Bill's Notes

Godel created a series of famous paradoxes designed to make your mind explode. But they boil down to ... you can't evaluate a system within a system/you need to stand outside the system. We theists have been using an argument against atheists for a long time that goes something like this: Exactly what is the source of your morality, since you cannot get to "ought" from "is". The whole thing is said better in quotes provided by Instapundit.

First, the human condition vis-a-vis morality:

I want to believe --and so do you-- in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe --and so do you-- in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.

Then, the devil speaks:

Well, well, let me not be cruel. I know at least as well as you what total separation from Him can lead to in the way of self-deception and bad lines. I tried to replace God with myself, and you tried, as He appeared unwilling to come again, to put your faith in some laughable Second Coming of Man. No hope. As long as you wanted simultaneously to make something in the world--mankind-- into the good and still reserve the right to judge its goodness, you were doomed. You were trapped in what, to save time, I might call a Gödel problem: how to validate the premises of a system from within itself. "Good," "right" and words like that are evaluations. For evaluations you need an evaluator. Either whatever the evaluator says is good is good, or you must find some superior place to stand to evaluate the evaluator. But there is no such place in the world to stand. From the world, only a man can evaluate a man, and unless some arbitrary standards are slipped into the game, all men, at this, are equal.

Or to put it another way, one more congenial, I think, to both of us, by dispensing with God we did more than just free ourselves of some intellectual anachronism. We also dispensed with the only intellectually respectable answer to the ultimate "Why is it right to do X?" It was not so very long ago that most people (and I, too) could and did answer: "It is right to do X because God says so." That answer was at least intelligible, the only one that did not depend upon mere sublunary assertion, the only one that even if it too involved the transformation of fact into value, was not for that reason insufficient. For assuming that God existed, and had commands, it was He who was evaluating our actions. He was not part of our evaluation system, nor were his evaluations subject, or even amenable, to our evaluations of them.

That does not mean, of course, that God exists, or existing, bothers to evaluate your activities. He may not, literally or figuratively, give a damn. It is just that if He does exist (whether or not He cares), as an intellectual matter your problem of normative grounding would be solved. No more would ethical imperatives consist merely of human beliefs, intuited in privacy, perhaps validated by wide sharing or whatever, but just mortal opinions nonetheless. A belief in God and His will would solve the Gödel problem and would avoid the necessary defeat visited on any attempt to validate a system from within itself.

There are, Professor Unger, not very many possibilities. In fact, there are, I think, just two. The first is that mankind is a species that doesn't mean anything at all, except to itself. There is no evaluator out there. If the species is or becomes one thing or another, or ceases to exist altogether, nothing else cares--except perhaps some other species which, mostly with joy, might register the ecological impact of man's extinction. You are what you are, and will become what you will become, and the goodness or badness of that being and becoming is for you, and you alone, to define and declare. No state of being is more authentic than any other or, just because it exists, any better. Oh, it's not so awful. If being isn't meaning, and it isn't, meaninglessness isn't nonbeing either. You and the species get to live. It's just that you have to shape your living, and its meaning, all alone.

The second possibility is that God exists, and still cares. My own opinion is that the Hand that holds you suspended over my fiery pit doesn't abhor you, but has forgotten completely that It has anything in It. But God may still care, and, if that is so, you have but one epistemological problem, to learn the will of God. If there is no God, everything is permitted; if there is a God, it's even more terrifying, because then some things are not permitted, and men have got to find out which are which. Since He has the right and power to evaluate you, but no duty to do so, you are bravely right: you must pray.

But while you try to live as best you can until His revelation, perhaps you will accept some practical advice from me. Look around you at your species, throughout time and all over the world, and see what men seem to be like. Okay? Now take this hint from what you have seen: If He exists, Me too. [Emphasis mine.]

This is the problem of postmodern philosophy. Once they eliminated an external source of morality -- that is, "because Jesus likes it that way" -- they're caught in the Godel problem. And they know it, and still stay there. Weird, man.

Bill is on vacation. Guest editor Dr. Know-It-All answers your burning questions about life, liberty and all that. All reasonable questions will be answered.

Dear Dr. Know-It-All: I recently shot my wife with a sniper rifle while she was on stage at a recent concert. Now the law's looking for me.

Dear Sniper-Boy: Killing an unarmed person who does not plan to physically harm you is an act of the crassest cowardice, and Dr. Know-It-All condemns it in the strongest terms. So did Dr. Know-It-All's advisor, Mr. Know-A-Lot, who added, however, that, "I guess she won't do whatever she did to piss him off again."

If you wanted to act honorably, you needed to attempt to kill her with a microphone in front of all those other people. Or you needed to give her a sniper rifle and then give her fair warning. As such, you need to eat the rifle to restore your honor. Or go to confession/turn yourself in.

Dear Dr. Know-It-All: My old friends enjoy reminding me of stupid things I did many years ago. I'm not terribly bothered by the chops-busting. But that's not the whole story. For example, I once utterly rocked the world of one of his wife's best friends. She talked about it for years. So 25 years later he sends me an email busting my chops one day about a joke I once made, and so I respond, "How's Jo---." He writes me the next day and says it took half a day to remember who she was. The girl was a bridesmaid at his wedding, fer f---k's sake. WTF, over?

Dear Toady-seeker: What was the stupid joke you made that you won't repeat? And who was Jo---? Oh, you mean the girl you were talking about in the beginning of the paragraph. I'd already forgotten about her after you mentioned the joke you won't repeat. Look, if you want to surround yourself with sycophants, toadies and bootlickers, hire an entourage. Otherwise, be prepared to be reminded of your youthful errors. It keeps you humble. And what was that joke?

Dear Dr. Know-It-All: I am afraid that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, that I will develop Clinton Derangement Syndrome and sound like a right-wing version of those frothing Atrios readers. If Hillary wins, will I go insane?

Dear Right-Wing Blog Dude: Actually, this is not as retarded a question as it sounds. You are right: If you think Clinton Derangement Syndrome as a potential problem, you should get used to the idea now. First, get a 30-day supply of bottled water and put it in your basement. Get 30 days worth of canned food. Get plenty of ammo. Feel better? Good. Because if our entire economic system collapses and the powergrid is destroyed, most of the weak will be killed off in the first 30 days of chaos. But you'll only be emerging, fresh, to fight for food, water and women in the post-apocalypse wasteland. Sounds kind of cool, doesn't it?

Dear Dr. Know-It-All: Many years ago, a girl who swore eternal love for me pressed the duck of a couple of other guys. She said it meant nothing, but I kicked her to the curb. She quickly entered a new relationship, declared the new guy the love of her life, got married and had kids with him. Twenty years later, I google her and find their divorce papers on the Internet. Turns out they just got divorced because she got nekkid with someone not her husband or me. In the legal papers, it mentioned that her own son has taken to calling her a ho. While I'm sorry people have been hurt, is it wrong that I somehow feel incredibly satisfied by this turn of events?

Dr. Schaudenfreude-Questioner: It appears it took you 20 years to confirm that breaking up with her was the right thing to do. After all, if she was able to succeed in this immediate rebound relationship, then clearly the problem was you. But with her repeating the pattern, it's obvious you made the right call. You may feel satisfied that your world once again makes sense. But as you said, it's not good to enjoy other's pain. Good boy.

I have obtained a copy of the ending of the new Harry Potter book, the last and final one, due out Friday. Here, to ruin it for everyone, is the ending:

But after Harry had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying goodbye to a statue. After a while he went out and left Hogwarts and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

I've long since mentioned my dubious, yet consistent support for the President's Post-Sept. 11 war policy. I had strong doubts about it, but my point of view was so out of touch with what my fellow citizens seemed to be feeling, especially in the blue state where I work, that I haven't taken to restating it too often.

As I've mentioned, I thought we needed to do something pretty horrible in the wake of Sept. 11 -- I would have gone full Jacksonian, which is to say, immediately done to Afghanistan what Rome did to Carthage. Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudia Arabia and the Palestinian Authority would have been on our short list. The war would have been over by Sept. 20.

I believed this not because I am a bloodthirsty maniac, but because I believe in the end, we would save more lives by obliterating Afghanistan than we will ultimately lose in this war.

That's because the destruction of the World Trade Center, while extraordinarily evil, was a brilliant strategic move by our enemies. It left us a series of choices that ranged from bad to terrible, and attacked us at our most vulnerable spots and cultural fault-lines. We are vulnerable not only in our freedom, but it left us playing defense, or trying to remake the Middle East, which at the time, I felt, was a fool's errand.

Still, I've gone along because it seemed to me that perhaps an annihilating attack of neutron bombs would after all commit a massive genocide. It also would have sent the message that we were not to be screwed with -- and that's a very important message to send. You don't pull this shit on us. Not on our homeland. Not ever.

As this War on Terror drags on and on, it's become apparent that our enemy knows us pretty well, and knows that they can get away with mass murder and terrorism on U.S. soil. That doesn't mean they'll win. Indeed, their movement could peter out merely through our resistance and our cultural and technical inertia. That is, they may get "canceled" one day by TV news networks that decide it's just not that important anymore ... and may be considered nothing more than a nuisance by most people. Like most evil, they may devour themselves in the end.

In the past six years, I've thought about the position about "what's the right thing to do?" from a lot of perspectives. I think about Iraq in terms of chess (it may seem convenient, I know, from my perspective, but this war has no fronts. That's clear.). In chess, there's something that happens when you've got a king and a pawn against a king. If done correctly, you can force checkmate. Done wrong, you stalemate. Similarly, there are several other times where you have to back off and "untie the knot." Do we need to untie the knot in Iraq? Or do we lose tempo? Is the holding action enough? Or are we on a fool's errand, flawed in the conception and doomed from the start?

Clearly, if we leave, we leave a mess and we're utterly discredited for a generation at least, if not more. No nation or group, after seeing us abandon the Kurds a second time, the Shi-ites a second time, will ever believe us again. And I wouldn't blame them. I wouldn't believe us again, either.

Yet we have bigger problems than Iraq. Pakistan has hinterlands that are now, effectively, the exact safe haven for terrorism we sought to deny Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. If we're serious, we should fight Al Qaeda in Pakistan. But we're not ... so we have a politicized situation, in which we try to look like we're doing something, when in fact we're taking half-measures.

Syria and Iran have committed acts of war against us. Yet we do nothing. Again, for fear of spreading the war.

I expected all of this malfeasance by Pakistan, Syria and Iran when we went into Iraq. In fact, I thought that was the point of the Iraq invasion -- then we'd have reasons to declare war against Iran and Syria, and maybe Pakistan as part of the Afghanistan War, and fight the terrorists there. But I also expected a full mobilization of the United States into war mode, and fight a World War II-style war with conscription of all able-bodied men and women, domestic interning Muslims and vocal opponents of the war [we did it in WWI--where do you think the "fire in a crowded theater" phrase came from -- it was to silence opponents of the draft], banning visas from Muslim nations, a permanent ban on Muslims working near airports and safety-sensitive areas, and the full-scale, Dresden-style total war against these nations. (I have since moderated these views considerably, you'll be relieved to know :))

I realized pretty quickly that the reality of the War on Terror was we were simply playing a game of pattycake with the terrorists, that we were actually dumb enough to try to think we could defend all our soft targets. That we were going to play the terrorists' game. Except for the invasion of Iraq, which really threw them for a loop. Right now, Iraq is the place we found in the world to conduct our war with Al Qaeda. We are doing a good job. They know that Iraq is crucial to their strategy, so they are fighting us there.

Victory for them there will not only demoralize our nation, but would be a resounding victory for Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda has repeatedly stated that they've got a lot riding on Iraq.

Perhaps Iraq can be a holding action -- can we stand another 10 years of this -- that is, for Al Qaeda, like a virus, to run its course and go away. People forget that Vietnam, while a defeat for the United States, may have been crucial to the Cold War by holding the line for 12 years or so. Sometimes time is important.

In chess, we call this tempo. When you have tempo, it means your opponent is reacting to your threats. When you intentionally give up tempo, you now must respond to his threats, and the only ways you can usually regain tempo is (1) By simultaneously neutralizing a threat while creating a counter-threat [see my nuke Afghanistan idea], but that's very, very difficult against skilled opponents, or (2) Your opponent blunders.

Our opponent has blundered, and will blunder again. We have blundered, and will again ... we may need to hold in Iraq, or we may need to widen the war -- which is politically impossible. But giving tempo -- perhaps not too bright.

Still, we're muddling through. It may work. We may win in spite of ourselves. And let's hope that we can continue to prevent attacks. If so, then clearly nuking Afghanistan would have been wrong. However, if Iran gets the bomb, and we see nuclear terrorism, then clearly muddling through won't work.

It's possible that as Peggy Noonan said, this generation of leaders (I would extend that to a lot of Americans, too) simply aren't up to the challenge of the times. It's also possible that ignoring problems may cause them to go away.

Pray.

A state superior court declares a child can have three parents.

Fortunate children have many people who love them as much as their parents do. But in the best interests of children, no court should break open the rule of two when assigning legal parenthood.

Note: I'm not exactly sure of the facts of this case. But if this case concerns a sperm donor, an egg donor and a "gestational surrogate" [I already loathe the term], then clearly the child has three parents. Two from whom it received its DNA, and the mother [a better term than gestational surrogate] who carried the child to term.

Technically, two parents. But a gestational surrogate who carries the child to term -- risking her life, by the way, and going through the great fun of childbirth -- has parental rights.

It gets really complicated, though, once you open that door. What if sperm can be hybridized, and the same eggs? Does donation of a chromosone to a sperm count?

I dunno. People smarter than me have to figure that out.

Am I wrong?