also, a demand for compliance at the end of the day on which the socialists have been defeated.
Obviously, this objective reflects a singular contradiction in terms. It seems a brutal ethic; especially when you consider how it has–on rare occasion–played out throughout history. Of course, to consider the devilish details implicit in given degrees of self-reliance–some people obtaining more margins for survival than others–is to consider how the most self-reliant can come to dominate, subject, and colonize the lesser, but no less (in these notional terms,) self-reliant.
The idealization of self-reliance does require some Other with their hands out. Evidently, for the Tea Party brethren, this is a very frightening requirement. It is the lens through which their paranoia is focused.
Mr. Beck frequently echoes Patriot rhetoric, discussing the possible arrival of a “New World Order” and arguing that Mr. Obama is using a strategy of manufactured crisis to destroy the economy and pave the way for dictatorship.
In New Mexico, Mary Johnson, recording secretary of the Las Cruces Tea Party steering committee, described why she fears the government. She pointed out how much easier it is since Sept. 11 for the government to tap telephones and scour e-mail, bank accounts and library records. “Twenty years ago that would have been a paranoid statement,” Ms. Johnson said. “It’s not anymore.”
Mr. Paul led Mrs. Southwell to Patriot ideology, which holds that governments and economies are controlled by networks of elites who wield power through exclusive entities like the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
One local group represented at Liberty Lake was Arm in Arm, which aims to organize neighborhoods for possible civil strife by stockpiling food and survival gear, and forming armed neighborhood groups.
Still, it is a big mistake to generalize about the ‘affectual’ terrain the tea party patriots travel.
(It interests me whenever there can be a thought problem such as this one: persons A and B, are in identical situations, yet A is afraid of stuff, while B is not; a subject for a future post.)
“If you think it’s a Socialist plot and it’s wrong, for goodness sakes, drop out of the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. But if you think it’s good enough for your family, shouldn’t our health insurance be good enough for the rest of America?”
Dick Durban, D-IL, stating the obvious about the Republican opposition.
No, I doubt there are any Republicans in the Congress principled enough to eject their government-managed health care.
Gigantic private insurers are rolling in money and they’ve been jacking up premiums for many years. They practice a brutal rationing of care to protect their profits. How brutal? Deadly brutal.
At the same time, even though among the most efficient providers of health care are several government-managed programs, the Republicans would like to be perceived as thought leaders on the subject of reform, except their ideas largely amplify profit raking; ‘raking’ as in: raking-in. Their own program, as always, privatizes profits and socializes risk. In fact, almost every one of their “ideas” can be explained as means to support even more risk shifting. Ironically, the resulting policies are no less social engineering than the policies from the center-left.
The evidence is already in that, for example, the tea party patriots want “the government to keep their hands off of my medicare and social security,’ and, every single Republican in Congress is vested in a number of beneficial social welfare programs offered by the Federal government!
“Doubters Rip Darwin — Badly” would have been better. In his article, Michael Ruse adds Thomas Nagel to the fold of philosophers seeming to enter a late, demented phase in otherwise illustrious careers. (He discusses Alvin Plantinga too, but he’s been a card carrying creationist for a very long time.)
As always, it’s enough to state the fact: there is not yet an iota of successful science done in the pseudo-scientific field of Intelligent Design. However, on the philosophical side of things, the controversies are different. But, as I’ve maintained previously, scientific research is not utterly contingent on a completely developed philosophy of science, so it’s not likely that any substantial challenge to biological research and demonstration will break free of the usual circularity found in such philosophy.
Ruse:
For 150 years, since the Origin, critics have feared that we humans might become part of the evolutionary picture—not just our bodies, but our minds, our very souls. What makes us distinctively and uniquely human? This worry is still alive and well in today’s philosophical community. Plantinga is open in his fear that Darwinism makes impossible the guaranteed existence of our species. More, for years he has argued that Darwinism is bound up with the metaphysical belief that everything is natural (as opposed to supernatural), and that this leads to a collapse of rational belief and knowledge. The chance elements in Darwinism are simply not compatible with Plantinga’s Christian faith.
This alludes to real problems because there are versions of philosophical naturalism that collide. Are nature’s mechanics run by a strictly determined code that necessarily voids free will? (Etc..) It seems a stretch to imply that if nature is all there is, then some set of singular philosophical assumptions are necessary and inevitable.
But, from the other side, there isn’t any real philosophy upon which to hang the various suppositions of ID.
After all, it is the nexus of designer and materiality, and the mechanics of supernatural intervention that are the only fruitful fields for a science, rather than a superstition, of intelligent design. So, what philosophizing might aid (or underpin,) research into the designer/nature interface? No such coherent and cogent philosophy yet exists. (This noted, Del Ratszch and Bradley Monton are possibly the only mildly worthwhile thinkers on ID.) The problem obviously is research into the interface would tend to be subsumed into the normative philosophy of ‘applied’ science; such as it is.
from a comment to the article:
Thomas Aquinas used logics, reasoning and other qualities that none of the philosophers after him will ever have.
Darwinism is a complete nonsense in the eyes of a contemporary science. The center of Darwinism in London has admitted that, but you won’t! All you do is quoting what this and that guy said!
Open your eyes and think about what it really is! A piece of non-organic matter becomes a human being and yet we relatively know almost nothing about it! Exuse me, but when science tell you that one the sea shrimps has the most sophisticated vision in color (!) than any organizm known on the planet, I have no choice, but to think about the super intelligence behind it! When I know that human optical nerve(relatively thin) is composed of over 6 million cables, each of which is isolated (!) I have no choice, but to think about super intelligence behind it. When I think of the total length of human blood vessels being 2,5 times longer than size of our planet around equator, I am thrilled about intelligence behind it. And knowing that complete blood exchange across the entire human body takes just about 2 minutes, all I can say that all of you “smart” Darwinists either deliberately don’t want to admit the facts of science, or you are just a bunch of complete idiots.
So far, nothing good has ever come out of Darwinism except of a lot of wasted time! Not to mention Hitler who got inspired by it and came with the idea of a holocaust! And no, he was not sick, he just based his ideas an a false science!
This raw comment encapsulates many of the anti-Darwin arguments and their wrongheadedness. As far as the laity goes–and I’m a member–I have discovered over and over again folk proponents of ID invariably have no grasp on biology, biological research, and very rarely can tell you much about either the paperwork of ID or the responses to this paperwork. You know, the responses which have obliterated complexity-based arguments.
Still, I appreciate the irony behind having no choice but to believe in the super intelligence and his or her’s brutal, so-called, creation. Hey, and the Thomist reference–as in, one version, the universe being wholly a Catholic one in which almost everybody is going to roast in hell?