I just want to note the irony of saying it's anti-democratic to delay seating Scott Brown, because America needs him to block legislation that 59 senators are willing to vote for.

Dennett on Postmodernism and Truth

via reddit:

What would be wrong would be that since this man didn't acknowledge the gulf, didn't even recognize that it existed, my acquiescence in his shopping spree would have contributed to the debasement of a precious commodity, the erosion of a valuable distinction. Many people, including both onlookers and participants, don't see this gulf, or actively deny its existence, and therein lies the problem. The sad fact is that in some intellectual circles, inhabited by some of our more advanced thinkers in the arts and humanities, this attitude passes as a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims. In fact this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naiveté, made possible only by flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power. Like many another naif, these thinkers, reflecting on the manifest inability of their methods of truth-seeking to achieve stable and valuable results, innocently generalize from their own cases and conclude that nobody else knows how to discover the truth either.

Abraham Maslow on the fusion of fact and value

From The Farther Reaches of Human Nature:

Too many people of limited vision define the essence of science as cautious checking, validating of hypotheses, finding out if other people's ideas are correct or not. But, insofar as science is also a technique of discovery, it will have to learn how to foster peak-experience insights and visions and then how to handle them as data. [...]

I quote a letter from Dr. A. Hoffer, dated February 8, 1963:

We have deliberately used P.E. (peak experience) as a therapeutic weapon. Our alcoholics who receive LSD or mescaline are given P.E. using music, visual stimuli, words, suggestion, anything which will give them what they say is a P.E. We have treated over five hundred alcoholics and certain general rules can be enunciated. One is that in general the majority of alcoholics who respond by sobriety after treatment have had P.E. Conversely, hardly any who have not had P.E. respond.

We also have strong data which suggest that affect is the chief component of P.E. When LSD subjects are first given penicillamine for two days they have an experience which is identical with the one normally gained from LSD, but where there is a marked dampening of affect. They observe all the visual changes, have all the changes in thinking, but they are emotionally flat and are more non-participant observers than participants. These subjects do not have P.E. In addition, only 10 per cent do well after treatment compared to our expected 60 per cent recovery on several large follow-up studies.

Now we make our big jump: This same list of described characteristics of reality, of the world, seen at certain times, is just about the same as what have been called the eternal values, the eternal verities. We see here the old familiar trinity of truth, beauty, and goodness. That is to say, this list of described characteristics is also simultaneously a list of values. These characteristics are what the great religionists and philosophers have valued, and this is practically the same list that most serious thinkers of mankind have agreed upon as the ultimate or highest value of life.

To repeat, my first statement is in the realm of science, defined as public. Anyone can do the same thing; anyone can check for himself; anyone can use the same procedure that I have used and can, objectively if he wishes, record on tape the things that are said in answer to the questions I posed and then make them public. That is, what I am reporting is public, repeatable, confirmable or not; it is even quantifiable if you wish. It is stable and reliable in the sense that when I repeat the operation I get approximately the same results. Even by the most orthodox, positivistic definitions of ninteenth-century science, this is a scientific statement. It is a cognitive statement, a description of the characteristics of reality, of the cosmos, of the world out there, outside the person who is reporting and describing, of the world as perceived. These data can be worked with in the traditional fashion of science, and their degree of truth or untruth can be determined.

The Despicable Richard Cohen

Richard Cohen is the author of Coming out Straight, whose book has been used in speeches to justify a proposed law in Uganda to execute homosexuals. This is an absolutely repugnant person. Observe his first statement, that "since the 1950's, the Ugandan government has punished people for engaging in homosexual behavior". Then observe that, minutes later, Cohen says it's "inconceivable" that they would pass a law to execute gays. Inconceivable? If he wants to represent this Ugandan history of oppression against gays as though it were common knowledge, how on earth could he not know that his book and his message would serve as justification for continuation of what he knows to be longstanding practice of oppression of homosexuals?

Then he denies that his book portrays gays as predators against children, which Maddow promptly follows up by reading an offending passage from his book with all of the outrageous claims you might expect. He disavows knowledge of the bill and disapproves it, but defends the sponsor of the bill, who was holding up a copy of his book. He can't even use his appearance as an opportunity to just drop everything and unequivocally state that the bill is abhorrent, no, he uses his airtime to spread his message of "opportunity," seconds after conceding his book is being used to justify execution. What a terrible, terrible man.

The impolite spite of Robby Wright

Robert Wright has again attempted to other-ise new atheists. I think the best reaction by far has been Russell Blackford's:

I take no delight in the impolite spite of Robby Wright. His screed is in need of some serious mothereffin’ rigour. It’s got vigour, but I figure that it’s not worth a widow’s mite – no! It’s kind of a slow bleed of real thought. It’s caught in error. It’s trite .. a kind of thinking-lite, yeah – an unpedigreed stampede of special pleading for creeds and unholy deeds and religious terror. It’s like Wright has smoked too much weed or got too much greed, and now he’s a satellite. An acolyte. A parasite on superstition. He’s turned off the light of reason, looking for a coming season when it gets him a treasonous prize, a kind of commission. His ambition has made him unwise: so now he’s a temporiser, when he ought to be a despiser and a pulveriser. It’s a hideous sight, a benighted blight that we must fight without remission. Thank Jerry [and Ophelia] for his[her] demolition!

If Max Baucus fails

The Missoula Independent profiles Max Baucus. They open with two competing portraits of Baucus, this being the positive one:

One view suggests Baucus is fulfilling his political destiny. The Montana senator, a Democrat and chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has prepared his entire 34-year career in Congress for this role. He's a savvy centrist. His political independence and the relationships he's fostered with senators on both sides of the aisle make him uniquely suited to broker intensely complicated negotiations among the most powerful people and special interests in Washington, D.C. Colleagues claim no one works harder than Baucus. He's spent more than a year—beginning well before President Obama took office and made health care reform his top domestic priority—holding hearings and educating committee members on the nuances of the issue. Baucus himself calls the process fun.

That being the case, if Baucus can savage the health care bill so much, and still not get significant Republican support, I think it would be fair to say his career is a failure. Is 34 years as a savvy, cooperative centrist finally culminating in a committee chairmanship and more than a year of hearings and devastating compromises not enough to win a couple Republican votes?

Matthew Yglesias on Prof. Gates' getting arrested:

Meanwhile, note that racial motivations or [their] absence have really nothing to do with the nature of Officer Crowley’s misconduct. What happened basically is that Crowley accused Gates, whether for good reason or not, of breaking into his own home. Gates, pissed off, offended Crowley. At which point Crowley, even though he was now perfectly aware that Gates was not guilty of anything, decided to exact revenge by manipulating the situation to create a trumped-up disorderly conduct charge. That’s not professional policing, and it’s not a good use of the City of Cambridge’s law enforcement resources. That’s why the charges were dropped, and that’s why it’s fair to say that Crowley was acting stupidly racial issues aside.*

And the asterisk:

* To consider a race-free instance, I was actually treated extremely rudely by an MPDC officer yesterday. I, wisely, just decided to not worry about it and move on. But suppose I’d decided to respond to him being rude by overreacting and blowing up at him. And then he decided to respond to me being rude by finding some pretext on which to arrest me. Neither the fact that the cop’s not a racist nor the fact that I had overreacted would make retaliating with a trumped-up charge the right way for the cop to respond.

Of course, the fact that the charge was dropped seems to be getting glazed over as though it were an inconsequential background piece (though not necessarily by Yglesias).

But, the charge was dropped. Unless one is committed to the a priori assumption that the officer was incompetent, he probably knew quite well that the charges were going to be dropped but arrested him anyway. There was no arrest for burglary, because the officer knew there was no burglar. There was only a misunderstanding that escalated into a baseless arrest.