william.scherk

We disagree on Jones as kook, then. Fair enough. I do wonder what item of Jones 'reporting' could be considered credible; as for the news link on Drudge that you highlighted, it has disappeared for the moment -- zero mention of Tunisia/Yemeni news there for now. Was that link at Drudge actually from Infowars or PrisonPlanet? I followed the link as it first appeared and seem to remember something like Hindustan Times . . . In any case, events in Tunisia have been front page news for several weeks, dominating Arab media as well. One hardly needs Drudge to fetch up a story on the fast-moving events. I suggest, if you are interested in details of the unfolding situation in Yemen and Algeria, Google News. Here's a brief Associated Press video summary of the events in Algeria and Yemen, via Google News. A fluid situation indeed.

The Baroness of Crossharbour is not likely to be a libertarian. Lord Black of Crossharbour and Lord Jonas of BombTheFuckOutOfThemAll hardly fit the profile, though I could be wrong. Read the whole paper, if you get a chance. It is fascinating. Whether or not you accept that psychological differences can explain much of political orientation, there is a boatload of information about real folks and their personalities.

Alex Jones is a kook. Proceed with caution . . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU5hxTVJrX4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zxFdY2B5mw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ccX_PQtlMY

Rand's views on women leaders was consistent with her views on sexuality, love and 'femininity' -- "the essence of femininity is hero worship - the desire to look up to man." "By the nature of her duties and daily activities," a female president ". . . would become the most unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically inappropriate, and rationally revolting figure of all: a matriarch." She really believed that a woman president was wrong wrong wrong, and she fit it into her philosophical system. I presume that Rothbard was equally consistent in his views. So, when he writes of the mafia, "Organized crime is essentially anarcho-capitalist, a productive industry struggling to govern itself; apart from attempts to monopolize and injure competitors, it is productive and non-aggressive," what should we the readers think about Rothbard? A first-class thinker, an astute observer, a rational analyst? A productive and non-aggressive industry? Yikes. This kind of flabby thought invites ridicule, and rightly so.

Around 150 deaths a year, in adults and children. Worth mentioning? Modern parents are still having, as did parents in the past, chicken pox parties wherein they are intentionally exposing their children to the pox, in order to "self vaccinate" them. http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20090111/Inside+New+York+Chicken+Pox+Parties Yes, some parents have a phobia about vaccines, courtesy of a long-running strain of irrationality in the body politic, re-infected by the fraud of Andrew Wakefield, reinforced by the 'natural health' industry . . . The Post story is reasonably well-balanced:

I added a link to the original post -- Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology. See also the blog put up by one of Haidt's co-authors, which has additional material.

Around 150 deaths a year, in adults and children. Worth mentioning?

The death rate from chickenpox has plunged in the USA and Canada since vaccination became widespread. Some studies earlier this decade suggested that future adult/elderly cases of shingles might increase over time. In any case, folks over sixty can get the shingles vaccine. Glad to see you haven't gone over to anti-vaccine kookery, Brant. As for the 'flu shots don't work,' so you say. Don't get one.

Reason's Ronald Bailey pens an intriguing look at Jonathan Haidt's newest work, “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology.” I had yet to hear about libertarians as amoral calculating rationalists . . . here's a few paragraphs from Bailey's piece. Full text at Reason.com ++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Science of Libertarian Morality A social psychology study explores the formation of the libertarian personality. Libertarians are often cast as amoral calculating rationalists with an unseemly hedonistic bent. Now new social science research upends that caricature. Libertarians are quite moral, the researchers argue—just not in the same way that conservatives and liberals are. The University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work in the past probing the different moral attitudes of American liberals and conservatives. With time he realized that a significant proportion of Americans did not fit the simplistic left/right ideological dichotomy that dominates our social discourse. Instead of ignoring the outliers, Haidt and his colleagues chose to dig deeper. The result: a fascinating new study, “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology,” that is currently under review at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In probing libertarians’ moral thinking, Haidt and his colleagues—Ravi Iyer and Jesse Graham at the University of Southern California and Spassena Koleva and Peter Ditto at the University of California at Irvine—used the “largest dataset of psychological measures ever compiled on libertarians”: surveys of more than 10,000 self-identified libertarians gathered online at the website yourmorals.org. In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the harm and fairness scales—that is, they gave those issues less weight when making moral judgments—and scored much higher on ingroup, authority, and purity. In the new study, Haidt and his colleagues note that libertarians score low on all five of these moral dimensions. “Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” Haidt et al. write. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on harm and slightly above on fairness. These results suggest that libertarians are “likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.” [ . . . ] Taking various measures into account, the researchers report that libertarians “score high on individualism, low on collectivism, and low on all other traits that involved bonding with, loving, or feeling a sense of common identity with others.” Haidt and his fellow researchers suggest that people who are dispositionally low on disgust sensitivity and high on openness to experience will be drawn to classically liberal philosophers who argue for the superordinate value of individual liberty. But also being highly individualistic and low on empathy, they feel little attraction to modern liberals’ emphasis on altruism and coercive social welfare policies. Haidt and his colleagues then speculate that an intellectual feedback loop develops in which such people will find more and more of the libertarian narrative agreeable and begin identifying themselves as libertarian. From Haidt’s social intuitionist perspective, “this process is no different from the psychological comfort that liberals attain in moralizing their empathic responses or that social conservatives attain in moralizing their connection to their groups.”

Are you sure about this? I just did an OL search of Roger's posts with "Tehran" and "Teheran" as search terms. I chose a date range back to 2005, and the search did its job. One annoyance of the upgrade (which I think you may have already explained) comes in searching via Member pages. If you try to look up Mr Soandso's posts this way, the results are truncated.

Quite a package to unpick. If I could get into Brant's mind and look out on the USA, I would probably shiver in horror. All is bad, all is moving towards more badness, and all activities seem to be flails of helpless creatures circling the drain. I kind of understand Brant's depression. If all these things are evil beyond evil, then surely the USA is doomed. If Brant's perceptions are true to life, there is not much to be done but don the sandwich board and bear witness: The End Of The World Is Nigh. One thing sticks out in the swirl of evil, however -- vaccines. Vaccines are pumped into babies and children. Vaccines are unnecessary. Vaccines are dangerous. I can see the drawbacks of ethanol production and use in the USA, via evil subsidies, via evil effects on small engines, via evil distortions of the market. I can see the evil of big pharma pushing drugs that do not work as advertized. I can see the full horror of modern education turning out collectivist zombies. I can see the awesome nightmare of soda-guzzling drones staggering to Walmart to turn in their food stamps for hormone saturated beef, and runnels of beefy antibiotics coursing into groundwater to deform a future generation, and I can see the evil windmills and evil solar plants churning out horror upon horror. I can see this vast evil conglomerate rampaging over all that is good and pure. But vaccines? Brant, have you adopted the paranoia of the anti-vaccine kooks?

You are llving in a dream world. Maybe. You seem to be a lot more certain of a darkening future than I am. I get the feeling you think unemployment will stay the same or worsen, cash-flush companies will sit on their funds, and that the US will stagger into a pit of pain and horror. I will bet you that US unemployment comes down, investment goes up, and Obama gets reelected in 2012.

It is an odd story. GE's ownership of some small Utah thrifts apparently put them under a different regulatory scheme than the other big finance outfits, which ultimately let them take advantage of fed-backed loan guarantees and let them access credit and get out of the crunch. I note that GE got their participation approved in October mid-November of 2008. The details of the maneouvering and its aftermath in this decent four-part Washington Post story from June of 2009. If you find it psychotic, and pp finds it evil, placing Obama firmly in the Satan+Dracula+Stalin vortex, I find it a considered political move by the Administration. The GE CEO replaces former Fed chair Volcker. If Obama keeps moving active and successful business folk into these kinds of advisory positions, who knows, maybe the result will be more investment from cash-flush companies like GE who benefitted from bailouts, and perhaps more jobs. +++++++++++ -- corrected the date that GE became eligible.

I recommended Spencer Weart's book The Discovery of Global Warming, but didn't mention why I recommended it, nor why I thought it would be useful for anyone thinking of debating anthropogenic global warming. Firstly, it is primarily a history book. If you wonder how scientists and lay people could have been gulled by a hoax or fraud, this book will take you back to the first notions that carbon dioxide played a part in world climate, and then tell the story of the following scientific back and forth. It shows the process that resulted in what some call the present scientific consensus. Secondly, this book is recommended by AGW skeptics -- Weart is one of the few partisans of the AGW 'side' who has not been excoriated as a fraudster, hoaxer or worse. Thirdly, the book is accompanied by some in-depth web-based resources.

Yup. Same point made by Dick Morris on his site and on O'Reilly, offering an explanation for Palin's current ratings in the polls. Same point .

I didn't yet find the particular Brit Hume comment you note about the furious Left, but did find this snip of a Fox appearance in which he cautions a 'radioactive' Palin.

From the context, Gene Wolfe's character Severian is speaking of the Autarch and the Third Bursar and the Algedonic Quarter, plus Jonas, Dorcas and Vodalus -- not to mention the guilds, the Increate and 'body cells of exultant women.' That much is clear. As for the repeal, how is it supposed to clear the US Senate? Perhaps Riggenbach/Wolfe have another apodictic remonstrance at the ready to guide the stupid through the fog. And indeed, here it is, Rothbard through the mouth of Riggenbach: QED

You physically tossed OPAR away in frustration? I enjoy a rousing polemic. I enjoy reading Rand for the full-on roaring excoriations in her best material, as in my favourite The Comprachicos. She could pull off withering contempt and lack of explicit references when novelist or columnist or Nietzschean prophetess. Dorothy Parker might have said of OPAR, "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

Maybe not. I am feeling out the positions of those who have explicitly shown interest so far -- Robert, myself, Adam and you. I am hoping Adam might propose a structure, given his experience. The idea of a reading list has been bruited, and I pointed to one book that brought me over from agnosticism, Weart's, cited above. I am glad you are interested. Did you have a book or series of readings that informed your opinion, or that you suggest as useful backgrounders for one side or another? If we accept the terms as defined up-thread, do you have a statement you think might make a good debate resolution? I'd say four people are enough to get the ball rolling. William: Agreed. Four is sufficient. The question that is important to answer is the determination of the "status quo." My perception is that the status quo would involve the following aspects: 1) global warming exists; 2) the warming globally is directly due to mankind's x) population increase y) industrialization and z) striping of the aquifer by food production; and 3) this trend will destroy the planet. This will help me frame propositional wording. 2 and 3 strike me oddly -- are these claims that any rational person or scientific group has made? "Destroy the world"? Who claims that? "Strip aquifer"? Where is that claim made, and who suggests it has anything to do with CO2? I like much more the implied proposition in "the global warming scientific fraud." If we started with 'anthropogenic global warming,' and accepted the definitions above, a much fairer restating of AGW theory must include CO2, to my eyes. Here is where you stood above: I would assert the hypothesis that mankind is one of the smallest causes of the increase in the near surface temperature of the earth. Moreover, the warming and cooling is cyclical and we are basically irrelevant to the huge biosphere that is this planet.I would assert the hypothesis that mankind is one of the smallest causes of the increase in the near surface temperature of the earth. I would also like to see some other recommendations, so I ask the same thing of you: Do you have a book or series of readings that informed your opinion, or that you suggest as useful backgrounders for one side or another?

I figure the Peikoff was honest in his pitch -- the book ain't for academics. Ross wrote/writes very much for the academics, or that part of academia growing out of kookpants sociology. His contempt for 'truth seeking' in science was complete, and it blew back and made him seem like a fool. I figure if you want to crush the folks you wish to crush, you need to be very familiar with the arguments on the other side. You need to take an honest evaluation of the other side, and if you don't engage with the other side, you run the risk of sealing yourself up in an echo chamber. What I didn't like in the Peikoff book in question was the utter lack of pointed references and examples. He would make a charge -- in the form of "X says Y," but leave out the the means by which a reader could check his argument. Who was X and where did X say Y? -- that was the question that pounded away in my mind reading OPAR until the book finally hit the wall . . .

Maybe not. I am feeling out the positions of those who have explicitly shown interest so far -- Robert, myself, Adam and you. I am hoping Adam might propose a structure, given his experience. The idea of a reading list has been bruited, and I pointed to one book that brought me over from agnosticism, Weart's, cited above. I am glad you are interested. Did you have a book or series of readings that informed your opinion, or that you suggest as useful backgrounders for one side or another? If we accept the terms as defined up-thread, do you have a statement you think might make a good debate resolution? I'd say four people are enough to get the ball rolling.

Do you have a cite for this? From a Ford Hall Forum appearance, apparently -- as cited in Ayn Rand Answers: Q: Could you write a revised edition of Intorduction to Objectivist Epistemology for people with an IQ of 110, or will it remain available only to people with an IQ of 150? A: I'd prefer that people raise their IQ from 110 to 150. It can be done.

Sometimes the withering contempt for the target is apt, sometimes not. Consider the 'science studies' critical theorist Andrew Ross, who wrote in the acknowledgments to his gamey Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits, 'This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them.' Since he didn't pay attention to any science but to rail again its practitioners in his 'critical texts,' he failed to catch the shit science of Alan Sokal's spoof, and published it in his journal Social Text, thus attracting much hilarity and ridicule of his pretensions . . . As for the Peikoff, I think he made an honest offer; although Rand and he may hold that a coming revolution in human thought and society must proceed from proper philosophies and from an informed intelligentsia, he made it difficult for intelligent philosophers to take him seriously by pitching so low. Now he pitches even lower with his 40 watt podcasts to the anointed. Ah, arrogance. Ah, humility.

It's something like the irony derived from the people of Lake Wobegon, "Where all the women are beautiful and all the children are above average." Derived also from the idea that we are sometimes the least qualified to judge our own competence. Also derived from the idea that naming oneself an Objectivist tells you not much more about that person's intelligence and reasoning abilities than that the person calls him or herself an Objectivist. Zee proof is in zee pudding.