Sam Harris and the “Ground Zero Mosque”

I agree with much of what Sam Harris writes. When I don’t agree, it’s usually a question of degree. For instance, Harris recently ignited debate at his TED talk, in which he advocated science as an arbiter of moral decisions. While I support this effort in principle, I fear Harris is a bit too optimistic on the prospects of science to  develop from a historically descriptive practice to a normative one, or, to put it another way, to rise above Hume’s (in)famous “is-ought” problem. In fact, one could review history and make a plausible case that science is often at its worse when it is used prescriptively. (The expected counterargument is that those examples are not examples of science, but pseudoscience used to further decidedly non-scientific agendas.)

I am not writing this to debate science’s role in morality, though. I believe a thoughtful debate can be had there. Rather, I am reacting to Harris’ recent article, Ground Zero Mosque from The Daily Beast. His first two sentences perhaps best sum up his position:

Should a 15-story mosque and Islamic cultural center be built two blocks from the site of the worst jihadist atrocity in living memory? Put this way, the question nearly answers itself.

Harris’ answer, in case the obviousness escaped you, is no.

Talking Over Torture

Conor Friedersdorf responds to Jonah Goldberg’s continuing attempts to frame the debate over water-boarding as a debate over semantics: Talking Over Torture | The American Scene

Goldberg is absolutely wrong to argue that there are no good responses to the ticking time bomb scenario. Perhaps he means that he chooses to pretend like nobody is making them. This makes sense, since the neocon crowd is quite adept at plugging their ears and yelling their mantras (not to mention running their own cable news networks) in order to drown out any opposing viewpoints. In fact, Friedersdorf’s analysis, as well as the comments of Mike Farmer’s above, provide two excellent responses to the ticking time bomb scenario.

I humbly offer a third

Andrew Sullivan: As The Onslaught Continues

As The Onslaught Continues – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

I was reading the above article by Andrew Sullivan, and I got to thinking: the Vatican is welcoming all the misogynists and homophobes in the Anglican community to rejoin the Catholic church… how about the remaining Anglicans invite all the priests who’d like to get married or come out of the closet over to their side^*. The Vatican gets the congregations, the Anglicans get the clergy. Sounds like an even trade to me.

^* They can keep the pedophiles.

Update: Apparently, Dawkins beat me to it.

What 10,000?

A reader spars with Andrew Sullivan over which administration(s) deserve credit for the Dow hitting 10,000: The Daily Dish – Dissent of the Day

Allow me to offer a different dissent:

In 1999, when the Dow hit 10,000, the unemployment rate was 4-4.5%. In 2009 when the Dow hit 10,000, the unemployment rate was 9.5%.

Let’s not start uncorking the champagne just yet.

Most Americans don’t enjoy a lot of benefit directly from the stock market. Even for those of us who have significant savings there, it’s mostly tied up in retirement accounts.

Yes, growth can lead to jobs. But it doesn’t necessarily have to. And until it does, the recession will not be over for most people, especially those looking for a job. So why don’t we all sit back, take down the “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging over Wall Street, and maintain a little bit of cautious optimism instead?

NYT: Justices Are Pressed for a Broad Ruling in Campaign Case

There seemed little question after the argument in an important campaign finance case at the Supreme Court on Wednesday that the makers of a slashing political documentary about Hillary Rodham Clinton were poised to win. The open issue was just how broad that victory would be.
Justices Are Pressed for a Broad Ruling in Campaign Case – NYTimes.com

The idea that corporations or other groups have constitutionally-protected rights by way of their corporate personhood is ludicrous on the face of it. Corporate personhood is a legal fiction that is convenient for business matters (esp. contract law and torts), but ought not be taken too far.

If we discard the notion that corporations have constitutional rights above and beyond the rights of their human constituents, then we can see that Congress should have broad leeway in regulating corporate participation in our political process.

Quote of the Day

“No man is an island, and rules made for imaginary islands ignore the fragile ecology of the actual archipelago.”
Adam Gopnik, The Return of the Native, The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 2009

Worst Television Companion Ever

John McWhorter must not have a lot of friends. Not a lot that care to watch a television show or movie with him at any rate. In a recent blog article in The New Republic, McWhorter opines about Mad Men’s allegedly inaccurate speech patterns of the 1960s.

Is it anachronistic idioms at which McWhorter takes aim? Nope, it’s their diction. His examples: someone said “I want to” rather than “I wanna”. The characters apparently use too formal an elocution even in informal situations.

As if we needed to be convinced that people spoke just as “slovenly” in the ’60s as we do today, McWhorter offers this newspaper ad for a grammar book:

How many of these frequent errors in English do YOU make? Do YOU say KEW-pon for KOO-pon, ad-ver-TISE-ment for ad-VER-tise-ment, or AD-ult for ad-ULT? Almost everybody makes these blunders in English: between you and I, it’s me, those kind of books.

In which circles, I wonder, does McWhorter socialize where the predominant “blunders” of English are someone stressing the third syllable of advertisement rather than the second (for the record, the only people I’ve ever heard stress the second syllable were British). In the age of “where you at?” and “lemme axe you somefin’”, where one places the stress on a word, or whether they use “kew” or “koo” to pronounce coupon (note: both are listed as acceptable pronunciations at the Free Dictionary).

Perhaps McWhorter is correct that Mad Men’s characters speak with unnaturally formal speech patterns. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that. But lemme axe you this: who wants to have to hear him complain about it? How enjoyable can a person be to be around when he is dissecting the difference between “I want to” and “I wanna” on a television show? The same snobbish folks who decide such a discussion is important enough to include in The New Republic, I suppose.

I AM A CONSERVATIVE SHITHEEL

I AM AN AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE SHITHEEL

this morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

Economist Laffer on CNN: “Just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid … done by the government”

File under Boneheaded comments:

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/flash/mediaplayer316.swf
Economist Laffer on CNN: “[J]ust wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid … done by the government” | Media Matters for America

Routed

From BBC Persian: