Also, the Spanish Inquisition is a good example, sort of like 1930s Germany, of how nationalism is equally a product of the need for a unified culture in order to maintain authoritarian, and especially autocratic control. You have to have everyone on the same page, and one way to do that is to get the people who are already roughly on your page to be even more on your page by pitting them against a perceived (often created, even) threatening outgroup. This has the dual benefits for the authoritarian ruler hat at the same time you get a bunch of people to be more fervent supporters of your “home-grown” rule, you get rid of the people who are less likely to support it. It also seems to help if you have some Jews around to paint as the threatening outgroup, as the Spain and Germany show.
In Europe, nationalism is sort of invented by the Napoleonic wars.
Depends on where you are in Europe. You’ll find pretty strong nationalism in Eastern Europe in the 16th century, at least (I suspect it goes back further). I know this in particular of Poland, Lithuania, the Don region, and other parts of western Russia and Ukraine.
Nationalism is less a product of the loss of custom, I think, than it is the product of perceived threat, be it internal or external. One sort of internal threat is a loss of custom, so it’s not that your hypothesis is wrong, it’s just only one part of the story. I’m not sure it really explains India and Pakistan (there is a whole hell of a lot going on there), but it probably has something to do with a lot of examples of radical nationalism in the last century or so, including Germany in the late 19th century and the 1930s.
I disagree about the Bonus Army, even if the effects weren't immediate (see: post World War II), but whatever, it doesn't matter. There are dozens of examples in the places and periods I've mentioned, that, even if they weren't global, produced results that affected many more lives.
But before we try to argue that point, why don't you tell me what you think it was that the Scientology protests achieved.
I'm not much older than you, to be honest, but I've read a little bit about, you know, the 20th century, or the 19th, and hell, even the 18th. If you're going to start looking for more effective protests, you could do worse than googling the year 1229 Paris, or staying in Paris, check out the 1780s, or look at Ireland and England in the 19th century (America's major pre-1865 political issue will furnish you with some examples as well), the draft riot in NYC, then the suffrage movement and its protest actions, the various labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, the Bonus Army, the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the anti-war movement in the 60s, the recent nationwide strikes in Spain and France, and so on (there are literally thousands of examples). If you want extent, you only have to go as far back as 2002-03, to the anti-war protests that were global on, at times, a spectacular scale (though their failure was pretty spectacular as well).
Seriously, it's not hard to find more effective protests, and it's probably not all that hard to find larger ones, though more global would have to be more recent, since this sort of thing didn't go global really until the 1960s. But maybe it's not perspective you lack, but hyperbole you have too much of.
"was responsible for one of the most extensive, global, and effective protest actions in history."
Most extensive, maybe, most global, maybe (though that might be redundant), but one of the most effective protest actions in history? Dude, you must be really young, not to mention a bit short in the perspective department (and historical knowledge department, to boot).
By the way, the argument is never simply, “Two consenting adults should be able to marry because they love each other.” That may be all the arguer ever says, but implicit in this are several other premises, not the least of which is that their marriage, or at least the class of marriage, will not be harmful to others (I can think of plenty of heterosexual marriages that are harmful to others). So, the counterargument has to address these premises, even if they’re left unspoken. One can easily come up with potential arguments (I’m not saying they’re actually valid) against, say, incest, by pointing out that incestuous relationships are harmful to the children they produce, or to society in general (just ask the Egyptians, eh?). The same kinds of arguments could be made against bigamy: there is evidence, for example, that it is harmful to the women involved, and it might (I’m not saying it is) be harmful to the children involved as well.
The point being that, in the case of same sex marriage, the top of the slope and the bottom of the slope are only connected in a relevant way if the two are alike on all of the relevant dimensions, and the slippery slope arguers never seem to get that far, because while it’s trivial to say that gay couples, incestuous couples, and bigamists love each other in similar ways, it’s nontrivial to say that everything else about the couples, and their affects on those around them, is the same.
The reason that slippery slope arguments are fallacious is for precisely this reason: they don’t argue the thing. They argue something else, in lieu of the thing, and the argue that something else is inevitable as a result of the thing. Like I said earlier, slippery slope arguments are tacit admissions of defeat.
Like I said, sometimes one thing follows inherently from another. In that case, it's not so much a slippery slope as an actual causal chain. In most cases, in fact, in every case that I've ever encountered, slippery slope arguments don't argue that there is an inherent causal link between the top of the slope and the bottom (there is, for example, nothing inherent in same sex marriage that will cause the legalization of incestuous marriages), but always involve a mediator, something about the legal system, say, or the behavior of people independent of the top of the slope.
Again, if x is legalized because x is harmless and the only reason to discriminate against it is because certain people are biased against x, then the only reason to legalize other things because x has become legal is because those things are also harmless, and the only reason to discriminate against them is because certain people are biased against them. If bigamy is harmless (and it's not obvious that it is), or if incest is harmless (and again, it's not obvious that it is), then there's no more reason for outlawing them than there is for outlawing same sex marriage. If that's the case, we don't so much have a slippery slope than a just outcome that makes other just outcomes more likely.
I actually have no problem with legalized bigamy, and I’m not worried about incestuous relationships between consenting adults either (the evidence that genetic defects are significantly more likely seems to be pretty slim), but I’m not sure how either of these things follow from gay marriage. It could be argued, I suppose, that by changing who can marry whom, as in the case of gay marriage, one has opened the door to other changes, but a.) bigamy isn’t really a change, since it’s been pretty common through much of history, and the same, to a lesser degree, can be said of incest, at least between cousins, and b.) “different from the way things are now” is a pretty abstract similarity, and seems a rather weak one for legal purposes. If, for example, we were to legalize marijuana, could someone then say that, because it is now legal to give someone marijuana in a brownie, it is also legal to give them (with their consent) arsenic in a brownie (assuming they know you’re doing it)? Legalized marijuana is different from the way things are, and so would be legalized arsenic, so if giving someone one of those is legal, why isn’t giving someone the other legal? I know, I know, analogies and all that, but you get the point: just because one thing changes the status quo does not mean other things that change the status quo are OK. What’s more, if we change the status quo because it turns out that the status quo discriminates against some group (say, LGBTs) for no rational reason (e.g., there is no harm in gay people marrying each other), then for the slippery slope to work, it would also have to be shown that there is no rational reason to discriminate against the other groups. In other words, the status quo is wrong on the case of gay marriage, and if we change the status quo for gay marriage, then in order for others to argue that we should change it for bigamy or incest, they would have to argue that the status quo is also wrong, because there is no rational reason to discriminate against those behaviors (e.g., they don’t cause any harm either).
Point being, while slippery slopes almost never work against a position, because they don’t argue against any flaws in the position itself, they can, on occasion, actually argue for the position, because they show that the wrongness of the counter position is actually much worse than its merely opposing the current position under debate: in fact, it opposes all sorts of other positions that it is wrong to oppose.
My view of the slippery slope is that it is not always, but almost always, a tacit admission of defeat. It says, “I can’t defeat your position directly, therefore I will argue against a position that I can defeat, and associate it via a hypothetical [usually opaque] causal chain with the position I can’t find a way to attack.” In some cases, there really is a direct and unavoidable causal connection between one position and another, much worse one, which makes the worse position a flaw of the original one, and therefore a slippery slope argument is actually required, but in most cases, it’s just giving up on arguing the point and instead arguing another.
In the case of gay marriage, legalized incest is not an obvious consequence of gay marriage’s legalization. Granted, some will use the legalization of gay marriage to argue for the legalization of incest (or bestiality, or bigamy, or whatever their kink might be), but it will take more than simply pointing out that gay marriage is legal to legalize those things, not the least of which is saying what the hell legalized gay marriage has to do with incest or bigamy or whatever. So it’s not an inherent flaw in gay marriage that other things might be legalized down the line using gay marriage as (one of) the arguments in favor of legalization. Therefore, when someone argues against gay marriage with a slippery slope to the legalization of something else, they are essentially giving up.
Wikileaks is a tougher issue, in my mind, than the death penalty. Since there is no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent, for example, then it’s almost certainly the case that the death penalty has a net loss in innocent lives. What’s more, the death penalty has several other things going against it, not the least of which is the fact that it makes further due process impossible (an important fact in a flawed, and in fact biased system).
Wikileaks, on the other hand, if it functions well (that is, if instead of giant dumps of diplomatic cables, it’s more focused on human rights issues and abuses of power, as it was for a while), could save more lives, on average. It might even do this if it keeps doing the occasional giant dump of diplomatic cables. This is certainly not the only factor in determining whether Wikileaks is good, or whether any particular action Wikileaks takes is good, but it at least shows that it’s not as straightforward, from a simple life calculus, as the death penalty. Furthermore, while there are few possible negative side issues related to doing away with the death penalty, the negatives for silencing Wikileaks could be extreme.
This is all of course assuming that Wikileaks costs lives at all, which we have no evidence of it doing (it hasn’t appeared to affect policy in a way that would save lives yet, either, but we’re speaking hypothetically here, eh?).
I think it’s important, and interesting, to point out that Anonymous, on its boards, is one place were such discussions about the ethics of hacking takes place. Groups, or quasi-groups, like Anonymous don’t worry me. It’s the 15-year old kid in his bedroom with no affiliation, even a loose one, with a group like Anonymous, who has no real concept of the consequences of his or her actions for others, and no real understanding of how things work in the larger world, and who is therefore much more likely to operate without an ethical code, or even if he or she has one, to apply it unskillfully.
Liberals have divided into factions on this issue too (when do they not). Some are pissed, though I'm not sure whether it's because there's a Democrat in the White House, and some have been supportive, even excited, about Wikileaks generally.
It's also important to keep in mind that Wikileaks releases a lot of different kinds of information, and it's possible to think of it as both good and bad.
Heidegger, maybe I'm being unclear. I don't think you're a liar; I think you buy the lies of others very easily when they're consistent with your world view, or at least the one you're trying to project. I don't think you're blaming Wittgenstein for the Holocaust; I think you are unwittingly using a common trope in the history Hitler explanations : blame it on a Jew. Clear as mud?
By the way, the reason I’ve gone to all this trouble of pointing out that everything you’ve said here is false –aside from the fact that the readers of this blog may not know as well as the readers of the now defunct Positive Liberty and The One Best Way, that arguing from a combination of debunked myths, ideological slant, and outright falsehoods, is pretty much your m.o—is that I find the constant attempts to pin Hitler’s massacre of 6 million Jews (to go along with 3 million non-Jewish Poles, a bunch of gypsies, gays, etc., to say nothing of the Russian P.O.W.s and 13 or so million Russian civilians) on a Jewish individual or a few Jewish individuals in Hitler’s past, to be infuriating. Sure, it was Wittgenstein’s brilliance, not anything malicious on his part, that caused Hitler to hate Jews so much that he’d try to wipe them off the face of the Earth, but it was still the fault of a Jew, ultimately. It couldn’t possibly be the fact that Hitler was raised in a culture—not just Austrian and German, but continental European generally—in which fervent anti-Semitism was not just rampant, but pretty nearly universal, or that just a few decades before Hitler’s anti-Semitism really reached new heights after German’s defeat in World War I, German nationalism and German anti-Semitism had become deeply intertwined in German intellectual, artistic, and even political culture, or that these facts made Jews a convenient scapegoat for someone looking to gain political power through German nationalism. No, it was the fault of some kid who was so brilliant that when confronted with him, Hitler, couldn’t stand the humiliation of his own intellectual inferiority, particularly not when combined with the emasculation that comes from having an apocryphal lonely testicle. Blame the victim. If only he’d been less Jewish along with whatever else it was that pissed pre-adolescent Hitler off, Hitler would have married a Jew, developed a scheme for eternal world peace, and everyone in the world would have gotten a digital watch and a cookie.
What's half right in what you've said here? That Hitler hated Jews? That's right, for sure. Everything else you've said has been either myth, British propaganda, or outright nonnsense.
Heidegger, I don't mean to be an ass, but you are talking out of yours. Wittgenstein is a county name, from which the surname was taken, in part at least, to hide the family's Jewish heritage. Just because a name ends in Stein doesn't make it Jewish name ("Stein" is actually fairly common in Germanic place names, and therefore in Germanic surnames).
And even if he were overtly Jewish (and not, himself, an antisemite), that still doesn't change the fact that he and Hitler didn't know each other. Or that Hitler had two balls, and that his antisemitism and evil temperment had nothing to do with Hitler, testicles, or any such simple explanation.
They don’t have numerous class pictures together. You made that up. There’s a picture, a single picture, with a young Hitler in it, and a kid some have suggested is Wittgenstein, but which almost certainly isn’t. But more than that, they weren’t in the same class! Wittgenstein was a couple years behind Hitler. It’s an apocryphal story, one of many about Hitler’s youth, told in an effort to explain his hatred of Jews, and like many of them, it ultimately blames it on a Jew. Never mind that Wittgenstein was Jewish in name only (and that very few people would have known that he had Jewish ancestry in his youth, as his family hid it well), that he himself was openly anti-Semitic, and that there’s no evidence that he and Hitler ever interacted, certainly not for any extended or meaningful period of time, and certainly not to the point that Hitler would have realized Wittgenstein was either brilliant or of Jewish descent.
The Hitler had one testicle thing is also a myth, serving the same purpose, though in this case blaming it on emasculation rather than a Jew. So at least it’s merely stupid, instead of maliciously so. In this case, we know exactly where the myth came from, and it wasn’t Hitler’s doctor.
Also, I don’t know what you’re talking about with AI and Penrose, and I rather suspect that you don’t either. I don’t despise you, and while I think his work on consciousness is interesting but ultimately useless, I certainly don’t despise Penrose.
All of these explanations are probably at play: motivated cognition (not just “motivated skepticism” or the overused “cognitive dissonance,” but a whole range of other heuristics and biases that are largely affect-driven), the team mentality, the short-sighted view that my side is not as scary as the other side when it wields certain powers, etc. But, I think one of the important factors, at least in the rationalizing of our behavior, is the fundamental attribution error. When Bush was president, liberals attributed his abuses of civil liberties to authoritarian impulses, while conservatives swore that the abuses were necessary because of the very real and very serious threats to our way of life. Now that Obama is president, the situation is reversed: liberals are much more likely to explain, if not excuse, Obama’s behavior by reference to the situation: terrorism is a grave threat that justifies certain extreme measures, or at least, the political reality is such that Obama has to behave as though it were, while conservatives chalk it up to the liberal inclination to expand the power of government, or socialism, or something to that effect. When you add all of these things up, what you get is the American political system.
Hmm... I think you'd be surprised at how much the mind, or at least the brain, can change as an adult. It's true that much of the major wiring, barring dramatic events (e.g., loss of a major sense or brain damage), much of the systematic wiring is done, but new connections are being created all the time, and the brain is remarkable in its ability to adapt even at a fairly advanced age.
Also, if you look at the research, you'll find that psychotropic drugs are less effective, and in many cases (e.g., anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, etc.) largely ineffective long term without talk and/or behavioral therapy (depending on the disorder). CBT, in particular, can be quite effective for a wide range of affective and behavioral disorders, particularly when coupled with medication.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The death of custom and the rise of nationalism in the post-colonial state”
Also, the Spanish Inquisition is a good example, sort of like 1930s Germany, of how nationalism is equally a product of the need for a unified culture in order to maintain authoritarian, and especially autocratic control. You have to have everyone on the same page, and one way to do that is to get the people who are already roughly on your page to be even more on your page by pitting them against a perceived (often created, even) threatening outgroup. This has the dual benefits for the authoritarian ruler hat at the same time you get a bunch of people to be more fervent supporters of your “home-grown” rule, you get rid of the people who are less likely to support it. It also seems to help if you have some Jews around to paint as the threatening outgroup, as the Spain and Germany show.
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Ah yes, I did mean that second part for Erik. Sorry 'bout that.
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In Europe, nationalism is sort of invented by the Napoleonic wars.
Depends on where you are in Europe. You’ll find pretty strong nationalism in Eastern Europe in the 16th century, at least (I suspect it goes back further). I know this in particular of Poland, Lithuania, the Don region, and other parts of western Russia and Ukraine.
Nationalism is less a product of the loss of custom, I think, than it is the product of perceived threat, be it internal or external. One sort of internal threat is a loss of custom, so it’s not that your hypothesis is wrong, it’s just only one part of the story. I’m not sure it really explains India and Pakistan (there is a whole hell of a lot going on there), but it probably has something to do with a lot of examples of radical nationalism in the last century or so, including Germany in the late 19th century and the 1930s.
On “All Apologies”
I think he meant "Abba DAbba Ding Dong," not "lice infested." But you probably figured that as well.
On “Anonymous launches new project, press release”
I disagree about the Bonus Army, even if the effects weren't immediate (see: post World War II), but whatever, it doesn't matter. There are dozens of examples in the places and periods I've mentioned, that, even if they weren't global, produced results that affected many more lives.
But before we try to argue that point, why don't you tell me what you think it was that the Scientology protests achieved.
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I'm not much older than you, to be honest, but I've read a little bit about, you know, the 20th century, or the 19th, and hell, even the 18th. If you're going to start looking for more effective protests, you could do worse than googling the year 1229 Paris, or staying in Paris, check out the 1780s, or look at Ireland and England in the 19th century (America's major pre-1865 political issue will furnish you with some examples as well), the draft riot in NYC, then the suffrage movement and its protest actions, the various labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, the Bonus Army, the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the anti-war movement in the 60s, the recent nationwide strikes in Spain and France, and so on (there are literally thousands of examples). If you want extent, you only have to go as far back as 2002-03, to the anti-war protests that were global on, at times, a spectacular scale (though their failure was pretty spectacular as well).
Seriously, it's not hard to find more effective protests, and it's probably not all that hard to find larger ones, though more global would have to be more recent, since this sort of thing didn't go global really until the 1960s. But maybe it's not perspective you lack, but hyperbole you have too much of.
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"was responsible for one of the most extensive, global, and effective protest actions in history."
Most extensive, maybe, most global, maybe (though that might be redundant), but one of the most effective protest actions in history? Dude, you must be really young, not to mention a bit short in the perspective department (and historical knowledge department, to boot).
On “Self-Serving Slippery Slopes”
By the way, the argument is never simply, “Two consenting adults should be able to marry because they love each other.” That may be all the arguer ever says, but implicit in this are several other premises, not the least of which is that their marriage, or at least the class of marriage, will not be harmful to others (I can think of plenty of heterosexual marriages that are harmful to others). So, the counterargument has to address these premises, even if they’re left unspoken. One can easily come up with potential arguments (I’m not saying they’re actually valid) against, say, incest, by pointing out that incestuous relationships are harmful to the children they produce, or to society in general (just ask the Egyptians, eh?). The same kinds of arguments could be made against bigamy: there is evidence, for example, that it is harmful to the women involved, and it might (I’m not saying it is) be harmful to the children involved as well.
The point being that, in the case of same sex marriage, the top of the slope and the bottom of the slope are only connected in a relevant way if the two are alike on all of the relevant dimensions, and the slippery slope arguers never seem to get that far, because while it’s trivial to say that gay couples, incestuous couples, and bigamists love each other in similar ways, it’s nontrivial to say that everything else about the couples, and their affects on those around them, is the same.
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The reason that slippery slope arguments are fallacious is for precisely this reason: they don’t argue the thing. They argue something else, in lieu of the thing, and the argue that something else is inevitable as a result of the thing. Like I said earlier, slippery slope arguments are tacit admissions of defeat.
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Like I said, sometimes one thing follows inherently from another. In that case, it's not so much a slippery slope as an actual causal chain. In most cases, in fact, in every case that I've ever encountered, slippery slope arguments don't argue that there is an inherent causal link between the top of the slope and the bottom (there is, for example, nothing inherent in same sex marriage that will cause the legalization of incestuous marriages), but always involve a mediator, something about the legal system, say, or the behavior of people independent of the top of the slope.
Again, if x is legalized because x is harmless and the only reason to discriminate against it is because certain people are biased against x, then the only reason to legalize other things because x has become legal is because those things are also harmless, and the only reason to discriminate against them is because certain people are biased against them. If bigamy is harmless (and it's not obvious that it is), or if incest is harmless (and again, it's not obvious that it is), then there's no more reason for outlawing them than there is for outlawing same sex marriage. If that's the case, we don't so much have a slippery slope than a just outcome that makes other just outcomes more likely.
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I actually have no problem with legalized bigamy, and I’m not worried about incestuous relationships between consenting adults either (the evidence that genetic defects are significantly more likely seems to be pretty slim), but I’m not sure how either of these things follow from gay marriage. It could be argued, I suppose, that by changing who can marry whom, as in the case of gay marriage, one has opened the door to other changes, but a.) bigamy isn’t really a change, since it’s been pretty common through much of history, and the same, to a lesser degree, can be said of incest, at least between cousins, and b.) “different from the way things are now” is a pretty abstract similarity, and seems a rather weak one for legal purposes. If, for example, we were to legalize marijuana, could someone then say that, because it is now legal to give someone marijuana in a brownie, it is also legal to give them (with their consent) arsenic in a brownie (assuming they know you’re doing it)? Legalized marijuana is different from the way things are, and so would be legalized arsenic, so if giving someone one of those is legal, why isn’t giving someone the other legal? I know, I know, analogies and all that, but you get the point: just because one thing changes the status quo does not mean other things that change the status quo are OK. What’s more, if we change the status quo because it turns out that the status quo discriminates against some group (say, LGBTs) for no rational reason (e.g., there is no harm in gay people marrying each other), then for the slippery slope to work, it would also have to be shown that there is no rational reason to discriminate against the other groups. In other words, the status quo is wrong on the case of gay marriage, and if we change the status quo for gay marriage, then in order for others to argue that we should change it for bigamy or incest, they would have to argue that the status quo is also wrong, because there is no rational reason to discriminate against those behaviors (e.g., they don’t cause any harm either).
Point being, while slippery slopes almost never work against a position, because they don’t argue against any flaws in the position itself, they can, on occasion, actually argue for the position, because they show that the wrongness of the counter position is actually much worse than its merely opposing the current position under debate: in fact, it opposes all sorts of other positions that it is wrong to oppose.
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My view of the slippery slope is that it is not always, but almost always, a tacit admission of defeat. It says, “I can’t defeat your position directly, therefore I will argue against a position that I can defeat, and associate it via a hypothetical [usually opaque] causal chain with the position I can’t find a way to attack.” In some cases, there really is a direct and unavoidable causal connection between one position and another, much worse one, which makes the worse position a flaw of the original one, and therefore a slippery slope argument is actually required, but in most cases, it’s just giving up on arguing the point and instead arguing another.
In the case of gay marriage, legalized incest is not an obvious consequence of gay marriage’s legalization. Granted, some will use the legalization of gay marriage to argue for the legalization of incest (or bestiality, or bigamy, or whatever their kink might be), but it will take more than simply pointing out that gay marriage is legal to legalize those things, not the least of which is saying what the hell legalized gay marriage has to do with incest or bigamy or whatever. So it’s not an inherent flaw in gay marriage that other things might be legalized down the line using gay marriage as (one of) the arguments in favor of legalization. Therefore, when someone argues against gay marriage with a slippery slope to the legalization of something else, they are essentially giving up.
On “Death Penalty”
Wikileaks is a tougher issue, in my mind, than the death penalty. Since there is no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent, for example, then it’s almost certainly the case that the death penalty has a net loss in innocent lives. What’s more, the death penalty has several other things going against it, not the least of which is the fact that it makes further due process impossible (an important fact in a flawed, and in fact biased system).
Wikileaks, on the other hand, if it functions well (that is, if instead of giant dumps of diplomatic cables, it’s more focused on human rights issues and abuses of power, as it was for a while), could save more lives, on average. It might even do this if it keeps doing the occasional giant dump of diplomatic cables. This is certainly not the only factor in determining whether Wikileaks is good, or whether any particular action Wikileaks takes is good, but it at least shows that it’s not as straightforward, from a simple life calculus, as the death penalty. Furthermore, while there are few possible negative side issues related to doing away with the death penalty, the negatives for silencing Wikileaks could be extreme.
This is all of course assuming that Wikileaks costs lives at all, which we have no evidence of it doing (it hasn’t appeared to affect policy in a way that would save lives yet, either, but we’re speaking hypothetically here, eh?).
On “Contraganda”
I think it’s important, and interesting, to point out that Anonymous, on its boards, is one place were such discussions about the ethics of hacking takes place. Groups, or quasi-groups, like Anonymous don’t worry me. It’s the 15-year old kid in his bedroom with no affiliation, even a loose one, with a group like Anonymous, who has no real concept of the consequences of his or her actions for others, and no real understanding of how things work in the larger world, and who is therefore much more likely to operate without an ethical code, or even if he or she has one, to apply it unskillfully.
On “Wikileaks and the Tea Party”
Liberals have divided into factions on this issue too (when do they not). Some are pissed, though I'm not sure whether it's because there's a Democrat in the White House, and some have been supportive, even excited, about Wikileaks generally.
It's also important to keep in mind that Wikileaks releases a lot of different kinds of information, and it's possible to think of it as both good and bad.
On “Julian Assange: bank account closed, prepares to meet with police, face talking-point wrath of GOP hopefuls”
Heidegger, maybe I'm being unclear. I don't think you're a liar; I think you buy the lies of others very easily when they're consistent with your world view, or at least the one you're trying to project. I don't think you're blaming Wittgenstein for the Holocaust; I think you are unwittingly using a common trope in the history Hitler explanations : blame it on a Jew. Clear as mud?
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By the way, the reason I’ve gone to all this trouble of pointing out that everything you’ve said here is false –aside from the fact that the readers of this blog may not know as well as the readers of the now defunct Positive Liberty and The One Best Way, that arguing from a combination of debunked myths, ideological slant, and outright falsehoods, is pretty much your m.o—is that I find the constant attempts to pin Hitler’s massacre of 6 million Jews (to go along with 3 million non-Jewish Poles, a bunch of gypsies, gays, etc., to say nothing of the Russian P.O.W.s and 13 or so million Russian civilians) on a Jewish individual or a few Jewish individuals in Hitler’s past, to be infuriating. Sure, it was Wittgenstein’s brilliance, not anything malicious on his part, that caused Hitler to hate Jews so much that he’d try to wipe them off the face of the Earth, but it was still the fault of a Jew, ultimately. It couldn’t possibly be the fact that Hitler was raised in a culture—not just Austrian and German, but continental European generally—in which fervent anti-Semitism was not just rampant, but pretty nearly universal, or that just a few decades before Hitler’s anti-Semitism really reached new heights after German’s defeat in World War I, German nationalism and German anti-Semitism had become deeply intertwined in German intellectual, artistic, and even political culture, or that these facts made Jews a convenient scapegoat for someone looking to gain political power through German nationalism. No, it was the fault of some kid who was so brilliant that when confronted with him, Hitler, couldn’t stand the humiliation of his own intellectual inferiority, particularly not when combined with the emasculation that comes from having an apocryphal lonely testicle. Blame the victim. If only he’d been less Jewish along with whatever else it was that pissed pre-adolescent Hitler off, Hitler would have married a Jew, developed a scheme for eternal world peace, and everyone in the world would have gotten a digital watch and a cookie.
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What's half right in what you've said here? That Hitler hated Jews? That's right, for sure. Everything else you've said has been either myth, British propaganda, or outright nonnsense.
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Oh, and Houston wasn't related to Neville. Seriously, where do you get this stuff?
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Heidegger, I don't mean to be an ass, but you are talking out of yours. Wittgenstein is a county name, from which the surname was taken, in part at least, to hide the family's Jewish heritage. Just because a name ends in Stein doesn't make it Jewish name ("Stein" is actually fairly common in Germanic place names, and therefore in Germanic surnames).
And even if he were overtly Jewish (and not, himself, an antisemite), that still doesn't change the fact that he and Hitler didn't know each other. Or that Hitler had two balls, and that his antisemitism and evil temperment had nothing to do with Hitler, testicles, or any such simple explanation.
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They don’t have numerous class pictures together. You made that up. There’s a picture, a single picture, with a young Hitler in it, and a kid some have suggested is Wittgenstein, but which almost certainly isn’t. But more than that, they weren’t in the same class! Wittgenstein was a couple years behind Hitler. It’s an apocryphal story, one of many about Hitler’s youth, told in an effort to explain his hatred of Jews, and like many of them, it ultimately blames it on a Jew. Never mind that Wittgenstein was Jewish in name only (and that very few people would have known that he had Jewish ancestry in his youth, as his family hid it well), that he himself was openly anti-Semitic, and that there’s no evidence that he and Hitler ever interacted, certainly not for any extended or meaningful period of time, and certainly not to the point that Hitler would have realized Wittgenstein was either brilliant or of Jewish descent.
The Hitler had one testicle thing is also a myth, serving the same purpose, though in this case blaming it on emasculation rather than a Jew. So at least it’s merely stupid, instead of maliciously so. In this case, we know exactly where the myth came from, and it wasn’t Hitler’s doctor.
Also, I don’t know what you’re talking about with AI and Penrose, and I rather suspect that you don’t either. I don’t despise you, and while I think his work on consciousness is interesting but ultimately useless, I certainly don’t despise Penrose.
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Heidegger, that Wittgenstein stuff is myth, and really really stupid myth at that.
On “Political Blind Spots, Ctd”
Yeah, Tom popped in on this thread to provide an excellent example.
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All of these explanations are probably at play: motivated cognition (not just “motivated skepticism” or the overused “cognitive dissonance,” but a whole range of other heuristics and biases that are largely affect-driven), the team mentality, the short-sighted view that my side is not as scary as the other side when it wields certain powers, etc. But, I think one of the important factors, at least in the rationalizing of our behavior, is the fundamental attribution error. When Bush was president, liberals attributed his abuses of civil liberties to authoritarian impulses, while conservatives swore that the abuses were necessary because of the very real and very serious threats to our way of life. Now that Obama is president, the situation is reversed: liberals are much more likely to explain, if not excuse, Obama’s behavior by reference to the situation: terrorism is a grave threat that justifies certain extreme measures, or at least, the political reality is such that Obama has to behave as though it were, while conservatives chalk it up to the liberal inclination to expand the power of government, or socialism, or something to that effect. When you add all of these things up, what you get is the American political system.
On “Training the Mind”
Hmm... I think you'd be surprised at how much the mind, or at least the brain, can change as an adult. It's true that much of the major wiring, barring dramatic events (e.g., loss of a major sense or brain damage), much of the systematic wiring is done, but new connections are being created all the time, and the brain is remarkable in its ability to adapt even at a fairly advanced age.
Also, if you look at the research, you'll find that psychotropic drugs are less effective, and in many cases (e.g., anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, etc.) largely ineffective long term without talk and/or behavioral therapy (depending on the disorder). CBT, in particular, can be quite effective for a wide range of affective and behavioral disorders, particularly when coupled with medication.
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