After the previous Republican debate last week, Jon Stewart nailed the development in the Republican party that I wrote about in this post.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
After the previous Republican debate last week, Jon Stewart nailed the development in the Republican party that I wrote about in this post.
One cannot help but observe a sharp rise in religious belief and anti-science feeling in American politics. Almost all the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination either wear their religion on their sleeves and proudly proclaim their religious fervor at every opportunity (Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain) or support at least some policies that are counter to science and seem to be religion-based (Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich). Only Jon Huntsman seems to be exempt from this particular feature although his policies in general are extremely pro-oligarchy. The fact that he’s getting nowhere, at least in 2012, shows how strong this religious feeling is.
[Read more…]
The Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry is having its 2011 Humanism Award banquet on Friday, September 30th 2011 at 7:00 pm at the Crowne Plaza Independence, 5300 Rockside Road, Independence, OH 44131.
The award is being given to Page Stephens, PhD, “who, as cofounder and seventeen year president of the now-disbanded South Shore Skeptics, was instrumental in cultivating a burgeoning skeptics community on the southern banks of Lake Erie and proved himself a staunch defender of science over pseudoscience.”
The featured speaker is the well-known biologist blogger P. Z. Myers.
Via Progressive Review, I learn that the chance of:
Being killed by a terrorist is 1 in 20 million
Being struck by lightning is 1 in 6 million
Being executed in Texas is 1 in 1 million
Dying in a bathtub is 1 in 800,000
Dying in a building fire is 1 in 99,000
Dying in a car accident is 1 in 19,000
Until the terrorism threat approaches that of a car accident, I don’t see any point in worrying. So let’s shut down the national security state and bring back civil liberties and the rule of law.
Reader Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write sent me this link to a Australian TV show that seems to have as its premise asking advertising agencies to come up with campaigns for extreme ideas. They usually get a good response but when they asked for campaigns to ban all religions, for the first time ad agencies declined to take part, even though earlier suggestions such as ‘Invade New Zealand’ or ‘Bring back child labor’ or ‘Euthanize everyone over eighty’ had not dissuaded them.
(For other posts in this series, see here.)
Reader Jeff asked three good questions about some of the issues I discussed in my series on the logic of science that I would like to address here. What follows are his questions and my responses.
“First, in Part II you discuss the concepts of Know-How and Know-Why. I am curious as to what extent these concepts might be applied to understanding the differences between the Hard Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, &c.) and the Soft Sciences (Psychology, Sociology, &c.) Are what we call Soft Sciences sciences at all?”
Science has considerable prestige as providing reliable knowledge and as a result many fields of study aspire to that label. But the issue of what distinguishes science from non-science is as yet unresolved. The know-how/know why distinction of Aristotle ceased to be considered viable as a means of distinguishing science from non-science when Newton came along. His laws of motion and gravity were spectacularly successful in explaining the motion of objects, especially the solar system. He thus provided the ‘know-why’ that had been previously missing from the purely empirical field of astronomy, lifting it into the realm of science. [Read more…]
Reading the Sunday papers was really quick today. I skipped over all the articles that had anything to do with 9/11, which resulted in almost the entire front and the forum sections being eliminated, along with good chunks of the others. Even the comic section, my favorite, took less time because some of them took the occasion to voice some sappy sentiment.
I was interested in seeing how the paper would deal with the first game of the football season for our team but in this one area, they did not let the anniversary get in the way and produced a full sports section and a supplement on the coming season.
The paper may wallow in manufactured grief but it has its priorities. Nothing gets in the way of football.
In this interview on Canadian television, journalist Chris Hedges, author of the book The Death of the Liberal Class adds texture to the bleak picture that I have been painting of the consequences of the complete oligarchic takeover of the US.
(Thanks to Norm)
Glenn Greenwald’s discussion on the ACLU report on the steep decline of civil liberties in in the US in the wake of that event is well worth reading.
The preamble to the ACLU report highlights the four major ways in which freedoms have been seriously compromised.
Everywhere And Forever War
The report begins with an examination of the contention that the U.S. is engaged in a “war on terror” that takes place everywhere and will last forever, and that therefore counterterrorism measures cannot be balanced against any other considerations such as maintaining civil liberties. The report states that the United States has become an international legal outlier in invoking the right to use lethal force and indefinite military detention outside battle zones, and that these policies have hampered the international fight against terrorism by straining relations with allies and handing a propaganda tool to enemies.
A Cancer On Our Legal System
Taking on the legacy of the Bush administration’s torture policy, the report warns that the lack of accountability leaves the door open to future abuses. “Our nation’s official record of this era will show numerous honors to those who authorized torture – including a Presidential Medal of Freedom – and no recognition for those, like the Abu Ghraib whistleblower, who rejected and exposed it,” it notes.
Fracturing Our “More Perfect Union”
The report details how profiling based on race and religion has become commonplace nationwide, with the results of such approaches showing just how wrong and ineffective those practices are. “Targeting the American Muslim community for counterterrorism investigation is counterproductive because it diverts attention and resources that ought to be spent on individuals and violent groups that actually pose a threat,” the report says. “By allowing – and in some cases actively encouraging – the fear of terrorism to divide Americans by religion, race, and belief, our political leaders are fracturing this nation’s greatest strength: its ability to integrate diverse strands into a unified whole on the basis of shared, pluralistic, democratic values.”
A Massive and Unchecked Surveillance Society
Concluding with the massive expansion of surveillance since 9/11, the report delves into the many ways the government now spies on Americans without any suspicion of wrongdoing, from warrantless wiretapping to cell phone location tracking – but with little to show for it. “The reality is that as governmental surveillance has become easier and less constrained, security agencies are flooded with junk data, generating thousands of false leads that distract from real threats,” the report says.