May 9, 2011
Anybody up for discussing Osama bin Laden? In particular, I’m interested in the epistemological considerations. Who believes that the U.S. killed him on Mayday? Who believes he was actually killed much earlier? Who believes he’s still alive? Who believes he never existed at all? Is it just a coincidence that Benazir Bhutto was assassinated just after declaring that bin Laden was murdered? Most importantly, does Osama bin Laden use Just For Men? If not, how do we explain this?
Except for that last one, of course, I see a direct correlation between these questions and questions relating to the historicity of Jesus Christ. Many who doubt the existence of Jesus Christ seem to blindly accept the existence of Osama bin Laden. These questions seem interesting to me, as I am quite skeptical of the whole thing [bin Laden, that is]. How would we know? It seems really tempting to refer to the who-knows-how-many syndicated news reports citing Pentagon documents that identify Osama bin Laden as the leader of al-Queda, but is that really justification for believing he exists? We know from history that powerful propaganda machines can blind entire nations for their nefarious purposes.
September 30, 2010
I’ve ranted about campaign commercials before, and I don’t really have anything new to say about them, but I saw one today that contained a perfect example of a bad argument.
A Meg Whitman commercial begins by comparing Sacramento and Silicon Valley, claiming the former is unorganized and the latter organized. In support of that statement, the narrator goes on to namedrop:
Apple. Intel. Ebay…
What’s wrong with this picture? Meg Whitman is certainly responsible for some success at Ebay, but what does she have to do with Apple? Intel? I know she’s been at the helms of prominent companies like Proctor & Gamble, Hasbro, Disney and others, but – as far as I know – Meg Whitman has nothing to do with Apple or Intel. So why does her commercial subtly imply a link where none apparently exists?
April 25, 2009
If you’re at all like I am, you probably consider the pursuit of truth to be pretty valuable. I think most of us can agree that the pursuit of truth is an important task. That’s the way I see it at least, and as an extension of that principle, I say one cannot accurately call oneself a pursuer of truth if they allow falsehood to remain uncorrected.
With that in mind, I’d like to discuss how passivity, especially selective passivity, can obscure the pursuit of truth – and more specifically – how these ideas relate to blogging.
February 1, 2009
Save for skateboarding evangelists, skateboarding and religion rarely cross paths in any sort of real way, but my friend Joe Haircut posted a link the other day to this New York Times article titled Skateboarding in Afghanistan Provides a Diversion From Desolation. The article was the story of young Afghan kids who share a small concrete foundation no bigger than the fountain everyone skates at Golden Gate Park, described as “…a decrepit Soviet-style concrete fountain with deep fissures.”
Despite the active environment around them, a half-dozen or more kids assemble peacefully to skate this thing fully-padded, with an instructor or two to keep an eye out for suicide bombers and other terror-related flare ups.
January 16, 2009
Dr. Lawrence Britt is a political scientist who published extensive research on the phenomenon of fascism, based among other things off of his detailed studies of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto and several Latin American regimes. He identified 14 characteristics shared by fascist states, and to commemorate the end of the Bush regime, I thought I would share them with you. It's absolutely frightening to see how many of them apply directly to America, today, and when I use the phrase "end of the Bush regime", it is certainly with a grain of salt, perhaps even the entire shaker.
June 5, 2008
A white Chevy Silverado careened into my girlfriend’s black Mazda Protégé as she drove to school, ironically about a mile away from home just as the cliché demands.
It was an everyday inner-city traffic occurrence, just another random combination of blind physics and the natural human ability to misjudge. However, as opposed to accepting responsibility for the accident or even making sure the afflicted party was alright for that matter, after making his ill-timed left turn, this rather self-centered driver proceeded to reverse, finish the turn and flee the scene.
May 31, 2008
So I went innocently enough to my email this afternoon, and there was a message whose subject read "Watch this video. Let me know what you think." Contained in the body of the message was a link to a thirteen-minute long video whose main character was Senator Barack Obama.
Not knowing anything about the video or its host site beforehand, and having nothing better to do, I hit play. What ensued further confirmed my near-unilateral rejection of American macropolitics, and further strengthened my argument that in the absence of a candidate one can endorse empirically, voting is immoral and dangerous.
September 14, 2007
In a controversial decision virtually guaranteed to increase resentment between scientists, educators, fundamentalists and constitutional rights buffs, United States District Court Judge Clarence Cooper ruled against the Cobb County School Board on January 13th that the inclusion of a religiously neutral disclaimer sticker in school science textbooks was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. Prompted by the ACLU, Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education (GCISE) and even former President Jimmy Carter, the lawsuit, filed by Jeffrey Selman and four other parents, is an ongoing expression of the religio-political battle raging in education, religion, science and civil liberties.
May 28, 2007
In 1802, representatives of the Danbury Baptist Association wrote to Thomas Jefferson inquiring about his refusal to follow in the footsteps of presidents George Washington and John Adams, who declared religiously-based national holidays of fasting and thanksgiving. Jefferson’s response referred to a symbolic “wall of separation” between religion and the state, a phrase that finds expression again and again in the debate over the extent religion should play in the public arena.
The institutions of religion and government have been noted in most every world civilization since the inception of recorded history, and for better or for worse most all societies have attempted to marry the two. Whereas Muslims and Jews, for example, both operate under systems of government that could be defined as theocratic or God-centered, one of the fundamental attractions to theoretical American democracy was its refusal to go this route: enter the outdated concept of religious freedom.
