Category Archives: Critical Thinking

God’s Name

28 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by in COVID-19, Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Logic, Religion

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I see yet another story bemoaning the death of a willfully stupid fool who not only denied the reality of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) but also declared that he would place himself “in God’s hands”, both to avoid catching the disease, and then survive it once caught. Well, God appears to have been too busy trying to wipe a grease stain off those hands to attend to this gentleman’s demands, because said individual got sick, suffered, and died gasping for air while intubated.

I’m going to step outside my usual zone of operation and address a few words at those staggeringly vain individuals who imagine it is their unique privilege to tell God what to do. Now, as a proper Whiteheadian, I do believe that the term “God” has minimal reference and conceptual content. Not even remotely enough to form the kind of center of meaning that one might go to church to celebrate. For that, one must move well beyond Whitehead and into the process theology that owes its source to Charles Hartshorne. Much of this latter, though not all by any means, is also rooted in various interpretations of Christianity. And while even this is beyond the scope of my primary interests, I’m actually going to address my remarks to the vastly more conservative field that tends to identify as evangelical or fundamentalist. (While there can be overlaps, the two groups are NOT the samei.) I’ll spare you any fatuous declarations as to either the reality of these people’s God, the truth of their concept(s), or the validity of the Bible. In fact, I’ll be taking these things as given. Rather, what I want to show is that a certain class of behavior that they publicize as evidence of their devout faith is, by their own standards, a gross and indefensible sin. It is not hard to show.

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Year of The Plague 5: Get to Work!

28 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Economics, General Philosophy, Plague

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I recently learned that I was, in fact, born in a plague year, 1957, during the early stages of the “Asian Flu” pandemic. (I’ll have more to say about this naming convention in a moment.) Estimates on mortality in the US range from a low of 70,000 to a high of 116,000. (Information on the H2N2 pandemic may be found HERE.) After some 12 weeks (rather than the 12+ months during which H2N2 ravaged the world) COVID-19 is already at the upper limit of that earlier pandemic.i With the inevitable second wave of infections and deaths that will come with the push to reopen the country regardless of consequences; with sloppy and unevenly applied testing, almost non-existent contact tracing; and with the monumental infantilism of people who believe their right to be slobbering, self-absorbed imbeciles trumps your right to live, the death toll from the SARS-CoV-2 virus will easily surpass that of H2N2 by the middle of summer. (And, let’s face it: that is a conservative estimate.)

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A word about that “Asian flu” moniker: It was common to name diseases after a place, sometimes even the place where the disease was first located or even came from. This rule has always been applied unevenly; for instance, the “Spanish Flu” pandemic most certainly did NOT originate in Spain. So why aren’t we calling SARS-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus,” or COVID-19 the “Chinese disease”? One is almost inclined to admire the willful stupidity of persons pretending puzzlement over these questions, since the answer is so manifestly obvious: because doing so is blatantly racist and serves no other purpose than to function as a dog-whistle trigger for low-lifes such as the pond-scum comprising Donald Trump’s political base. One might as well complain that, “My grandfarther used to call black people by the ‘n’ word, and address them as ‘boy’! Why shouldn’t I be allowed to do that now, since it was so commonplace back then?” The naming convention for the disease has already been established, so no excuse other than racism can be offered for changing it in such a way as to blame a certain ethnic group. And let’s face it, even if SARS-CoV-2 is too tricky for their poor, pea-puddin’ racist brains to remember, terms like “novel coronavirus” and “COVID-19” are simple enough that even a remedial 3rd grader can learn and use them properly, all with little or no effort.

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The Implicit “All”

12 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Logic

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One of the fundamental units in logical analysis is that function/operatori lovingly known as “the quantifier.” Most logic texts content themselves with just two: “all” and “some,” formally symbolized as “” and “” respectively. Thus, to say that, “All X is p,” one is asserting that every (or any) instance of X is also an instance of p, or is characterized by p, etc. Similarly, when someone says only that, “Some X is p,” the claim is made that, if one looks hard enough, one will find at least one instance where X is p. There are ways of precisifying (one of those $5.00 words philosophers love to use) the above statements, but there is hardly any need to do so here. It suffices to have a general idea. Two points I’ll mention in passing. First, in most formal contexts (substructural logics are an example of an exception), “all” and “some” are defined as being interchangeable using “not”: thus, “not-All X is not-p” is taken to mean “Some X is p,” and conversely. Secondly, these are not the only quantifiers possible: “many” and “most” are also examples. But these last two are difficult to formalize (to say the least) and by a polite convention among logicians they are generally ignored wholesale.Implicit All

As the title of this post states, I wish to talk about what I am calling the implicit “all”; uses of the “all” quantifier in which that quantifier is functioning but not explicitly stated. This happens quite often, in point of fact, and is not problematical in itself. Where problems do arise is when that usage is not merely implicit, but actively denied as a means of evading the consequences of what someone has actively stated or written. When this happens, we are faced not merely with a logical error, but an overt act of dishonesty. The dishonesty becomes not merely overt but blatant when, even after the implicit “all” is pointed out, the individual continues to deny it. Continue reading →

The Myth of Technofix

26 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Climate Change, Critical Thinking, Global warming

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On a more or less regular basis, some wild-eyed enthusiast in a lab coat will get his name – and by my account, they’ve all been men, the reasons for which will become evident as we proceed – in the media by proposing some massively destructive campaign of crapping all over the global environment in order to “save” it from AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming). In order to make such a deliberately manufactured catastrophe sound respectable, it is given a fancified, multi-syllabic name: geoengineering. According to these well-paid (male) lab-coats, the way to make things better is to make them unimaginably – and, most terrifyingly – unpredictably, worse. One is reminded of the enthusiastic, lower-level Air Force PR officer who effused to the press how it was necessary to destroy some particular Vietnamese village in order to “save” it. These days this isn’t even recognized as ironic. One is also reminded of the nursery rhyme about the Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly. But getting people to recognize an obvious analogy is almost as distressed a program as getting them to notice irony.Sisyphus

Now, everyone who isn’t intransigently stupid, viciously dishonest, or some combination of both, has long since recognized the reality of AGW. Gee golly willikers, it was cold in some places in North America this Winter. Well, given that we’re talking about less than 1.84% of the entire surface of the Earth, a person might feel justified in asking if there might just possibly be a difference between GLOBAL warming and “your backyard” warming? Or again, the fact that the destabilization of the winter jetstream that leads to the “polar vortex” is itself a consequence of global warming, as unparalleled warmth moves into the Arctic and pushes relatively cold air South, is not one of those arcane secrets that gets hidden away in books, so that the denialists will never find it. So, the question is: What do we do about it? Continue reading →

It’s Not Easy Being Green

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Altemeyer, Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Green Party, Hillary Clinton, Politics

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The Green party has long been anathema to any genuine progressive turn in American politics now for upwards of twenty years or more. Beginning with Nader’s undercutting Gore’s electoral chances and thus putting Shrub (the lesser Bush) in the office of the President, the Green party has done everything in its power to demonstrate its absolute rejection of basic logic (to say nothing of facts on the ground) in favor of an “ideology” that amounts to nothing more than self-absorbed infantilism.kermit confused

And yes, I too have seen the strained fabrications that have self-righteously proclaimed that Nader did not cost Gore Florida in 2000. But like any person gifted with nothing more exotic than the mere abstract possibility of intelligence or thought, I recognize these exercises in childish excuse-making for what they are. This nonsense has even gone so far as to claim that Nader voters would have turned to Bush, had Nader not been running. Which is to say, Gore wasn’t far enough to the political left for such people, so in the absence of Nader they would have leapt even further to the political right. The only imaginable reason for doing so would be sheer, infantile spite which, given the nature of the Green party and its devotees, is actually almost believable. But I’m going to work on the assumption that Green party voters are merely stupid, as opposed to self-absorbed, narcissistic, intransigently petty, sniveling little cry-babies. If I am mistaken on this point, I apologize in advance. Continue reading →

At Least I Have Chicken

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, John Dewey, Process Philosophy

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Person’s familiar with the gaming world might well recognize the title of this essay as a quote from a famous incident in the online game World of Warcraft. The incident, recorded and posted on YouTube (see video below) might be labeled The Last Charge of Leroy Jenkins. A group of players are nervously planning a complex attack against a difficult, game generated collection of very dangerous “creatures” (the online game permits players in remote locations to play together, and communicate verbally even as they operate their “character” in the game.) But after a few minutes of this, one of them (“Leroy Jenkins”) loses all patience with the process, declares “Enough talk!” and rushes into the midst of the creatures bellowing his battle cry, “LEEEROY JENKINS!!!” Caught off guard, the other members of the team realize they’ve lost the advantage of surprise and follow in, only to have the entire team wiped out by this cluster of creatures. As they bitterly review this catastrophe, casting an occasional word of criticism in Jenkins’ direction, Leroy simply responds, “At least I have chicken” (presumably in his real world crib, as there is none in the game.)

The whole thing is much funnier if you’ve had any experience with multi-player roll-playing games, whether online, networked, or old school paper and painted tokens D&D. But the behavior is familiar to us all from the broader reaches of our lives, as we recognize a form of doomed compromise that those around us – and most likely we ourselves, at one time or another – have made. This came out again recently in a colleagues interaction with the students in his class. (It is not revealing much to note that said colleague is, indeed, a man.) The colleague was presenting one of the classic figures of Western philosophy, and the students began asking in reply, “but how important is this really?” Discussion went back and forth a few times until finally exasperated, my colleague said something to the effect that, “the alternative is to be an uneducated pawn in a machine that views you as nothing more than a commodity to be used until you’re used up, suffering the waste of your life in a job that offers no fulfillment, living in a house in the suburbs with a spouse that is indifferent to you and children that despise you!” There was a moment’s silence, when finally one student replied, “at least we’ll have a house in the suburbs.”

At least they’ll have chicken. Continue reading →

What is Populism?

06 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Fascism, Metaphysics, Politics

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The question came up on social media, What is populism? I had my own little St. Augustine moment, where I realized that, as long as no one asked me, I knew exactly what I meant by the term, but as soon as someone asked I had no idea. (In fairness to Augustine, his moment was around the significantly more subtle notion of “what is time?”) I could run off to the dictionary and waste people’s time by quoting that, but I won’t. For one thing, the dictionary (like Wikipedia itself) is not the answer to a question (other than “how do I spell this word?”), it is the starting point for asking questions. Further, dictionary answers aren’t always that well considered. Thus, the dictionary will tell you that an ad hominem fallacy occurs any time you say something bad about a person, ignoring the fact that, in order to be an actual fallacy, it must be either irrelevant or untrue (or both). Finally I’ve enough acquaintance with the word “populism” via use – both my own and other peoples – that the dictionary will either tell me nothing new or, like ad hominem, tell me something wrong.Mob action

After I make of quick gloss of the sorts of things that populism is at an absolute minimum, I’ll go on to suggest two different developments of the idea. One development leaves populism as a relatively “morally neutral” political method or technique, while the other will put it squarely in the negatives as a substantially fascist instrument. Neither one of these approaches represents the “truth” about populism, or the “real definition”; they are simply different ways in which the word can be used, ways that should never be conflated. I’ll finish with some thoughts from Whitehead and Dewey about the philosophical underpinnings of the kinds of popular relationalism that strengthen genuine democracy. Continue reading →

Argumentum ad Baculum

12 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in Academia, Bullying, Critical Thinking, Fascism, Power, Professoriate, Social Media

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According to the American Association of University Professors (as reported by CNN), “In the last year, more than 100 incidents of targeted harassment against professors have been reported on college campuses.” These reactions have reached the level of actual death threats, so that some professors have been banned from campuses, so as not to expose the rest of the community to potential violence. This is not the kind of situation that would be rendered more secure by everyone carrying guns, since that would erase the distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” a distinction that would NOT become clearer once someone started shooting, since no one would know who started shooting first, or if it was a “bad guy” or “good guy” that started it. This is why, happy as I would be for permanent employment, I would never accept employment at a college or university that permitted any form of civilian “carry” on campus: a wild-eyed pack of posturing, untrained rubes with deadly weapons at the ready makes no one safer; it takes a special kind of stupid to imagine otherwise.

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But here we find ourselves in a situation where professors are receiving enormous volumes of vicious, if not always credible, threats upon their very lives for the kinds of things they have said in public. How did all these poor little, anonymous (because the cowards are always anonymous), tragically butthurt babies come to decide that the legitimate response to the public expression of a reasoned conclusion (I avoid the vacuous notion of “opinion”) is a threat of violence or even death? Certainly the election of the “crypto”-fascist Trump has energized many white supremacist and neo-nazi groups and sympathizers, and silencing by way of the threat (or act) of violence has long been a favored technique of such people. Which brings us to the title of this post, which is the fallacy of the argumentum ad baculum, the “argument from the stick”: using threats of violence and other forms of intimidation to compel others to accept your position. Continue reading →

Evidence

20 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by in Cherry Picking, Conspiracy Theories, Critical Thinking, Gun Control, Politics

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In one of the more spectacularly fatuous recent displays of why formal public debates are a complete waste of time, Ken Ham (creationist promoter of Kentucky’s financial albatross “Noah’s Arc” theme park) and Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) “debated” the question of evolution versus creationism. Now, for there to be a debate, there first has to be something TO debate and, in this instance of course, there was not. While there are many scientific issues of deep perplexity still to be found in the theory of evolution, there is no reasoned question as to the FACT of evolution. Creationism, on the other hand, lacks even the abstract possibility of scientific – or even logical – content; not even amounting to a fabulous “just so story,” creationism is nothing but childish hand-waving, and it is incapable of being anything other than such hand-waving. (Detailed scientific texts on evolution can be downloaded for free from the National Academies Press HERE.)Ham-Nye-debate-in-a-nutshell

Still, one of the stand-out moments of this exercise in wasted time, which thoroughly demonstrates why the entire exercise was a waste of time, came at the end, when Ken Ham and Bill Nye were both asked what would suffice to lead them to change their mind regarding their position. Ham’s reply was an immediate and unqualified, “Nothing.” Nye, on the other hand, responded almost as instantly, saying, “Evidence.” Ham perfectly exemplifies the pointlessness of “debating” with people such as himself; there is no discussion to be had with the willfully impenetrable. Nevertheless, current events have me thinking once again about the role of evidence and denial in our society today. So this seems like a good opportunity to return to the subject, albeit in contexts other than that of creationism. Continue reading →

Stoicism for Every Day

01 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Public Philosophy, Stoicism

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A very nice “Intro to Stoicism” was brought to my attention the other day that I wanted to share with folks here. NJLifehacks “10 Stoic Core Principles” is an interesting and handy read on the subject. One of the most interesting aspects of stoicism (besides the fact that it is widely misunderstood) is that it is NOT an academic pursuit, but a method of achieving what the Greeks called “eudaimonia.” For reasons that have long mystified me, this term is generally translated as “happiness,” but a vastly superior translation would be “living well.”MarcusAurelius

The “eu” in “eudaimonia” is the Greek particle meaning “well,” but it also translates as “healthy”. Thus, if you’re a dog owner, you’re probably aware of the dog food Eukanuba. Since “kanuba” comes from the Greek root meaning “dog,” the brand name literally translates as “healthy dog.” The “daimonia” in eudaimonia means something like “spirit,” though in a different sense from the Greek word “pneuma.” So eudaimonia means something like “healthy spiritedness” or, as already noted, living well. That is a little like happiness, as long as we don’t confuse happiness with pleasure. Being a stoic does not mean a life of giggles, kittens, and carnival rides. Continue reading →