I saw that d r i f t g l a s s was also celebrating David Bowie’s birthday with this video: Never Get Old. I like it so much I had to post it too.
Excellent! OK, I promise to try to never get old.
Sam Harris has really done it now. He’s stepped into the gun control debate with The Riddle of the Gun, and he’s taking the side of Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. And he’s also making a series of logic-defying assertions that have no credibility at all. I’m not even going to try to work through them all; this subject is clearly a bit of an obsession with him. But throughout, he takes a very personal and rather paranoid view of the world and makes it a justification for individual self-defense, which I think is his big mistake. For instance,
…if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not the fault of the police—it is a problem of physics.
Hmmm. If I’m on a crowded street, and the person behind me pulls a knife, I can’t expect the police to stop him in time, either — it is a problem of physics.
If the guy in the house across the street has a sniper rifle aimed at my bedroom window, waiting for my silhouette to cross his scope, I can’t expect the police to stop the bullet in time — it is a problem of physics.
If a disgruntled student rolls up to my front door in a tank, I can’t expect the SWAT team from Minneapolis to get all the way here in time — it is a problem of physics.
What I see over and over again in Harris and rabid defenders of gun ownership is something other than just merely seeing guns as a tool: it’s the cult of the rugged individual, the lone cowboy on his own in hostile territory, where the only recourse is to be quick on the draw. What’s the answer to any trouble? Why, you take care of it yourself, usually by killing the troublemaker. It’s a simple, quick solution that doesn’t require any thinking at all.
He takes a complicated problem — that an individual wants to do him great harm (something I have no trouble believing) — and reduces it to a simplistic scenario — the hostile bad guy is in his house, with a gun! — that can only be resolved by his personal decisiveness and training in firing right back at him.
Do I need to point out that in his scenario, he has already lost, no matter how well-trained he is with a firearm? He is having a gunfight in his home, with his family around him. Imagine yourself in your bedroom, pulling a pistol out of a bedside drawer, loading it, and calmly taking a few shots in the direction of the hallway, without the presence of an intruder to complicate and make even more dangerous the situation. This is not an action without consequences and without risk. But this is the preferred nightmare of the gun fanatics.
I prefer a multi-layered defense that relies on the cooperation of a community. I don’t want a gun put in my hands, because by the time the gun would be useful there have been multiple catastrophic failures of the whole system. An intruder should not be in my house. How about better locks, a security system, and regular police patrols in my neighborhood? An intruder should not be heavily armed. How about serious gun control that limits access to guns and monitors those who do have them? The intruder should not be vengefully gloating about the glory of shooting someone. How about changing the culture to stop worshipping gun violence, to stop thinking that killing an enemy resolves a problem rather than amplifying it?
I know already what response that will get: that it’s a starry-eyed optimistic dream. But what they won’t care about is that Harris’s dream of battling an evil-doer to the death with his well-practiced expertise in firing a gun is just as pie-in-the-sky, and that even in its most benign outcome, is still a horror and a nightmare.
This is my dismissal of the whole gun debate: that the answers the gun advocates propose all amplify the problem. The problem is the ready availability of guns and the willingness of self-righteous people (because, really, even the people gunning down school children are steadfast in their confidence that what they are doing is both right and necessary, as much so as the homeowner defending himself against a burglar) to resort to violent action to resolve conflicts. But they don’t bother to recognize that by the time deadly force is needed, it’s too late.
I promised I wouldn’t get sucked into a line-by-line dissection of Harris’s post. Fortunately, Eric MacDonald has exposed many of the logical fallacies in his argument, and Sean Faircloth has the facts and numbers that show his rationale is bogus.
I just want to emphasize that it’s a huge mistake to make the debate about the physics of the ultimate confrontation. The debate should be about how to make those gun-on-gun confrontations less likely.
This is the risk of taking call-ins on an atheist show — you have to deal with some of the most repulsive people in the country, Bible-believin’ Christians. So there they are, arguing the problem of evil with a caller like they do, and the caller makes one of the usual Christian excuses.
“I don’t think that God exists but if we’re talking about the God character in Bible as God is represented, you know, it’s a pretty horrible, jealous, angry being that advocates slavery,” Dillahunty pointed out. “I don’t know why he’s that way. Maybe he’s just a dick.”
“You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a God who simply watches it and says, ‘When you’re done, I’m going to punish you,’” Harris agreed. “If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That’s the difference between me and your God.”
“First of all, you portray that little girl as someone who’s innocent, she’s just as evil as you,” the caller shot back.
With that comment, Dillahunty disconnected the call.
“Goodbye, you piece of shit!” he exclaimed. “You know what? I was a better Christian than you when I was a Christian, and I still am.”
BAM! That’s how you do it!
Now let’s hear the cries of “Censorship! Free speech!” from the usual crowd.
We need a lot more of these. Check out Little Changes by Tiffany Taylor.
He’s released a new single for his 66th birthday — a lush, melancholy song that made me happy.
He’s looking good at 66. Even though I can’t quite imagine the thin white duke as a senior citizen yet.
Not so good, I’m afraid.
If you feel like torturing yourself some more, read the comments on that youtube video. They are…typical youtube comments.
I’m not a woman, but I’m a nerd, and we aren’t looking so hot, either.
I said I was done with this guy, but his latest includes a bit that annoys me to no end. Keith Kloor interviews Daniel Sarewitz to get ammo for his claim that religion and science are compatible.
Based on your piece, I would presume that you think the two are compatible. However, some of the prominent New Atheists, such as PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, insist that science and religion are incompatible. Why has this discussion become so binary? Why the either/or mindset exhibited by some atheists?
DS: There are lots of scientists who are also religious, so as an empirical matter science and religion are apparently not incompatible.
Gah. Dumb.
There are scientists who believe the earth is 6000 years old and that there was a global flood 4000 years ago. Therefore, science and creationism are perfectly compatible.
There are accountants who skim off profits and hide them in the books, therefore accounting is compatible with criminal larceny.
There are doctors who smoke, therefore smoking is compatible with healthy lungs.
Why has this discussion become so binary? Easy. Because some scientists have gigantic religious blindspots and want to pretend that their gullibility is part of their science.
I like the idea of MOOCs — massive open online courses — as ways to help spread the information at universities to a wider public. I don’t like the idea that these can replace real universities, though. It buys into the assumption that what universities deliver is big brains talking at a passive audience, when that’s only a small part of the experience. Scicurious is unimpressed, too.
Look, you want to learn? These online courses are a good supplement, and give you an opportunity to hear from experienced instructors. But if you really want to dig deep, there’s the disciplined grind as you try to master the minutia of a subject, there’s the hands-on lab experience, there’s give-and-take with peers and professors that you really need to bring it home. MOOCs just don’t do that.
I have a question for you all. I was reading this article about our terribly violent cultural surroundings, which includes both the Bible and American movies.
Whether history or mythology or some fusion of the two, the Bible stories, when tallied, include an estimated 25 million violent deaths. And yet, like any people, the internal narrative of God’s Chosen Ones is one of yearning for peace and prosperity, the dream of an idyllic past in which the lion lay down with the lamb; an idyllic future in which men will beat their swords into plowshares and the lamb and lion will lie down together again.
The Bible is a collection of stories about nasty genocidal people, with a message of peace that they pay lip service to while slaughtering their foes. American movies are all about brave heroes killing people to protect the good and kind.
So, the question: have you ever in your entire life settled a personal problem with violence? Have you resolved any conflicts by taking out your opposition, just destroying them to remove the obstacle to your life or happiness?
If you did use violence to fix a personal problem, did it work?
Just curious. I can think of only one time that I tried it; I hauled off and punched a grade-school bully in the face. It didn’t change anything, but it did make it worse, because a teacher (one who was a bullying jerk himself) decided to discipline me with a little corporal punishment — an hour of deep knee bends that left me barely able to walk afterwards.
Ever since, though, I’ve experienced nothing where I was tempted to resort to violent action, and nothing where I could believe that violence would help. There’s no situation that can’t be made worse by adding a gun, no opponent who will respond to a normal civic conflict by being cowed by the guy with a baseball bat.
Second question: so why is our media so saturated with bloody-minded simple solutions to problems? Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing up buildings with two-fisted cannons, Liam Neeson smashing heads and knifing evil-doers, superheroes solving every difficulty by applying force…it’s ludicrous that anyone imagines that these are effective answers to anything.
I’ve constricted my anus 100 times
Scientists intend to sequence Adam Lanza’s DNA. They’re looking for genetic markers for mass murder. Why? Because some scientists are stupid.
Some researchers, like Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them.
“We can’t afford not to do this research,” Dr. Beaudet said.
There must be genetic changes underlying this specific behavior? There is no reason at all to assume that. Furthermore, this isn’t “off the charts of normal behavior” — there have been 62 mass murder events in the US in the last 30 years. There are witch-burnings going on in Africa right now. European Americans casually exterminated the native population of the Americas, and now pens the remnant population in reservations where they are kept in poverty. We had entire nations worth of people involved in the mass murder of 6 million Jews in the last century. Hey, shall we round up a bunch of Germans and take DNA swabs so we can figure out what there is that’s unique to their genes that allows them to commit genocide? (I better be clear here: I’m being sarcastic. I really don’t think Germans have a biological predilection for racism or murder, any more than any other people.)
I would ask whether there is any reason to assume that this behavior is a heritable trait. Is there a familial history of mass murder? Are we really going to assume that the diverse individuals who have committed these horrific crimes are all related, or all carry some common marker that isn’t found in people who don’t commit murder?
I can predict exactly what will be found when they look at Adam Lanza’s DNA. It will be human. There will be tens of thousands of little nucleotide variations from reference standards scattered throughout the genome, because all of us carry these kinds of differences. The scientists will have no idea what 99% of the differences do. They will make dubious associations — for example, they might find a novel nucleotide in a gene that has other variants correlated with schizophrenia — and in the absence of any causal link at all, they’ll publish garbage papers that try to impute a signal to common genetic noise. Some idiot will make noise about screening for an obscure mutation that Lanza carried, just because it’s something different.
I wonder if there are neurologists poking around in his brain, looking for differences, too. It’s the same issue; we don’t understand the majority of the functional consequences of individual variations in connectivity in the brain, and we have a population with large amounts of random variation. So how are you going to recognize what’s special and unique and causal about Lanza’s brain (or Einstein’s brain, or my brain, or yours)?
Fortunately, there are some sensible people out there.
“It is almost inconceivable that there is a common genetic factor” to be found in mass murders, said Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist and neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “I think it says more about us that we wish there was something like this. We wish there was an explanation.”
I suspect the explanation is going to be more a consequence of individual experience, although of course biology is going to shape how we respond to circumstance. But to go rifling about in a genome we don’t understand to find a simple cause is ridiculous and futile. Sure, freeze some cells down and store them away; maybe some day we’ll understand more and there will be a legitimate and specific hypothesis that can be tested by examining killers’ genetics…but a fishing expedition is pointless and dumb, and at this state of our understanding, only opens the door to misconceptions and ethics abuses.
