House of Eratosthenes

I hear people are contradicting themselves when they say they value life, and want to stop abortions, but then turn around and want murderers executed. Hmmm, it’s an entirely valid critique…until you think about it. The babies being aborted haven’t murdered anyone. If anyone is contradicting themselves, it’s the people who want the executions stopped and the abortions to go ahead. In many cases, the contradictions are quite glaring; some within the anti-capital-punishment crowd say they are speaking up for the voiceless, because our civil liberties and constitutional rights must be applied to the least among us. Eh, voiceless, least among us? Hello?

Come to think of it, these are the people who want a sumtuous gourmet of ever-more-lavish social programs and retirement programs. Isn’t it a real problem when there’s no next generation coming up, to get socked with the bill?

Another thing I’ve been hearing is that Americans have a reputation around the world for being boorish, poorly-mannered, arrogant, intellectually stilted, incurious, et cetera. I’m seeing Americans criticized for reaching middle age without ever having held a passport, meaning they haven’t traveled outside their country’s borders. And it occurs to me: If these are the ones who have not traveled outside the country’s borders, shouldn’t we be looking to the enlightened, sophisticated, well-traveled nuanced-thinking blue-bloods as we try to figure out how we got our reputation? Some of them can act pretty boorish. Why blame the people who haven’t traveled anywhere?

How come democrats want more things in our lives to be run by a government that is run by their enemies six years out of every ten? Are they really so myopic that they think their friends will be calling all the shots, forever and ever? Just wow. Let’s not even discuss the values they have that are different from mine…I don’t want anyone that dense to be in charge of anything, anywhere. For their own good.

I think if I liked Barack Obama’s positions on the issues, and I was excited about His presidency because He has all this gravitas and weight and cred and…well, whatever else you call it when you’re accustomed to getting your way, nobody wants to argue with you about anything, and nobody can explain why…right about now, I’d be wishing for someone else to take charge who had a lot less of this. Think about how it goes with most presidents: The election is coming up in a year or two, so it’s time for the administration to get worried about gas prices, food prices, et al. This one, thanks to all the cred, managed to snooze all the way through about February of this year. Even now it’s a debatable question whether or not He’s on our side on this thing.

That’s another thing: Everything’s open to question. Birth certificate, bin Laden death photo, college transcripts, every little question is answered with “I/We shouldn’t have to produce that and you shouldn’t be asking.” So, again, even if I saw things more President Obama’s way, about now I’d still be wishing for a Republican to be in charge just because that’s the only time it seems we can have a transparent government.

Do Americans want the wealth to be spread around? We certainly do have a stewing, steaming resentment of rich people and there certainly is a feeling that they’re getting away with things…many Americans openly opine that this is how the rich people got rich in the first place. Hmmm, one wonders what it is about the rich that makes them different, if the being rich is not what set them apart, it must have been something else. What was that, then? But when the agenda advances to spreading the wealth around — I do not perceive that there is much passion for this in America. Seems to be an attitude getting forced on us, by the people who are running things.

Does it even work?

I think the problem with many of these items is that they’re not “positions” — which can be contradictory — but creeds.

When Ned Flanders complains to God that he’s done “all the stuff in the Bible, even all the stuff that contradicts all the other stuff,” we hip secular folks chuckle, but he’s not really articulating a problem for believers. The central premise of Christianity is a logical contradiction — a being cannot be both dead and alive, both human and divine — but that’s why it’s faith. The statement “Jesus was a man” and the statement “Jesus was immortal” are articles of faith, not propositions in a syllogism, which is why believers can assent to both without the slightest bit of cognitive dissonance.*

That’s how liberals compartmentalize their wildly incompatible beliefs. Which would be fine…. except that one of their other articles of faith — seemingly the main article of the liberal faith — is that they’re all deep-thinking intellectuals who are totally committed to facts, reason, and science. “The facts have a liberal bias,” they constantly intone, and they often choose to brand themselves the “reality-based community.”

Which invariably leads them to attempt to catechize us with the form of logical arguments. The typically gruesome results of which are visible to all in that global warming thread. For instance, here:

Severian: You are using Knutti and Hegerl (2009) to argue for all kinds of sweeping, explicitly political solutions to a problem that Morgan, at least, claims — with at least as much hyperlinked evidence — doesn’t exist at all.

Um, no. We cited Knutti and Hegerl to substantiate the claim that climate sensitivity is probably in the range of 2-5°C but with the upper limit still very uncertain.

[emphases mine]

In the context of the debate, this reply is ludicrous. Z spent twenty or more posts arguing about all the sweeping macroeconomic changes that must be taken because of global warming. They spent roughly seventy more posts asserting that global warming must exist. The sum total of their evidence for global warming was a .gif and a few bibliographic citations, one of which was…. Knutti and Hegerl.

Thus, Knutti and Hegerl are crucial parts of Z’s argument that all manner of sweeping macroeconomic changes must — scientifically must — take place in order to combat global warming.

When called on this, however, Z came back with: “We cited Knutti and Hegerl to substantiate the claim that climate sensitivity is probably in the range of 2-5°C but with the upper limit still very uncertain.”

Which is blatantly circular. 2-5 C is “global warming.” Global warming produces effects E and F. These effects require huge macroeconomic changes G and H.

QED. The only way someone as intelligent as Zachriel can miss this, is that they’re not “arguing” at all –they’re catechizing. They’re ticking off the Warmist rosary beads one by one. Unfortunately, since their liberal faith also compels them to assert that all their propositions are “reality-based,” they’re reduced to arguing in scientific-sounding tautologies.

David Stove has a great essay about this type of thing called “What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?” (http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html). Here’s the most pertinent passage:

What is wrong with our thoughts is hardly ever logical falsity either, or ignorance of logical truth, or failure to live up to the logical knowledge that we have. This is so, at least, if the word ‘logical’ is used in its usual sense. Take the controversy about the filioque. I have not read any of this literature, but since philosophy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was, if anything, over-attentive to logic, it is safe to assume that on both sides of this controversy the logic was impeccable. You would search the controversialists’ writings in vain for invalid inferences, or concealed contradictions. And the reason is obvious. Logic is concerned only with the relations between propositions, but everything that has gone wrong in the filioque dispute has gone wrong inside propositions: in the terms which are common to both sides, such as ‘Holy Ghost,’ ‘Father,’ and ‘proceeds.’ And this state of affairs is typical. The logicians’ net is too coarse-meshed to catch the fish that matter.

Zachriel’s statements are rigorously “logical” in that sense — that is, it’s a necessary truth that A=A. But it is in no way scientific to continue chanting “A=A” — as Zachriel does many times, in a discussion spanning 100+ posts — when the question is about B.
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*(And I’m not, let me hasten to add, in any way trying to knock religious belief. I mean no offense to any faithful people, though I see how being associated with Warmists, even rhetorically in a blog comment, could be construed as fighting words. For any unintentional offense given, I apologize).
- Severian | 04/20/2012 @ 10:34
As a fellow California boy, I’ll take that particular little jab seriously either when we can execute murderers on demand, or when it takes decades of legal review to get an abortion.
- Rich Fader | 04/20/2012 @ 13:36
No offense taken here, Sev. Faith can be placed in either a true or a false creed, but it operates according to its nature, as it always must. That some place it in nonsense, in the unreliable and untrustworthy, doesn’t discredit faithfulness; any more than a person making a spelling error invalidates the concept of language.

I have found that one of the things that distinguishes truth from falsehood lies in the difference between a paradox and a contradiction. Moroever, the paradox is often the key to keeping either of the two sides of the equation balanced. They work as a balanced set, like opposing muscle pairs. Without the paradox, we lose the value of both the individual truths. So we see that kindness without justice can turn into destructive indulgence, and justice without kindness can turn draconian and eventually totalitarian. So far it’s been a reliable barometer for me.
- nightfly | 04/20/2012 @ 14:37
So we see that kindness without justice can turn into destructive indulgence, and justice without kindness can turn draconian and eventually totalitarian. So far it’s been a reliable barometer for me

Well said. Why is it that in modern America, the supposed “theocrats” are among the most reliable champions of individual rights? Makes you wonder if your typical leftist has ever had a real conversation with anyone other than another typical leftist. Which, being so open-minded and nuancey and reality-based and all, you’d think they’d be eager to do…..
- Severian | 04/21/2012 @ 07:51
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ContradictionsFriday, April 20th, 2012

Contradictions
Friday, April 20th, 2012