Just a bit more on the Charles Krauthammer piece mentioned in my previous post. Mr. Krauthammer makes a couple of points. One is about Madisonian norms.
But even more importantly, and what makes his piece so trenchant, is that he is exposing a subtle way to suppress and control the media without explicitly violating the Constitution. It's called industrial policy.
Threaten a network and you are also sending signals to other who might get in the way of a political agenda.
To potential advertisers: we control a lot of money, contracts and life support in bad times. Don't advertise on networks where we find stories unfavorable to our political agenda.
To media rivals: don't follow the disfavored media outlet or we'll do the same to you that we're doing to them.
This is the change we've been waiting for? Co-opting the NEA, ACORN and other government-funded groups for political propaganda purposes? And cutting the financial legs out of the free press if it interferes with our "revolution?"
How very Hugo Chavez-like of Mr. Obama.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
On Obama Thuggishness toward Dissenters
Charles Krauthammer is one of Washington's most intelligent and respected opinion journalists. He makes an important point in this piece. President Obama and his thuggish administration, in trying to delegitimize political dissenters (Fox News, Chamber of Commerce, Insurance Companies, etc.) and in fact intimidate them into silence by threats, is ignoring the Madisonian traditions of our country.
You know, the traditions that say we must respectfully tolerate dissent.
The traditions that differentiate us from countries such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela, whom Mr. Obama has such cordial relations with, but who all intimidate, prosecute and even murder dissenters as enemies of the state, Allah, or the revolution.
Mr. Obama is showing himself to not only fail at all of his promised open-minded and open-dooredness. He is showing himself to be diametrically opposed to it.
Can a person with such a vaunted opinion of himself and his mandate to "fundamentally reform America" be trusted to respect dissent, or even the Constitution itself should his project be threatened by political failure?
When he attempts to exclude Fox News from a press event, as took place this week, how long before, Hugo Chavez-like, he finds some reason to shut down Fox News entirely?
Is this intolerant behavior the "change we've been waiting for?"
You know, the traditions that say we must respectfully tolerate dissent.
The traditions that differentiate us from countries such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela, whom Mr. Obama has such cordial relations with, but who all intimidate, prosecute and even murder dissenters as enemies of the state, Allah, or the revolution.
Mr. Obama is showing himself to not only fail at all of his promised open-minded and open-dooredness. He is showing himself to be diametrically opposed to it.
Can a person with such a vaunted opinion of himself and his mandate to "fundamentally reform America" be trusted to respect dissent, or even the Constitution itself should his project be threatened by political failure?
When he attempts to exclude Fox News from a press event, as took place this week, how long before, Hugo Chavez-like, he finds some reason to shut down Fox News entirely?
Is this intolerant behavior the "change we've been waiting for?"
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Waxing Poetic about Logic. Really.
Last night I gave a lecture to my three Dowling College students (yes, three), about the importance of logic and critical thinking.I am perhaps the only person I know who can get excited about this subject.
Perhaps I can capture some of that magic here.
Logic was one of those remarkable gifts given us by Aristotle, the great observer of nature, who found and captured patterns in everything, from the heavens, to state constitutions, to thought itself.
In stepping back, even from thinking itself, to observe its patterns, we are able to control thinking, and expand its power. (We also discover deep mysteries in it, and paradoxes. More on that below.)
If we observe the syllogism: "All mebops are ziggly. Zanthor is a mebop. Therefore, Zanthor is ziggly" we understand the power of logic. No, seriously.
Why? Because we recognize that logic illuminates aspects of thought that move beyond questions of truth.
First, this nonsense example shows that thought has a flow. From premises to conclusions. We feel impelled to draw a certain kind of conclusion, even in this example about something we have no experience of, because of that flow. From here Aristotle would catalog way in which thought flows properly and improperly. ("Validity")
Secondly, that flow is supported by our ability to say "if this were true." An awareness of this aspect of thinking is important because it is the basis of hypothetical or imaginative thinking. Once we recognize the flow of thought, and its roots in saying "if this were true" of the premises, we become self-consciously aware of our ability to turn on and off the truth of statements or claims about reality.
Combine that with the idea of the flow of thought, and we become aware of what might follow when we combine new thoughts or truths together. That ability to see the implications is powerful.
(I often use the example of Steve Jobs, whose own logical skills allowed him to consider what it would mean for the world if it were true that there were personal computers. Even as many others, such as the bankers who rejected him, could not consider the possibility, stuck as they were in the logic that supported only the current uses of the mainframe.)
Michael Gelb's books on genius, such as "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci" and "Discover Your Genius," opened my eyes to thinking of logic this way, as he argues that genius is not mere intuition, but a powerful combination of intuitive, imaginative thinking with deep analytical skills, uniting both sides of the brain. Geniuses had to be conscious of the assumptions of their current pursuits, so as to transcend them.
Hearkening back to the dialectic of his teacher, Plato, Aristotle's description of thought as moving from premises and conclusions also makes us aware of the need to examine the truth of our premises; themselves the conclusions of some rudimentary previous "arguments" in our minds. Hence, for example, how did we come to believe that "all mebops are ziggly"?
We begin to recognize that all thought is built on previous thought. Even as we also see that those previous thoughts disappear into the mysterious depths of our memory and our senses. Only a small portion of our thought "flow" or process is available to us at the conscious level. A riddle.
One can see here the groundwork for everything from Augustine's awe-inducing reflections "On Memory" in the Confessions, to Descartes' consideration of the Evil Genius, to Freud's theories of the Unconscious.
From these kinds of mysteries, people might be inclined to conclude that thought disintegrates into impenetrable irrationality. However, despite that mysterious disappearance of prior thought into the depths of the senses and unconscious, I still believe Aristotle's gift of logic remains inherently progressive.
Only by recognizing one's premises and those of others can one move toward any kind of consensus at all. (Or any act of forward-thinking genius, as I noted above.)
We continue even today to strive via the dialectic in psychology, art, and other disciplines to draw our experiences from the depths, into conscious awareness.
We learn to examine prior premises, even our own, for the larger purpose of understanding, expression, and yes, even reaching agreement.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
How about Re-Engineering our Distrusted Media?
So CNN reports alleged racist "quotes" Rush Limbaugh made without fact-checking them. But it does fact check a parody done by Saturday Night Live about President Obama. Public trust of the media is at all time lows, because of bias and shoddy reporting like this.
Meanwhile, my and many other local newspapers are dying for lack of readership.
How would an engineer solve this problem? Or an entrepreneur? I asked myself these questions this morning as I looked over the tabloid rack at the local supermarket.
How about if the media began doing what engineers and entrepreneurs do all the time? As I am trying to do with my own small business ventures on the model of The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber.
That is, put processes in place to standardize where there is variation, and remove "bias" surprises, so that the media consumer knows more of what to expect.
How?
These days, a self-policing "ombudsmen" reporting on the media outlet itself is about as far as many media outlets go. And that weekly or monthly cleanup comes usually too late for our rapid fire news cycle. And, quite frankly, such people and stories are boring.
How about making the processes by which stories are written more transparent to the consumer? How about posting them in a wiki, for ongoing modification, and maybe even public comment, or task-taking when the story goes awry. And linking to them in each and every story written for additional comment?
For example, a captured process might say, if a story is about X controversy (abortion, taxes, government spending), then the following must be included.
You get the idea. The first tries and "captures" of these processes in a media team wiki, for example, will be halting and have mistakes. But think about what it would mean if CNN, or Fox News or MSNBC created processes that the public could compare the stories against, for quality and consistency!
If we allow "advocacy journalism" on television or in print, another process could describe how it should be clearly delineated to the consumer at the beginning.
I think that would improve the quality of journalism, restore public confidence, and also sharpen the discussion in areas where "opinion" is tolerable.
Given the lousy shape of the media, I'm surprised it has not been done already.
Meanwhile, my and many other local newspapers are dying for lack of readership.
How would an engineer solve this problem? Or an entrepreneur? I asked myself these questions this morning as I looked over the tabloid rack at the local supermarket.
How about if the media began doing what engineers and entrepreneurs do all the time? As I am trying to do with my own small business ventures on the model of The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber.
That is, put processes in place to standardize where there is variation, and remove "bias" surprises, so that the media consumer knows more of what to expect.
How?
These days, a self-policing "ombudsmen" reporting on the media outlet itself is about as far as many media outlets go. And that weekly or monthly cleanup comes usually too late for our rapid fire news cycle. And, quite frankly, such people and stories are boring.
How about making the processes by which stories are written more transparent to the consumer? How about posting them in a wiki, for ongoing modification, and maybe even public comment, or task-taking when the story goes awry. And linking to them in each and every story written for additional comment?
For example, a captured process might say, if a story is about X controversy (abortion, taxes, government spending), then the following must be included.
You get the idea. The first tries and "captures" of these processes in a media team wiki, for example, will be halting and have mistakes. But think about what it would mean if CNN, or Fox News or MSNBC created processes that the public could compare the stories against, for quality and consistency!
If we allow "advocacy journalism" on television or in print, another process could describe how it should be clearly delineated to the consumer at the beginning.
I think that would improve the quality of journalism, restore public confidence, and also sharpen the discussion in areas where "opinion" is tolerable.
Given the lousy shape of the media, I'm surprised it has not been done already.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Commentary on a Recent Viral Video Defense of Religion
Some of my Facebook friends are passing around the video below. It's an interesting defense of religious belief, going viral on the Internet. It's good to see that not only the atheists like social media.
The argument made by the young Albert Einstein in this video is one taken directly, although in less scientific form, from St. Augustine, its original author.
Simply put, evil is not "real" but rather the absence or "privation" of goodness.
Augustine made this argument against the Manicheans, who held that evil was an equal and opposing force to good. If so, Augustine reasoned, then man has no free will, being caught up simply in the war of two opposites. A convenient deterministic theory for escaping responsibility.
An elaboration of this argument is made in a modern context by author Jean Bethke Elshtain in a talk given at GooglePlex, entitled, "Harry Potter, St. Augustine and the Confrontation with Evil." In it, she elaborates on the idea of evil as a parasitic form of non-being, using the examples of the Nazis and Voldermort from Harry Potter." It's a very interesting talk, parts of which I show my philosophy students every year.
Interestingly in the first video, however, the young Einstein makes a "reductionist" argument against his instructor. He cites darkness as the absence of light, not a reality itself at the subatomic level. The same for cold, which is the absence of heat, which is subatomic activity.
However, if one were to rely on the subatomic level, what would we say about love? Is it a reality at that level, or something else?
There are risks to denying realities that man experiences at his own level. That is why Einstein's instructor is onto something, and why the argument for atheism persists. Because just like our experience of love, we experience cold, or darkness, or myriad other evils at our own, not the subatomic level.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about this very same point. And about my concerns with the limits of Augustine's argument.
I sometimes think Augustine's argument is stretched too far from its original purposes.
If one proposes that evil is a lack or privation, then it is merely a zero or non-being. There is nothing to see in it, only to ponder the mystery, as Ms. Elshtain does, of its parasitical nature.
But what if one looks at the myriad manifestations of evil in the world? The privations of so many goods, that yield so many different and disturbing forms of evil, at our human level, not the metaphysical or the subatomic.
This is the gist of the black comic points made in first video in the comic series "Mr. Deity," which I truly enjoy, even as it disturbs me greatly. The episode is entitled "Mr. Deity and the Evil."
God is questioned as to why he wants SO MANY evils. Now, one could argue that God simply wanted to create so many goods. And each good must, by God's own plan face its own potentially horrifying privation. Granted, privation is the absence of good. I've got that.
But at another level, you must consider the black comic point above. What the heck is the plan for history when there is so much evil that seems to be driving it? Just think of the Nazis, for example. Or child abuse. Or cancer. History is moved greatly by the reality of evil. Privation is everywhere. Pervasive.
Collectively, we are resilient in the face of it no doubt. But I do not believe, as I noted in a previous post, that one can dismiss an individual's being scandalized by the experience of it, as Michael Novak has done at times, as a "morose" concern with it.
I have no answer to the comic point raised above. Except to recall the point made by Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, which scandalized me in graduate school. (II-II, Q. 19, Article 11. "Whether Fear Remains in Heaven.")
Aquinas argued that even in a state of beatitude in Heaven, man would still feel fear of God. This entire passage is contained in a section on "The Gift of Fear" contained in a larger treatise on "Hope." (I think this section bears re-reading on my part, for sure.)
I don't think Aquinas would be willing to call God "dark." But when one considers the prominent role of evil and suffering in the world, and even the scandalous and almost fetishistic obsession among Christians with evil and suffering, one can't help but feel disturbed. By them, and by God's apparent "plan" for "sacred history," so-called.
Is it in any way inefficient? If so, what does that say about the nature of God?
It certainly disturbs atheists, especially when they read the gleeful way in which Christians were willing to see them in a state of eternal damnation for their annoying lack of faith. Today, we have far more empathy and understanding of our fellow man, and should reject co-dependency with them, for their and our own sake. And recognize that their concerns are our own.
The argument made by the young Albert Einstein in this video is one taken directly, although in less scientific form, from St. Augustine, its original author.
Simply put, evil is not "real" but rather the absence or "privation" of goodness.
Augustine made this argument against the Manicheans, who held that evil was an equal and opposing force to good. If so, Augustine reasoned, then man has no free will, being caught up simply in the war of two opposites. A convenient deterministic theory for escaping responsibility.
An elaboration of this argument is made in a modern context by author Jean Bethke Elshtain in a talk given at GooglePlex, entitled, "Harry Potter, St. Augustine and the Confrontation with Evil." In it, she elaborates on the idea of evil as a parasitic form of non-being, using the examples of the Nazis and Voldermort from Harry Potter." It's a very interesting talk, parts of which I show my philosophy students every year.
Interestingly in the first video, however, the young Einstein makes a "reductionist" argument against his instructor. He cites darkness as the absence of light, not a reality itself at the subatomic level. The same for cold, which is the absence of heat, which is subatomic activity.
However, if one were to rely on the subatomic level, what would we say about love? Is it a reality at that level, or something else?
There are risks to denying realities that man experiences at his own level. That is why Einstein's instructor is onto something, and why the argument for atheism persists. Because just like our experience of love, we experience cold, or darkness, or myriad other evils at our own, not the subatomic level.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about this very same point. And about my concerns with the limits of Augustine's argument.
I sometimes think Augustine's argument is stretched too far from its original purposes.
If one proposes that evil is a lack or privation, then it is merely a zero or non-being. There is nothing to see in it, only to ponder the mystery, as Ms. Elshtain does, of its parasitical nature.
But what if one looks at the myriad manifestations of evil in the world? The privations of so many goods, that yield so many different and disturbing forms of evil, at our human level, not the metaphysical or the subatomic.
This is the gist of the black comic points made in first video in the comic series "Mr. Deity," which I truly enjoy, even as it disturbs me greatly. The episode is entitled "Mr. Deity and the Evil."
God is questioned as to why he wants SO MANY evils. Now, one could argue that God simply wanted to create so many goods. And each good must, by God's own plan face its own potentially horrifying privation. Granted, privation is the absence of good. I've got that.
But at another level, you must consider the black comic point above. What the heck is the plan for history when there is so much evil that seems to be driving it? Just think of the Nazis, for example. Or child abuse. Or cancer. History is moved greatly by the reality of evil. Privation is everywhere. Pervasive.
Collectively, we are resilient in the face of it no doubt. But I do not believe, as I noted in a previous post, that one can dismiss an individual's being scandalized by the experience of it, as Michael Novak has done at times, as a "morose" concern with it.
I have no answer to the comic point raised above. Except to recall the point made by Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, which scandalized me in graduate school. (II-II, Q. 19, Article 11. "Whether Fear Remains in Heaven.")
Aquinas argued that even in a state of beatitude in Heaven, man would still feel fear of God. This entire passage is contained in a section on "The Gift of Fear" contained in a larger treatise on "Hope." (I think this section bears re-reading on my part, for sure.)
I don't think Aquinas would be willing to call God "dark." But when one considers the prominent role of evil and suffering in the world, and even the scandalous and almost fetishistic obsession among Christians with evil and suffering, one can't help but feel disturbed. By them, and by God's apparent "plan" for "sacred history," so-called.
Is it in any way inefficient? If so, what does that say about the nature of God?
It certainly disturbs atheists, especially when they read the gleeful way in which Christians were willing to see them in a state of eternal damnation for their annoying lack of faith. Today, we have far more empathy and understanding of our fellow man, and should reject co-dependency with them, for their and our own sake. And recognize that their concerns are our own.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)