achoice

The fundamental moral choice is to value something rather than nothing.

denyskeptic

The skeptic applies doubt to everything, including especially oneself. Denialists apply doubt only to reaffirm their committed selves.

Denial of climate change, like denial of evolution, is heavily concentrated within the United States, and therein heavily concentrated among those aligned with or influenced by a particular political faction.

Do not honor denialists by calling them skeptics. I'd feel reluctant applying the word skeptic to lots of people, including myself.

letnotutbeaz

Daily Herald story
Deseret News story
Couldn't find anything on ksl or sltrib.

I was glad to be one of the I'd say 150+ people who braved the descending cold to be on the steps of the Utah State Capitol building. Though I can't help seeing chants from a meta perspective, sometimes shouting along, but often just amused by them.

Good speakers, though not always the best speeches. Each speech cycled to hit the same key phrases, which works as a kind of poetic rhetorical mnemonic, but i'ts a bit on the blunt side.

I signed up for United for Social Justice's mailing list, though for the time being I work during their meeting times. I'm leery of the other group there, the UVU Revolutionary Student Union. Their main organizer is clearly bright, passionate, and dedicated, but they go out of their way to specifically say they're not closed to those who believe in violence.

Ideally, I like the idea of open borders. In a free world, anyone should be able to live where they like. Practicality should consist not in lamenting the impossibility of the ideal while reinforcing its opposite, but in working incrementally to make the reality more like the ideal.

Nations are an occasionally useful fiction. Fixed borders are a more recent and philosophically suspect notion. The borders of a place were the vague area where a power couldn't reliably project its control.

It's ironic and hypocritical to blast the people coming to our shores and borders when what drives them here is economic situations often imposed on their home countries by our corporations, our strategic doctrines, and our Department of State.

Our laws need to be reformed to make legal immigration easier, and yes, amnesty will need to figure into that. Stricter enforcement of bad laws won't fix a broken system. Strict enforcement of disrespected law undermines respect for the rule of law.

newcentrismanditsdiscontents

I read this and thought it needed some spreading around. Of course, I've already demonstrated my tendency to align with Lakoff, he says what needs to be said about the language and philosophy behind political positions, and the political positioning behind political language.

The "New Centrism" and Its Discontents, by George Lakoff

On another note, I'm going to try to adjust my web2.0 usage. Since this blog feeds my facebook anyway, I'll try to put any non-slice-of-life thoughts here first, not reassembled here later.
HTML is more flexible, anyway.

monist

Dualists want to tell us there must be more than merely this mundane world. We must be able to tell them that this world is not mundane nor mere, and that what are separately called physical, mental, spiritual, material, are of one Nature.

(Dualism, of course, is the philosophical notion that reality is divided into two realms: one of meat, dirt, and atoms, the other of emotion, meaning, and mind-soul stuff.)

lootingschool

Rick Scott's School Plan for Scoundrels
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/12/rick-scott-florida-education-jeb-bush

It's not just a hypothetical harm, as charter schools in many states have demonstrated. Charter schools get paid by the number of kids they enroll, and they are free from much of the bureaucracy Republicans like to bash so much. All that money mixed with all that freedom hasn't produced much in the way of an education boost: Charter schools perform no better and often much worse than traditional ones. But they have produced a bumper crop of fraudsters.

Do advocates of scrapping the public schools and invoking private school vouchers as panacea actually think that, were Germany and Japan to do the same thing, they would start kicking our asses at math and science even more?

These people don't value an educated populace as necessary to democracy. They don't value the basic human right to learn and understand the universe. They aren't really concerned with improving education at all, they just see public education as a lost opportunity to loot riches.

However effective or ineffective, public education at least carries a moral mission beyond increasing shareholder value.

Privatizing essential public infrastructure is devastating for the people of every country and polity it has ever been inflicted on.

granddesign

The Grand Design by Stephen W. Hawking

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a good explanation of general relativity and quantum theory for the layman. However, I can see it becoming the standard recommended text for a bunch of fuzzy-thinking newage religions accompanied by their misleading interpretations to show how "scientific" they are. Also, it may not be clear that Hawking in fact represents particular 'sides' of a few approaches and theories that remain in dispute.

I find myself wondering how much of the style is Hawking's and how much Mlodinow's. The cynical rule is that most of the work was done by the less-famous author. Still, it's kind of fun to imagine the text as being all in Hawking's computer-voice.

As I said, the explanations of gravity, quantum theory, and the standard model are very good, including curvature of space, multiple quantum histories contributing to measured results, and particle bestiaries, but M-Theory, the purported theme of the whole book that's supposed to unite them all, gets fairly brisk and vague explanation. They compare it to a set of overlapping maps that all agree where they overlap, but none of which could ever be extended to a single accurate map of the whole globe. They speak of 10^500 possible universes in quantum superstate, one of which we experience, and take the reader through the anthropomorphic principle to show the fact of our existence places restrictions/selections on which possible universes we can experience.

Unfortunately, that M-Theory is the final theory comes across more as a final assertion than as the logical conclusion of the whole book. As does the idea (however interesting) that the universe can emerge from nothing because on a universal scale, the negative energy of gravity precisely balances the positive energy of matter so that the whole energy of the universe is zero, which is also abruptly dropped on the reader at the end.

I'd recommend this as one of several layman's introductions to science, but not as one to stand alone for physics and cosmology.



View all my reviews

somenotinthis

A few years ago, someone on the right of the spectrum was in my e-mail saying that the idea of "we're all in this together" was the source of everything wrong with America, distorting people's ideas with socialist thoughts and unAmerican values (and depleting precious bodily fluids, no doubt.)
Several days ago, someone on the right of the spectrum was on the radio saying that because "we're all in this together," the most well-off people in America need to keep tax cuts that have cost the country billions. (Yeah, because tax rates are the single biggest problem facing all Americans today. Note that he didn't come out and say that the costs would require scaling back or cutting out essential services to the less well-off people in America.)

thisisapost

This blog is not dead, just neglected as per usual.
I'd composed an essay on the Park51 issue, which may not be timely anymore. I'll at least put it here, but parts of it can be worked into another essay I've been composing on First Amendment issues in general, which I plan to send to a few newspapers as well as put online. It works in honor of the upcoming 90th Anniversary of the ACLU's beginning, and in the spirit of "now that the election circus is over, real work can begin." Whatever change ought to be, it won't be achieved through elected officials, but by affecting and effecting the cognitive and moral landscape of society.

I've been maintaining the Utah Freethought Society's activity, however minimal, with the goal of promoting skepticism, science literacy, and open discussion. Our latest topic discussion of Israel/Palestine has attracted more interest than we've had in recent weeks, so I hope a good turnout comes of it. I've also met with the local Coffee Party a bit. They're planning an endrun push for the Disclose Act before the congressional changeover, Then the Utah bunch will try to help the local Fair Boundaries anti-gerrymandering push.

My ancient desktop has been choking on software and had network access problems. Not having the patience to fix it the right way, I'm running off a Crunchbang Statler live CD right now. I think I'll have the monetary flexibility to complete a new desktop soon, then the question of whether to include a Windows partition for the first time in a couple years will be upon me. I may do so just because I've been jonesing to run through the Thief series again, but there's little other reason to run Windows.

Meanwhile, some recent recent thoughts pulled from FB, though I've been trying to reduce my time spent there:

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Re: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2010/11/louisiana_panel_votes_in_favor.html

The matter isn't with evolution being a theory. No duh, so is gravity. The matter is that "intelligent design" isn't. (Nor any other prettified version of creationism)
"Theory" is as good as it gets in real science, and ID plain hasn't done the work to qualify as such. It isn't an explanatory model, just a handwave, and it makes no predictions for what future discoveries might be on the horizon, what future tests might yield new knowledge. It's a worthless security blanket for those unwilling to reconcile their faith with the empirical realities of the world.

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Re: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/cindy-mccain-noh8-photo-m_n_430004.html

Cindy McCain actually provoked a lot of ire in conservative circles for this; claims she shouldn't go against her husband and that it was a "hateful" attack on conservative Christians and their values.
Of course in 15 years or so when nearly every U.S. State has gay marriage and adoption, conservative politicians of the future will point to her as proof that equal rights for gays was always a conservative goal.

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