Exploding head watch

Is it wrong to take joy in the suffering of others? Probably. But when the others are rabid wingnuts, I don't want to be right.

Some PJM wanker:

The current American president is arguably the gravest mistake the American electorate has ever made...This is not the place to run through the chronicle of Obama's blunders, backslidings, broken promises, outright lying, despotic tendencies, shallow education, historical falsifications, ludicrous policies, betrayal of allies, and economic bungling (assuming this is not deliberate)... What strikes me as most ominous, however, is that the American people have elected a president for whom the critical battleground in the world is not the Middle East or Iraq or Iran or even Afghanistan. For this president, the war he is declaring is to be fought right here on American soil against a late-awakened majority of his own countrymen, on whom he wishes to impose a political structure alien to their history, culture, economy, and feeling of exceptionalism.

Bill Whittle, another PJM columnist:

Everywhere I have looked this morning the reaction seems to be more or less the same: a nation of steely-eyed missile men. These Marxist bastards have no idea what is coming for them. No idea.

"Steely-eyed missile men"?



Jan Z in a comment on Victor Davis Hanson

Racism is fueling the leadership, read, Obama. This is all about Reparations plus interest....Ultimately all the government intervention will empower the government to be a single employer...Revenge against all non minority people is what Obama desires from his heart.

A sturdy Viking lashes out with his +6 battleaxe: (via Sadly, No!):

Posted by: Odins Acolyte at March 22, 2010 09:47 A
We have a war now, should this become law. The little liberal weenies who have been crying about illegal wars over seas are about to have a real reason to cry. This shall not stand in my land.

Never.

Merlich:

All across the nation, Americans are cleaning and lubricating their guns and checking their ammo supply.

There will be no election this November. The coming revolution will resemble France in 1789 more than America in 1776.

This one's pretty vanilla, but I love people who say things like this on the Internet, which I seem to recall the government having a hand in building:

Wildman:
We hate universal health care simply because everything the government touches, regulates, manages turns to s@@t. The government has not solved a single social or economic problem in its history.

Oh well, that was a stupid exercise. Here's a real thought to redeem this post. One thing I've learned in following the right -- the factor that is always bubbling under the surface, the reason the US has such trouble enacting basic social welfare legislation, the universal hidden variable of American politics, is the same original sin of the Republic -- racism. Any sort of social welfare is seen as a transfer from the deserving race to the undeserving. The French or the Swedes don't have that sort of problem. This sounds overly reductive but it becomes glaringly obvious if you spend any time on these sites.

What's on my mind

Messing around with some computational language tools, I generated this list of words which are more frequent on this blog relative to a standard corpus (some misspellings removed), in order from most overused. Many of these are unsurprising, but I had no idea I used "cannot" more than is normal. Or "parasitical", which is more worrying.

cannot simpleminded parasitical excoriate delegitimize kvetching temperamentally treacly politcs cosmopolitans authoritarians twitter rightwingers inexpert constructivists constructionists entertainingly clathrate undesireable frenzies mystifies wastefulness repurpose gintis wobblies kunstler turmoils bukovsky bankrolls laitin smidgeon sociopaths scienceblogs cleavon oddsmaker vegetating reifying situationists doper yecs popularizer nobels cultish solidary arduino militarist prolixity congealing proft larded atran nixonian seatmate appeaser rationalists leftish libertarianism literalist materialist vitalism rejoinders schuon fusty facebook torahs arduously hugeness universalizing tinkerers factuality autoworkers parasitize rationalist dominionism physicalist incarnating idiocies axiomatically ferreted gourevitch glaringly symbiote averagely incisively shitheads skimped netzach appall metonymic onrush chokehold halldor churchy scampers starkest agentive dalliances emet mistimed ceasefires hallucinated reimagined overplaying bioethicist copleston disempower flippancy oversimplifies outrageousness indvidual ginned douchebags explicates plumbs mencius metaphysically schelling foregrounding polarizes outlives subtexts acquiesces nostrums undescribable malkuth marketeer analagous preeminently remediable flamers slipperiness bunraku proles burkean peaceniks materialists unaccountably athwart mcworld petraeus romanticizing unnamable huffpo ineffectually commonsensical interoperating empathizing wingnut supplicants hypostasis inchoate obama transhumanists fulminate affordance nonviolently geneological gashed mussed chuppah charnel felin reconstructionism verbalizing tegmark crabbed armys shalizi dehumanization hoohah vannevar copyable bungler unlikeliest preindustrial legitimated downscale fugs bilin slavering egomania naveh determinedly oligarchies chasten reappropriated bekki taleb bioethicists valdis ultraconservative wahabi straussian rewatch anthropomorphism ecstasies libertarians ruination exceptionalism vacillate overreach forthrightness informationally bushites rottenness biomorphic parceled twittering sorley parapsychological irreligious statists maddeningly selfing militarists bushite infuriates deconstructionist dallying harrows glutted worths misplacement engross jewishness hearkens girdled zombified prohibitionist braf sniggering positivists prostrating doomy schmaltzy yesod hewing philosophize doomsayers unconcern conflate jibes misappropriate convulse constructionist relabeled cavalierly mesmeric phantasms atrophied nattering reductionist personhood asocial placating incuding amorality incontestable weida greybeard inescapably scrabbling foreordained puthoff antiabortion commandeering iphone reinterpreting fudges minsky spluttering obsessional explicating rovian subdues ascription graeber counterargument plops

Now I'm playing the Burroughs-ish game of trying to find meaning in this shredded language. "physicalist incarnating idiocies axiomatically" sounds applicable to a number of discussions I've been having lately.

Is this the right room for an argument?

For reasons that are obscure to me, I've been spending a lot of time sniping on the blog of Wesley Smith, a bioconservative and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. Partly I just like to argue, for reasons no more noble than those of someone who picks fights in bars.

On the other hand, the underlying issues (what defines personhood) are of genuine intellectual interest to me. I also feel like I've discovered yet another hidden agenda of the Discovery Institute, that somewhat meshes with what it is chiefly known for. That is, most of what they do is putting a thin veneer of supposedly respectable science on top of creationism. In Wesley's case, it's putting a veneer of concern for human exceptionalism over an anti-abortion, anti-choice agenda. Whereas the ID debate rages on in numerous blogs and other places, nobody else seems to have taken up this part of the battle yet. In the course of these debates I found that the Discovery Institute is funded by some extremely scary Dominionists, which I didn't know before.

Arguing over there has also led me to take a closer look at some transhumanist sites, since that seems to be the polar opposite of bioconservatism, and is a lot more interesting.

Anyway, my collected jibes can be seen here.

Personhood theory

I inserted myself in the middle of another fruitless debate, arguing against both sides. This one was primarily between Wesley J. Smith, a conservative bioethicist at the Discovery Institute (!), John Derbyshire, and Josh Rosenau over "human exceptionalism". My comments are here and here. A lot of hear and not much light, as usual. But it introduced to me a useful term, personhood theory. This is used by some bioethicists to describe the process of deciding who is or isn't a "person" under law and ethics. It makes sense to me that there should be such theories, although they may vary widely. For instance, I (and most sensible people) don't consider a 16-cell blastocyte to be a person, but many of the religious do.

But to Wesley Smith the very idea of "personhood theory" is anathema. He doesn't merely offer a competing definition of person, he regards the entire topic as an occasion for bluster and obfuscation. I can't quite understand why generally anti-science conservatives are wedded to the idea that it's 46 chromosomes that define a person.

The two main theories in play seem to be either genetic (the right-to-life conservative view) or based on some kind of cognitive quality such as self-awareness or language use). Smith's entire output seems devoted to warning that the latter criterion is perilous, leading us down a variety of slippery slopes to euthanasia, infanticide, and all manner of horrors. He's got a point, this stuff is very problematic. But throwing up hands and refusing to think about it does not strike me as a useful or interesting approach.

Marvin Minsky once proposed (jokingly, I think) that you aren't fully human until you can speak in sentences with subordinate clauses, which would allow infanticide up to age 3 or so.

It is obvious (to me at least) that "person" is a social construct. Some societies permit infanticide, others don't. The default for tribal societies seems to be to consider everyone outside of the tribe as somewhat less of a person than those within. The desire of conservatives for some kind of moral absolutism based on biology is doomed to failure, as is obvious from the glaring inconsistencies in their position. Given that, personhood theory should be a subject of intense interest.

Everything God Is Bad For You

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
...

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

Wow, who'd've thunk?

Actually the thing that stands out from the original article is that the US is off the charts in both variables -- far more homicides and other social dysfunction than other first-world countries, combined with far more religiosity. American exceptionalism, indeed.