Sweet, sweet schadenfreude ...as a liberal professor reaps the whirlwind.

Sure, we raised a generation of totalitarian special snowflakes, but at least they are totalitarian about liberal social issues.

//I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic.  The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed's current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics, a discourse that "is focused much more on taxonomy than politics [which] emphasizes the names by which we should call some strains of inequality [ ... ] over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them." Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.

Herein lies the folly of oversimplified identity politics: while identity concerns obviously warrant analysis, focusing on them too exclusively draws our attention so far inward that none of our analyses can lead to action.  Rebecca Reilly Cooper, a political philosopher at the University of Warwick, worries about the effectiveness of a politics in which "particular experiences can never legitimately speak for any one other than ourselves, and personal narrative and testimony are elevated to such a degree that there can be no objective standpoint from which to examine their veracity." Personal experience and feelings aren't just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it's no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses.//

Public discourse in Britain seems like public discourse in America, unfortunately.

Let's have a rational discussion, but realize that if you are a conservative, you are racist, sexist homophobe.

//I’m not so sure. I am attracted by the view that we should all keep the debate open, discuss our political views, take other people’s views into account, and revise and improve our own as we all benefit from this dialogue. I’m attracted by the view that there is such a thing as progress in politics. But—depressingly—I’m far more sceptical than I was yesterday about how much of a difference we can make with political debate. There are several reasons for this.

One is that, in much of British culture, people are uncomfortable with debate about politics. It would, in some circles, be rude to raise the topic of politics over dinner, and to try to change someone’s mind about their political views—well, that’s frankly out of order. We’re much more comfortable talking about the weather, who might win the X Factor, or Kim Kardashian’s arse. The British unwillingness to discuss politics was illustrated today by the sway of the ‘shy Tories’: the people who voted Conservative, but who kept quiet about it in the run-up to the election, and certainly didn’t tell the opinion polls.?

And:

//For these reasons, I’m tired of reasoned debate about politics—at least for a day or two. I don’t want to be friends with racists, sexists, or homophobes. And I don’t want to be friends with Conservatives either.//

Old: The personal is the political.

New: Everything is political and you are a racist.

Via Instapundit, the last few days in Science Fiction:

//SO ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY PUBLISHES A NASTY HIT JOB — Larry Correia Fisks it here — and without contacting any of the people it attacks, and then after publication, the author, Isabella Biedenharn, invites Larry to give the other side. After publication. What, did she come to Entertainment Weekly from Rolling Stone or something?

Correia responds with typical reticence: “You went to press with a bunch of asinine, obvious lies, and you’re happy to include my side AFTER YOU LIED?”

UPDATE: See, this is why you punch back twice as hard: Entertainment Weekly retracts claim of ‘misogynistic, racist’ Hugo Awards voting campaign.
CORRECTION: After misinterpreting reports in other news publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.

This story has been updated to more accurately reflect this. EW regrets the error.

Bottom line: Entertainment Weekly listened to some Social Justice Warrior types, made the mistake of believing them, and humiliated itself. Here’s the corrected version. Props to Entertainment Weekly for correcting so swiftly and prominently.//

Why government doesn't work...

...when we promote people for something other than competence but have to pretend it was because of competence, and we can't admit otherwise because War on Women! or Racism!, then we end up with disasters in positions of power.

Senate Report on Torture did not identify the woman responsible for American intelligence failures.

For the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in the devastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why.

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”

Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

According to sources in the law-enforcement community who I have interviewed over the years, and who I spoke to again this week, this woman—whose name the C.I.A. has asked the news media to withhold—had supervision over an underling at the agency who failed to share with the F.B.I. the news that two of the future 9/11 hijackers had entered the United States prior to the terrorist attacks. As I recount in my book “The Dark Side,” the C.I.A. got wind that one of these Al Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had obtained a multiple-entry visa into the United States eighteen months before 9/11. The agency also learned, months before the attacks, that another Al Qaeda operative, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had flown into Los Angeles. Yet the C.I.A. appears to have done nothing. It never alerted the F.B.I., which had the principle domestic authority for protecting the U.S. from terror attacks. Its agents had, in fact, been on the trail of at least one of the hijackers previously, but had no way of knowing that he had entered the United States. Nor did the C.I.A. alert the State Department, which kept a “TIPOFF” watch list for terror suspects.

This also puts a lie to the Senate Democrats claim that they released the report to inform the American people about their government. They were willing to inform terrorists about intelligence gathering, but pointing a finger at a female was War on Women!

Progressives show their inner Stalin.

Last month, the Nanaimo city council voted to ban Christians from using publicly funded facilities.




More information here:

Officials in the Canadian city of Nanaimo issued a statement Monday affirming the rights of “men and women of all faiths” to rent government-owned venues after the same council members recently raised the ire of Christian pastors for banning a public venue from being used for an event because it was sponsored in part by Chick-fil-A.

Council member Fred Pattje last month blasted fast-food owner Dan Cathy’s “history of homophobia” and introduced a measure to bar the streaming of an annual conference called “Leadercast.”

The event, which took place May 8 in Atlanta and was streamed to 800 cities in North America, is aimed at providing thought-provoking speakers who can help build up a generation of viable leaders; the conference does not explicitly address controversial subjects like homosexuality, based on an analysis of its website.

But Pattje took issue with Chick-fil-A’s sponsorship of the event, saying that it made it ethically impossible for the city to allow it to be simulcasted at a local convention center.

Public Discourse.

Why think when we can vilify?.

//Instapundit writes:

RESPONDING TO THE SMEAR ATTACK AGAINST GEORGE WILL: Rage Against The Outrage Machine. But let’s be clear. People aren’t “misunderstanding” what Will wrote. They deliberately misrepresented what Will said, and they did it to chill debate. That’s who they are, that’s what they do.
Glenn deploys the classic metaphor: chilling. Notice that this metaphor focuses on the debate, as though the whole conversation about a subject is an entity, a composite that has a temperature. 

I think what is happening is more nefarious, because it focuses on the person. It's not just an idea that is put off limits (such as questioning the veracity of a woman who accuses a man of rape), it's the person who dares to say it. You are to be regarded as toxic. It's this fear of being regarded as toxic that inhibits many people from speaking.

The problem isn't merely that the debate is chilled — that people don't get to hear the arguments on different sides — but that people are also influenced to choose their side out of a psychological need to be accepted by others and not shunned. Even if, in a chilled-debate environment, you sought out information and arguments on your own and even if you saw the value in them, you might still choose your position out of a desire to be thought of as one of the good people. So the argument "George Will is toxic" works even on people who think George Will makes a persuasive argument. 

I'm using the word "toxic" — the poison metaphor — because I see it a lot, and because to me — someone who has lived and worked in a liberal environment for a long time — it expresses the threat of shunning so well: You are afraid that if you associate at all with the toxic person — if you offer one good word — you will have toxin on you, and others will have to avoid you lest they become toxic. //

Plus, we get to feel morally superior!

Did Western public discourse commit suicide?

Or was it murdered?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Judge permits lawsuit against pastor for "bad speech":

A U.S. judge is allowing a lawsuit by a Ugandan homosexual group charging an Evangelical pastor with a “crime against humanity.” The American pastor is accused of violating international law for speaking against homosexuality and discussing legislation with Ugandan leaders.

Scott Lively, an attorney and author, runs the Holy Grounds coffee house in Massachusetts where coffee and Bibles are free and Sunday church services minister to homeless people, drug addicts and others. In 2009, he was invited to speak at a conference in Uganda where he said the goal of the homosexual movement is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) accuses Lively of inciting “persecution” through public speaking and advising Ugandan leaders who introduced legislation against homosexuality. SMUG advocates for legal and social acceptance of lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender and intersex people. It opposes legislation to strengthen anti-homosexuality laws.

The lawsuit describes several events in Uganda, such as a raid of SMUG’s office. Lively is not mentioned a “single time within the many pages of the complaint that describe” those events, said Liberty Counsel, the law firm representing Lively.

An event SMUG attempts to tie to Lively is the murder of David Kato, a co-leader of the group. The suit fails to mention a homosexual prostitute confessed to killing Kato over a dispute regarding payment. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

If SMUG is successful, any person “petitioning in opposition to special designations for homosexuals would become an international human rights criminal,” Lively’s attorney Horatio Mihet told WND.

The lawsuit is based on the Alien Tort Statute, a federal law that allows U.S. courts to hear cases on violations of the law of nations or a U.S. treaty. The Supreme Court recently ruled the statute does not apply to conduct that occurred outside the U.S.

The lawsuit appears to be “a meritless publicity stunt designed to harass Scott Lively into inaction,” a legal expert told the Friday Fax. The right to free speech in the U.S. bars “such nonsense” as holding someone legally liable for trying to convince people against an opposing idea.

The veteran litigator notes this could come back to haunt homosexual activists. SMUG’s theory would invite lawsuits against “homosexual activists who are trying to repress their own political and cultural opponents in foreign countries.”

In his decision, Judge Michael Ponsor described Ugandan leaders and legislators as “co-conspirators” with Lively. Ponsor said some officials consider “persecution” based on sexual orientation and gender identity “constitutes a crime against humanity that violates international norms,” but it is questionable whether it violates U.S. law.

Judge Ponsor made news in June when his first published novel, a legal thriller set in Massachusetts, was released. Posner originally aspired to be a writer, but after two unsuccessful novels re-directed his writing when he was appointed a judge.

A positive step for public discourse.

Separate the man from the speech.

Joshua S. Trevino writes concerning the furor of the moment:

The Erik Loomis affair is one of those Internet furors of the moment that consume massive time and attention, and then are swiftly forgotten once the desired scalp is obtained: in this case, that of an intemperate and agenda-driven history professor who has a long record of saying unintelligent and offensive things. On online mob has therefore formed against him, and the consequences — a public rebuke from the President of his university — seem fairly serious. (Maybe they’re not — I don’t know academia — but they seem that way.) In mere days, this will be generally forgotten, except of course by the subject himself.

 

One could hardly defend Loomis and his record on the merits. Nevertheless, one can note that this might not be, well, justice. My only interactions with the man revealed him to be offensive and somewhat dim: he loathes Texas, is a rather pedestrian academic-left radical, and seems to have problems moderating his tone online. These are bad things. (And, reversing the ideological direction, it is not wholly unlike myself.) But they are not the whole man: and they don’t rise to the level, in my book, of wanting to render him bereft and ruined.

 

Left-radicalism in the academy is a problem. Extremist rhetoric on the left is normalized. Bad behavior on the left is excused, and the same on the right is ruthlessly punished. These things are baleful features of modern public life, and there is a school of thought that holds that force must be met with force: that the answer to their mob is a bigger and better mob of our own. I adhere to it myself depending on the mood and circumstance.

But ultimately, I am not sure we want to be like them. I’m not sure we can be. In trying, we buy in to their Big Lie, which is that all things are intrinsically political, and the full measure of the man is his public face. Well. That’s where one must draw the line. I know only the Erik Loomis that Erik Loomis has shown me: for all I know, when he’s away from his computer, he is a devoted husband, a loving son, a charitable provider, a caring mentor, et cetera. I don’t have to know, because he doesn’t owe me — or you — those bona fides. What we owe him and everyone else, though, is the benefit of the supposition that this may be the case.

 

What I am sure of is that bringing low an Erik Loomis only sows bitter harvests later. He earned his opprobrium, but not his destruction. We on the right are charged with persuasion — a thing we’ve notably failed at of late. Every moment we spend destroying is a moment lost to that task.

Thinking is hard; Being outraged is easy.

A few days ago, I was told by a close liberal friend that my posts are "repugnant."  I asked fo an explanation of this expression of moral superiority and was pomptly "defriended"....again.

Ironically, since she was a liberal, her defriending me actually confirmed the findings of social science that liberals/leftists are twice as likely to defriend on Facebook than conservatives, thereby implying that liberals are not as open-minded as they like to think.

Perhaps the reason for this is the moral outrage that liberals seem to be required to express. Correlated with that outrage is a dull and banal apparent inability to comprehend things like "irony" or "arguments ad absurdum" or the other rhetorical tropes that add spice to the life of the mind.

Ann Althouse connects some of the dots on this subject:

I've gone on quite long about Scalia, but Scalia wasn't the inspiration for this post. What got me started on this track was the difficulty readers had with 2 of yesterday's posts that entailed the use of rhetorical devices. One consisted of 2 quotes: "What is the gun community going to do about this tragedy?"/"I dunno. What is the gay community going to do about Penn State?" This linked to Instapundit, who provided the source of the quotes and who now has a couple updates that suggest he's getting pushback similar to some of what I see in my long comments thread, e.g., "Professor Althouse, the comparison is absurd, bigoted and offensive any way you cut it. You should be ashamed of yourself for linking to it with approval."

See? Shame on you! I am offended! Come on, think about it. Figure out the puzzle. It's an analogy, pithily phrased, and thus an occasion to pick apart the ways in which the 2 statements are/are not parallel. Many readers in my comments thread did understand the rhetoric and deal with the coherence of the analogy, but many fell into the sort of expression of outrage that's so common and so dull these days. At least show you understand the rhetoric and then tell me it's in bad taste to be humorous and challenging over topics so raw and painful.

The second post that got me started on this topic was the one that linked to this Matt K. Lewis item "The media should be ashamed of its Connecticut coverage." I'd quoted only the last few lines of that piece, where he proposed "some common sense media control." He's doing a twist on the post-Newtown gun control arguments, switching the right under threat from the 2d Amendment to the 1st Amendment. I thought that was clever and thought-provoking, but unfortunately some readers didn't get it. One said: "Professor Althouse, I'm not sure whether you got punked or if you get that this article is satire and are endorsing it's [sic] specious point." Oh, jeez, that's annoying! I like to keep things crisp around here. Are people going to be so dull that all humor will need arrows pointing at it saying it's humor?

Actually, I see that the 2 comments I've selected for quotation here are by the same person. Maybe he's simply pretending to be dull and doing the Theater of Outrage. That's rhetoric too, and I need to get it.

In the final two weeks, Obama pins his hope on turning out the "moron" vote.

Jonah Goldberg explains why Obama only visits comedy shows and low-information venues.

Great Moments in Public Discourse - How sarcasm and insult took over the Democrat Party.

This is very worthwhile essay on the rise of the "juvenile insult" culture within the Democrat Party:

Here are some good points:

Read The Obamians by James Mann and you discover that the Obama team came in thinking United States foreign policy could be fixed simply by doing the opposite of whatever Bush had done. What they found instead is that Bush’s policies are difficult to overturn because they are not as unreasonable or as superfluous as his opponents had thought. There is a resurgent global jihadist movement bent on killing Americans. Russia is belligerent not because Bush was rude but because Putin’s interests are not our own. The rise of China requires international balancing regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. American soldiers have left Iraq, but that does not mean Iraq or the world is safer. Iran is on track to obtain a nuclear weapon. Opening space between the U.S. and Israel did nothing to advance the cause of Middle East peace.

And:

Even a narrow win for Obama, though, would not reestablish anything like the mandate and amity the president enjoyed on his Inauguration Day. The reason is that, as the Obama coalition diminished, Obama no longer disguised the prejudices, inflections, outlook, and approach of the progressive movement. A confessed reader of Andrew Sullivan’s hysterical web site, the president has taken on the maximalist characteristics of the liberal blogosphere. He is scornful and contemptuous of Romney, as could be seen in his patronizing lecture on aircraft carriers and submarines during the third debate. His campaign seizes on the most trivial comments—“I like Big Bird”; “Binders full of women”—to engage in juvenile jibes that would not make the first cut at the Late Show writers’ meeting. His rallies have become self-congratulatory comedy hours in which the assembled Democrats laugh heartily at the insults and zingers the president throws Romney’s way. Obama has been on a seemingly nonstop tour of television shows hosted by late-night comics. His new attack line that the Republican nominee has “Romnesia” was, as the vice president might say, literally taken from liberal blogs. The vice president even asked his audience at a recent rally whether it had watched The Daily Show the night before. The men who hold the highest offices in the most powerful country in the history of the world have been debased to the point where they look like fill-in guests on Up with Chris Hayes.

The Democrats allowed the progressive movement’s hatred of Bush to take over their old and storied political party. That party and movement found a champion and a path to power in Obama, but the electoral forces on which his power relied were unstable. In 2008, he satisfied the left and won the middle. Once in power, though, he kept the left satisfied and lost the middle and right.

In 2012, there is just the left. The Democrats are back where they started eight years ago. And this time, Barack Obama cannot save them.

Ted Turner is a loudmouth bigot but he did not say that he is in favor of American servicemen committing suicide per se.

This is part of the apparent inability of large swathes of people raised in our "sound bite culture" to actually, you know think. It's part of the same motivation that causes mouth-breathing liberals to pretend to think that a Republican senate candidate is in favor of rape, when what he clearly was in favor of was letting living human beings being permitted to remain alive.(For a powerful dissection of this "crime against reason," check out Taranto's "In Defense of Richard Mourdock."

Ted Turner is catching flack for purportedly telling Piers Morgan that the suicide of soldiers is "good." Here's the relevant portion of the interview:

In an interview with CNN host Piers Morgan last week, Media mogul and CNN founder Ted Turner said the fact that there have been more suicides than combat deaths in the Army this year is not “shocking,” but “good.”

Highlighted first by Breitbart.com, the Oct. 19 interview has Turner speculating that “it’s time to put war and conflict behind us and move on,” and the rising rate of self-inflicted troop deaths is good because it brings attention to that view.

Here’s the exchange:

TURNER: It’s time to put war and conflict behind us and move on, and start acting like civilized, educated human beings.

MORGAN: You made the point to me in the break there, more American servicemen have –

TURNER: — are dying now from suicide over there than are dying in combat.

MORGAN: That’s shocking, isn’t it?

TURNER: Well, what — no, I think it’s — I think it’s good, because it’s so clear that we’re programmed and we’re born to love and help each other, not to kill each other, to destroy each other. That’s an aberration. That’s left over from hundreds of years ago. It’s time for to us start acting enlightened.

President Barack Obama has spoken out to condemn Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s controversial comments on abortion and rape in recent days. Will he let this remark go unaddressed?

What Turner is saying is that the human capacity for love and charity - which he feels expresses itself in the self-destruction of soldiers who have been forced to act opposite to their true human nature - is good. I take it that he would prefer that no one engage in acts of war or to commit suicide.

Is Turner right about suicide being related to a human aversion to killing other humans? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably there is a human aversion to killing other human beings - and that is a good thing - but this aversion is mediated through the individual's understanding of what the action means. If the individual understands that he is protecting his home, then he may feel better about it than if doesn't have that understanding. There are limits to this, of course. For example, the SS concentration camp guards apparently had high rates of suicide despite the Nazi indoctrination that they were serving the good of Germany. Apparently, there comes a point where the cognitive dissonance becomes so great that self-deception is no longer possible. With the SS, it was blatantly obvious that they were abusing defenseless human beings, not protecting Germany.

And that is a good thing.

You see a similar wilful inability to understand an obvious point when people assert that Thomas Aquinas taught that those in Heaven would be entertained by the punishment of the damned. That is simply BS. Thomas never said any such thing. What he said was (Supplementum, Q.94.3):

I answer that, A thing may be a matter of rejoicing in two ways. First directly, when one rejoices in a thing as such: and thus the saints will not rejoice in the punishment of the wicked. Secondly, indirectly, by reason namely of something annexed to it: and in this way the saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy. And thus the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed: while the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly.

In his own maladroit way, Turner is making the same point. He is not rejoicing in the suicide of soldiers; he is rejoicing in what he sees as a natural order that makes people sympathetic to others.

New Amazon Review.

It's a really long review of a short book.

Please go here and give it a helpful vote.

				In Praise of Reason by Michael P. Lynch Edition: Hardcover Price: $14.96		59 used & new from $9.03
Is knowledge of reality just an incidental value for philosophy?, September 28, 2012 This review is from: In Praise of Reason (Hardcover) Michael P. Lynch expresses his concern for public discourse in his new book "In Praise of Reason." To that extent, it could be the liberal mirror image of the conservative The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse by Steven D. Smith. Both men think that reasoned discussion is necessary to the living public discourse which knits together civil society. Both men think that public discourse has broken down. Both men think that the break-down of public discourse has something to do with a crisis of confidence on the part of intellectuals, and perhaps the average person, who know longer think that reason can be defended. However, it seems that the agreement of Lynch and Smith end at that point. Smith seems to be a conservative who thinks that the crisis of confidence stems from the fact that people are engaged in a shell game that leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance. The shell game involves the fact that people "smuggle" in values from the sphere of religion, but they are prevented by public intellectuals from acknowledging that they are in fact making religious claims. When Smith talks about the poverty of public discourse, he includes the shrill, braying, irrational arguments of the left in his examples. Lynch seems to be a secular liberal. His theory is that people - intellectuals, and, maybe, the average person - knows that reason is floating free from any intellectual support, that when we seek to trace reason back to one ineluctable principle, we find only the question-begging assumptions that reason works. When Lynch talks about the poverty of public discourse, he trots out the familiar example of conservatives who think that "global warming is a myth" or who believe that "creationism should be taught in secondary science classrooms alongside the theory of natural selection. (p. 1.) Thus, it seems that their diagnosis and prescriptions are ultimately in conflict. Lynch's book is slim - about 150 "short" pages - and fairly accessible. He does tend to repeat himself, sometimes he uses jargon without explanation, but on the whole he writes in clear prose accessible to the layman. He organizes his argument into 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is "Hope and Reason." In this chapter, Lynch presents the problem of reason. The problem is that reason is subject to the successful assault of skepticism which accurately points out that we can't give reasons for our trust in reason without running into a vicious circle. (.4.) Reason, according to Lynch, in a broad sense is our ability to explain and justify our beliefs; in a narrow sense, reason is a particular method of logic, observation and logical inference, i.e., the scientific method. (p.3.) The problem is that most people are quite willing to dispense with reason in this narrow sense, if this kind of reason - the scientific model of reason - conflicts with their beliefs and a lot of people a skeptical about the possibility of objective knowledge, in any event. A broader social problem is that "democracy is a space of reason," which requires people to explain and justify themselves to each other. Lynch doesn't say this, but it seems inferable that reason is required because the alternative to reason is force rather than persuasion, and if people can't reason with each other, and therefore persuade each other, then they live in a mental universe where might makes right. The further problem is if people don't agree on their "epistemology" - their source of knowledge - they are going to look irrational to each other. (Again, Lynch doesn't say it in so many words, but if one person believes in making decisions from observations of the real world, and another from consulting a Ouija board, their discourse is going to break down pretty quickly.) Chapter 2 is "Neither Slave nor Master." In this chapter, Lynch further develops the problem by setting forth recent sociological findings that show that people make decision based on split-second evaluations of irrelevancies, e.g., they decide competence based on a split second evaluation of a face. Lynch then goes on to explain two models of who reason interacts with the will. The first model is Platonic and views the reason as the master of the will; the second model is from David Hume who wrote that "Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."(p.20.) Lynch seems to side with Hume in that he points out that humans cannot be impassionate, literally so, in that people who have impaired emotions have been empirically shown to have impaired ability to make decisions. (p.19.) But Lynch doesn't want to go the whole hog with Hume, who argued that reason is completely subordinate to emotion, or, as Hume put it, Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching my finger...'tis a little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater." (p. 21.) The problem with this, according to Lynch, is that we measure emotion relative to reason. We recognize when someone has shown inordinate anger or engaged in senseless acts. (p. 23.) What are we left with? Lynch talks about "intuition," which we experience and which seems to be non-rational and yet is not entirely independent of reason. (p. 30.) We recognize that intuitions of experts are somehow more trustworthy than those of novices or laypeople. Intuition may simply be tacit knowledge by which we collate a lot of information from different sources. So, apparently, from this Lynch concludes that "defending reason doesn't mean defending the idea that we dispassionate, unintuitive robots." Another anthropological view that Lynch brings into play is the "Quine-Durham hypothesis" which is that it is "our beliefs from a web or lattice-like structure" that is interconnected, with some at the core of our belief world, and generally well supported by other beliefs, and others at the periphery and subject to change. (p. 33.) This makes it very difficult for anyone to substantially change their beliefs.(p.34.) Consequently, when intuition is added into the Quine-Durham structure, what we find is that people's "intuition" makes the decision and then explanations are made up to justify the intuition. (p. 35.) The pay off for this chapter seems to be Lynch's conclusion that "epistemic principles" are beliefs like anything else and just as much a subject of "intuition" and impervious to movement as any other belief. I found this chapter unsatisfying. It seems that Lynch ended up with the same insights as those of Aristotle and Aquinas. Aquinas devotes a substantial portion of the First Part of the Second Part of the Summa Theologica to explaining how the will is an "appetite" that chooses the end or goal based on its perceived "goodness" to the will, and that reason involves the choice of the means. Aquinas also noted that there is a constant interplay between reason and will in that reason presents the will with a view of the goods which may be chosen and the will directs the reason to reason about what how to get to an end, and even, since every final end involves a series of intermediate ends which are means to that end, whether to reason about particular intermediate ends. So, Aquinas' anthropological model seems to find a middle ground between reason and emotion, and to explain how they interrelate. Aquinas also explains the stroke of "intuition" which is nothing less than the will making a decision based on the information "teed up" by the reason. It seems odd that a philosopher wouldn't note this thread of thought on the subject. The third chapter is "Nothing but Dreams and Smoke." In this chapter, the devastating effect of skepticism. Lynch starts by introducing Sextus Empiricus who taught the technique of demonstrating that any intellectual system has an epistemology that involves a vicious circle. How do you prove reason? By showing that it is consistent with reason? How do you prove your divine revelation is authoritative? By showing that the revelation says it's authoritative? According to Lynch, all claims of knowledge rely on assuming that the source of the knowledge is trustworthy and credible, which is the problem. The system of Sextus Empiricus is great fun when applied to the other guy's system, but it is not so much fun when it gets applied to yours. The history of skepticism, according to Lynch, has been the application of Sextus Empiricus' insights to everyone's system. The problem is ultimately a problem of epistemology. How can we know that we know anything since our knowledge about what we know presupposes that we know what we know, but this is a dicey proposition. Lynch points to Hume's critique of inductive knowledge. We induce things based upon our assumption that similar causes have similar effects, but how do we know that? Because in the past similar causes have had similar effects? How do we know that will occur in the future? We really don't know; we are just guessing, an educated guess, perhaps, but a guess nonetheless. (See p. 49 - 52.) We can't use inductive reason to prove inductive reason because that is just begging the question or making a circular argument. (p.52.) Chapter four is "Reasons End: Tradition and Common Sense." In this chapter, Lynch sketches what he considers to be a false start to the problem of epistemological uncertainty, namely "tradition." According to Lynch, some conservatives seek to put "tradition" into the role of the irreducible basis of knowledge. These people, including Alistair Mcintyre and Thomas Kuhn, start with the true observation that we understand only by virtue of understanding within a tradition, but understanding knowledge within a tradition is not the same thing as knowing that the knowledge is objectively true. This leads to an uncertainty about which tradition to follow and, more importantly, it opens conservatives up to the charge that they are the moral relativists with no external standards for determining truth. (p. 66.) It is in this section - in response to the perceived conservative insistence on tradition as the irreducible founding principle - that Lynch makes his argument about reason and democracy. In his view it is the conservative program of promoting tradition that is anti-democratic because it short-cuts the offering of reasons. (p. 69 - 72.) Democracy requires the furnishing of reason. Where reasons can no longer be furnished, then the alternative is manipulation and force. (Id.) If two people simply argue about their incommensurable traditions, they are not going to be able to reason.(p. 70.) If they are going to have a discussion, then they must found their discussion in something outside of tradition, utility, reason, something that is not tradition. (p. 71.) Lynch also attacks "common sense" and "presuppositions." The problem in Lynch's view is that these forms of knowledge amount to a statement of something that is not plainly and uncontrovertibly obvious as if it was, or of stating as dogma something that needs more explanation. (p. 77.) In this section, Lynch states the problem as, "the problem is whether we can show that we have such knowledge by giving public reasons - reasons that can be appreciated from a common point of view."(p.77.) Chapter 5 is "The `Sacred Tradition of Humanity.'" In this chapter, Lynch describes his solution to the problem of the foundation of knowledge. Lynch starts with the observation of W.K. Clifford - often quoted by on atheist web - that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." (p. 79.) Although Lynch finds Cliffords' observation generally correct when it comes to religion, he thinks Cliffords oversteps the mark. Cliffords point, according to Lynch, is that people should commit to a life of reason, i.e., being open-minded and willing to subject one's views to scrutiny. Lynch makes a potentially powerful point at this section; namely, that living a life "committed to reason" is not something that a skeptic is capable of doing. A skeptic is someone who only asks questions, but who never commits, which is not a way to live a life. (p. 84.) Simply asking questions is not the key to reason; rather "questions rightly asked" is the "ideal of reason."(Id.) This is an insight that deserves some development. Lynch doesn't develop that particular insight, but rather uses the idea of "commitment to reason" as a matter of practical virtue to establish a guide to "practical reasoning." Commitment cannot be blind, it must be based on some open, transparent and articulable justification. With that insight, Lynch decides to find a way of justifying "reason." The "reason" he selects is science because scientific principles "get results." (p. 86.) With that insight, he abstracts principles from science that are not strictly epistemological. Hence, science is open, transparent, self-correcting, intersubjective, repeatable and natural to human beings. (p. 89- 93.) With that insight, he creates a "method game" along the lines of John Rawls method for determining the "original condition" behind a "veil of ignorance." He suggests that people imagine themselves going to an alternative universe where they don't know who they will be or what social position they will be in or what epistemological principles will work. With that in mind, what epistemological principles would such people privilege? Lynch believes that they would privilege a system that was - voila - like that which is found in science, namely open, transparent, self-correcting, intersubjective, repeatable and natural to human beings. On the other hand, he also posits an "epistemic difference principle" whereby people in this game would "allow those who have a developed palate (whether for modals or Malbec) to employ some methods that are closed to the rest of us." Allowed? That's big of him. The point of the "method game" is not to find a system that we know will provide us with truth. We simply can't know that. Rather, his system is compatible with democracy and has the best chance of being flexible and correctable to provide us with truth or something like it. We will have "epistemic trust" in the results afforded by the "method game" because we have more trust in things that are open and objective. Lynch's penultimate chapter is "Truth and the Pathos of Distance." In this chapter Lynch argues that a reason for the nihilism of leftist thinkers like Richard Rorty was an effort to defend the humanities from the imperialism of science. The humanities isn't as exact or dependable as physics, it seems, which leads to those engaged in the humanities to question the value of their life's work. The solution is to "deconstruct" science so that it is no more a guide to objective truth than humanities are, because there really is no objective truth. Lynch concludes from this analysis that the problem of Rorty's project is that he misconceives truth. Truth is not about whether an idea corresponds with the world. Such an idea is not the only idea of truth that exists, and such a model simply cannot apply to ideas like "torturing a prisoner is a violation of that person's rights" because "rights" do not really exist, which means that there is nothing on which to map the belief. (p. 127 - 128.) In such areas, Lynch thinks that "truth" ought to be determined by a different standard, such as whether the idea is "coherent" with other ideas. Coherence isn't enough, even if it is "supercoherence" in Lynch's terminology. (p. 130.) "Unless there are facts about what makes a belief-system coherent or incoherent - and facts that don't consist in supercoherence - then there is nothing to nail down that system. It will float free of reality." (p. 132.) So, Lynch's solution is to posit a truth of "concordance," where the belief system is both internally coherent and compatible with external facts. Lynch concludes that "[s]cientific rationality can be defended, in short, because it has virtues that are central to a just and civil society." (p. 138.) Skepticism is mistaken because it is not only a philosophical mistake but a political mistake. (p. 138.) Lynch concludes with a paean to the "one really inspired idea of the Enlightenment, that we share a common currency of reason with our fellow human beings. (p. 138.) So having got to the end of Lynch's book, what do we conclude? We have a defense of reason that seems to deny the purpose of reason, which is to find a way from our mind to the objective, external world. Truth is not even about transcendent, objective reality outside of our minds; if we have a coherent system of thought that is "compatible" with the objective evidence - however "compatibility" is defined and determined - that qualifies as truth. There might be a number of mutually contradictory, internally consistent, somehow compatible with the facts beliefs, and they all amount as true, which amounts to an illogical conclusion since it violates the basic principle of logic, the rule of non-contradiction. Lynch is clearly a man of the left. This kind of pluralistic illogic seems to fit in with the usual the typical program of the left, which is a broad pluralist multiculturalism. It would seem that Lynch's program fits this kind of view of democracy. One thing that annoyed me was Lynch's equivocal use of the term "reason." Reason was not really logic; on occasion it meant science, and on occasion it meant giving an explanation, and on occasion it meant being justifiable because of having politically good side effects. This book doesn't seem to be rigorously analytical; rather it seems to be an exercise in reasoning from ends to principles, a manipulation of ideas to an end determined by a political agenda, which, ironically, Lynch starts out condemning (when he sees it on the "Right," of course.) Another annoying feature is Lynch' seemingly limited about Scholasticism. For example, Lynch seems to think that the people in the middle ages believed the Earth was flat. (p. 43.) People from antiquity knew that the Earth was round. Thomas Aquinas explicitly identifies the Earth as round in the Summa Theologica. I've also mentioned how Lynch's "either/or" approach to reason as master or servant of the passions is confounded by a knowledge of Aristotle and Aquinas, but when Lynch ascribes to the Enlightenment the idea that we share a common currency of reason with our fellow human beings, this slights the Scholastics who were absolutely into the notion that reason was their currency with every other human being. That was the reason which motivated Aquinas to read and cite pagans like Aristotle and Muslims like Averroes. And that leads to the most annoying feature of this book, the strawmen that are assumed to be true throughout. Science is good, and religion is bad, because one purportedly is open, intersubjective, transparent, etc. Really? This is true of all things that call themselves "science" which are not physics? Is this true of sociology or anthropology or history? Furthermore, how is this not true of theology, which develops over the course of time through a lengthy dialectical process that weeds out the weak arguments and gives as much credence to coherence and compatibility with facts as Lynch likes. But we do not get a discussion of this; rather, we get a dismissal of religion as not being scientific. And what is this point about "allowing" someone to engage in private reasoning based on private insights or epistemologies so long as the net benefit outweights the costs? How is that kind of thing going to be prevented? Moreover, why would we want to prevent it? Aren't we better off with as many people thinking outside the box and offering ideas which can be considered and weighed and rejected or accepted? It seems that in the heart of liberal multiculturalism there beats the rhythm of fascism. Further, it is terrific that Lynch sets up a "method game" that results in exactly the kind of multi-cultural society anyone could wish for, but is it really the case that everyone would opt for an epistemology of the kind that he advocates. What about the role of experts? We rely on experts regularly without objection. How many of us really know how our lights work or that evolution is really, really true or that global warming is true? We don't. We believe in those things because we trust people who have studied those things. Further, people who are experts are experts because they have the time and resources - the privilege - to study those kinds of things. In short, it might well be the case that people playing the "method game" would come up with a system that favors an aristocracy of knowledge, kind of like the one that exists and has always existed. Lynch doesn't explain or argue or offer a plausible reason for discounting this option. This option simply doesn't get mentioned. On the whole, although it does offer some insights into reason, I can't really recommend this book. I would recommend the Smith book, but this one seems to have been written "for the choir" - if you already agree with the ideas set forth in the book, then - pace the Quine-Durham hypothesis - you will find that your beliefs are reinforced. If not, you will be unsatisfied. This is clearly a long review, but I wanted to walk through Lynch's arguments. Comment | Permalink

Is the emergence of Fox News and the blogosphere causing other media sources to move toward a more "fair and balanced" position?

Or is it the fact that CNN is tired of the fact that by after two decades of catering exclusively to the Left, it has no audience?

First, we have the Newsweek cover featuring a Niall Fergusson article.

Then, we have Wolf Blitzer grilling Life-like Talking Points Robot Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on her repetition of the claim that the Ryan Budget would affect seniors.

Now, we have Anderson Cooper holding Lifelike Talking Points Robot Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's feet to the fire about the DNC's and her own lies and misrepresentations on abortion policy - Cooper even points out that the LTPR "completely misquotes" the LA Times.

When did CNN grow a pair and decide to start acting like a news source?

Victor Reppert and C.S. Lewis on ...

...the ideal of public discourse.

"We never claimed to be impartial. But argument is. It has a life of its own. We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours... The arena is common to both parties and cannot finally be cheated."

C. S. Lewis, "The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club."

Engagement in real dialogue about matters of religious faith is an act of faith. One must be so sincerely convinced of what one believes that one is prepared to trust one's ideas to the forum of open intellectual dialogue, playing as fair as it is possible to play. We have to trust that dialogue will be rational even if the people who engage in it are not. Honest philosophy and theology has to come first, the conversions have to be a by-product.

Water is wet, the sky is blue and ...

...liberal academics discriminate against conservatives.

Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement - ‘Impossible lack of diversity’ reflects ideological intimidation on campus:

It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority.

But that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.”

This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr. Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”

One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).”

More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”

Mr. Inbar, who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008, cautions that the finding reflects only what respondents said they would do — not necessarily what they actually would do in real life.

Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy.

To Massimo Pigliucci, chairman of the philosophy department at the City University of New York-Lehman College, the problem is not that conservatives face discrimination; it’s that any hint of political bias, whether conservative or liberal, necessarily flouts the standards of objectivity to which scholarship must adhere.

“It is to be expected that people would reject papers and grant proposals that smacked of clear ideological bias,” he says. Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers, he says, should have examined the extent of bias against liberal-leaning papers and grant proposals. If the degree of bias against liberals and conservatives is similar, maybe the data on discrimination against conservatives would not be so alarming after all.

But Harvey Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard University, argues that the anti-conservative bias is real and pronounced. He says conservatism is “just not a respectable position to hold” in the academy, where Republicans are caricatured as Fox News enthusiasts who listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Beyond that, conservatives represent a distinct minority on college and university campuses. A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative.

Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers found that conservatives fear that revealing their political identity will have negative consequences. This is why New York University-based psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described centrist, has compared the experience of being a conservative graduate student to being a closeted gay student in the 1980s.

In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.

This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.

And this is a feature, not a bug, for the lack of diversity:

The statistical representation of self-reported conservatives in the study may be largely moot as long as they are intimidated by a hostile, discriminatory majority. After all, a silent minority can hardly function as the kind of check on the prevailing assumptions of their liberal colleagues essential for robust academic debate.

“Because of the way the confirmation bias works,” Mr. Haidt says, referring to the pervasive psychological tendency to seek only supporting evidence for one’s beliefs, “you need people around who don’t start with the same bias. You need some non-liberals, and ideally some conservatives.”

The Truth of Art - "That Lying Son of Bitch Johnson" Division.

Christopher Fountain points out the following:

Lowlife imitates art

Fired drive-through bully explains:

[Rachel], you should know that I never planned to say the things I said to you that day, and how I said them. I planned to peacefully participate in the August 1st YouTube post where Jackson Pearce asked people to simply order a large water to show support for the gay community.

But when I got to your window, after seeing all the people in and outside the restaurant that came to support Chick-fil-A, I lost it. I just lost it. I couldn’t believe the number of people came out to support a corporation that associates themselves with anti-gay groups, like Exodus International and the American Family Association.

(From Forrest Gump) Boyfriend Wesley explains to Jenny why he had to smack her around:

Jenny? Things got a little out of hand. It’s just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson and…

Actually, that's an interesting explanation on the part of Adam Smith.

Look at what he says caused his "near-psychotic break" - "But when I got to your window, after seeing all the people in and outside the restaurant that came to support Chick-fil-A, I lost it. I just lost it."

What Smith is saying is that he was surprised at the number of people who disagreed with his position. Perhaps he was surprised that there were such people or that they were sufficiently motivated to turn out, but whatever the real reason was, the genesis of his break was his surprise that there were so many people who disagreed with him.

It makes sense that in a fit of cognitive dissonance, he would "break" as he tried to make reality conform to his mental structure of reality by seeking to explain away what he was seeing, i.e., everyone else was deluded or evil or ignorant or whatever.

So, he suffered a "break."

The real issue is why was he surprised?

The answer is, obviously, that the other side has been marginalized to such an extent that liberals can go through their life without confronting the uncomfortable reality that there are real people who disagree with them and that these real people aren't the caricatures of evil they expect. And, so, when that happens, a person like Smith begins to treat real people - even innocuous, minimim-wage employees - according to the caricature.

Prudence, according to Joseph Pieper, is the foundation of ever virtue. Prudence is nothing more than the habit of the intellect that recognizes reality itself. Without prudence, we can't hope to exercise the other virtues, such as justice or love.

Gay Chick-Fill-A Demonstration sets mainstream acceptance of Gays back by 50 years.

It's beyond parody.

I mean that literally. A few years ago, the Onion published "Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years":

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA–The mainstream acceptance of gays and lesbians, a hard-won civil-rights victory gained through decades of struggle against prejudice and discrimination, was set back at least 50 years Saturday in the wake of the annual Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade.

"I'd always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth," said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. "Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong."

The Onion's parody became reality in the Chick-Fill-A counter demonstration as shown in these pictures:

Because nothing says "tolerance" like open-hatred for other people's most cherished beliefs.

Because nothing says we are serious and deserve respect like a hairy man wearing a leopard print dress.

Source: Ringo's Pictures.

Because nothing says "tolerance" like vandalism.

Truth is not determined by a majority vote...

...but it may be decided by "search engine optimization."

Io9 has an interesting article on how one amateur enthusiast has managed to put his unorthodox view of "reptile evolution" into a position to dominate how the average person thinks about reptile evolution by virtue of his proficiency with "SEO" aka "search engine optimization."

One of the many unintended consequences of the cyber-revolution.