no soup, no clouds
Ann Althouse demolishes ‘philosopher’ Bernard-Henri Lévy in The Philospher’s Petition just a few days after Harry’s Place expresses some surprise at the special pleading – especially from the French – over the arrest of the criminal fugitive Roman Polanski.
If you’d like to know why Althouse is right and French Philosophes wrong, read the grand jury account of the rape and sodomy of a drunk, drugged, 13 year-old girl. Then marvel at the free passes you get if you’re moderately talented auteur.
A state senator from Brooklyn said on Tuesday he plans to introduce legislation that would ban people from using an MP3 player, cell phone, Blackberry or any other electronic device while crossing the street in either New York City or Buffalo.
NewsChannel 4 reported that Sen. Carl Kruger is proposing the ban in response to two recent pedestrian deaths in his district, including a 23-year-old man who was struck and killed last month while listening to his iPod on Avenue T and East 71st Street In Bergen Beach.
No news of course about preventing motorists from tuning in to death metal as they mow down pedestrians.
the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others
John Stuart Mill, On Librty
The turkeys that provide this meat have hugely overdeveloped breasts and are a travesty of what a turkey should be
Joanna Blythman in the BBC’s How turkey became a fast food
Although in recent times the excellent Professor John Searle has attempted to demonstrate the possibility of deriving claims about what ought to happen from an observation of what is the case, what we have here is a perfectly irritating example of the naturalistic fallacy.
Even if Joanna Blythman can’t see that you can’t base a moral conclusion in a description of contingent facts, she could surely extend her own observation to the point where even she would find it so utterly ridiculous that the light dawns.
For example, turkeys happen to be native to the New World. So what a turkey should be is at least 5,000 miles away from Joanna’s contemplation and the tables of Brits. I suppose that turkeys should be wild animals, too, probably riddled with the infestations and diseases ubiquitous in wild birds. I could go on.
Stephen Jay Gould published the collection of essays Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes
way back in 1984, 22 years ago; so when the National Geographic recently published an article headlined Dolphin With Four Fins May Prove Terrestrial Origins
I was less than suprised, except by the exaggerated claims for the significance of the find. As Jan Haugland wrote recently about the same story,
I wonder if the scientists or whoever wrote the press release have exaggerated the importance of this discovery for added publicity. It is surely an interesting find, but the land ancestry of whales was not something that needed much further evidence
Indeed. There’s already overwhelming evidence that whales and dolphins descend from land-based animals not the least of which is the fact that mammals arose on land and cetaceans are mammals.
C – the undeveloped hind legs of a baleen whale, from Meyers Konversionlexikon 1888
Some of the more impressionable – or forgetful – news sources seem to think this is a great breakthrough, though:
The ABC radio news announcer introduced it as A sign, that maybe, once, mammals that live in the ocean, once walked on land”
Maybe? Ya don’t say? Wow, I never woulda thunk it!
The trouble with vestigial organs or better yet, atavisms, is that creationists decline to interpret them sensibly. For example, the Young-Earth creationists at AnswersInGenesis have no problem shrugging off supposed vestigial limbs, or throwbacks, or atavisms, having already successfully ignored modern physics, cosmology, geology, paleontology, and just about every other area of science that suggests the Earth’s older than about 10,000 years. When it comes to evidence from biology, creationists, like the Red Queen, easily believe six impossible things before breakfast:
This teaching is based on an assumption that is then passed off as science, an assumption that the ancestry and function of the structure is known.
young-Earth creationists, AnswersInGenesis
With such ideology-driven idiocy, anybody suggesting that an odd dolphin might prove to anyone still needing proof the fact of evolution by Natural Selection is woefully deluding themselves. The blogger Tom Coates, for example, writes:
If there are people that are unconvinced, there is something that needs to be demonstrated. Taking advantage of news stories to do this seems to be an obvious thing to do
Tom Coates, plasticbag.org
Which seems to seriously misunderstand the nature of creationism. There’s already a wealth of evidence and it hasn’t worked.
In passing, Coates takes an opportunity to take a swipe at Americans: In the meantime, sir (sic), you should know that half of America doesn’t believe in evolution
. Coates appears either to be unaware of a BBC poll:
Just under half of Britons accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life, according to an opinion poll
the BBC, Britons unconvinced on evolution
or else is rather dishonestly having a go at Americans in particular because that’s what a certain type of liberal European likes to do.
I think Tom Coates, unfortunately, champions of a strain of thinking that represents facts as postures to adopt that signify an allegiance to a political position. I think that’s why Tom tries to alarm his audience about the US while he ignores the apparently similar problems at home.
Incidentally, should you leave a comment on Coates’s weblog you might find yourself the recipient of an uninvited email like this:
Please fuck off!
Please continue fucking off!
And when you’ve finished fucking off, could you please fuck off some more!
Peter Black, Lib Dem AM (Liberal Democrat Welsh Assembly Member) posts a halfway approving piece about Mary Riddell’s wittering in the Observer. Riddell’s article, supposedly on image in politics, is about Daniel J Boortein’s early stab at pre-empting silly Continental ‘philosophers’. I suppose Riddell’s education stopped before 1968 because she name-drops Sartre rather than the obvious post-structuralist comparisons. I think she’s simply got the wrong French philosopher and misunderstood Sartre. Baudrillard and the precession of the simulcra would have been a better reference. I confess to having read Barthes, Derrida, et al. At least Barthes could be funny. Baudrillard and Derrida, simply meaningless crap.
Riddell seems in thrall to the notion of inauthenticity and pseudo-events. Yes, a bird flu pandemic hasn’t occurred but it could – and only the royal inbred half-wit Prince Charles was ever much worried about nanotechnology and ‘grey goo’. She seems to ignore her own role in writing up non-events – as if she forgets that weekly grind of having to find something to write about.
Riddell then loses it completely when, amongst a random list of contemporary, supposedly ‘synthetic’ experiences, she includes podcasts. That is, saveable audio files distributed over the Internet, a convenient way of me hearing Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time because I’m working after 9am on a Thursday when it’s broadcast. This is one of Boorstein’s nightmares come to pass, apparently.
No, this is shockingly poor journalism. Why does Peter Black seem to like it?
Maybe, like that anti-philosophe Paul de Mann, who preferred post-structuralism to admitting an unfortunate history of collaboration, Black preferes an understanding of events and experience that have only a passing resemblance to fact. At the moment, with reference to MP Simon Hughes, he is maintaining that the Liberal Party did nothing wrong in the Bermondsy Election of 1983 except for not speaking up against the homophobia targetted at Labour candidate Peter Tatchell. This despite Tatchell saying they fought a dirty campaign and Hughes apologising for it. Inauthentic indeed
A few methods of divination:
to which we may now add podomancy:- divination by iPod. Method: switch iPod to shuffle songs and try to determine what your iPod’s choices are telling you.
Helen walked to the newsagent on shuffle and the iPod chose ELO twice in 10 minutes out of 2,800 songs. Mr Blue Sky? I asked, assuming the iPod was forecasting happy days ahead. But the song chosen was Confusion, which I’ve never even heard of. Confusion ahead for Helen, then.