Huge silly controversies

Flat Earth vs. spherical Earth is often used as an example of opposing viewpoints. However, a lot of popular propositions are all of them so far off the mark, they could just as well be debates on whether the shape of the earth is flat or pyramidal.

Once a conflict between absurdities becomes a big thing, it can be difficult to make people see beyond the spectacular clash of horrible idea against awful idea. Take hypertext visionary Ted Nelson, who under the heading "The huge silly controversy" says I see almost no difference between the Macintosh and the PC. Stunning and unheard of? Exactly. Seeing beyond this particular conflict is perhaps especially difficult because computers are things that you buy — if no alternative is available off-the-shelf this is the same, to a consumer, as no alternatives being conceivable. The mouse and the clicking and the icons is simply the way of things. Invented, you say? But it's so natural! It's what everyone does!

When two sides of the same coin become the only viable currency like this, people tend to see everything in terms of it, leading to some very strange categorization. Returning to the hypothetical case of flat earth vs. pyramidal earth, say you came to a debate panel — perfectly balanced with equal time for 'flat' and 'pyramid' views — and said the world was round. To someone who primarily kept the farcical conflict in mind, the first thing they'd say would probably be, Oh, right, you think it's like a flat disc? I'll chalk you up with the flat-earth side, then.

It's as if, once a side or two has become sufficiently elaborated, people are painted into a corner, having severe trouble backing up to a position where they can approach something without preconceptions or singing vikings, where they'll let you order something that doesn't have any spam in it.

What I have in mind in particular is the assumption that not carrying the card of a religion is like not wearing a caste mark. You have to wonder if this is for the benefit of people so they know which stereotype to apply to you.

If you want a mark for effort, you can approach the pyramidal-earth people and try to convince them that it's sort of like a pyramid... with more sides. You know, like a dodecahedron, only with lots and lots of sides? If you succeed in doing anything other than disgust or confuse them, you'll then see the flat-earthers chalking up a victory against the now fragmented pyramid-earthers while ridiculing the minority position of a dodecahedumb-earth.

[Technorati consumer choice consumer mentality dodecahedumb elaboration far-fetched Python refs framing framing the debate glorious spam group fragmentation group mindset lovely spam minority opinion pyramidal earth spam and eggs spam spam spam two sides of the same coin vikings singing we have always been clicking icons winning by default]

BusinessSpeak

The relation of Unspeak™ to advertising slogans and such seemed like it should be obvious, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I read apenwarr's old post about IBMese — the strange language involving "paradigm shifts" and "issues" and "core competencies".

Why are these two examples interesting? Because I finally found the common theme: "non-arguability." [...] It's not that you don't argue with it because everyone agrees; it's that you can't argue with it because the person making the statement wins by default.

[...] But sales - and by extension, people hacking - is different. In that case, you're messing with someone's emotions with the goal of getting them to agree with you and eventually do something for you (eg. buy your stuff). And the biggest barrier to sales is (ironically?) defensiveness: the feeling that someone is trying to sell you something. Being non-controversial helps avoid making people defensive.

This would be a type of framing, then, akin to winning by default because you're playing on home ground and your local supporters won't let anyone else on the field.

Non-arguability appears to be one step up on the ladder from what was the previous state-of-the-art of advertising, knowing common criticisms of advertising and preempting them in the manner of: You might ask yourself, why does a famous celebrity like me go on TV to tell you about the wonders of Pro-Vital™? Why, it's because you'll do anything for money, of course. But the real answer is preempted by following up with The answer is, Pro-Vital™ really is that good!

With this higher-level defensiveness, you usually can't just shoot it down with well-timed snappy truth. Someone trying to take the non-arguable proposition apart to expose it as a load of old toss, no matter if it actually is, will come off as negative, pessimistic, a hair-splitting naysayer who wants to argue about Those Things That Everyone Knows. You'll want to watch out. That could mean he's not only a hair-splitter, but a... reductionist.

More on this later, maybe.

[Technorati advertising rhetorics bizspeak businessSpeak businesspeak defense-lowering framing framing the debate non-arguability noncontroversiality people hacking reductionism reductionists soundbite culture stealth marketing unarguable war on specifics winning by default]

T-shirt

Hmm. Hmmm.

A?

The scarlet letter? You're kidding. That's, um... very... postmodern?

Now I sort of want a T-shirt that says "Diagoras Fanclub" on it. I mean, one that isn't the logo for FC Diagoras. S'pose I'll have to make it myself.

Don't say a word — it's easy to pass as a Christian or a Muslim, you know.

Yes, and you'll find it easier to persuade people when they don't discount you as an outgroup member to be opposed from the outset. Shouldn't matter objectively of course, but given humanity's tendency to tribalism...

[Technorati A Out Campaign atheist bastardry]

Superficial balance II

(previously)

Douglas Adams, in 1999:

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view.

Today at Respectful Insolence: Mistaking failure to support for "censorship": The Danish government funding a Holocaust denier. (from History on Trial)

That is, the Danish government is actually awarding money to this Haaest, not just tolerating his opinion. This appears to be the actual article in the Danish Information, and here's the statement from the Simon Wiesenthal Center website.

Respectful Insolence goes on to say something I've been trying to phrase myself:

They know they can appear far more legitimate than they are, and they are not constrained by evidence, science or the truth, which allows them to put the side that is constrained by these things on the defensive. Moreover, as the "rebel," the crank almost always controls the agenda, and, particularly in the U.S., people root for the seeming underdog anyway.

A true underdog story™ of how one man's dream of corrupting the truth got him gobs of cash! Heartwarming, that's what it is.

Tangentially: Lipstadt has her post tagged "Holocaust Denial; Politically correct idiocy". Politically correct, of course, is another one of these concepts that are easily bent into obscene shapes.

[Technorati Erik Haaest atheist bastardry politically correct]

Atheist extremism pt. 5000

Jason Rosenhouse on scienceblogs, against the argument that Dawkins and Hitchens are basically saying kill whitey:

If Dawkins and all the rest stripped every snide remark out of their books, that would not stop the right wing noise machine from painting them as dangerous extremists. The mere fact that they are endorsing atheism and having some success is enough for that.

The wide spread of the atheist-extremist meme would indicate the degree to which the noise machines have already succeeded.

[Technorati Jason Rosenhouse atheism atheist atheist bastardry atheist extremism noise machine]

Distilling the espresso religion

I'm increasingly getting the impression of very similar language used to describe "religious extremism." As an easily available example, let me pick on an excerpt from Sam Harris' End of Faith, The Problem with Religious Moderates (emphasis mine):

Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.

This must mean that by being a moderate, you're being less strong than you could be. I'm inclined to blame this on Harris being an American who equates violence with strength, but this sort of language is generally quite common, isn't it?

I wonder if this isn't a case of taking at face value the fundamentalists' own claim that they're a return to the "foundation" of faith, to the roots, the essence: an image of anything not "literalist" as watered-out coffee — and fundamentalism, strong espresso. As someone who'll have no truck with the concept of Platonic ideals I find this quite nonsensical, of course. But. When you keep using this metaphorical image, you're basically reinforcing the literalists' own bullshit, confirming the stereotype that feeds their cause: that they have greater religious authority because they follow "the" dogma "to the letter."

"To the letter." The existence of multiple "hard core" belief-mutations around the same holy book should be enough to expose the ridiculousness of literalisms. Even if all the copies of the particular holy documents are letter-for-letter identical, meaning does not lie in the printed words alone: it arises in the interaction between the person and the words, in the interpretation that is unavoidable for any human being. Every person being different, it's impossible to have no variation in meaning: the only way to get an unambiguous result from it would be to feed the words to something controlled by a deterministic computer program. (Turing-complete holy code, anyone?)

And yet, we reinforce this myth of the "most literal" interpretation where fundamentalism is the espresso from which weaker cappuccinos and lattes are derived. Stop it, please. Stop helping these bastards that are making the world unsafe for tea.

[Technorati Sam Harris atheism atheist dodgy metaphors espresso religion essence of hogwash framing fundamentalism hard core literalism memetics rhetorics stop helping unspeak violence is strength]

How theology is different from witchcraft

We've had the gender pronoun switcher regender for some time. Now Sam Harris picks up the search-and-replace and applies it to Terry Eagleton's Dakwins review, replacing 'theology' with, well, see for yourself:

This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of [conjuring and divination] that would make a first-year [sorcerer's apprentice] wince...Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and [witchcraft] are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates [witchcraft] from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake... while [belief in magic], rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it...

Sam Harris is of course the author of Letters to a Wiccan Nation. This redundant link exchange has been brought to you via Friendly Atheist.

This is so brilliant. I have to look into how easy it would be to create a regender-like web application to automate this sort of search-and-replace satire.

The gateway drug to Stalinism

It seems to be very easy to tar any atheist as an inhumane communist. In addition to the exchange mentioned in my last post, it's a throwaway point in this opinion piece in NYT, by N.D.Kristof:

Granted, religious figures have been involved throughout history in the worst kinds of atrocities. But as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot show, so have atheists.

A slightly less grazing treatment by Rod Liddle in The Spectator:

By far the weakest part of The God Delusion is when Dawkins attempts to explain why atheistic regimes have far outdone religious regimes in their murderousness, their inhumanity. [...]

Isn't that the point, I suggest. That with one set of values removed, another will always fill its place? That if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled — and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves? [...]

By Dawkins's argument, the moral imperatives of 500 years ago were, de facto, right then — and wrong now. In the end, it leaves you without a real sense of right and wrong, merely a constantly shifting plane — and thus open to the malefactions of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot.

(Note the sly little insertion of Hitler, who won an election in a Christian country.)

Anyway, the presumption seems to be that not having a religion to which everyone is expected to conform will almost automatically lead to seduction by malevolent dictators. This sort of thing keeps popping up, so presumably it has some sort of resonance with people.

The best counter I've seen is Sam Harris:

(Who decides what is good in the Good Book? Answer: We do. Our moral intuitions are still primary. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to think that we get our basic sense of right and wrong out of scripture).

Presumably there is some feeling that having an Authority gives you the proverbial moral anchor. Which would be why Italy, being anchored firmly to the pope, has no problems with organized crime.

Maybe there's a sense that some types gravitate towards dogmatism, and that it's better for them to join a moderate church than a totalitarian movement. But really, are Dawkins or Harris against free speech, or for outlawing churches? Implicit in this is also that people with these inclinations won't just go for the most dogmatic community he can find, religious or not. Religions are tacitly presumed to be basically mostly beneficial.

As for "answerable to nobody but ourselves," it paints a picture of someone who makes himself out to be a god, rather than someone godless in an actual society. People in a society will develop norms, because this is a very fundamental feature of humanity. Any people, anywhere, will negotiate "social contracts" between themselves rather than just pulling random individual codexes out of thin air.

Anyone truly megalomaniac will easily think to pay lip service to the prevailing deity, if that is what it takes: on this note, check out Liddle's complete non-mention of Mussolini in his list of dictators. Mussolini has to be omitted, of course, as he exemplifies that totalitarian leaders can be quite perpendicular to strong religiosity.

Lumping towards futility

This argument between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Dennis Prager, who is some warmongering radio talk show host, is of course unfruitful practically by definition, as it's on wether God exists.

Before you shout "next!", though, the back-and-forth seems to reveal one interesting thing, about categorizing. Somewhere about here, a familiar lumping-together rears its head:

Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters."

The salient thing about this, and the reason I'm even mentioning this discussion, is that Harris also lumps together, but in a different way. Prager, responding to the strategy "we are all atheistic about Zeus":

But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?

In the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. What on Earth does that even mean? It means that Prager is indignant at being lumped together with those false believers. Harris operates with a category 'religion' which contains, well, religion, and Prager has a big faceted category labeled 'true religion' ("Judeo-Christianity" and conformity) and a wastebasket of 'false religions and abominations' (everything else).

So Harris is in the same intellectual league as Stalin, because he's one of those, you know, those secularists. Regardless of the fact that Harris does not appear to be a Marxist-Leninist, nor a Stalinist.

Judt on recent political grotesqueness

The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially.
[...]
This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

—Tony Judt in the London Review of Books, on the recent political climate.

On a tangent from that article:

They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide.

That's about lefties-turned-"hawks", and again seems to echo the meme that's been sloshing around (Francis Fukuyama, was it?) that the "neocons" are actually crypto-Trotskyists.

Sara Robinson of Orcinus has discovered Dawkins' Root of All Evil? miniseries (that I'm still thinking about), and uses the basic matter that they could never have gotten made in the US as a tangent point, speculating in some sort of Apocalypse of Christianity.

It smacks a bit of wishful thinking, really. The premise of "they're doing this in the name of your savior, you know" has a lot going for it, but this wouldn't appear to be the way to tap into it; perhaps something to do with the way it internalizes rather than rejects the apocalyptic myth.

The God that must not be named

Velfna is great!

Now, I realize some of you might say that "Velfna doesn't exist." But how can you say that? You just said Velfna yourself! You already acknowledge Velfna's greatness! Do you not long to taste Its pears of eternal clemency?

Such is the power of names: it allows you to paint someone into the same corner as yourself.

[This would appear to be called "The problem of negative singular existence statements" (article apparently by Dr. M. E. Reicher). Looks like I have my work cut out researching it.]

In Steven Poole's Unspeak, he deals with a growing tendency in recent political speech to methodically employ words and phrases that obscure opposing and alternate viewpoints; they unspeak their alternatives. That is, the nouns themselves function as covert capsule arguments, akin to effective marketing slogans.

"Velfna" above is a rather basic example: it uses Velfna as a proper noun and then immediately ascribes greatness to it. The nature of language makes it very hard to back out of the corner that's been thus painted: counterarguments, such as "Velfna isn't great" and "there is no such thing as Velfna" both involve saying "Velfna" a lot.  Asking "but what is Velfna?" is also just as likely to drive the conversation further into the half of the field occupied by Velfna.

Not to mention that just thinking about it makes your mind go Velfna, Velfna, Velfna. Before long, you react to "Velfna" as though it were a word that makes any sort of sense.

The word "God" is functionally not entirely identical to Velfna. It is in fact so unique and deeply entrenched that it's difficult to find anything to compare it to. It appears to presuppose, in itself, that there is only one god, as evident in the Arabic use of the definite article. However, the word also makes itself somehow like a coconut: if you try to crack it, even with a vise, it tends to slip.

It follows that once a religion has discovered a word with this property, it will tend to spread, and strengthen the impact of the religions that adopt it. Confusion then arises when different religions which have all adopted this come together and figure they must be worshipping "basically the same god" or "a heretic god," depending on how magnaminous they're feeling.

Certainly a very high mileage from just one capital letter.

(Pandagon already reviews and critiques Unspeak brilliantly so I don't have to. Cheers!)

It must be really easy to keep believing

"Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it" seems as though it ought to be more rhetorically effective than it is.

Maybe people don't like to be reminded of just how much it is they forget, especially things they once believed in.

Or maybe it's to do with the sheer simplicity of it.

(The quote is from Philip K. Dick, apparently. I had forgotten.)

Show of weakness

Jehova's Witnesses and their ilk always travel in packs of two. In a related field, clipboard beggars for worthy causes never go after groups: when I asked one of them about it, she told me it rarely meets with success.

So groups reinforce behavior and consistency of belief; what else is new. Well, the fact that I was able to talk to the representative about her job, instead of the Cause, is a blueprint for something I've never tried with evangelizers: humanization as a defense tactic.

How's it going? Save many souls lately? Take care, now.

It'd be great if it worked. If I'm lucky, I might get some stories out of them about the things that people tell them.