Joe, saying that he doesn’t address the similarities is not an argument, nor is it actually addressing what he said. Since he points out that there are large structural differences, he undercuts the similarities, since analogies require strong structural similarities in order to be useful. At least, they require such similarities to be useful in reasoning. I’m sure the analogy works quite well in inflaming the emotions of the choir.
Bob, I’m sure you’re well aware that most, if not all pro-choicers would consider comparing a fetus and a disabled child akin to comparing apples and lawnmowers.
Basically this is the "black people/liberals are the real racists" response. First off, it's not the "race card," it's a response to a comment that is about race, or at least an issue that is inseparable from race. "The race card" is only applicable when someone brings race into a discussion from which it had been absent; you can't bring up "slavery in America" and then accuse someone responding to you of "playing the race card."
Also, suggesting that someone was an affirmative action hire is a really disgusting way of avoiding actually addressing the arguments that person offers. That is akin to playing the race card.
When arguments defending the right of the woman to treat her property the way she wants in the face of people yelling “it’s a person” bring to mind the arguments of slave owners in the face of abolitionists, that doesn’t make abortion similar to slavery at all.
Except the property is the woman's body. I'm pretty sure telling someone what to do with their body is like slavery. In a sense, that's exactly what slavery was.
I don't mean to suggest that this is an analogy people should use, merely to point out that it works one way a bit better than the other. I suppose the echoes should give one side pause.
Bob, no need. Where you get under my skin is in your self-righteous, everyone who disagrees with me is disordered comments, not in the comments in which you shed Voegelin and show who you really are.
Bob, oh, all I’m trying to do with both of those comments is show that you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about: notice how you can’t even provide examples of assertions you’ve made about things I’ve said in this thread; that’s some shit, man, that’s some shit. Second, it wasn’t a cry for help. It was to point out that I’m not exactly a preacher for the fad of the day. In fact, among such preachers I’m a bit of a pariah. But I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to understand the written word any more than you need to understand it to quote it out of context and without attribution.
Also, while I know Imprint Academic, or at least a couple of their journals (one of which I check with each new issue), the name Sutherland is not familiar.
One more thing, Bob. You may find this odd, perhaps surprising, but among atheists, I’m fairly tame when it comes to religion and the religious. I don’t see religion as mere fairy tale, I don’t think believers are just deluded, at least not any more than the rest of us are, and I have a genuine respect for honest belief.
I used to write a blog of my own, mostly about cognitive science (my field; I suppose it’s a Gnostic distortion of classical Greek and Augustinian psychology to you), but I also delved into issues of religion and atheism now and then. This was partly because I’ve done research in the psychology of religion from a cognitive perspective, and partly because as someone who became an atheist, it’s something that has been a fairly big issue in my life (in dealing with family and friends, dating, etc.). However, as someone who came to atheism not through finally understanding the truth of evolution and general relativity, I’ve tended to be much less enamored with the “New Atheism” that’s arisen in the last 5-10 years. In fact, I find it intellectually, politically, hell even scientifically disturbing on many different levels. It’s a big friggin’ mess, to put it mildly. So from very early on, I publicly argued against their more intemperate claims about religion and the religious. As a result, I became sort of anathema on the very site (ScienceBlogs.com) that I was blogging on, I was frequently compared to a man wildly considered to have let Hitler run amok, I was insulted publicly and privately by fellow atheist bloggers, and had their sycophantic commenting hoards sicked on me on multiple occasions, often simply for saying that things were more complicated than they appeared and that respect was important. I suppose I wasn’t defending the current preachments of derailed thinkers strongly enough, eh?
Bob, I wonder if you could point to which current preachments I've defended here. I've mentioned stuff I've read and liked, none of which are particularly popular these days, at least not among the atheists I know, or even among the people in my field. Or hell, in some cases, much of anyone. Of course, I haven’t even attempted to engage in philosophy here, either, so there’s that. At most, I’ve simply pointed out that you haven’t attempt to engage in any either. You’re simply parroting ideas, without any hint that you might understand how they’re relevant today, much less any argument about why we should take anything you say seriously. You argue by mere assertion, and it’s not clear that your arguments, or assertions, are ever relevant to anything anyone says here. Case in point, what you just said about me.
I will, however, be interested in learning what you think I think about the world, given that you’re so familiar with these modern ways of thinking, and you know exactly which ones I’m defending.
I know, of course, that pointing this out and demanding actual evidence or agument won’t affect your behavior in any way. You’ll avoid explanation (as you have on this thread: see, e.g., Gnostic distortion), you’ll throw around concepts it’s not clear you understand or know how we’re supposed to understand your use of them, tell everyone how misguided they are as a result of intellectual and historical forces that only you (or Voegelin) are aware of, use insulting labels for ideas and positions with which you disagree, and pretend that, at the same time you’re posturing yourself as above all of this, you’re really just a humble guy out here trying to learn. Whatever gets you through the day, I guess.
Where Bob is mistaken is in his belief that it is only the atheists/agnostics who “assume a position of ‘contempt.’” Tom and Bob (to say nothing of Heidegger), our resident defenders of faith, have shown little more than contempt. In fact, Bob’s whole shtick is based on contempt – contempt for the President, contempt for liberals/Democrats, contempt for the secular, contempt for just about anyone who thinks differently than he. It’s not surprising that we’ve all, to some extent, “assume[d] a position of ‘contempt’” in a discussion about something that tends to be as important as religion is in people’s lives (even the lives of many atheists), but Bob is clearly blind to the fact that he is riddled with contempt, and that it oozes from virtually every word he utters on this blog.
Bob, I think modernism was/is dehumanizing as well, and was particularly so when it was at its height. That’s not an uncommon sentiment, even among atheists (like, say, the Frankfurt School… which was composed of Marxists, not communists; most were critical of communism both in practice and in theory). Which gets to my point: in order for your, and Voegelin’s (shall we say outdated, to be kind), view of secularism and atheism require that you attribute motives to secularists/atheists that they are not only unaware of, but that in some cases actually go against the motives that they are consciously aware of. And as I said, that demands some serious work with arguments and evidence that I highly suspect you want no part of. It may not be personal when you parrot it here and wherever else you vomit Voegelin, but when it’s done the way it’s done, which is to say as a bare assertion, it’s still insulting. It’s sort of like me saying that Christians believe in their particular God because they have a death obsession, both personal and sexual. It’s bullshit, but if I put a name behind it, and a few fancy words, why do I need to argue for the position? Isn’t it obvious that it’s true?
Awww... Heidi, and just the other day you were telling me that people on the right never said that if you disagreed with their position on the war you were a traitor and/or in league with the enemy.
Given that Iraq is still plagued with widespread violence and a generally unpopular, though “democratically elected” and, to date at least, largely ineffective government, it’s surprising that more Arab states haven’t seen how wonderful democracy-by-force has worked out for Iraq and decided to try it themselves. I mean, we can all see that Libya wouldn’t be the democracy it is today if it hadn’t been for the size of George W. Bush’s testicles (one wonders what Tom knows about what was going on in Libya prior to the invasion of Iraq).
Personally, I can’t decide which was the bigger influence in the decision of the people of Tunisia to effectively overthrow their government: the 8 years of horrific violence and foreign military occupation that “democracy” has given Iraq, or the fact that people in Tunisia were spending 60, 70, even 80% of their income on food, as food prices continued to rise while a corrupt government did little more than sit back and watch. It could be either one.
Bob, I was making fun of you earlier, I admit, but now I want to address you a bit more seriously, if only a bit. Your entire position, which is to say VoegElin’s entire position, hinges not only on inferences (and rather wild and at times uncharitable inferences) about the thought processes of atheists/agnostics/we the thoroughly modern, but also inferences about the motivations behind those thought processes. I can stomach inferences about the thought processes themselves, because there is plenty of data, if not for a given individual, then at least for the history of the ideas. Inferences about the motivations, and in this case, motives that must be unconscious, however, seem to be entirely invented, by Voegelin and you (quoting Voegelin), in order not so much to explain the ideas as to undermine them.
I probably don’t need to tell you that most Anglo-American-Australian atheists, and perhaps most European atheists as well, get their atheism not through Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud, but through Kant-Mach-Carnap-Ayers-(maybe a l’il) Quine/Ryle. That is, they come through positivism, with a healthy dose of the (not-necessarily-pejorative version of) positivism, instead of through a suspicious (not my term, as I’m sure you know) approach to spirit (in the broad, not necessarily dualistic philosophical sense). Attributing a single set of motives to those two camps requires some serious psychoanalytical gymnastics, and there is no evidence whatsoever that you’ve even chalked up your hands, much less spun around the pommel horse, or that you even have any conception of what such gymnastics would look like.
Now, lumping together everyone who thinks differently than you is pretty common when the subject is religion. Granted, even a casual perusal of atheist blogs will show that this sin is not limited to theists. That doesn’t make it right, though, or any less offensive when people do it out of ignorance or worse. It doesn’t make doing so any more conducive to discussion, either, though it’s clear from your choice of language and style that you have no interest whatsoever in actually discussing these things (that’s why I usually choose to just make fun of you instead of engaging you, though perhaps Rufus’ method of just wondering at you is better), so perhaps that’s a criticism that doesn’t apply to you specifically.
By the way, unlike most of the atheists around here, or at least the ones who talk about it, I am from the Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud strain of atheism. I’m also, you may be interested to know, a fan of Bergson (I have a copy of Matter and Memory sitting right in front of me). That said, you must be aware by now of the tendency that arose within that strain of atheism, unfortunately after Voegelin so that his analysis will do you know good (and therefore, you’ll be unable to think about it), of a turn against the “impulse to be modern,” or whatever it is you young Voegelineans are calling it these days. I mean, Voegelin probably should have read more of the stuff coming out of Frankfurt back in his day, but he wasn’t really around to read much of what came with and after structuralism, say. You’d probably be surprised how self-consciously Greek, Roman, and even Medieval all that stuff is (it wasn’t Strauss or contemporary Christian philosophers who brought the name Scotus back into the consciousness of young philosophy grad students, for example).
Yeah, with the possible exceptions of the bit about licensing cartels and no mention of unions (not surprising, given that private sector unions haven't really been a force during Yglesias' adult life), I don't see how this is all that different from the way the American center-left (liberals and progressives) has thought for at least my lifetime, and from what I can tell, pretty much forever. There doesn't seem to be anything neo about this. (I don't know where you see "central planning," to the extent that phrase means planned economies, in the thinking of any viable version of the American left ever.)
First of all, not all atheists are skeptics (and conversely, not all skeptics are atheists). Second, it’s not clear to me that skepticism is supposed to make people happy. However, it’s a pretty strong claim, in need of serious defense, that this life, and this (natural) world, cannot produce happiness without adding something on top of it in the form of the supernatural or a separate life. This is exactly the sort of life-denying position that makes most theism abhorrent to this non-skeptical atheist.
Not that I really want to be defending Tom, because he goes about his argument in a pretty slimy way, but the FSM, if it can be considered a critique, is more a critique of what we might call “folk intelligent design arguments” than any serious arguments for god. This is so in large part because, pace Hume and the FSM people, most such arguments actually do argue for a god with a particular nature. The FSM really only works against the sort of “we’re not creationists, we swear!” intelligent design theories that you get from the likes of Bill “The Newton of Information Theory” Dembski, because these arguments have no real content, or at least they supply none to their “designer.”
If I’m not mistaken (and I could be, because I haven’t read the book), Robinson discusses some of the work in psychology that I was thinking of (Damasio, e.g.), though the book came out before the work on moral emotions (by Jonathan Haidt, e.g.) began to get any real empirical backing. This, by the way, is name-dropping of a different sort, and I suspect more of the sort that you’re speaking of. I mention Damasio because, since you’ve read the book, you probably know what I’m talking about so I don’t have to go into more detail, in this case because I’m lazy, and I mention Haidt because, if you’re familiar with Damasio, you can look up Haidt and have a good idea of where his work and the work he’s inspired is coming from. The other sort of name-dropping is largely meant as an appeal to authority, and little more.
On jealousy, it’s one of the more widely studied emotions in the social and behavioral sciences and, as I’m sure you know, literature. It’s almost certainly a very old, innate emotion, and it probably helps us navigate a world in which a particular form of cheating, infidelity, is extremely common. But its innateness doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to experience it, and there is some literature on individual differences in the experience of jealousy. Also relevant. That said, you’re a freak. ;)
Rufus, I think that if you combine your two theories of jealousy, you’re pretty close to the truth. With one minor disagreement (or at least addition): if you look at the data, people certainly aren’t fishing everyone, but they’re fishing plenty. Infidelity is the rule, not the exception, and jealousy becomes a useful tool for most people because of it.
There’s a view in psychology, which is gaining wider and wider acceptance, that something like this underlies morality in general. Through whatever means – biology, culture, or both – most of us react in similar ways, emotionally, to the actions of others, and these emotional reactions drive our moral judgments of the actions and the actors. These emotional reactions, which are almost exclusively intuitive, are in turn justified and codified in post hoc reasons and narratives. Under this view (incredibly oversimplified here, I admit), it’s not surprising that cultural narratives justifying the most common of our emotional reactions have built up over the millennia. This is to say nothing of the social and political control that such narratives afford, of course.
On theism and atheism and all that jazz, these discussions always look funny to me because of people like Tom and Steve S. These are two people who have clearly participated in similar discussions many times; so many times, in fact, that common arguments have become like habit to them. As a result, they read things from those past discussions into what’s being said now because they hear certain keywords or phrases. The result is almost always that they end up talking to people who aren’t here.
By the way, one of the things that impresses me most about TvD is his ability to say of those with whom he disagrees, “They are biased/committing error X,” and then display remarkably similar biases and errors himself in a completely un-self-conscious way. It’s a gift. But he’s no Cheeks: Like Bob, Tom argues almost exclusively by name-dropping and quoting, to be sure, but Cheeks’ method of name-dropping/phrase-dropping and eliding pretty much everything else, and still sounding like he’s actually saying something, is particularly impressive.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Abortion and Slavery again”
Joe, saying that he doesn’t address the similarities is not an argument, nor is it actually addressing what he said. Since he points out that there are large structural differences, he undercuts the similarities, since analogies require strong structural similarities in order to be useful. At least, they require such similarities to be useful in reasoning. I’m sure the analogy works quite well in inflaming the emotions of the choir.
"
Bob, I’m sure you’re well aware that most, if not all pro-choicers would consider comparing a fetus and a disabled child akin to comparing apples and lawnmowers.
"
Basically this is the "black people/liberals are the real racists" response. First off, it's not the "race card," it's a response to a comment that is about race, or at least an issue that is inseparable from race. "The race card" is only applicable when someone brings race into a discussion from which it had been absent; you can't bring up "slavery in America" and then accuse someone responding to you of "playing the race card."
Also, suggesting that someone was an affirmative action hire is a really disgusting way of avoiding actually addressing the arguments that person offers. That is akin to playing the race card.
On “Schilling on Social Security”
Yeah, follow the link.
On “Abortion and Slavery again”
When arguments defending the right of the woman to treat her property the way she wants in the face of people yelling “it’s a person” bring to mind the arguments of slave owners in the face of abolitionists, that doesn’t make abortion similar to slavery at all.
Except the property is the woman's body. I'm pretty sure telling someone what to do with their body is like slavery. In a sense, that's exactly what slavery was.
I don't mean to suggest that this is an analogy people should use, merely to point out that it works one way a bit better than the other. I suppose the echoes should give one side pause.
On “Schilling on Social Security”
The founders on health care mandates.
On “Lucretius, “Of Natural Things”- also Atoms & Atheists”
Bob, no need. Where you get under my skin is in your self-righteous, everyone who disagrees with me is disordered comments, not in the comments in which you shed Voegelin and show who you really are.
"
Bob, comparing me to Loughner? Dude, I must have really touched a nerve to make you more petty and mean-spirited than usual. I apologize for that.
"
Bob, oh, all I’m trying to do with both of those comments is show that you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about: notice how you can’t even provide examples of assertions you’ve made about things I’ve said in this thread; that’s some shit, man, that’s some shit. Second, it wasn’t a cry for help. It was to point out that I’m not exactly a preacher for the fad of the day. In fact, among such preachers I’m a bit of a pariah. But I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to understand the written word any more than you need to understand it to quote it out of context and without attribution.
Also, while I know Imprint Academic, or at least a couple of their journals (one of which I check with each new issue), the name Sutherland is not familiar.
"
Er... Eva
"
Evan Braun?
"
One more thing, Bob. You may find this odd, perhaps surprising, but among atheists, I’m fairly tame when it comes to religion and the religious. I don’t see religion as mere fairy tale, I don’t think believers are just deluded, at least not any more than the rest of us are, and I have a genuine respect for honest belief.
I used to write a blog of my own, mostly about cognitive science (my field; I suppose it’s a Gnostic distortion of classical Greek and Augustinian psychology to you), but I also delved into issues of religion and atheism now and then. This was partly because I’ve done research in the psychology of religion from a cognitive perspective, and partly because as someone who became an atheist, it’s something that has been a fairly big issue in my life (in dealing with family and friends, dating, etc.). However, as someone who came to atheism not through finally understanding the truth of evolution and general relativity, I’ve tended to be much less enamored with the “New Atheism” that’s arisen in the last 5-10 years. In fact, I find it intellectually, politically, hell even scientifically disturbing on many different levels. It’s a big friggin’ mess, to put it mildly. So from very early on, I publicly argued against their more intemperate claims about religion and the religious. As a result, I became sort of anathema on the very site (ScienceBlogs.com) that I was blogging on, I was frequently compared to a man wildly considered to have let Hitler run amok, I was insulted publicly and privately by fellow atheist bloggers, and had their sycophantic commenting hoards sicked on me on multiple occasions, often simply for saying that things were more complicated than they appeared and that respect was important. I suppose I wasn’t defending the current preachments of derailed thinkers strongly enough, eh?
"
Bob, I wonder if you could point to which current preachments I've defended here. I've mentioned stuff I've read and liked, none of which are particularly popular these days, at least not among the atheists I know, or even among the people in my field. Or hell, in some cases, much of anyone. Of course, I haven’t even attempted to engage in philosophy here, either, so there’s that. At most, I’ve simply pointed out that you haven’t attempt to engage in any either. You’re simply parroting ideas, without any hint that you might understand how they’re relevant today, much less any argument about why we should take anything you say seriously. You argue by mere assertion, and it’s not clear that your arguments, or assertions, are ever relevant to anything anyone says here. Case in point, what you just said about me.
I will, however, be interested in learning what you think I think about the world, given that you’re so familiar with these modern ways of thinking, and you know exactly which ones I’m defending.
I know, of course, that pointing this out and demanding actual evidence or agument won’t affect your behavior in any way. You’ll avoid explanation (as you have on this thread: see, e.g., Gnostic distortion), you’ll throw around concepts it’s not clear you understand or know how we’re supposed to understand your use of them, tell everyone how misguided they are as a result of intellectual and historical forces that only you (or Voegelin) are aware of, use insulting labels for ideas and positions with which you disagree, and pretend that, at the same time you’re posturing yourself as above all of this, you’re really just a humble guy out here trying to learn. Whatever gets you through the day, I guess.
"
Where Bob is mistaken is in his belief that it is only the atheists/agnostics who “assume a position of ‘contempt.’” Tom and Bob (to say nothing of Heidegger), our resident defenders of faith, have shown little more than contempt. In fact, Bob’s whole shtick is based on contempt – contempt for the President, contempt for liberals/Democrats, contempt for the secular, contempt for just about anyone who thinks differently than he. It’s not surprising that we’ve all, to some extent, “assume[d] a position of ‘contempt’” in a discussion about something that tends to be as important as religion is in people’s lives (even the lives of many atheists), but Bob is clearly blind to the fact that he is riddled with contempt, and that it oozes from virtually every word he utters on this blog.
"
Bob, I think modernism was/is dehumanizing as well, and was particularly so when it was at its height. That’s not an uncommon sentiment, even among atheists (like, say, the Frankfurt School… which was composed of Marxists, not communists; most were critical of communism both in practice and in theory). Which gets to my point: in order for your, and Voegelin’s (shall we say outdated, to be kind), view of secularism and atheism require that you attribute motives to secularists/atheists that they are not only unaware of, but that in some cases actually go against the motives that they are consciously aware of. And as I said, that demands some serious work with arguments and evidence that I highly suspect you want no part of. It may not be personal when you parrot it here and wherever else you vomit Voegelin, but when it’s done the way it’s done, which is to say as a bare assertion, it’s still insulting. It’s sort of like me saying that Christians believe in their particular God because they have a death obsession, both personal and sexual. It’s bullshit, but if I put a name behind it, and a few fancy words, why do I need to argue for the position? Isn’t it obvious that it’s true?
On “Tunisia and Iraq”
Awww... Heidi, and just the other day you were telling me that people on the right never said that if you disagreed with their position on the war you were a traitor and/or in league with the enemy.
On “Lucretius, “Of Natural Things”- also Atoms & Atheists”
Awww... Heidi, I think you have a crush on me.
On “Tunisia and Iraq”
Given that Iraq is still plagued with widespread violence and a generally unpopular, though “democratically elected” and, to date at least, largely ineffective government, it’s surprising that more Arab states haven’t seen how wonderful democracy-by-force has worked out for Iraq and decided to try it themselves. I mean, we can all see that Libya wouldn’t be the democracy it is today if it hadn’t been for the size of George W. Bush’s testicles (one wonders what Tom knows about what was going on in Libya prior to the invasion of Iraq).
Personally, I can’t decide which was the bigger influence in the decision of the people of Tunisia to effectively overthrow their government: the 8 years of horrific violence and foreign military occupation that “democracy” has given Iraq, or the fact that people in Tunisia were spending 60, 70, even 80% of their income on food, as food prices continued to rise while a corrupt government did little more than sit back and watch. It could be either one.
On “Lucretius, “Of Natural Things”- also Atoms & Atheists”
Bob, I was making fun of you earlier, I admit, but now I want to address you a bit more seriously, if only a bit. Your entire position, which is to say VoegElin’s entire position, hinges not only on inferences (and rather wild and at times uncharitable inferences) about the thought processes of atheists/agnostics/we the thoroughly modern, but also inferences about the motivations behind those thought processes. I can stomach inferences about the thought processes themselves, because there is plenty of data, if not for a given individual, then at least for the history of the ideas. Inferences about the motivations, and in this case, motives that must be unconscious, however, seem to be entirely invented, by Voegelin and you (quoting Voegelin), in order not so much to explain the ideas as to undermine them.
I probably don’t need to tell you that most Anglo-American-Australian atheists, and perhaps most European atheists as well, get their atheism not through Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud, but through Kant-Mach-Carnap-Ayers-(maybe a l’il) Quine/Ryle. That is, they come through positivism, with a healthy dose of the (not-necessarily-pejorative version of) positivism, instead of through a suspicious (not my term, as I’m sure you know) approach to spirit (in the broad, not necessarily dualistic philosophical sense). Attributing a single set of motives to those two camps requires some serious psychoanalytical gymnastics, and there is no evidence whatsoever that you’ve even chalked up your hands, much less spun around the pommel horse, or that you even have any conception of what such gymnastics would look like.
Now, lumping together everyone who thinks differently than you is pretty common when the subject is religion. Granted, even a casual perusal of atheist blogs will show that this sin is not limited to theists. That doesn’t make it right, though, or any less offensive when people do it out of ignorance or worse. It doesn’t make doing so any more conducive to discussion, either, though it’s clear from your choice of language and style that you have no interest whatsoever in actually discussing these things (that’s why I usually choose to just make fun of you instead of engaging you, though perhaps Rufus’ method of just wondering at you is better), so perhaps that’s a criticism that doesn’t apply to you specifically.
By the way, unlike most of the atheists around here, or at least the ones who talk about it, I am from the Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud strain of atheism. I’m also, you may be interested to know, a fan of Bergson (I have a copy of Matter and Memory sitting right in front of me). That said, you must be aware by now of the tendency that arose within that strain of atheism, unfortunately after Voegelin so that his analysis will do you know good (and therefore, you’ll be unable to think about it), of a turn against the “impulse to be modern,” or whatever it is you young Voegelineans are calling it these days. I mean, Voegelin probably should have read more of the stuff coming out of Frankfurt back in his day, but he wasn’t really around to read much of what came with and after structuralism, say. You’d probably be surprised how self-consciously Greek, Roman, and even Medieval all that stuff is (it wasn’t Strauss or contemporary Christian philosophers who brought the name Scotus back into the consciousness of young philosophy grad students, for example).
On “Reclaiming Liberalism”
Yeah, with the possible exceptions of the bit about licensing cartels and no mention of unions (not surprising, given that private sector unions haven't really been a force during Yglesias' adult life), I don't see how this is all that different from the way the American center-left (liberals and progressives) has thought for at least my lifetime, and from what I can tell, pretty much forever. There doesn't seem to be anything neo about this. (I don't know where you see "central planning," to the extent that phrase means planned economies, in the thinking of any viable version of the American left ever.)
On “Lucretius, “Of Natural Things”- also Atoms & Atheists”
Sadly, the FSM has evolved.
It's now composed entirely of vermicelli?
"
First of all, not all atheists are skeptics (and conversely, not all skeptics are atheists). Second, it’s not clear to me that skepticism is supposed to make people happy. However, it’s a pretty strong claim, in need of serious defense, that this life, and this (natural) world, cannot produce happiness without adding something on top of it in the form of the supernatural or a separate life. This is exactly the sort of life-denying position that makes most theism abhorrent to this non-skeptical atheist.
"
Not that I really want to be defending Tom, because he goes about his argument in a pretty slimy way, but the FSM, if it can be considered a critique, is more a critique of what we might call “folk intelligent design arguments” than any serious arguments for god. This is so in large part because, pace Hume and the FSM people, most such arguments actually do argue for a god with a particular nature. The FSM really only works against the sort of “we’re not creationists, we swear!” intelligent design theories that you get from the likes of Bill “The Newton of Information Theory” Dembski, because these arguments have no real content, or at least they supply none to their “designer.”
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If I’m not mistaken (and I could be, because I haven’t read the book), Robinson discusses some of the work in psychology that I was thinking of (Damasio, e.g.), though the book came out before the work on moral emotions (by Jonathan Haidt, e.g.) began to get any real empirical backing. This, by the way, is name-dropping of a different sort, and I suspect more of the sort that you’re speaking of. I mention Damasio because, since you’ve read the book, you probably know what I’m talking about so I don’t have to go into more detail, in this case because I’m lazy, and I mention Haidt because, if you’re familiar with Damasio, you can look up Haidt and have a good idea of where his work and the work he’s inspired is coming from. The other sort of name-dropping is largely meant as an appeal to authority, and little more.
On jealousy, it’s one of the more widely studied emotions in the social and behavioral sciences and, as I’m sure you know, literature. It’s almost certainly a very old, innate emotion, and it probably helps us navigate a world in which a particular form of cheating, infidelity, is extremely common. But its innateness doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to experience it, and there is some literature on individual differences in the experience of jealousy. Also relevant. That said, you’re a freak. ;)
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Rufus, I think that if you combine your two theories of jealousy, you’re pretty close to the truth. With one minor disagreement (or at least addition): if you look at the data, people certainly aren’t fishing everyone, but they’re fishing plenty. Infidelity is the rule, not the exception, and jealousy becomes a useful tool for most people because of it.
There’s a view in psychology, which is gaining wider and wider acceptance, that something like this underlies morality in general. Through whatever means – biology, culture, or both – most of us react in similar ways, emotionally, to the actions of others, and these emotional reactions drive our moral judgments of the actions and the actors. These emotional reactions, which are almost exclusively intuitive, are in turn justified and codified in post hoc reasons and narratives. Under this view (incredibly oversimplified here, I admit), it’s not surprising that cultural narratives justifying the most common of our emotional reactions have built up over the millennia. This is to say nothing of the social and political control that such narratives afford, of course.
On theism and atheism and all that jazz, these discussions always look funny to me because of people like Tom and Steve S. These are two people who have clearly participated in similar discussions many times; so many times, in fact, that common arguments have become like habit to them. As a result, they read things from those past discussions into what’s being said now because they hear certain keywords or phrases. The result is almost always that they end up talking to people who aren’t here.
By the way, one of the things that impresses me most about TvD is his ability to say of those with whom he disagrees, “They are biased/committing error X,” and then display remarkably similar biases and errors himself in a completely un-self-conscious way. It’s a gift. But he’s no Cheeks: Like Bob, Tom argues almost exclusively by name-dropping and quoting, to be sure, but Cheeks’ method of name-dropping/phrase-dropping and eliding pretty much everything else, and still sounding like he’s actually saying something, is particularly impressive.
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