Blackburn parses Hume's Dialogues

One of the things that I've intended to do (but haven't gotten around to doing) since I first started this blog back in '05 was to write a post about David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published 1779). The Dialogues is one of the seminal texts in the history of atheistic and skeptical thought, which is reason enough to write about them. But that leads into the even greater motivation I had to want to write about them: I get rather annoyed when I hear someone like Richard Dawkins (whose work I am a fan of) say that evolution made it possible for himself or persons in general to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

That annoys me because I consider atheism a philosophically justifiable position with or without the science of evolution; and you will hardly find a stronger case in point than the Dialogues, in which Hume ends up demolishing the design argument while turning other arguments for belief in God into mush, essentially leaving negative atheism and cautious skepticism as the only intelligible positions.

At least that's my amature reading of him.

For a professional parsing of Hume's work, you can see this article by Simon Blackburn, who offers Hume as an alternative to "dogmatic atheism." Blackburn also appears to by annoyed by the likes of Dawkins, but for a slightly different reason than me. Blackburn is annoyed:

because of the strong sense of deja vu. But it is not just that old tunes are being replayed, but that they are being replayed badly. The classic performance was given by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, written in the middle of the 18th century. Hume himself said that nothing could be more artful than the Dialogues, and it is the failure to appreciate that art that is annoying.

I recommend reading Blackburn's whole article (as well as the brilliantly written Dialogues itself) but here are the key points

Since by the end neither Cleanthes nor Demea can defend any usable conception of a deity, it matters not in the least whether you are drawn to say that "it" exists or to deny it. There is no inference to be drawn about anything - moral, political, empirical or theoretical - from either the assertion that "it" does or "it" does not. Joining in on either side equally implies that we know what we are talking about, and the right philosophical attitude is just to laugh at persons who suppose that.

Hume elegantly sidesteps the common charge that dogmatic atheism is just as much a "matter of faith" as faith itself. You cannot make that claim against someone whose mocking irony is careful to issue no "ism" at all.

He also escapes the debating point that atheism is "parasitic" on religious belief. A contented absence of belief is no more parasitic on what is absent than the absence of crocodiles in England is parasitic on them being there, although it is also true that you could not laugh at faiths without them being there to laugh at.

But it is also wrong to call Hume an agnostic. That would imply a definite question about which we do not know the answer. But since there is no definite question at stake, that too lapses.

Hume knew that he was unlikely to be understood. He also knew that the interesting questions now shift to the study that he pioneered in The Natural History of Religion: the comparative study of religious practices and the psychological and social mechanisms that give rise to them, and that they articulate.

Hume did not have the benefit of evolutionary theory, yet he made short work of the argument from design and prefigured Daniel Dennet's plea in Breaking the Spell for an empirical study of religion as a social phenomenon.

For more on David Hume's views on religion across his major philosophical works, see this excellent 8 part series (10 if you count the response sections) by Julian Baggini. I would also note that in part 3, Baggini raises a point similar to mine about Hume being able to argue against religion just fine without knowledge of the theory of evolution.

Quote of the day

"The best way to respond to what-aboutery is to state a simple truth. Say it slowly: there can be more than one bad thing in the world. You can oppose American atrocities, and Chinese atrocities. You can be critical of Israel, and of Islamism. You can condemn Dubai's system of slavery, and the fact people are detained without trial in Britain. You can stand independent of governments - including your own - and criticize anyone who chooses to abuse human rights. The world is not divided into a Block of Light, and a Block of Darkness; you don't have to pick a tribe and defend its every action." - Johann Hari, "How to spot a lame, lame argument"

We all owe Douglas Feith an apology

'Whatever [Douglas] Feith may achieve during the remainder of his life and whatever epitaph he chooses for inscription on his gravestone, history will remember him as "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet."' - Andrew Bacevitch, The Limits of Power

After watching Friday's episode of the Glenn Beck program, I have to conclude that history is being unfair to Feith. Glenn Beck is the stupidest fucking guy on the planet. Because during the show, Beck said that Henry Ford was one of the American heroes who stood up against the liberal progressive happy face fascism of F.D.R.

Ok, let's walk through this. F.D.R. headed up the war efforts against the Nazis during World War II. Henry Ford did everything he possibly could to prevent the United States from fighting the Nazis because he was a fan of the Nazi regime. Henry Ford was awarded and accepted the highest medal that Germany bestowed upon foreigners in 1938. The Ford factories in Europe helped build the Nazi war machine. The rabidly anti-Semitic paper that Ford published helped inspire the Holocaust and popularized the notorious Protocols of Zion.

But in Beck's warped, alternate universe, Henry Ford is anti-fascist because he didn't like the New Deal - see here for Dave Neiwert's debunking of Beck's previous invocation of Ford as anti-fascist champion - while the guy who actually headed up the government while it fought and defeated the fascists is a fascist. Here's a clue for the eternally clueless Beck: we actually had fascists in America during the New Deal - and some of them were opposed to it precisely because they were fascists.

I'll have more to say on this program tomorrow.

Update: I was too tired to mention this last night, but the worst part of that show was watching Beck turn Thomas Paine into a prop to promote his anti-tax "Tea Bag" extremism. It's sickening to watch the segment because Paine actually held views that Beck has demonized idiotically as being "liberal fascism." For example, Paine was a scientific rationalist, while in that anti-intellectual show both global warming and evolution were characterized as being ideological adjuncts of fascism. But even more pertinent is the fact that Thomas Paine was one of the early proponents of the "liberal fascist" welfare state, something anyone remotely familiar with Paine's work would be aware of; as opposed to some hack who is just interested in using the iconography of Paine to promote the notion of overturning the results of a democratic election in the name of "democracy."

Paine's proposal can be found in the second half of The Rights of Man, his defense of the French Revolution. Paine did not advocate for financial support for the poor and elderly as a matter "of a charity but of a right."

So let's reiterate this: Beck is using "Thomas Paine" to sell a revolution to abolish the welfare state (and overthrow the government?) The actual Thomas Paine advocated revolution to establish a welfare state.

Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

...

A revolution in the state of civilization is the necessary companion of revolutions in the system of government. If a revolution in any country be from bad to good, or from good to bad, the state of what is called civilization in that country, must be made conformable thereto, to giveth at revolution effect.

Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.

It is a revolution in the state of civilization that will give perfection to Revolution of France. Already the conviction that government by representation is the true system of government is spreading itself fast in the world. The reasonableness of it can be seen by all. The justness of it makes itself felt even by its opposers. But when a system of civilization, (growing out of that system of government) shall be so organized that not a man or woman born in the Republic but shall inherit some means of beginning the world, and see before them the certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments accompany old age, the Revolution of France will have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations.

You might have a Manichean mind-set if ...

... you say something like this.

"In short, leftists, at their very core, operate from a platform of pure evil."

I can't help but think of the scene from Scrubs where Dr. Cox first explains to J.D. how he feels about Chief Kelso: "I'm gonna go ahead and say this just as carefully as possible so I don't overstate it: Dr. Kelso is the most evil human being on the planet. And may, in fact, be Satan, himself."

Unlike Dr. Cox who just has a dry sense of humor, Pusateri is completely serious.*

*I had incorrectly attributed the post to Mark Noonan when I first posted this. I regret the error.

Take him off the air

That's my advice to anyone at Fox "News" who might have a conscience and a say in the matter. Glenn Beck is getting crazier by the day and it is only a matter of time before another member of his audience is inspired to kill someone. Of course, this isn't going to happen. So an alternative suggestion I have is that anyone with a conscience working at Fox who can find employment elsewhere do so, and that anyone invited to be a guest on Fox decline and give the reason that the network is being boycotted until it removes Beck's irresponsible insanity from the airwaves.

Dave Neiwert does a good job in that link of responding to Beck, but here are two additional points:

1. Beck says that Obama is gutting the military budget. This meme is literally insane. This year's budget increases military spending by over 20 billion dollars.

2. "We didn't vote for any of this stuff! We voted for change!" screamed Beck. How delusional can this man possibly get? Um, I missed the part where Barack Obama ran on a right-wing survivalist platform. "We" apparently only means Beck and his 9/12 followers, the rest of America who voted for a more progressive politics no longer count as Americans. If anyone has a reason to be upset, it's those Americans who were promised an Executive that did not traffic in secrecy and civil liberties encroachment, but are witnessing the Obama administration now continuing and actually worsening some of the worst Bush administration practices.

Update: From Daily Kos:

We in America, Officers and private citizens alike, are fortunate that at this moment in our history we can still LAWFULLY EXTERMINATE these parasitic Global Blood Suckers by placing numerous "STAKES" made of words, paper, pen, and hard work through their hardened hearts.

-- OPERATION VAMPIRE KILLER, a militia manual still on sale at gun shows today along with texts on changing identity, how to operate machine guns, and the perennial 'classic,' the "U.S. militaman's handbook." See fourth photo down in this post from David Weigel.

and

These bloodsucker vampires are not going to be satisfied with just sucking the blood out of GM’s top guy, the AIG executives, or any other business, or business person. Their thirst for power and control is unquenchable. They will not stop. There’s only two ways for this movie to end. Either the economy becomes like the walking dead, or you drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers.

--Glenn Beck, March 30, 2009

Which is partly why the "Tea Party" movement is turning into a meshing ground for the mainstream conservative movement and proto-fascist extremists.

Also, since I watched that the Beck/gasoline segment live, I didn't watch the C & L till just now. It doesn't do justice to just how bizarre Beck's behavior is, because it cuts off a few seconds to soon. Right after Beck gets done with his rant, he looks over at the guy he dumped the "gasoline" on and starts laughing somewhat maniacally.

And if you don't think that Beck is moving proto-fascism into the mainstream, see what happened at one of his 9/12 parties. Amidst plugs for the theocratic Constitution Party (the party of choice for militia members, survivalists, white supremacists, and neo-Confederates) a speaker got up and talked about the 50 year plan to take over America fronted by George Soros. Then someone shouts "Burn the books ... The ones in college, those, those brainwashing books."

Quote of the day

"Wildlife conservation is always a race against time. As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read." - Mark Carwardine, Last Chance to See

Why grant liars a forum to lie?

Disclosure: I hate Hardball with Chris Matthews. I think it epitomizes everything that is wrong with what passes for "news" on television, and believe that just about everything Jon Stewart said about Crossfire applies to Hardball. It is a forum that decontextualizes facts, reducing debate down to he said, she said sound bites of partisan exchange (which benefits the intellectually dishonest since lies are granted equivalency with truth). The purpose is not the advancement of public discourse, but to use the facade of journalistic enterprise to generate ratings from what is really a form of "insider" opinion driven entertainment.

Which is what made watching this segment yesterday so painful (even though Matthews was absent.) It featured a "debate" between Maggie Gallagher of National Organization For Marriage and Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Council over NOWs despicable propaganda video asserting that gay marriage is a threat to individual liberty, the preferred fear-mongering tactic of Christian supremacists since it is no longer socially acceptable to openly express their bigotry.

At no point was the audience ever informed that Maggie Gallagher is a known liar (and hypocrite.) I would say "disgraced former journalist" but in our media culture violating professional ethics doesn't seem to earn one any disgrace.

The National Organization for Marriage, "a national organization that opposes same-sex marriage is targeting New Jersey in a $1.5 million advertising campaign." The group is also running ads in Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The television spots warn that supporters of same-sex marriage "want to change the way I live. ... That means wedding photographers and marriage counselors could be labeled bigots and sued if they oppose working with same-sex couples," they claim. "It's obviously going to happen if gay marriage is the law of the land," remarked National Organization for Marriage president Maggie Gallagher. In 2005, Gallagher was exposed as a payola pundit (as was Armstrong Williams), for receiving tens of thousands of dollars from the Bush administration to write favorably about its "marriage promotion" initiatives. Gallagher failed to disclose the payments, even as she praised government marriage promotion programs in her syndicated columns, op/ed pieces and interviews. She later claimed that she "had no special obligation to disclose this information," but would have done so, "if I had remembered."

As one might expect from someone with a demonstrated history of dishonesty, Gallagher's gay demonizing, Christian supremacist propaganda is based in lies and fake testimonials. As Chris Hedges observed, the sort of "liberty" that Gallagher is keen on protecting is the liberty to impose her religious views on others.

Lies in the service of prejudice and bigotry should not be granted legitimacy under the guise of being "debate" over a difference of opinion on policy. That's not news. It's pseudo-news.

An awesome dedication

Browsing through my recently obtained copy of I Have Landed, the first thing I came across was this dedication from Gould

TO MY READERS
Fellow members of the ancient and universal (and vibrantly continuing) Republic of Letters

I can't think of a more perfect dedication from someone who spent a lifetime doing science and writing essays promoting scientific literacy to the general public. The Republic of Letters was the Enlightenment era notion of a metaphysical community comprised of individuals engaging cooperatively in free inquiry and open discourse (via informal letters and Salon discussions) in order to advance human knowledge. This community of reasoned discourse and collaborative effort eventually came to become one of the foundations for the Englightment belief in meritocracy and democracy, the link expressed perhaps best by John Dewey in Democracy and Education: "A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience."

Thomas Paine exemplified how the spirit of the Republic of Letters inspired the American revolution when he wrote in American Crisis II: "The Republic of Letters is more ancient than monarchy, and of far higher character in the world than the vassal court of Britain; he that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defense of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to 'Defender of the Faith' than George the Third."

Cop-killer Richard Poplawski uploaded Glenn Beck video at white nationalist forum

Eric Boehlert's latest column, "Glenn Beck and the rise of Fox News' militia media" is must reading.

Although we've already addressed the role that the sort of fear-mongering and conspiratorial thinking that Beck traffics in plays in legitimizing the world views of persons like cop-killer Richard Poplawski, Boehlert identifies an even more explicit connection between Beck, Fox News, and Poplawski.

We learned that Poplawski hosted his own (failed) Internet radio show and that he visited the website of 9-11 conspiracy backer Alex Jones, who has been hyping the threat of a totalitarian world government for years. More recently, Jones has been warning listeners like Poplawski about The Obama Deception (that's the name of Jones' new documentary DVD) and how President Obama is bound to destroy America.

...

Jones might be a "freak," but he has recently been embraced -- and mainstreamed -- by Fox News, as part of the news channel's unprecedented drive to push radical propaganda warning of America's democratic demise under the new president.

During a March 18 webcast of FoxNews.com's proudly paranoid "Freedom Watch," Andrew Napolitano introduced a segment about "what the government has done to take your liberty and your property away." And with that, he welcomed onto the show "the one, the only, the great Alex Jones," who began ranting about "exposing" the New World Order and the threat posed by an emerging "global government."

"I appreciate what you're exposing," Napolitano assured his guest.

Waving around a copy of his Obama Deception, Jones warned Fox News webcast viewers about Obama's "agenda" for "gun confiscation" and the new president's plan to "bring in total police-state control" to America.

Jones also noted with excitement that Fox News' Glenn Beck had recently begun warning about the looming New World Order on his show, just like Jones had for years. "It is great!" cheered the conspiracist. (Like Jones, Beck recently warned viewers that "the Second Amendment is under fire.") Concluding the interview, Fox News' Napolitano announced "it's absolutely been a pleasure" listening to Jones' insights.

Boehlert goes on to note that the sort of radical propaganda about the end of America being promoted on Fox News on a daily basis is "unprecedented in the history of American television" and that although Beck finally got around to debunking the notion of FEMA concentration camps this week, weeks ago Poplawski had uploaded footage at the white nationalist forum Stormfront of Beck referencing the camps. Dave Neiwert has more on this.

This is a classic example of how "the Transmission Belt", by which far-right ideas are borne into the mainstream of American political discourse, actually works -- "how stuff gets essentially a trial run in ... the far right, and the messages will get refined, and then they'll be picked up by these intermediary groups and individuals, and refined some more, and then there'll be a buzz that's created, and then that gets media attention in the mainstream press."

It's important to point out the relationship between the mainstream media and the far right in these situations, especially for unstable and violent actors like Poplawski: Typically, full-on subscribers to extremist beliefs view mainstream conservatives with distaste and distrust, since they believe them to be weak-kneed sellouts. They instead tend to trust the Joneses and the John Trochmanns and Lew Rockwells and Ron Pauls first.

So when the memes regarding "suppressed knowledge" that these extremists organize around suddenly appear in the mainstream media -- in places like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs' and Sean Hannity's cable-network shows -- it has a real amplifying effect: Not only is it final and consummate confirmation of their beliefs in these conspiracy theories, but it induces an extreme apocalypticism, a fear that things must be even worse than they suspected.

That's why Poplawski posted that Beck video on FEMA camps: If even the mainstream media were reporting it, then you know it had to be coming.

Although he amply makes his case that Fox is giving voice to the extremism of the militia/survivalist movement, Boehlert did not even mention that Beck brought on one of the most militia (and crazy) sounding members of Congress - Michele Bachmann - on his show to discuss her belief that the US is preparing to get on board with a One World currency (an obvious step on the road to a New World Order.) That's the same Bachmann who called for Democrats to be investigated for anti-Americanism; told her constituents, that in response to a carbon cap-and-trade plan, she wants them "armed and dangerous" in preparation for a revolution; and, most recently, said that the Serve America Act could create American re-education camps.

And even after Beck featured a segment debunking FEMA concentration camps Monday, he immediately followed that by saying that there is no need to believe stuff like that because there is plenty of real conspiracy out there to get worked up about. Which was his way of introducing the next segment, a segment about State Dept. Legal Adviser nominee Harold Koh being a threat to democracy. So, basically, Beck used the debunking of FEMA concentration camps to lend credibility to a different conspiracy theory - based on a fabrication - which still promotes the idea that because of Obama America is rapidly heading towards losing its sovereignity to one world government.

Boehlert concludes his column by noting how similar the reasons Jim Adkisson gave for wanting to kill "liberals" are to the ideas that Beck promotes on his show regularly.

I hope to be finished reading Dave Neiwert's The Eliminationists by the end of next week and to have it reviewed soon after, but until then, a good portion of the book is currently available at Google books.

Limbaugh tells veteran he's not a Republican

I just listened to a caller to the Rush Limbaugh program tell Limbaugh that he is the reason McCain lost the election. The caller was a self-identified veteran and Republican who voted for McCain. He blamed the loss on Limbaugh's idiotic "Operation Chaos" and, to a much greater extent, Rush's disgusting defense of torture. The caller said that torture was what the Nazis did, that Americans don't torture, etc. Searching for an epithet to express what he felt about Limbaugh's support of an American torture regime, he called Limbaugh a "brainwashed Nazi."

This is an inappropriate thing to say about Limbaugh, but it gives you an idea of what some Republicans feel about the sort of extremism that has taken over their party.

Limbaugh first attempted to dismiss the caller's criticism on the grounds that he voted for Obama. After the caller reminded Limbaugh that he voted for McCain, Limbaugh went into an incoherent ramble about how the caller was the brainwashed one, that Limbaugh knows of no one that has died from torture, concluding by telling the caller that it's no surprise that he's the sort that would support McCain and that he isn't a real Republican.

That's the level of respect that Limbaugh has for veterans. They're great and swell when they're off dying in wars that Limbaugh won't fight in himself. But when they come home and oppose the United States using communist torture techniques, Limbaugh excludes them from the Republican party.

Of course, we already knew that Limbaugh considers soldiers who disagree with him to be "phony." And as for no deaths resulting from torture, funny how Limbaugh never lets stuff like this enter into his hermetically sealed mind.

Update: Transcript and audio of the exchange.

Gould for a dollar

For the cost of 1 dollar, I now own a hard cover, retired library copy of I have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould.

Although perhaps not as well known as, say, Carl Sagan, Gould was one of the greatest popularizers of science of our generation. You can find more about him and many of his writings at the excellent Stephen Jay Gold Archive.

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was among the best known and widely read scientists of the late 20th century. A paleontologist and educator at Harvard University, Gould made his largest contributions to science as the leading spokes-person for evolutionary theory. His monthly columns in Natural History magazine and his popular works on evolution have earned him numerous awards and one of the largest readerships in the popular-science genre — penning altogether over twenty successful books throughout his career.

For more than 30 years Gould served on the faculty at Harvard, where he was Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Professor of Geology, Biology, and the History of Science, as well as curator for Invertebrate Paleontology at the institution's Museum of Comparative Zoology. On this website you will find articles by Gould and his colleagues focusing on the finer points of his work, the nature of life's evolution, and the general ontogeny of evolutionary theory.

Images from "the best" of "real America"

David Weigel went to a gun rally in the sort of place that Sarah Palin seems to think constitutes "real America," one of the "pro-America areas of this great nation."

Here's one of the images that Weigel encountered

Weigel notes that the couple responsible for this display declined to explain what it meant. Let me take a guess.

When writing makes a difference

When I first heard that a Spanish court headed by the same judge who indicted General Pinochet is considering opening a criminal case against six key Bush administration figures for their role in creating an American torture regime, my immediate thought was that it sounded like the court and those who brought the charges were following through on the detective work international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands did for his book Torture Team. (see here and here for previous posts on his work.) Torture Team had layed out a concise case demonstrating how those very same six individuals had played a leading role in the creation of policy that led to human rights abuses.

Now I see that Jane Mayer - herself an author of a definitive book on America's torture regime - has confirmed what I suspected.

Pittsburgh police killer reportedly afraid Obama would take away his guns

Dave Neiwert - author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, the the next book I intend to review - points out that initial reports suggest that the 23 year old Richard Poplawski, who killed three police officers and wounded five at least several others, feared that police officers were coming to take away his guns at the behest of the Obama administration, and links this sort of paranoia to the fear-mongering from the likes of Glenn Beck and Wayne LaPierre of the NRA that Democrats are coming to take people's guns away.

An additional sign that Poplawski was a right-wing extremist is that his self-described "best friend" Edd Perkovic appears to be a white supremacist whose MySpace page promotes infamous conpiratorial hate material such as The Turner Diaries (which was an inspiration of Timothy McVeigh) and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which was a justification given by the Nazis for their persecution of Jews); and another friend has explained that Poplawski was fearful that our government is under Zionist control.

Look: Fox News has given a platform to someone - i.e. Glenn Beck - who is busy mainstreaming the sort of extremist conspiratorial worldview that Poplawski apparently inhabited. Of course, Beck isn't promoting the nakedly racist material of the right-wing as I expect he finds that stuff contemptible and he would be taken off the air if he did promote it (presumably, that is ... Sean Hannity promoting the racism of Andy Martin didn't seem to bother Fox), but the stuff about totalitarianism, FEMA concentration camps, seizure of guns, a coming militia war, and all the other insanity that Beck talks about on a daily basis provides a sanitized version of the same underlying conspiratorial beliefs.* This is troubling, to say the least.

And maybe Rep. Michele Bachmann might want to rethink encouraging her constituency to be "armed and dangerous" for a revolution against the "nefarious activities" of Democrats.

*I don't believe that Beck is a racist, or that Beck necessarily believes any of that stuff. Indeed, I am fairly certain that Beck would consider that stuff absurd hate material. But he fails to notice the underlying structure of his conspiratorial beliefs and those of racists like Perkovic. This applies also to Bill O'Reilly, who himself has been busy promoting a mainstream, sanitized version of white supremacist New World Order conspiracy theory, which, as I've noted now many times, posits the ethnically Jewish, international financier George Soros as the mastermind of a leftist one world government plot to take over America. The most significant difference between O'Reilly's version of this meme and the racist one - that I can tell - is that instead of identifying Soros as the mastermind of the Jewish plot to take over the world, he identifies him as the mastermind of the S-P plot take over the world.

Update: Neiwert has more on the emerging portrait of Poplawski as a starter white supremacist, including a long rant against the imagined Jewish control of America at the white nationalist hate site Stormfront that he apparently posted there.

Excerpt of the day

From Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy by Noam Chomsky

Sensible people will seek differences between the Social Security and health care systems that might explain the paradox [of why S.S. "reform" is an issue for some in politics, while health care isn't despite the success of Social Security and the inadequacy of health care.]. And they will quickly find critical differences, which are quite familiar in other domains: the paradox mirrors closely the “schizophrenia” of all administrations that underlines the “strong line of continuity” with regard to “democracy promotion,” to take one example. Social Security is of little value for the rich, but is crucial for survival for working people, the poor, their dependents, and the disabled. For the wealthy, it is an irrelevant pittance. But for close to 60 percent of the population it is the “major source” of retirement income, and the most secure. Furthermore, as a government program, it has such low administrative costs that it offers nothing to financial institutions. Social Security helps only the underlying population, not the substantial people. It is therefore natural that it should be dispatched to the flames. The medical system, in contrast, works very well for the substantial people, with health care effectively rationed by wealth, while enormous profits flow to private power for superfluous bureaucracy and supervision, overpriced drugs, and other useful inefficiencies. The underlying population can be treated with lectures on responsibility.

There are other sound reasons to destroy the Social Security system. It is based on principles that are deeply offensive to the moral values of the political leadership and the sectors they represent – not those who vote for them, a different category of the population. Social Security is based on the idea that it is a community responsibility to ensure that the disabled widow on the other side of town has food to eat, or that the child across the street should be able to go to a decent school. Such evil ideas have to be driven from the mind. They stand in the way of the “New Spirit of the Age” of the 1850s: “Gain Wealth, forgetting all but Self.” According to right thinking, it isn’t my fault if the widow married the wrong person of if the child’s parents made bad investment decisions, so why should I contribute a few cents to a public fund to take care of them? The “ownership society,” in contrast, suffers from none of these moral defects.

Thomas Paine still not getting the credit he deserves

Christopher Hitches gives Thomas Paine the credit that Barack Obama did not properly give him in his inauguration speech.

Here’s how the speech ended, as you may remember:

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of Amer­ica’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The en­emy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words to be read to the people: “Let it be told to the future world . . . that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive . . . that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.”

Slightly boilerplate stuff in a way: na­tional unity; Valley Forge; the darkest hour just before dawn—it took a while for it to sink in. Yet after all, as far as I know, there was only one occasion when General Washington ordered anything to be read aloud. And that was to the troops (not “the people,” if we are to be fussy). And the words that he ordered to be read were the imperishable words of The Crisis, by Thomas Paine, from which, indeed, the above words are taken. (They are not as lapidary as the opening “These are the times that try men’s souls,” but still. . . .)

So here is an apparently encouraging sign. The new president, having rather spoiled his first day in office by inviting the grotesque figure of Rick Warren, that bulbous religious entrepreneur, to give the invocation, redeems himself by citing the author of not just The Rights of Man but The Age of Reason. Except that he doesn’t quite “cite” Paine. He masks the quotation by making it seem, without exactly saying so, that he is referring us to the altogether “safe” authority of George Wash­ington. The word crisis can be used in lower case, but the name of Paine himself cannot.

Although Thomas Paine is the person who coined the phrase "United States of America" and convinced the colonists to declare their independence, with the Declaration of Independence itself reading as a distilled version of the argument Paine gave in Common Sense; and it being his war propaganda in the American Crisis that gave the colonists the spirit to keep fighting at a time when it was thought that all was lost, he still remains something of a forgotten Founder. And as Hitchens observes, it's hard not to suspect that Paine's place in history has been denied because of his deistic attacks on organized religion and Biblical superstition (and probably to a slightly lesser extent his participation in the French revolution.)

Blackwater out, Triple Canopy in

Jeremy Scahill reports on the increasing use of the mercenary force Triple Canopy in the Middle East.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama's advisers said he "can't rule out [and] won't rule out" using mercenary forces, like Blackwater. Now, it appears that the Obama administration has decided on its hired guns of choice: Triple Canopy, a Chicago company now based in Virginia. It may not have Blackwater's thuggish reputation, but Triple Canopy has its own bloody history in Iraq and a record of hiring mercenaries from countries with atrocious human rights records. What's more, Obama is not just using the company in Iraq, but also as a U.S.-government funded private security force in Israel/Palestine, operating out of Jerusalem.

George Will demonstrates how to lie without lying

From The Intersection (bold emphasis mine)

Whoa boy. George Will has done another global warming column. He doesn’t mention either my takedown, or that of the World Meteorological Organization, but it’s obvious he has seen them. And yet, he still wants to use WMO data to cast doubt on the idea that it’s warming up globally:

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

Congratulations, Mr. Will–your statement is no longer factually incorrect! However, you still appear to reject statistical reasoning about temperature trends. How else to explain this silly fixation on 1998 being the warmest year? This isolated factoid does not cast any serious doubt on the idea that we’re in a warming trend. It’s absurd to assume that we’ll set a new temperature record each year, and that if we don’t, there’s nothing to worry about.

Although Will's statement is technically accurate, it's still a lie. First, remember that 1998 is the warmest year on record according to the WMO, but NASA data shows 2005 to hold the record. Will, like other AGW deniers, focuses on '98 because it better fits the contra-reality narrative they've developed, i.e. it sounds better to say "it hasn't warmed in ten years" than "it hasn't warmed in 3 years".

Secondly, this is how Will phrases the claim in his original Feb. 15th column: "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." After that column, Will received an avalanche of criticism -including from the WMO itself - explaining to him that the WMO data said no such thing.

What this reveals is that Will carefully constructed his sentence in the most recent column to be able to make the same assertion - AGW is dubious because there hasn't been a warmer year than 1998 - without technically lying. Given that Will obviously restructured this sentence in response to the criticism he received, it is impossible to believe that Will hasn't also been made aware that a single data point up or down does not define a trend. Indeed, as Mooney points out, the Post ran a letter from the WMO chastising Will for using their data to say something it does not say:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record—as was done in a recent George Will column—and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

Yet the Post has allowed Will to do exactly the same thing. And in this instance there can be no doubt that Will is intentionally misrepresenting the WMO's data.

Look at it this way: for a 500 day period you have five cars a day drive by your house. Over the next 49 days you have 20 cars go by. Then the next day 30 go by. Then for the next 50 days 29 cars go by.

Would it make any sense for someone to say there hasn't been an upward trend of of cars driving by your house because the number hasn't passed the 30 mark? (The claim would grow even more absurd if you were also aware of a known mechanism for an increase in traffic around your house, e.g. a particular road is shut forcing more traffic onto your road.)

As the Union for Concerned Scientists notes, "The World Meteorological Organization concluded that the decade 1998-2007 was the hottest on record." Convenient how Will leaves that part out of the "it hasn't warmed in ten years" mantra.

Preaching elimination

From The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton

If religious fascisms are possible, one must address the potential - supreme irony - for fascism in Israel. Israeli reactions to the first and second intifada have been mixed. Israeli national identity has been powerfully associated with an affirmation of the human rights that were long denied to Jews in the Diaspora. This democratic tradition forms a barrier against "giving up free institutions" in the fight against Palestinian nationalism. It has been weakened, however, by two trends - the inevitable hardening of attitudes in the face of Palestinian intransigence, and a shift of weight within the Israeli population away from European Jews, the principal bearers of the democratic tradition, in favor of Jews from North Africa and elsewhere in the Near East who are indifferent to it. The suicide bombings of the second intifada after 2001 radicalized even many Israeli democrats to the right. By 2002, it was possible to hear language within the right-wing of the Likud Party and some of the small religious parties that comes close to a functional equivalent to fascism. The chosen people begins to sound like a Master Race that claims a unique "mission in the world," demands its "vital space," demonizes an enemy that obstructs the realization of the people's destiny, and accepts the necessity of force to obtain these ends.

A few years ago I expressed concern over the Israeli military naming a military strike in Gaza "Operation Samson's Pillars," noting that this evokes some disturbing Biblical imagery that I guessed would likely not be reassuring to Palestinian civilians. Not least of which being the irony of the hero Samson engaging in an act that comes across as the Old Testament equivalent of a suicide bombing. That Israel considers its nuclear weapons the "Samson Option" isn't very reassuring, either. More generally, I objected to allusion to the tribal, Us vs. Them God of the Bible because:

The Old Testament God is a god of retributional violence, cruelty, and mass slaughter. Any mission paying homage to him is starting out on the wrong foot.

Now there may be further evidence of the democracy eroding effects of religious fundamentalism in Israel. Recent allegations have surfaced that in the latest IDF military operations in Gaza - which resulted in Palestinian deaths at a ratio of about 100 Palestinians killed for every one Israeli (estimated 1400 Palestinian deaths, 13 Israeli deaths) - fundamentalist rabbis were preaching to soldiers a military mission that sounds dangerously like Paxton's description of a functional fascism.

A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”

The linked article goes on to note the increased presence in the military of religious nationalists, including "the military’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field." After which he was "reprimanded" for distributing material that "contain[ed] a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy." That's putting it nicely. The specific verse was from Book of Numbers, Chapter 31, Verses 13-18:

Moses, Eleazer the priest, and all the chieftains of the community came out to meet them outside the camp. Moses became angry with the commanders of the army, the officers of thousands and the officers of hundreds, who had come back from the military campaign. Moses said to them, "You have spared every female! Yet they are the very ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, so that the Lord's community was struck by the plague. Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and slay also every young woman who has known a man carnally; but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man."

Christopher Hitchens observes that this seems to be part of a campaign to create an army within the army which will be willing to disregard orders to disband the settlements which stand as one of the obstacles to a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and suggests that the United States make its continued support of the Israeli military conditional on putting a stop to the spread of extremism in the IDF.

Peering over the horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties that has immediately resulted, it's fairly easy to see where this is going in the medium-to-longer term. The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs. The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place, with the religious excuses given for Baruch Goldstein's rampage and the Talmudic evasions concerning the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Once considered highly extreme, such biblical exegeses are moving ever closer to the mainstream. It's high time the United States cut off any financial support for Israel that can be used even indirectly for settler activity, not just because such colonization constitutes a theft of another people's land but also because our Constitution absolutely forbids us to spend public money on the establishment of any religion.

Internal critics also note the seeming proto-fascist nature of the fundamentalists, with the first article I linked quoting an opponent of Rabbi Rontzki

The right tends to make an equation between authenticity and brutality, as if the idea of humanism were a Western and alien implant to Judaism,” he said.

“They seem not to know that nationalism and fascism are also Western ideas and that hypernationalism is not Jewish at all.”

The LA Times also covered this story, and provides more testimony

This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness," a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter. "His message was clear: 'This is a war against an entire people, not against specific terrorists.' The whole thing was turned into something very religious and messianic."

In addition to commentary on the nature of the problem

But soldiers now going public with allegations of misconduct in Gaza portray the military rabbinate as a corps of self-appointed holy warriors whose sermons and writings demonized Palestinians.

"The army itself is a battleground of conflicting ideals in Israeli Jewish society," said Avi Sagi, a Bar-Ilan University philosophy professor who in the 1990s was a co-author of the military's code of ethics, which obliges soldiers to avoid killing innocents.

On one side, he said, are universal values that call for respecting all human life equally and are largely shared by Jews who seek accommodation with the Palestinians. On the other side are more nationalistic passages of the Torah, cited by religious thinkers who liken the Palestinians to Old Testament invaders and place a premium on Jewish life.

The LA Times goes on to write about a military doctrine adopted for the mission that sounds nakedly like a war crime

And after the 22-day operation, a Tel Aviv University philosophy professor with close ties to the military, Asa Kasher, said the decision to shell Gaza's cities stemmed from an anti-terrorism doctrine he had helped draft a few years ago. It stated that in Gaza, as in other areas the army does not control, there is no justification for endangering soldiers' lives in order to avoid killing civilians in the proximity of targeted militants.

That doctrine appears to be at odds with the military code, which obliges the army to avoid civilian casualties, and it was never formally adopted. However, it was echoed in religious terms in literature distributed in Gaza by military rabbis.

"Our ancestors did not always fight with a sword and at times preferred to use a bow and arrow from a distance," one text read.

"Actions must be taken from a distance in order to spare our soldiers' lives."

Human Rights Watch noted that these sort of attacks are indeed a violation of international law

Israel's use of heavy artillery in residential areas of Gaza City violates the prohibition under the laws of war against indiscriminate attacks and should be stopped immediately, Human Rights Watch said today. A Human Rights Watch researcher on the Israel-Gaza border on January 15, 2009, observed Israel's repeated use in the center of Gaza City of 155mm artillery shells, which inflict blast and fragmentation damage up to 300 meters away.

In addition to being a violation of international law, this is a morally indefensible practice. AC Grayling explained in Among the Dead Cities

[S]aving military lives by substituting civilian deaths for them is no different morally from a soldier on the battlefield using a civilian as a shield. Soldiers are contracted, trained and armed for battle, and although they are placed in danger, their commanders usually try to keep as many of them unharmed as possible, by appropriate tactics. Civilians are in a very different situation from soldiers. Many, whether or not in a minority, will not be willing parties to the war that affects them. Civilians also have many efforts made on their behalf to protect them, but the conditions of modern war - especially in respect of bombs and missiles from the air - place them in great hazard despite all that defence measures can do.

Now imagine this scenario: a sniper, let's say a black radical, is on top of a roof firing at white people in an American inner city. Its the 50s. The building is some sort of black community center usually filled with a couple hundred people. The sniper kills two people and the police respond by detonating the building, killing the couple of hundred people inside, in addition to the sniper. It later comes to light that the persons responsible for the choice to blow up the building belong to a church that preaches that black civil rights are a Satanic plot. Would anyone possibly consider the need to not risk police lives an acceptable justification for the mass casualties of civilians in this scenario?

I am not saying this is a direct parallel or anything of that sort, but am trying to draw out the underlying absurdity of the rationalization offered for what ends up being retributional violence being visited upon a population collectively.

More disturbing evidence of the radicalization of Israeli soldiers comes from a Haaretz report that some veterans have ordered t-shirts that appear to celebrate the Michael Reagan approach to peace.

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

The Israeli military certainly put an end to the lives of the daughters of Palestinian peace activist and doctor Abu El-Eish who was told by the IDF that his home was a legitimate military target. He recounted the events to Democracy Now

We are standing in the scene of the tragedy, in the place where four lovely girls were sitting, building their dreams and their hopes, and in seconds, these dreams were killed. These flowers were dead. Three of my daughters and one niece were killed in one second on the 16th of January at a quarter to five p.m. Just a few seconds, I left them, and they stayed in the room—two daughters here, one daughter here, one daughter here, and my niece with them.

The first shell came from the tank space, which is there, came to shell two daughters who were sitting here on their chairs. And when I heard this shell, I came inside the room to find, to look. I can’t recognize my daughters. Their heads were cut off their bodies. They were separated from their bodies, and I can’t recognize whose body is this. They were drowning in a pool of blood. This is the pool of blood. Even look here. This is their brain. These are parts of their brain. Aya was lying on the ground. Shada was injured, and her eye is coming out. Her fingers were torn, just attached by a tag of skin. I felt disloved, out of space, screaming, “What can I do?”

They were not satisfied by the first shell and to leave my eldest daughter. But the second shell soon came to kill Aya, to injure my niece, who came down from the third floor, and to kill my eldest daughter Bessan, who was in the kitchen and came at that moment, screaming and jumping, “Dad! Dad! Aya is injured!”

The second shell, it penetrated the wall between this room to enter the other room. Look. This is the room with the weapons, where this room was fully equipped with weapons. These are the weapons which were in this room. These are the weapons. These are the weapons: the books and their clothes. These were the science handouts. There, you see, these are her handouts for the courses that she studies, which is stained with her blood. It’s mixed with her blood. These are the books. These are the weapons that I equipped my daughters with: with education, with knowledge, with dreams, with hopes, with loves.

I am a gynecologist who practiced most of my time in Israel. I was trained in Israel. And I devoted my life and my work for the benefit of humanity and well-being, to serve patients, not as someone else that you are delivering or helping choose. I am dealing with patients and human beings. We treat patients equally, with respect, with dignity, with privacy. Politicians and leaders should learn from doctors these values and these norms and to adopt them.

On his home being a legitimate target

You know, they said there were—they think there were snipers on the roof of my building. It’s important to say the truth, and the truth lies here: only innocent civilian girls were in this room and this building and this surrounding. Nothing else.

The assertion that such deaths are unfortunate but excusable because they were not intentional is one that I find to be seriously lacking. In his lengthy article on this matter, Noam Chomsky put it best

The claim that "our side" never targets civilians is familiar doctrine among those who monopolize the means of violence. And there is some truth to it. We do not generally try to kill particular civilians. Rather, we carry out murderous actions that we know will slaughter many civilians, but without specific intent to kill particular ones. In law, the routine practices might fall under the category of depraved indifference, but that is not an adequate designation for standard imperial practice and doctrine. It is more similar to walking down a street knowing that we might kill ants, but without intent to do so, because they rank so low that it just doesn't matter. The same is true when Israel carries out actions that it knows will kill the "grasshoppers" and "two-legged beasts" who happen to infest the lands it "liberates." There is no good term for this form of moral depravity, arguably worse than deliberate murder, and all too familiar.

More on O'Reilly's dishonesty

Commenting on footage of of Bill O'Reilly's paid stalker Jesse Watters attempting to physically prevent one of his ambush victims from escaping, I wrote

In the clip, you'll see that when the individual attempts to enter his car and leave, Watters sticks his foot in the door and tries to prevent him from driving off. There seems to me something very wrong with that ... at a visceral level. Trying to physically prevent someone's escape after you stalk and ambush them is a violation of the person's personal space and is threatening behavior. The sort of behavior that might trigger the flight/fight response and escalate a situation to violence.

Alex Koppelman watched the same clip and came to the same conclusion about the potential escalation to violence, but also notes that the dishonesty that O'Reilly and Watters employ actually undermines a respect for the notion of due process

That this particular ambush nearly escalated to violence is bad enough, but what's worse is the way O'Reilly and Watters twisted the facts of the situation. Clearly, no one wants to see a newly convicted sex offender out on the street, certainly not one like the man convicted in this case, whose victim is mentally challenged. But O'Reilly and Watters made it seem as if the judge had a choice in the matter, with Watters even using some loaded language -- "obviously this guy's got some predilection to being soft on sex offenders" -- in a way that seemed to suggest that perhaps Padgett had ulterior motives.

Turns out, unsurprisingly, that the real story differs sharply from the way O'Reilly told it. John Campbell, a local defense lawyer, told Tampa's News Channel 8, "As a matter of law, Judge Padgett had no choice... I would like to see that gentleman locked up as well, but the law doesn't allow for it." According to Campbell, unless it was shown that the convict is a flight risk, he had to be let out on bail pending appeal.

Moreover, as he does in most cases -- Terkel's was an exception -- O'Reilly claimed that the only reason he sent Watters out for the ambush was that they had contacted Padgett, who'd refused to speak to the show. That may be true, but it ignores an important fact: As News Channel 8 reported, "Under Florida law, sitting judges are not allowed to discuss pending cases."

O'Reilly's broadcast has inspired protests from local residents. It's also done some damage to our legal system, the idea that people are entitled to due process. Cable news shows focusing on crime generally oversimplify the law, but this sort of thing is on a different level entirely. In O'Reilly's world, if a judge acts in a way we don't like, then it's time to get him, facts and law be damned. That sort of attitude won't end well for anyone.

Quote of the day

"The conclusion of [supply side] theory is that a large reduction in U.S. taxes would actually raise government revenues ... Unfortunately, like all other perpetual motion machines, it will not work. It is a lovely vision, but it is actually a mirage - and a dangerous mirage at that." - economics Professor Robert Dunn, in the Washington Post July 9, 1978

Quoted by Haynes Johnson in Sleepwalking Through History.

One more point

In my list of highlights from the Ricks lecture on The Gamble, I forgot to mention this point:

- One way or another, the Iraqi government is going to end up being a closer ally of Iran than the United States.

I've added this back into the original post.

Thomas Ricks discusses "The Gamble"

A couple of nights ago I watched Thomas Ricks give a talk at Fora.tv about his most recent book on the last few years of the Iraq war, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (a sequel to his previous work, the authoritative Fiasco.) I'd embed it here but I haven't been able to get that feature to work ever since Fora redesigned its website.

Anyways, the talk is a little over an hour and, as can be expected, is highly informative. Here are some key points from the discussion:

- Where as the message of Fiasco was "the war in Iraq is going worse than you think it is," the message of The Gamble is "the war in Iraq is not going as well as you think it is." The reductions in violence that have been achieved are tenuous.

- The "surge" did not work (at least not in the way that it was intended to.)

- We have not "won" in Iraq or achieved "victory." The war is, by Ricks' estimation, maybe half way done and will end up being the longest military conflict in US history.

- Leaving Iraq may be immoral. Staying in Iraq may be immoral. Iraq is poisoned fruit and we are left with having to figure out the least bad options.

- George W. Bush will be remembered as the worst president in U.S. history.

- There is no such thing as "non-combat troops."

- One way or another, the Iraqi government is going to end up being a closer ally of Iran than the United States.

I've highlighted what I found to the most significant points of the talk, but if you watch the entire thing you will see that Ricks does have some praise for President Bush and for what Petraeus has done since taking command, as well as plenty of other general information about the situation in Iraq.

One point of dissent: Ricks favors a truth commission to investigate war crimes committed during the last eight years, with amnesty granted for those who participate. I see no reason to grant war criminals amnesty. A truth commission is a good idea for a society that is moving from civil war or tyranny to a democratic state, where an open inquiry can help push the society to the right of the J curve and avoid the destabilizing effect of criminal prosecutions for the previous regime; but in America, which is already a democratic state and an open society, a truth commission will lower America's J curve by sacrificing one of our most democratic institutions: the rule of law. Besides, member of the Bush administration have long demonstrated that they are not going to be willing participants in any kind of discussion, nor will they speak honestly without some sort of penalty imposed on them (although Ricks does suggest amnesty be revoked for anyone who does not come forward freely before a certain date.)

I realize that I probably need to explain the concept of the J curve, but I'm in a bit of a rush and that link will have to do for now. Nevermind, this link explains it.

O'Reilly lies. Again.

Bill O'Reilly,not content merely to stalk and demonize Amanda Terkel, also decided to lie about it.

In a new interview with Broadcasting & Cable, O’Reilly defends sending his producer to harass me on March 21. Specifically, he says that he contacted our “website” beforehand, but received no response. He also says that I clearly wasn’t disturbed by the incident because I didn’t “look threatened” in the video that Fox aired ....

Neither I nor anyone else at ThinkProgress ever received any sort of request from anyone at Fox News. O’Reilly’s producers did ask CAP CEO John Podesta to appear on his show — after his ambush of me. They then had no problem finding the phone number of the appropriate people to contact at our organization; why wasn’t I extended the same courtesy, if they were legitimately interested getting a response from me?

...

So not only does O’Reilly think he knows how abducted children feel, he also now thinks that he can assess the internal emotional states of women. Maybe O’Reilly thinks that unless I cried or ran away, I must have been enjoying the harassment

An op-ed isn't a fact-free zone

I've recommended before that The Elements of Journalism should be essential reading for both citizens and journalists. The first element of journalism listed is that "Journalism's first obligation is to the truth." The third is that journalism's "essence is a discipline of verification."

These elements apply to all forms of journalism, including op-eds. The authors explain that just because someone is writing an opinion piece that does not free them from an ethical obligation to verify facts.

I mention this because of the recent controversy that has resulted from George Will writing a global warming denial op-ed for the Washington Post that had it been fact-checked, it would not have been printed. Among his numerous falsehoods, Will only cited two scientific sources. And in both instances those sources have responded that their data does not say what Will claims it does. Yet the Post has stood behind Will's column, justifying it by saying that Will provided "sources" that contradict the work of climate experts, i.e. Will relied on the work of pseudoscientific cranks and corporate propagandists.

Carl Zimmer, who has worked as an editor and author for the excellent science magazine Discover, understands that science writing requires science fact-checking. Which is why his examination (also see here, here, here, and here) of this topic is so illuminating, and why I'll quote part of his omnibus post on this at length.

What has kept me hooked on this saga is not George Will’s errors. Errors are as common as grass. Some are made out of ignorance, some carefully constructed to give a misleading impression. What has kept me agog is the way the editors at the Washington Post have actually given their stamp of approval on Will’s columns, even claiming to have fact-checked them and seeing no need for a single correction.

The climax to this part of the story came yesterday, when the Columbia Journalism Review was finally able to get Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor at the Post, to speak directly about the ice affair:

It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject–so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point…I think it’s kind of healthy, given how, in so many areas–not just climatology, but medicine, and everything else–there is a tendency on the part of the lay public at times to ascribe certainty to things which are uncertain.

I’ve heard that line before…the one about how people can look at the same scientific data and make different inferences.

I’ve heard it from creationists. They look at the Grand Canyon, at all the data amassed by geologists over the years, and they end up with an inference very different from what you’ll hear from those geologists.

Would Hiatt be pleased to have them writing opinion pieces, too? There is indeed some debate in the scientific community about exactly how old the Grand Canyon is–with some arguing it’s 55 million years old and others arguing for 15 million. Would Hiatt consider it healthy to publish a piece from someone who thinks the Grand Canyon is just a few thousand years old, with just a perfunctory inspection of the information in it?

At this point, it’s hard for me to see how the answer could be no.

I've drawn this parallel before myself, noting that just like the Creationist who believes that scientific facts are atheist bias, global warming deniers consider the established science relating to AGW as liberal bias.

Another science journalist, Chris Mooney, was allowed to publish a rebuttal to Will in the Post, and his conclusion makes this point

Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.

As Mooney says, this is not an issue that only applies to science writing. Critical thinking, weighing of evidence ... verification of empirical claims should apply to all news writing, period.

You might recall that last Monday I took issue with several b.s. claims that were made by Andrew Breitbart, one of which was the assertion that Rush Limbaugh has never said anything racist. Now I see, via Media Matters, that Andrew Klavan was given an op-ed in the LA Times in which he asserted that Limbaugh critics:

don't need to listen to him. You've heard enough to know he's a) racist, b) hateful, c) stupid, d) merely an outrageous entertainer not to be taken seriously or e) all of the above.

Now let me tell you the real answer: You're a lowdown, yellow-bellied, lily-livered intellectual coward. You're terrified of finding out he makes more sense than you do.

I listen to Limbaugh every chance I get, and I have never heard the man utter a single racist, hateful or stupid word. Do I always agree with him? Of course not. I'm a conservative; I think for myself. But Limbaugh, by turns insightful, satiric, raucously funny and wise, is one of the best voices talking about first principles and policy in the country today.

At which point he goes on to issue the "Limbaugh Challenge" to listen to Limbaugh for an hour a day for several days and think about the intellectual arguments he makes.

Ok, this is another op-ed that should have never seen the light of day. It has about as much merit as if the Times had published Kent Hovind challenging readers to take his bogus evolution challenge to provide any evidence of the theory. The point of the challenge, in both instances, is not an intellectually honest effort at inquiry, but to provide propaganda for a predetermined conclusion that is at odds with the facts.

I have listened to Limbaugh. Frequently. Which is what led me to come up with the 30 second rule of thumb for listening to Limbaugh: "turn to Rush Limbaugh's radio program randomly at any moment and he'll either be lying, or will tell a lie within 30 seconds." I've found this to work virtually every time I tune in.

A stupid word: Limbaugh tells his audience that carrots are deadlier than second hand smoke and trans fats, having previously told them that nicotine is not addictive and that cigarettes do not lead to emphysema and other diseases. Limbaugh says that outrage over torture at Abu Ghraib "is an example of the feminization of this country" - I suppose retired major general Antonio Taguba just isn't as manly as the chronically fat, draft-dodging, pill-popping hypocrite, chickenhawk Limbaugh.

A hateful word: Limbaugh says that Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden are Democrats. Limbaugh equates liberals (and Carl Sagan) with cockroaches.

A racist word: Limbaugh characterizes both opposition to genocide in Darfur and apartheid in South Africa as a Democratic plot to get blacks to vote for them, with opposition to apartheid also being described as a communist ploy. Other instances include Limbaugh saying we shouldn't provide food assistance to the starving in Africa because they're getting too fat like Americans and Limbaugh denigrating and mocking efforts to put a stop to the blood diamond trade, which Limbaugh described as "mindless twaddle" which:

is typical of a bunch of weak kneed liberals trying to make a difference, and trying to make themselves feel, the new castrati [Blogger's Note - this is Limbaugh's preferred pejorative label to denigrate liberal males as being insufficiently manly] on display, make themselves feel noble and moral and superior.

See any sort of pattern developing regarding Limbaugh's views towards Africa?

On Limbaugh's supposed brilliant principles and policy proposals: Limbaugh promotes bullshit to trick people into voting against their interests. Limbaugh's notion that "Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country?" Limbaugh tells his audience that Democrats are the second front in the War on Terror.

Look: one could go on and on. Limbaugh's factually-challenged pathology is no secret.

The LA Times and other news organizations should not be be in the business of treating Limbaugh's lies, bullshit, and misinformation as a "point of view" or a difference of opinion. This break down in the discipline of verification contributes to an atmosphere in which "truth" becomes the subject of political manipulation for partisan gain, and our ability to act rationally based on consideration of an emipirical reality is reduced.

From the vault: more "liberal balance" at Fox News

I was flipping through my notes just now and came across another fantastic example of what constitutes "balance" at Fox News. This particular instance comes courtesy of "Democratic strategist" Kirsten Powers, whose main purpose on the network has been for the most part to agree with Michelle Malkin about how unhinged "the left" is.

I have jotted down that Powers was disturbed by people, aka "liberals," questioning Sarah Palin's statements about God and Iraq.

Right, because only the unhinged would be troubled by a person who would be first in line to fill the presidency potentially believing that the world is approaching the End Times and that the United States by invading and occupying Iraq is carrying out God's plan for the end of the world.

Frederick Clarkson explained to Amy Goodman what Powers doesn't seem able to comprehend. (I'm bolding a key point)

FREDERICK CLARKSON: Well, I’m most concerned with the point that you raised earlier, and that is her well-documented belief that she’s living in the “end times,” we’re all living in the “end times,” and that her interpretation of the Book of Revelation may be driving her public policy and particularly her foreign and military policy views.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what is meant by “end times.”
FREDERICK CLARKSON: Well, that means that if you take the Bible, and you begin with Genesis and Creation and the Book of Revelation, which describes God’s plan for the end of the world, we’re at the end of the book, and that it ends in a bloody conflagration before God’s people are saved. And she and people who think like her believe them, themselves, to be the people who are going to be saved, and the rest of us are not looking so good.
AMY GOODMAN: And these comments about the war being a task of God, the Alaska pipeline, you know, praying for the companies and the people.
FREDERICK CLARKSON: Yes, certainly, the idea that the war in Iraq could be a task of God could be interpreted in that way. But I think, more specifically, it’s a conflation of one’s particular political or public policy views with that of the will of God that makes for a very unstable kind of political thinking.
AMY GOODMAN: In what way?
FREDERICK CLARKSON: Well, I mean, that whatever idea may be popping into your head, that you might be inspired to invade a nation, could be the will of God. That’s where it gets very dicey. And sometimes you can find what you’re looking for in metaphor, such as what most of what the Book of Revelation really is.

The Democracy Now conversation points out that America is a secular democracy, yet Palin has long been affiliated with a form of Christian fundamentalism that believes politics should be transformed into a medium for the achievement and promotion of theological goals.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, what about this issue of separation of church and state, even raising what her religion is, that there is a separation? She’s entitled to believe what she wants to believe.
ESTHER KAPLAN: Well, she—again, she comes from a world, a theological world, in which the idea is the role of Christians is to bring God’s will into public life. She hasn’t said that explicitly herself, but there’s no question that, since age twelve, she has been attending churches whose pastors explicitly believe this. She’s said things that indicate that she understands herself that way, as well.
Her pastor at her home church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, sort of takes credit for her election as governor through his prayer. In that same speech that you played excerpts from earlier, she does thank him for that and more or less implies that she also believes that God helped to put her in office. She clearly is not immune to this idea that God is guiding her public life.
And what’s really troubling is she’s been turning down all interview requests to clarify her positions, to clarify—is she a Dominionist? Does she believe in legislating based on the Bible? Her authorized biography almost—I think there’s two or three pages, total, that refer to her religious beliefs at all. There’s a sense that she’s hiding what her true beliefs are. And she needs to answer a lot of questions.

Bruce Wilson at Talk 2 Action also captured the problem with Palin's beliefs

So, religious behaviors, in the case of the Christianity of Sarah Palin's churches, matter insofar as they are yolked to religious doctrines that effect the temporal, earthly realm. Triumphal and exceptionalist religions teaching their believers to "infiltrate" and gain control of governmental, business, educational and media sectors are toxic to the pluralist ethic that has characterized America's over two-century long pioneering experiment with democracy.

That's why Sarah Palin's churches matter : not because people at Palin's churches speak in tongues or for any specific gestural or behavioral expression. These things are deeply felt and not properly mocked or stigmatized, Rather, Palin's churches matter because pastors in those churches espouse an aggressive form of Christian nationalism and also the doctrine that all forms of religious and philosophical beliefs other than their own are invalid and even under demonic influence.

One would think that a candidate for Vice President's political beliefs being informed by anti-intellectual, extremist superstition would be legitimate ground for concern. But not from a go-to "liberal" at Fox News.