Bill's Notes

The Nobel committee apparently is as politicized as Hollywood. A British Court recently found 11 inaccuracies in An Inconvenient Truth, and said showing the movie to school children counts as political indoctrination. These 11 inaccuracies are not side issues or quibbling over irrelevant details (see below post), but are important ones:

The inaccuracies are:

* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.

* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.

* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.

* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.

* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.

* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.

* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.

* The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.

* The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.

* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.

* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Though we have made great progress since I was a boy, we still have ongoing and serious environmental issues to face. Our farming practices in the Midwest are depleting water reserves, and the Great Lakes could be at risk. We do have to continue to work to protect against deforestation, to protect drinking water supplies, to continue to reduce air pollution. I am completely on board with trying to replace fossil fuels — a trip to Manila would convince anyone of that. And what the heck is happening to the bees? And other species, especially birds?

I agree, also, that man should limit his "ecological footprint." I'm concerned about suburban sprawl. And I want to see a world where animals can roam free and man hasn't subdivided every last lot on the world. (And I do believe that time is coming — within 100 years within the U.S.) And

But global warming alarmism isn't going to help any of these serious issues. It politicizes issues that should concern us all. And it may blind us to the real issues we face.

Several ways to be wrong even though you're right:

1. False comparison and analogy. You say X is evil and Y is evil, thus X=Y. It's a logical fallacy in syllogisms. Other times, it's simply a refusal to understand that the issues are different. The Amanda Marcotte affair, for example, is not analogous to the Danish cartoon controversy. On the surface, both were concerned with offending religious sensibilities. But one concerned the appropriateness of hiring someone who had offended, and the other concerned whether someone should be allowed to publish at all (or should have published the cartoons at all). Different topics.

2. Failure of emphasis. Similarly, you can merely emphasize one fact over another ... omitting or downplaying relevant facts, over-emphasizing others, to give a distorted picture of reality. Calling the Democrats the party of slavery, secession and segregation, for example, over-emphasizes crimes.

3. Failure of proportion, or sentimentality. Your reaction is out of proportion to the facts of the case. Someone cuts you off, and you shoot them. You compare the coerced interrogation of 33 suspected terrorists over six years to the inauguration of a "torture regime" in the U.S. You decide you want to write a book about it. Or you decide to burn down your town over some cartoons.

4. Timing and repetition. You say the right thing at the wrong time. Or you just say the same thing over and over again, regardless of appropriateness. "Do these jeans make my ass look fat?" "No, your ass makes your ass look fat." "That's a terrible thing to say." "You've got a fat ass." "Take that back." "But your ass is fat." Less humorously, pointing out the good things about Islam a few days after they've brutally killed thousands of our citizens.

5. Fundamentalism. You do a literal and superficial reading of a topic and insist it's correct and that's all there is to it.

6. Lack of charity. William Blake said one of the most devastating things you can do to someone is speak the truth without charity.

7. Presuming bad faith on the part of your opponents. This is an ad hominem attack, except you're right and they're wrong. You just assume they know their wrong, or that their motives are bad.

8. Assuming you know more than you can or do know. You guess the motives of others, engage in mindreading ... and other fun psychological distortions. Or you assume you know all about a topic simply because you read an article. Or a few articles. Trust me. I've spent about 20 years in editorial — a lot of important stuff gets left out.

9. Excessive, irrelevant, non-applied or misapplied abstractness or concreteness. You may be correct either on the abstract, or in the concrete, but you misconnect the two. Or you may say something so vague and generic that it applies to anything, and is thus meaningless. Or you focus entirely on the concrete details and refuse to consider the abstract principles at stake. Or you get stuck on an abstract issue.

10. Refusal to consider implications. Sometimes your objections, even if correct, will only make things worse. I always thought this was the biggest mistake the Democrats made in attacking Dubya. We need a leader, and we need a strong leader. Attacking him — even if you're right on the facts — was only going to make things worse. And weaken an already flawed man -- especially when you consider there are real issues of national security at stake. A little like "cutting off your nose to spite your face."

11. Side issues. You complain about something correctly, but it's not relevant to the topic. Essentially, you're trying to divert the issue.

12. Plain old bad manners. These are implied in many of the above, but should be stated separately. You simply aren't polite, so why should anyone listen to you?

This entry here talks about how the blogger lost friends because of his GOP support. I have no way to assess the facts in the situation.

I wonder, though, about the issue of politics and its affect on friendships. I know that since the election of Dubya, there have been some negative effects in some of my relationships because of politics. Occasionally, I've been subject to condescension. In other cases, I've been talked at, not to. And in other cases, people were willing to lump my conservatism in as just-another-of-Bill's-eccentricities. In my last job, my conservatism certainly affected my work relationships.

And many times I've heard people say things where they just assumed everyone around was a liberal. At one party, someone mentioned what an incompetent, evil nincompoop Clarence Thomas was -- at a company Christmas party -- as if everyone would automatically agree. I just kept eating ... manners, you know.

I dunno. I do know that since Dubya became president, a lot of people became deeply unhinged. People who were not political suddenly became political. It's been weird, man. Really weird.

Yesterday we discussed the main questions of philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the main question: How do I know? Today I'd like to give a [very] broad overview of where everything went wrong.

In the beginning, you had an argument between Plato and Sophists. This argument has been continued, in various ways, ever since. Plato held that abstractions have reality; sophists laughed at him. Critical theorists of today are merely the sophists of old, but without the sense of humor, and with a far more totalitarian agenda.

So how did philosophy go from an ennobling enterprise to a totalitarian philosophy of brute power? Basically, flawed epistemology. A good epistemology is Aquinas' faith-guided-by-reason.

Epistemology must be rooted first and foremost in mysticism. That said, the mind boggles at the danger of mysticism. Mystics claim all sorts of things, and usually cannot be talked out of it. See Mohammed, founder of Islam. That said, mysticism can be an extremely effective way of answering the big questions, to wit, is there a spiritual dimension to life? And: Is there a God?

You strip away mysticism, and you're left using the remaining tools, which are reason and empiricism — and they just don't get you far enough. You tumble down the rabbit hole, asking narrower and narrower questions, into darker and darker realms, until you're so far down the hole you can't see the entrance. Pretty soon, you can't be sure of much of anything, so anything goes.

Mysticism, thus, must precede both reason and empiricism. But wait ... I'm going further. Mysticism isn't enough either. How can we know, for example, that the 10 Sikh gurus, whose followers took mystical experiences and applied reason to those messages, have any less of a cornerstone on truth than the Christian? Islam also has a mystical faith and reason component. How can we distinguish among mystical experiences, between so-called revelations?

The answer, for the Christian, is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. A historical claim, for which there is a great deal of evidence. All Christian claims hang on a historical fact in space-time, in the incarnation. It's not just mystical revelation to the person, but a revelation to the entire world.

I'm not sure I'm explaining this well. In the end, if you focus on mystical experiences, reason and empirical reality, you can still end up just about anywhere, believing just about anything. (You might be down the rabbit hole, e.g., Satanism, Islamism, and Wicca, or you might be walking around in the sun, like the Muslims and Sikhs.) In the end, though, you're still living in a world of abstract concepts and concrete things.

But when Christ comes, these two realms come together, they cross paths. God-as-man simply offers an answer that no other form of mysticism or revelation can respond to, except to deny the incarnation and resurrection of Christ.

Does this make sense? I'm really failing to explain this. I'm saying an epistemology goes something like this:

Historical revelation
Mystical confirmation
Rational testing.
Empirical testing.
Refinement of understanding of mystical experiences.
Further mystical experiences, go back to Step 1.

That is, the tools must be appropriate to the question.

For example, historical revelation. What evidence do we have that Jesus Christ existed and He was who he said he was? Well, we have reports, we have people willing to die rather than renounce the fact, we have amazing teaching ... I'm not trying to get you to believe, only saying that we can rationally look at the question of the incarnation using the rules of evidence. It's a rational question. But by choosing to believe, we experience a mystical confirmation. Yet, that still doesn't tell us the earth is round, not flat. It's a different order of question: You need reason and some observation for that.

Does this make sense? I feel like I'm missing something here. I'm not able to really explain that there's an interaction among all these forms of epistemology that helps us understand, not pure truth, but enough of it to see, "Now through the glass darkly."

[Editor's Note: This post has been rewritten somewhat to improve clarity.]

So what's philosophy all about, anyway? Glad you asked. Here's an attempt to give a broad overview.

There are three main branches of philosophy: ontology, epistemology and ethics.

1. Ontology deals with this fact: A world exists, and that world is orderly. It is concerned with asking all the big questions about this fact: What is being? What is the nature of reality? What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of the order of the world? What is man? What is society? Is the fundamental unit of society the individual, or is it the community and the individual merely a constituent part? Is there a God? What is his nature? Ontology basically boils down to all the "What is ...?" questions.

2. Ethics deals with the question: How should I act? What is the proper way for people to behave? Obviously, your ontology affects your ethics. For example, if man is an animal, why should he be privileged above other animals? Is PETA correct that meat is murder? (Note: Paul Burgess has correctly noted in the comments that technically, ethics is subsumed under the branch of philosophy known as axiology, that is, the answer to the question: How do I make judgments, whether ethical, aesthetic, or otherwise?)

These two questions, and indeed, any question pursued far enough, leads to a third question. Hence, the third branch of philosophy, epistemology.

3. Epistemology deals with the question, "How do I know?" As you can tell, this is more fundamental than, "What is ...?" or "How should I act?" Because you don't know the answer to how do you know, you really can't answer any other question. "Is there a God?" is an ontological question. "How do I know there is a God?" is an epistemological question. If man is an animal, how do I know that he is an animal and not something above the animals?

These three questions, "What is ...?" "How do I know it?" and "How should I act (or how should I make judgements)?" are the key questions of philosophy. The attempt to answer these questions leads to other questions, which lead to other questions, arguments and counter-arguments, which form the history of philosophy.

Some particularly issues:

Immanuel Kant, for example, held that a purely rational epistemology (that is, you can reason your way to truth) is flawed because our brain depends on our sense organs for information, and we really can't be sure that anything outside of our sense organs exist.

Critical theorists hold that epistemology has failed — we simply cannot know how we know, and thus we don't know. There are only personal "truths," contingent and fluid, and they aren't real truths at all. In fact, since there is no truth, there is only power, and power relations. The attempts to declare one thing true is merely a mask for the exercise of power. Any attempt to declare a higher truth is a pretense — someone's reaching for your wallet.

That is, you declare something is in the interest of justice, but since you don't know what justice is, you are merely declaring what's just for you, or more correctly, for your race, class and gender group. And not only that, but you didn't come up with these concepts yourself — they are socially constructed and you just bought into them by not critically analyzing them. (Some say that critical theory is simply a series of ad hominem attacks on those in power.)

Thus critical theorists attempt to "deconstruct" arguments to show the power relations behind any argument, especially arguments in the past. This applies to literature in the sense that storytelling is deconstructed to show the power relations at play in the story. The Tempest is thus about Caliban, not Prospero, except for Prospero's "othering" of Caliban.

Many critical theorists also hold that man is an animal, who thinks not like an individual with free will, but is conditioned by the power relations of his community, and controlled by meta-narratives that keep him or her in line. (That is, your worldview, and abstract concepts, are socially constructed.) Thus, critical theories seek to expose these meta-narratives for the power grabs they are, and replace them with more "just" social relations. Hence, its support for race, class and gender analyses.

If you've read this far, you might note a sleight-of-hand — critical theorists have some absolutes, the first of which is that "we don't know" is an answer to the question, "How do we know?" If we don't know, then we know we don't know, which means we know something. Some critical theorists are honest enough about this to leave it open-ended, and to say, we can't even be sure we don't know.

Second, the power relations thing assumes an idea of justice — but what is justice? And how would we know? Especially if we can't know. And how do we know that the critical theorists aren't merely after a power grab of their own, especially considering they believe that power is all? (Ain't that a scary group of people to have in charge?)

*****

But enough of critical theorists. Let's move on to some other groups of epistemologists:

1. Empiricists employ the scientific method to determine what is NOT true. The focus is on finding a repeatable experience. As Einstein put it, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

2. Positivists. Basically, if the scientific method can't answer it, they don't ask it. Often, they focus on definitions. For example, a triangle is a geometric figure on a single plane that contains three sides. No big questions, just the little ones answered precisely, not necessarily accurately. (Accurate means true; precise means correctly measured.)

Note: You can be an empiricist and not a positivist.

3. Nominalists. When you try to answer the question, "How do you know?" you end up discussing abstract concepts, such as liberty, justice, freedom, and the like. You end up thinking about whether or not these concepts have any reality. So nominalists focus on the problem of universals. They hold that abstract concepts have no reality in and of themselves, but are merely names.

This conclusion is a bigger problem than it sounds. If there is no reality to the abstract concept of "freedom," then it means any damned thing we want it to mean. But if we hold that abstract concepts have a reality in another realm, then a natural moral order is possible.

Plato apparently realized the temptation of nominalism long before nominalism became popular, and created his theory of the forms to counter it. Plato held that abstract concepts are real, and that individual things in this world instantiate the abstract reality of the other realm. So a real-world apple instantiates the abstract idea of apple, which exists in the forms. It's the appleness of the apple that makes an apple an apple, not the fact that we call that fruit over there an apple.

Again, this is more important than it sounds, because the disease from which our culture suffers is largely caused by philosophical nominalism. You lose that appleness of the apple, and pretty soon, you have chaos.

Others opposed to nominalism include religious people hold that abstract concepts have reality in the mind of God. Most members of the "elite" are nominalists, and are wrong.

4. Rationalists. There may be a few dead-enders left. They haven't apparently gotten the message of what Hume and Kant did to their arguments. Rationalists hold that you can reason your way to truth. Um, yeah.

5. Mystics. These folks hold that man can experience truth directly, beyond reason and experimentation, and focuses on techniques for having those mystical experiences.

*****

Now, most of us aren't quite sure how we'd fit in, and of course, I've left out a gazillion categories and reduced the rest. This is meant merely to serve as a kind of map of the terrain, akin to a map of the world that says "continents," "water," and "Thar be dragons."

I know that I've struggled with philosophy, and only until I focused on the three questions, did I have any hope of thinking about it.

You should also know that almost every possible answer to these questions is already a philosophical school of some sort. It's your fault for showing up so late in history.

That's all.

So the Yankees lose the "ant series". Now we can enjoy the playoffs. Diamondbacks-Rockies for the NL. Red Sox-Indians for the AL. No predictions here. I don't know much about any of these teams. Didn't really pay much attention to baseball this year. Just glad the Yankees are done.

Forgiveness. Specifically, forgiving others. One thing that can happen if you work too hard to be forgiven, is forget you have been sinned against, too — and to forgive them.

Also, took a long drive this weekend and listened, back-to-back-to-back, Like a Hurricane, Down by the River and Cowgirl in the Sand. Nothing like a Indian summer drive with great Indian summer road music. I was practically a hippy by the time I was done.

Also, the Phillies lost. Not a disappointment for me, because normally the season ended a week ago.

The Colorado Rockies have now won 18 of 19. They are either the hottest team ever, or it's gonna come out they're stealing signals. Let's hope it's the former.

Just how much do you shrink when you're older? Saw a guy I hadn't seen in years. He used to be my height. Now he's four inches shorter. But, hey, he's 80. So I'll give him a break.

Effing Yankees won. Let's hope the Indians get 'em out of there soon, so we can all enjoy the playoffs.

The Iraq War was a mistake. Still, we need to win, and (knock on wood), there are real signs of progress. I don't want to jinx it. So knock my wooden head on wood with a wooden stick.

No, it's not Sunday night depression. I am a little worried about the three deadlines tomorrow. But I'm not all like, "Shit, I should've been a plumber."

Vacation in two weeks. Amsterdam. Paris. I've been brushing up on my Arabic for the trip, you know, in case what I hear about the Islamicization of Holland and France is true. Ah Salaam Aleikum, mon ami ...

Those grassy islands that poke up in shallow mid-Atlantic bays are known as sedge islands. That's because that tall grass that makes up the island — it's called sedge. So now you know, too. This has been a public service announcement.

You know those CDs Sam's Clubs sells? They just randomly pick some stuff and there's one rack of it. I saw a terrific Sam Cooke retrospective. Don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't much about a science book, don't know much about the French I took. But I do know what a sedge island is, so there.

Speaking of Sam Cooke, I taught that song (What a Wonderful) World (not the Louis Armstrong song) as my first English lesson to my Gabonais students while in Peace Corps. They really liked Sam Cooke, peace be upon him, which proves that everyone liked Sam Cooke. Except that confused woman who shot him.

Meanwhile, in the National League, we have a Rockies-Diamondbacks championship series. I think we should just take a fan vote and reverse the results of the division series and have the Phillies play the Cubs for the NL pennant, by popular demand. Same goes for the Red-Sox Indians.

I mean, who remembered that the Colorado Rockies existed? Most people remember they got in the league, there was a strike, they made the playoffs in 95, and were never heard from again. Except to throw off the statistics charts, you know, because the ball in Denver isn't affected as by gravity as in lower areas, or something like that. You see, gravity isn't the same all over the earth's surface. In some areas, gravity is very strong, and it pulls the earth's crust deep down, creating oceans and deep lakes and places like Death Valley. And in other areas, gravity is very weak, and that allows the earth's crust to stretch out a bit more, and it appears to us as mountains. There's actually so little gravity on the top of Mount Everest that mountain climbers use ropes to hold themselves to earth's surface, lest they get blown away suddenly by the wind.

That's all. Have a good week.

I have a regular reader in Paris. It might be someone I know, but it might not. In any case, I will be in Paris in about two weeks. If the Paris reader would like to get a cup of coffee, SVP let me know. Tks.