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About Cowthulu
I was recently asked my opinion of the current debacle in the senate over filibusters and the nuclear option. I explained the recent history - how many Clinton nominees had been blocked via blue slips, committee processes, etc., and I also talked about the fact that the Senate is designed to be slow, and that, whatever way you feel about filibusters, there is certainly nothing unconstitutional about them, and nothing in the constitution obligating the senate to have or not have any particular process.
One thing I did not bring up, but that seems more important the more I think about, is the idea of party.
It is fairly well known that the founding fathers did not like the ideas of parties. Parties existed in England at the time - the original parties where the Tories and the Whigs, who initially came into existence just before, and, indeed, because of, the succession of James II. The Whigs were attempting to prevent a Catholic coming to the throne, and the Tories were doing their best to insure that he did.
It says something about the concept of parties in general that both terms - Tory and Whig, were terms of abuse given by their oppositions.
This was about a hundred years before the American revolution, so parties were an established concept, although they were not exactly parties as we would recognize today (for example, on most issues, party members generally didn't vote together). Jefferson in particular was very opposed to the idea of parties, although some (Hamilton I believe) were fairly convinced that they were inevitable.
America avoided having parties for all of eight years (or less) - pretty much until the 1800 race between Adams (a Federalist) and Jefferson (a Democratic-Republican). FWIW, that race, in some ways, makes the Bush/Kerry race look quite tame and polite.
Like the British parties, however, those parties were quite different than the parties of today. Sure, there were common beliefs shared among the members, and particular issues on which they worked together. However, the idea that a member of a party would, on any other issue, vote with their party against their personal conscience, just because it was their party, would have been considered insulting and, probably, immoral.
Times have changed somewhat.
If it were not for the current way in which parties work, I would actually be in favor of straight up-or-down votes. Each member of the senate would evaluate the qualifications and record of each member, and would vote accordingly. Instead, what we have is the vast majority of each party voting on party lines, with only an occasional (and castigated) moderate voting their conscience.
This means that, at the moment, to be in the majority means carte blanche to do whatever the leaders of the majority want - damn balance of powers, damn the fact that the majority represents barely half of the population of the country, and while your at it, damn your conscience.
In a reasonable world, the extremists (ex: Owen, Brown, Pryor) would have no chance of passing the senate because they are too obviously unqualified, and way too far outside the mainstream (and I believe that any extreme left-wing jurist should also stand no chance of passing). Of course, in a reasonable world, they would never have been nominated in the first place.
It says a lot about the extreme-right that they are furious about the deal reached yesterday where they get virtually everything they want. Yet, because of these ideologues, the senate came close to a complete meltdown.
So, how far away are we from the original idea of a balance of power, democracy, a republic? Madison said in the Federalist Papers (#10 if memory serves) that there was a real danger of powerful groups wielding massive power, but, he argued, this was unlikely because of the size of the country, because of the number of different, disparate interests.
Now, we have a majority party with a 55 to 45 majority in the Senate (although, as I understand it, because of the size of the states, these 55 represent slightly less (by about 3 million) Americans than the minority party). The majority of these senators feel obligated to vote with their party on most things because of the current system, which is not far different from the patronage system), so whoever runs the party, controls all.
It is worse, though - because the leadership of the Republican party is now controlled by right-wing zealots that represent a fairly small minority of the views of Americans. And the really extreme people, a fraction of the fraction, have a truly terrifying hidden agenda.
I feel our country slowly slipping away. . .
I miss the Renaissance. Well, to be more accurate, I missed the Renaissance. The specific thing I miss is the ability to pretty much know everything – it was not that uncommon for a single person to be fluent in a number of languages, ancient and modern, a skilled musician, a lawyer, an athlete, a scientist, an architect, all at the same time.
Of course people like Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Alberti were brilliant, but they had a couple of major advantages over a would-be modern renaissance man:
1. No television!
2. There was a whole lot less to know.
I am probably in the top 1% of my particular chosen field. But that field is a sub-field of a sub-field of a sub-field. There is simply too much information – I have to work hard to stay current in my field, and only manage the vaguest impressions of what is going on in even slightly removed disciplines. It is a rare person indeed today who can be an expert in 2 or even fields, let alone all fields.
This makes me sad because I am interested in so many different things, and I hate being a dilettante. Unfortunately, I can either ignore everything that I don’t have time to study fully, or be just slightly informed. I guess that is better than nothing.
The nutcases in Kansas are at it again, trying to back-door the teaching of creationism, and get rid, as much as possible, the teaching of evolution.
The original arguments of these people, that no longer fly, is that "the bible says the world was created in this way, so that is how the world was created." This has been shown to be unconstitutional, and just plain silly (In a future post I may spend some time on this). The new debate features around two ideas:
<heavy sigh>
Lets start with evolution being a theory. Of course it is a theory - everything in science is, at best, a theory. Gravity is a theory. But, then, what is a theory?
To the layman, the word theory has a very different meaning than to a scientist. In science, there are generally three levels of understanding - laws, theories and hypotheses. The difference between a law and a theory is less about how "believed" it is, and more about how easily it can be stated - a law is generally stateable in a single sentence or phrase (Entropy increases), whereas a theory requires more detail. An hypothesis is what laymen call a theory - a stated possibility yet to be "proved".
The reason for this sort of terminology is that scientists, or at least good scientists, know that nothing is really certain. A good science teacher should always make that clear to their students on any subject of science. Everything we know is just the best understanding of a topic at this time.
Evolution is our best understanding of the source of biology at this time. It is incredibly successful as a theory in that it explains a great deal, makes reliable predictions that can, and have been tested, is fecund in that it generates new ideas, etc. - everything that a good theory should be. It also has its own controversies, and lots of details that have yet to be worked out - something it has in common with most other sciences.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, isn't. One of these days I am going to buy the ID textbook of choice - Of Pandas and People, and debunk it methodically, page by page, but even on the face of it, ID breaks down as a theory almost immediately.
ID breaks down on logically grounds, even without pointing out that it is a "theory" mostly about attacking another theory, rather than one that makes its own testable predictions, etc. In this regard it doesn't even qualify as an hypothesis, because it doesn't make testable predictions - it is based around an initial belief in metaphysics - and metaphysics is, literally by definition, not science.
ID breaks down, and demonstrates its dependence on metaphysics, based on simple logic. Go directly to Descartes, do not pass go. . .
I think, therefore I am
The cleverness of this statement is in its recursive nature. My mother used to have an apron with Snoopy and thought bubbles that went something like:
The beauty of the original statement is that it doesn't matter how many "dreams within a dream" you are living, at some level, something - you, an ant on top of a building dreaming about you, something is at the source of all this thought.
Now look at the idea of Intelligent Design, and see if you can spot the flaw:
The world is so complicated that it must have been designed
It is obvious, but I like to hear myself type, so I will write it anyway: If the world is complicated, then surely anything capable of creating something that complicated must be even more complicated, so something must have designed it. . .
To the ID people, this is the point. They figure that it proves there must be a god somewhere in this thought stack. What they haven't stopped to think about is that it, perforce, puts their god on the microscope - you can't say "we are a science right up until the point where you get to the top, and then we are a religion again". Either it is one way or the other.
So either it is a god at the top, in which case this whole thing is religion, and can't be taught in schools, or it isn't really a god at the top, in which case, you get to slice and dice whatever it is and, by the way, via the tautology above, you get to show that it doesn't really exist.
I suspect, in the very biased hearings in Kansas, there is a lot of discussion of what is wrong with evolution, and a lot of missing the point. The ID people are very good at muddying the waters. Next time I will write about my thoughts on where this may lead us. . .
I saw the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie last night, and was quite disappointed. It had a few good moments, but the managed to suck out a lot of the humor from the film.
I know that Douglas Adams didn't really like the television version of HH (largely because of the effects) but I think it was far superior to the film (although the film did have good effects).
It was odd. There would be a speech from the radio version or the book, and the one line that would be cut would be the funny, thought-provoking one. They seemed to do this over and over again.
I am not sure it is a good idea to let Americans remake British comedies - they don't seem to have the knack for it. . .
BTW - I recently read the Douglas Adams' biography by Nick Webb, and I do recommend that - it was interesting and well written.
A good friend of mine asked me recently whether I was an atheist or an agnostic, and was surprised that I was an atheist. He thought it was odd that I would believe in nothing, vs. believing that I did not really know.
Blaise Pascal (the inventor of probability mathematics) famously dedicated his life to religion based purely on probability. He figured that the potential rewards for following the rules, if there were a god, outweighed the potential benefit he would get from living a continued hedonistic lifestyle. Of course, he set the value of the “reward of heaven” at positive infinity, which screws up most calculations!
But, of course, he lived in a different time. Until relatively recently (a few hundred years) there really weren’t atheists per se – a person might be called an atheist, but the meaning was closer to the way we use heathen today – someone who believes something other than the accepted religion.
Of course, from a scientific perspective, there are no such things as facts – there are theories and there are hypothesis, but the theory is only good until disproved. If there were a scientific definition for a fact, it would be something like “something that you would have to be willfully perverse to not accept” – like “the ground is below the sky”. Even this is tricky, though, because our way of looking at the world keeps changing, and many of our great discoveries come from being willfully perverse.
I mention this because I want to make it clear that I don’t know anything for sure. Nobody really does. But I have a rational world view. And in my world view, believing that there is no “god” is as close to a fact as I can get.
Let’s try something unrelated to religion. If someone came up to you, and, in all seriousness, said “there are giant, invisible space lemurs stealing our pencils,” you would probably not believe it (although I have a friend who runs a convention for people who believe similarly strange things :-).
But what if the first person to believe in the giant, invisible space lemurs had lived a couple of thousand years ago, and had written it down. What if he had convinced his friends that they were there, stealing writing materials. Maybe his friends were just being nice, but they also wrote about the lemurs.
What if there had been a few wars as to whether the giant, invisible space lemurs really preferred stealing pens instead of pencils.
You may have never seen a giant, invisible space lemur, but if so many people believed it. . .and some of your pencils had gone missing. . .
My point, if not ridiculously obvious, is that having a silly notion for a long time, doesn’t make it any more true. If the idea of a god hadn’t been floating around for so long because, thousands of years ago, a god was the best scientific explanation for, well, pretty much anything, then suddenly, someone suggested the idea out of the blue, you wouldn’t believe it either.
Next time I will try to talk about something other than religion or politics. . .
