The failure of conservative humor

As if more evidence was needed?

I don't actually read that many books of hard-core conservative persuasion. It's kind of amusing, since many of my personal principles and philosophies do seem conservative on their face, but today's so-called conservatives lie too much. Today's uninteresting example is Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P.J. O'Rourke. He's supposed to be a humorist of sorts, though a more apt description is "libertarian propagandist of little skill".

I've actually read 6 of his earlier books, so I have to count this book as being fooled for the 6th time and shame on me, but I keep hoping to learn something worth the time. After all, the whole point of REAL humor is to learn (in accord with my General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff), but O'Rourke never fails to disappoint. There are some traces of interesting ideas buried in his stuff, but mostly he's just wasting my time with cheap sophistry. Almost done with this book and so far only detected one interesting thought: The distinction between negative and positive rights. The rest of it was fluff and piffle.

What finally provoked me enough to write this quasi-review was Chapter 8 in Part II. Just too perfect as an example of the intellectual dishonesty of the Libertarians. The premise is supposed to be that Part II is about solutions on an issue-by-issue basis. The ostensible issue of Chapter 8 is gun safety, but O'Rourke actually changes the subject to attack voting rights. It's supposed to be a parody, but it comes off as too sincere, almost a harbinger of the Bolshevik Republican policies of voter disenfranchisement. Actually I'm pretty sure those policies had started before the publication of this book, but either O'Rourke hadn't noticed or it's another example of his highly selective focus. Also a vicious focus in his unfunny personal attacks.

I'll go ahead and run through my earlier tags, though I was planning to discard the book without memory. On a page-based basis:

On page 11 (which is early in Chapter 2, dismissing Chapter 1 as an intro), I was struck by several items, such as the delusional attack against Richard Dawkins that only showed (1) O'Rourke hates Dawkins, and (2) O'Rourke hasn't read the book he's attacking. This page had a number of poorly written, false, and dumb things, but I keep reminding myself that O'Rourke will claim the "It's only a joke" defense, and only more so for his worst writing.

On page 13 I was offended by his joke about the Japanese word "jiyu" for one of the senses of freedom. The only things it showed are (1) racist viciousness, (2) ignorance of the Japanese language and indifference to the truth, and (3) ignorance of what "freedom" actually means--but that's only typical of Libertarian "thinking". The reality is that the Japanese word is about the sense of freedom where the cause of your actions is yourself. Also, I strongly suspect it's a word coined in China, not Japan.

Page 15 had some strikingly offensive personal attacks on the Clintons, but "It's just a joke" of some twisted flavor. A more substantive annoyance was the discussion of "intolerance" without any apparent knowledge of the Paradox of Tolerance. Add Popper's philosophy to the LONG list of important topics O'Rourke is ignorant of or chooses to ignore.

At this point I was already getting fed up and wanted to stop paying such close attention, but... On pages 42 and 43 he dragged Donald Trump into the picture. Really laughable dismissal considering how things have panned out. Most amusing quote must be "Every property he touches seems to go to hell" as he dismisses Trump's self-claimed wealth as a trick of "former Enron accountants". Words worth eating, if not well worth anything, eh?

On page 49 he brings the birthers into the discussion, though Trump doesn't get an explicit mention. The offensive aspect here is the link between birtherism and O'Rourke's own frequent and vicious and unjustified attacks on Barack Obama. Maybe there's some racism there, too, since on the next page (50) he also takes a cheap shot of some sort at Tiger Woods. At least I think it was supposed to be "Just a joke" of some sort. Maybe it was just broken by time? The joke seems to be implying that Woods could not keep a secret, so I'm guessing it had to do with his exposure as a philanderer and subsequent career collapse? Perhaps these things just seem less funny post-Trump-as-politician?

Speaking of narcissistic personality disorder, he actually cites the diagnostic criteria on page 70, but without reference to Trump. If he had mentioned Trump, then it would have looked as wise and prophetic as Harlan Ellison's prediction of the Reagan presidency in The Glass Teat.

Page 95 is the apex of his attacks on science. The only thing O'Rourke actually proves is that he has no idea of what science is about. Even less idea of how it works.

If there's any thoughtful or educational stuff in this book, then it's been shredded far above my poor power to unshred. Sometimes "It's just a joke" is no excuse.

New Pearl Harbor

Version 0.5

Politically Correct Zen Repudiation of The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin

Funny story about contagion and guilt by association here. The only logical result of assuming that the NSA knows that I've 'touched' this book is to publicly repudiate it in the most forceful terms. Easy enough, but is that even adequate? America has fallen down such an insane rabbit's hole that not only are books like this one being published, but a lot of people are buying into them and we're even electing patently insane reality-challenged politicians like Ted Cruz in Texas. You know what they say: Everything's bigger and more crazy in Texas!

So now the question facing me is how to most clearly demonstrate that I am not an insane conspiracy theorist, if I can. After all, I think that I have been contaminated to some degree. While I can dismiss all of the ideas in this particular book, the problem is that I still believe in some conspiracies. Actually, this book uses the most obvious and relevant example: Everyone believes that there was a secret conspiracy to attack the WTC, but the devil is in the details of who was involved and how they pulled it off. A more troublesome example involves the murder of Michael Hastings. Can you believe that his brand of insanity was so dangerous that it could only be 'cured' by hacking his car to kill him? Having considered the problem, I think the best way to repudiate this book is to approach from two angles: (1) a specific destruction of a major point of the book and (2) an alternative and Occamic explanation. However, to make the repudiation stronger, I'm going to apply these perspectives twice, once at a low level and again at the highest level.

There are so many crazy points in the book that it is impossible to pick the best one for detailed refutation. For example, the lack of interception is mostly predicated on not knowing how planes actually fly and maneuver or how humans make decisions under pressure. However, I've decided to focus on the collapse of three buildings in the WTC complex. This author is arguing for the use of explosives, while simultaneously managing to refute himself. The most obvious refutation was his note that explosive-sniffing dogs were in the twin towers up to 5 days before 9/11. That only leaves two lines of analysis: (1) Large quantities of explosives were already in place and trained experts completely failed to detect them, or (2) Large quantities of explosives were were rapidly brought into the towers without anyone detecting the operation. The conspiracy extremists can try to cover those paths with bribery, but... It's hard to reliably bribe dogs and the it's fundamentally impossible to hush up a large number number of people. Even if none of them knew they were handling explosives at the time, many of them would have figured it out afterwards and some of them would have started talking. However, the main reason I reject this idea is that there would have been extremely large quantities of debris contaminated with explosives residue, and that physical evidence could not be completely eliminated no matter how quickly they cleared it away. You have to add a completely new level of insanity to believe that the Chinese would actually destroy all of the evidence once it was in their possession. I certainly think you can rest assured that the Chinese version of the CIA took plenty of samples hoping for something to use for blackmail against America's politicians.

Time for Occam's razor to cut this idea to size. What the book doesn't talk much about is the computer analyses of the structural failures. Once you know that a thing is possible, it's relatively easy to show how it happened. Before these collapses, the computer models seemed to show they were not possible, but afterwards, we sadly know much better. The author actually touches just barely on how the initially local failures unzipped the links between one floor and the vertical framework in each of the buildings that collapsed. Once the failures spread enough for that floor to settle downward, nothing was going to stop the force of gravity from finishing the job, and how. As soon as the failures were adequately modeled, there was little reason to delay the cleanup. The only physical evidence you could hope for would be recognizable traces of some of the original joints around the points of the initial local failures, or some of the neighboring joints that failed in the second stage of spreading, and the odds of finding those few joints in a recognizable state would be pretty microscopic given the vast amount of rubble. Virtually all of the joints were simply sheared to small bits as gravity did its work.

Now let's go to the highest level of the grand conspiracy. In this form, we wind up with an army of accomplices. Even if they didn't know what they were doing at the time, as in the previously mentioned idea of a large crew of people moving explosives without knowing what they were moving, they have had many years to figure it out. Even if they didn't want to talk at the time, they have had many years to change their minds, or even to die of natural causes and leave the evidence behind them if they didn't want to face retaliation. There are too many old sayings and even jokes about how to keep secrets, but the point is always the need for as few conspirators as possible, and all of the grand conspiracy theories totally fail on this point. It's possible to conceive how one or a few people could have killed Michael Hastings, but orchestrating a vast conspiracy with vast guilt trips for all of the conspirators? No, that is beyond my conception, and I even insist that my imagination is far wilder than average.

So what is Occam's answer? It really is hard to explain the low quality of the investigations of the 9/11 attacks. In addition, any explanation has to hold up on the long term. Therefore, I conclude that there were massive failures and plenty of blame, but the failures were obvious and bipartisan. Not sure if this is the truth, or if the truth even matters, and you also have to make allowances that I am currently under the influence of this crazy book, too, but... My theory today is that certain people within the ISI were intimately involved in the planning for the 9/11 attacks, mostly because they hoped to move America to support Pakistan more closely in an alliance against 'non-state' terrorists. It is even possible that members of the CIA or NSA were aware of this conspiracy but regarded it as fundamentally too crazy to succeed and too flawed to cause significant damage even if it partly happened. The actual amount of damage was much worse than anyone imagined, apparently even including Osama Bin Ladin himself. However, I believe that there were internal and secret investigations that quickly determined these problematic facts. These facts were even more extremely problematic because they also showed the intimate relationship between the ISI and the CIA, and they were bipartisan problems since they started with that good-intentioned Democrat Jimmy Carter, continued through the presidencies of Reagan and Poppy Bush and Clinton, and were still there under Dubya's watch. Maybe there was even an element of truth to the New American Century angle, but in the relatively passive sense that the big dick Cheney downgraded the priority of anti-terrorism efforts. I've often felt that some of his extreme reactions as described in The One Percent Doctrine smack of an extremely guilty conscience... No one can be sure about Cheney, however, since he's always been such a cocksure extremist.

So to summarize it to Occam's satisfaction, from their perspective, there was no reason for a public investigation, since they knew almost exactly what had happened and how, and it was extremely embarrassing to EVERYONE involved, no matter what their political persuasions. The bipartisan mess must have been big enough to persuade even President Obama to let it lie. This is kind of like the gerrymandering thing. Both parties are quite willing to work together against the public's interests to protect their own behinds, but just about the one thing all of the professional politicians can agree on is that they should be allowed to stay in office. As this theory applies to 9/11, it's still a bit surprising that none of the people in the know has clearly revealed the truth, but the total number of people carefully watching each other is within the bounds of reason, or at least my reason.

Now it's time for the zen trick, eh? The real significance of this kind of book is what it reveals about the mental instability of America. Our reality makes so little sense that many people are able to look at the wildest conspiracies and take them seriously. I think the one that is bothering me the most these days actually involves the chronic problems with my Android devices. I don't think it is simply the google's growing EVIL as typified by "All of your attention is belongs to the google" leading to large-scale incompetence. I've reached the point of believing the flakiness is linked to snooping software being deployed on a wholesale level. It might be criminals, except that I think they could be and would already have been nailed by following the money trails. Therefore at this point it seems most plausible, even to such a rational and level-headed individual as yours truly, that the real cause is government-driven snooping. We're back to the old joke about the lost quarter:

"Let me help you for your lost quarter. Exactly where were you standing when you noticed it was missing?"

"I was in Afghanistan."

"But Afghanistan is thousands of kilometers from here. Why are you looking here?"

"The light's much better here."

In other words, I'm not a terrorist and I don't even know any terrorists, no matter how much I stretch my rubbery imagination. However, mostly because of my Android devices, I am standing where the light is good. It's convenient for the NSA to harvest my personal information, and so they do, but with a certain amount of bugginess that shows. Since it's Android and since the google has gone all evil on us, it seems most likely that it's driven from America, but we could speculate about the Chinese intelligence agencies, too. Not really anything personal about me (though the game of six degrees of Keven Bacon might argue otherwise), but just cheap data. If you actually are a person of interest and they want to put some actual resources into investigating what you're up to, you might as well surrender now, Dorothy.

Have a lovely non-paranoid day.

P.S. Let me add a special encouragement to your replies and again clarify why I moderate the comments. I'm really interested in your points of disagreement, even if you are a sincere conspiracy theorist, but I'm absolutely opposed to spammers and I will not support them, even for the period until I can nuke their scammy ads. Once again we return to the deep EVIL of the google?

The New Jackals

Big Picture Conclusions Linked to The New Jackals by Simon Reeve

The detail that got me to look at this book about Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden was the misleading publication date of 1999. Once I started looking at it, I found the book interesting enough to read, and light enough to read quickly, but it was NOT published in 1999, and this casts a large shadow over the entire thing. There was only one concrete proof of the later publication date: The back cover talks about the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Most likely, that means this was a later reprint to capitalize upon or even exploit the new infamy of UBL after 9/11--but if so, why doesn't the book mention anything about the publication history? Are they just hoping to mislead potential purchasers? Or were there other changes they don't want to talk about? One source (via Wikipedia) claims that the last and rather sensationalist section was added to the reprinted edition, but I suspect that there may have been other changes, too. The book would have been much more valuable and interesting to me if it were the original and unmodified edition reflecting what was known BEFORE 9/11 changed the world's view of the significance of terrorists. It seems to me that almost half of the book may have been added in the reprinting, since there is a lot of redundancy there and less substantiated stuff there.

Having said that, I'll try to assess the book briefly before moving to my conclusions. There is a lot of good information in the book, and some solid investigative journalism. There are also a lot of rumors and unfiltered stuff thrown in, and I strongly suspect that the relative significance of UBL was bulked up in this printing. Much of the material is downright speculative and could be used to feed conspiracy buffs, though the author's citation comes down to 'Someone told me he thinks so' or even 'Someone agreed with me it could have happened that way.' The most obvious fantasy is his attempts to link UBL to Saddam Hussein, which remains fundamentally implausible--but which was a leading propaganda angle of the neocons and neo-GOP politicians at the time when the book was probably being revised for republication. For support of conspiracies, he suggests the Oklahoma City bombers may have had more help than has been acknowledged, and he even tries to link that bombing to the first WTC bombing. The variability in the solidity goes beyond troubling, but basically forces you to go back to the primary materials.

My conclusion is fundamentally economic: We just can't afford to continue playing this game on the terms that the religious terrorists are defining. Essentially, they can make very small investments that induce us to make vastly larger counter-investments. UBL has said that he wants to bankrupt America, and he has described his strategic approaches to doing it, and this book greatly increased my feeling that America under Dubya was playing the game exactly by UBL's rules--and losing. If we are going to win against the terrorists, we need to change the game in our favor, which means we need to realign the bulk of the Islamic world against the terrorists. As shown by the recent kerfuffle about proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, it is clear that the majority of Americans do NOT understand this necessity. They are blindly walking into UBL's trap, even though there is nothing hidden or secretive about UBL's evil strategy.

Going rather beyond the scope of this book to consider the large historical view, but the degree of religious militancy in the Islamic world has fluctuated over the centuries. The actual peak was probably during the early transitional period when the cult became an established church. To survive the threats of those years, Islam became a highly militant religion, and even after its survival was assured, it continued aggressively expanding for a long time. Then it settled down and for a long time was quite peaceful, though UBL would surely call it a decadent period. Now it is moving back towards militancy--and most Americans are eagerly pushing to make it more militant by mindlessly attacking all things associated in any way with Islam. The most mild mannered and rational pacifist in the world would be regarded as anathema by most Americans--if that person was in any way tainted by Islam. In economic terms, we cannot afford this. Even if we only manage to grow the terrorist groups by a few percent, their RoI advantage is going to suck us dry.

Amusingly enough, that lunatic Rumsfeld was not crazy when he talked about the dangers of asymmetric warfare. He couldn't understand the solutions or he never would have supported the insane lost investment of billions of dollars in Iraq, but at least he noticed that such low-tech adversaries were getting much more bang from their limited bucks.

The Goldilock Enigma

Targeted Review of The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies

My original intention was to review this book as a comment appended to my earlier review of The God Delusion, where Professor Dawkins mentioned in passing that Professor Davies was a winner of the Templeton Prize. However, my intention for brevity got carried away, and the comment ran too long, resulting in this new post. (Comments are limited to 4,000-odd characters.)

In his book Professor Dawkins criticizes scientists who accept such prize money from the Templeton organization. He basically feels that such scientists are giving an aura of scientific credibility to religion, and that this is basically harmful. Based on this newer book I doubt that Professor Davies would receive the award at this late date, though they probably won't try to revoke it. He basically includes a fuzzy and weak god hypothesis as one of the possible 'ultimate explanations' for the universe, but merely as one of the options on a long list of possible ultimate explanations--and he explicitly states that he does not favor it.

However, my main reason for reacting to the book is that I feel I have to reject several points of the book rather strongly. Overall, the book is a good overview of modern astrophysics and the current theories of the early universe, but I think it mostly fails in its largest purposes for two major reasons.

The first reason is that there is some serious confusion about cause and effect. Or perhaps it should be dismissed as a form of circular reasoning? The central enigma of the book is that the universe is just right for life, and that seems amazing to Professor Davies. Actually, it works the other way around--life is adaptive and will attempt to adapt as well as possible to the universe as the universe is. He actually doesn't do a very good job of explaining all of the remarkable fits, but he does acknowledge the problem in a couple of places where he remembers to say "life as we know it" or something along those lines. That's exactly the point and the problem. If the universe were different, then life would also be different--but that life would still evolve to become extremely well adapted to that changed universe. It is not that the universe is trying to be perfect for life, but rather that evolutionary pressure drives life to be as perfect as possible for its environment in THIS universe.

The second major reason I think he fails in his search for the ultimate origins is even harder to describe succinctly... Should I call it projection? It is a fundamental human characteristic to seek explanations even where NO explanation exists, but he simply wants to assume that there is some deep explanation for the universe. Actually, the assumption of causation is just a useful heuristic that helps humans deal with the excessive complexity of the real world. We try to seek meanings in things because that helps us deal effectively with the world. This is a pragmatic justification, because much of the time the assumption of causation is useful. (In accord with the Dawkins book, it is precisely when such a search for causation fails that we wind up with such things as irrational and unprovable religious explanations.)

My constructed example begins with his own example of the birds. If we see a live bird fly by, we can reasonably assume that the bird is behaving in the way that birds do and for the reasons that the bird has. We might not fully understand the 'causation' of the bird's precise path, but we understand it well enough for our purposes, such as hunting the bird. However, when a dead bird 'flies' past us, we quickly realize there is something wrong, and there must be some other cause at work here. In the real world, the dead bird fails the test as the cause of its own flight, but we quickly understand we need to consider the situation more carefully. Much more important to our lives if, rather than a bird, the flying object is something dangerous like a stone. Did the stone fall off of a cliff? If so, we should move away from the cliff, because gravity might cause another stone to fall. Did the stone come from where another person is standing? Maybe the stone was actually thrown as an attack, and the real cause is that the thrower is planning to kill me and take over my cave and spouse? Though I deliberately picked a negative example, you can just as well argue that this is the ultimate source of Kant's Categorical Imperative and the deeper source of ethical behavior. It is actually quite reasonable to assume that other humans are similar to us and that they share our own motivations and will act in similar ways for similar reasons. However, though it makes sense to assume other humans might share our motives and that this causes them to behave in ways that we think we can explain, it is a very strong form of projection to assume that the universe as a whole has to have such a motivation.

Part of his attempt to justify his position on this issue involved observer effects, but this was one of the places where the book didn't do a very good job. In particular, his attempt to argue that the observer could force the photon to choose its displayed nature struck me as very unpersuasive. Perhaps my technical background is just too weak, but he didn't convince me that any choice was needed, and I'm still willing to believe that the photon can be both a particle and a wave at the same time.

Another area (but less important) where his presentation struck me as weak was his treatment of velocity in expanding space. I felt like he needed to at least acknowledge the effects of the expansion of space on the distance traveled... The space that the light wave passed through at some past time was much smaller, and that space has since expanded, but he seemed to be treating it as a linear constant relative to the present time.

However, as already noted, I felt the book was mostly a good overview of modern cosmological theories. It was mostly in the 'ultimate' speculations of the last few chapters that things seemed to break down for me.

The God Delusion

Definitely a book of the sort that Dubya would never touch. However, religious fanatics (like Dubya) are still welcome--to the trap, as will soon be explained... (By the way, I'm still reading a lot these days, but not reviewing many of them here, mostly in light of the apparent lack of interest as evidenced by the scarcity of comments.)

Analytic Review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Much of this review is going to be scientifically critical of the book, even though I think it's an excellent read and well worth your time. If the search engines are properly doing their stuff, then I believe this review may most likely be found most often by religious fanatics desperately looking for ammunition to use against Professor Dawkins. Well, plenty of ammunition to be found here, but it's fundamentally a trap, so I feel obliged to give you fair warning.

To any religious fanatics among the readers: In order to really understand the criticisms here, you need to adopt a scientific frame of mind, which is fundamentally poisonous to your religious frame of mind. Just parroting the arguments won't work. If you don't actually understand the arguments, it will only take a few moments of discussion to expose you as a mindless parrot, though it's more likely that you'll mangle the arguments even before you can finish presenting them. To actually use these arguments, you have to understand them, and to understand them, you would have to destroy the foundation of your own religious fanaticism.

Let me try to suggest an analogous approach that you religious fanatics should be able to appreciate. Imagine that you really wanted to study the merits of competing religions. The scientific approach to your religious faith would require you to perform some kind of scientific experiment, such as comparing your religion to some other religion. The most obvious experiment would be to abandon faith in your current religion and start to believe in some other religion. It won't work to just study the rituals or watch how the members behave and join in. In your faith-based reality, you must HAVE the faith or the faith has no meaning to you. Of course, you can't do this, because that would mean that your original faith had become wrong--until you switched back to it. However, you can't even imagine doing that kind of experiment because 'faith doesn't work that way'.

You religious fanatics are crucially unable to deal with the reality of truth in the limited way we humans can deal with that truth, which is also a partial and evolving truth--and therefore you can't actually deal with the reality of scientific criticism. You think probabilistic estimates of truth are a weakness, whereas they are just a reflection of our human limitations and the way the real world works. The point of science is precisely that we can get better--but we can never become perfect. We can acquire more knowledge, but we can never acquire absolute knowledge of the actual world. (The world of mathematics is a special case--but as noted below, it lacks the attribute of existence.) In contrast, the point of faith is to pretend to perfection--which always breaks down to some simplistic and empty shortcut, such as 'faith in Jesus' or 'the Bible is the inerrant word of God'.

If you are a religious fanatic, you might as well stop now. You'll never be able to understand or use these criticisms. Dawkins would apparently argue for trying 'to save you' from your ignorance, but I regard that as basically preposterous. I think the mind of a religious fanatic is damaged beyond any hope of freedom or wisdom. (Shades of Dijkstra's reaction to BASIC?) In the best case, you might switch to a less harmful form of fanaticism. Your ignorance is proud and willful--where 'proud' is defined by your 'saved' status and 'willful' is your own will. I'm reminded of a religious fanatic I know who likes to projectively blame the willful part on the so-called will of god. God's chosen people, eh? (What a clever meme, but the book's treatment of memes is also good, and I won't comment further on that topic.)

I also must confess that I'm quite unconcerned about wasting your religiously fanatical time in some relatively harmless reading if you choose to ignore my polite warning. Most religious fanatics believe in miracles, though I'd regard it as a kind of miracle if I 'reached' the mind of any sincere fanatic.

Now let's go back to the more general target readership, which in the case of this typical blog, is just a projection of the author's own style of thinking. I claim to be a rational scientist of sorts, so I hope that a rational scientist will be entertained or even enlightened.

Time for an overall summary: I think this book is quite good, handling many complicated topics with deftness and some humor. In most places I'm in complete agreement with the author. I think, there are a couple of places that could be improved, and only one place where I think substantial rewriting is called for. That's a short passage of a couple of pages, and in such a large book, that's quite a good job by the author. Going a bit beyond the scope of the book, I would also like to comment on the fundamental logical collapse of religion into evolution.

Mostly for the sake of politeness, I had better clarify my usage of "religious fanatic". One of the weaknesses of this book is that it seems to basically lump all religious people together, and it seems the only metric of interest is whether they are more or less harmful. The basic view in the book is that all of the religious followers are just harmful.

In contrast, I think there are legitimately religious people who are NOT fanatics and who are basically harmless (with apologies to the shade of Douglas Adams as admired by the author). My view is actually closely related to what Dawkins addresses under the label "NOMA", for "non-overlapping magisteria". The book addresses this topic fairly well, so all I'll note is that there are some religious people who can accept the world as it is, even including science and logic, which uniformly forces them to reject any literal interpretation of the founding documents of any of the conventional religions, obviously including the Bible and going right up to the latest and most amusing Scientology tracts. Such people basically hold that there is another sphere of meaning beyond the ken of science, even though most of them also try to pick and choose some conventionally religious elements to fit into their larger view. However, the sincerely religious people of this ilk are not defensive about their beliefs, and very few of them would even be motivated to read this book or its reviews. (At the same time, I have to note that such people seem very scarce, at least in my experience. Also, I think that a super-intelligent god would have been aware of information theory before we discovered it in the last century, and such a god would therefore have used information theory to make sure any messages were not mangled in transmission.)

The topic of atheists actually leads to one of my anecdotal disagreements. He argues that atheists are not religious fanatics, and that agnostics are just fence sitters. I have actually known a very devout atheist, and I would not be so kind. He was just as fanatical as any religious fanatic I can recall, and with no better justification. As regards the agnostic side of this question, Professor Dawkins regards himself as an agnostic, though very close to the atheist end of the scale of religious belief. I also regard myself as an agnostic, though basically because a negation cannot be proven. At the same time, I'm convinced you need to use extremes of mental gymnastics to imagine such a diabolical god who would lie to our faces on such a scale. Should we give some credit to the Christians who blame Satan while somehow exonerating God for his poor delegation skills?

The part of the book that reviews the various arguments for the existence of god is quite good and seems complete (though my own academic studies of these topics were many years ago). He also does a good job of surveying the arguments against the existence of any god, though he doesn't actually mention one of my current favorites: Most of the so-called mainstream religions insist that man was created in God's image while at the same time insisting that God is perfect and powerful. However, given how imperfect we human beings are, there has to be some kind of contradiction there. I can actually partially resolve the paradox by considering the mathematical domain of mental models, say of the triangle or of a perfect line in Euclidean space, but the problem of that approach is that existence is NOT one of the attributes of such mental models, and even physical space itself is ultimately curved and 'imperfect'. We all have awareness of that sort of shadow of perfection, but the real world cares not. It simply is as it is (which is broadly addressed in the book under the topic of the anthropic principle).

One of the specific arguments that bothered me in spite of his disclaimers and vague references to competing hypotheses was the notion of evolutionary selection in favor of gullibility in children. Rather I would argue for evolutionary selection in favor of being lovable, where obedience to the parents is only one of the favored attributes of being lovable. I regard generalized belief in authority figures as an extension of the child's faith in the parents, and especially faith in the 'godlike' primary caregiver. It's basically hard to raise children, and lovable children have a much better chance of making it, even today, though much more so in the hunter-gatherer days in which virtually all of our own evolutionary development took place. (As far as the development of our culture is concerned over the last few thousand years, our own evolutionary development is essentially negligible, as I've noted elsewhere in relation to the Fermi Paradox. I actually was lucky enough to persuade Bill Maher to ask a related question to Professor Dawkins on his Real Time program, if you like tenuous personal links.) The medical evidence is that most children didn't even survive their first year, no matter how lovable they were and how much their parents actually loved them. I do acknowledge that seems to be a naturally rebellious period in adolescence, but I suspect that is probably desirable in an evolutionary sense for disrupting nuclear families and encouraging genetic diversity--but the child's religious views have been determined and solidified well before that point.

What I regard as a major area of disagreement in the book involves his Chapter 9, where he thinks there is a special and anomalous status around such usages as "a Christian child" or "a Jewish child". He wants to treat this as a misleading label of belief, and argue in favor of such usages as "a child of Christian parents". However, it seems fairly obvious that it is more a matter of depth and that this usage is similar to some other labels that he does not consider. He compares the religious labels to other belief-based labels that would not be used for children, but he does not consider any examples of deeper labels such as "an American child", "a black child", "a Mexican child", or "an immigrant child". The essential boundary here clearly seems to be the presumption of inherited traits. Few people change their nationality from whatever they were born with, and few people change their religion from whatever their family practiced. He wants to change our consciousness in hopes of influencing people, so that more people would be aware of the possibility of changing their religious beliefs, but I think linguistic usage will follow reality, and I would even predict that there are cultures and languages where his recommended usage already prevails.

Now for what I regard as the largest weakness of the book, a topic which he only addresses indirectly, mostly under the subtopics of 'imaginary friends' (A.A. Milne's Binker) and consolation. I would put it as 'people are weak, and they know it, and they actively desire faith to compensate for their personal weakness'. Faith also addresses the reality that they are also intellectually lazy and foolish, though most of them are less willing to admit to those traits. In particular, I'm reminded of a religious acquaintance who boasts about 'her strength' based on her belief in having a superior crutch. She thinks she has a super-intelligent crutch in the form of a god who has chosen to save her, while she ever-so-humbly professes her unworthiness. Certainly not an unusual encounter, but merely a relatively recent one.

Another way to look at this weakness is that it's quite hard to be a really good and objective scientist. In a complicated world, we don't have the time to check the evidence for everything, so we have to start by taking a lot of things on faith. Sometimes we decide which things, but often not. From this viewpoint, I'd say that there are basically two attributes of scientists. The less important one is the willingness to accept new evidence. That may sound strange, but I think there are a lot of good-enough scientists who are just running on their hunches. In many of those cases, their hunches are well founded and they achieve solid results, but in plenty of cases the main thing they accomplish is to disprove their own assumptions, even if they personally refuse to admit their mistakes. However, the more important attribute of the rare great scientist is an ability to figure out WHICH evidence to search for. Sometimes it involves looking at old evidence differently. In that case, the evidence exists, but no one else can see its true meaning. After all, the ultimate meaning of any evidence is in how we interpret it. The important thing is that the scientist will look at the actual meaning of evidence (even when it is just an improvement on earlier interpretations), while the religious fanatic is looking for 'absolute' meaning as a handout from some god.

There is another major weakness in the book that involves non-religious evil, specifically related to his short section about Hitler and Stalin. This is probably the only place where I felt his argument was quite weak and incomplete. The crucial aspect of both Hitler and Stalin was that they were religious fanatics, but the followers of new cults, not established religions. As much as the old mainstream religions hate the concept of evolution, the process of creating new religions has changed over the years, along with the kinds of religions that are created.

The big-picture perspective is that many new cults have similar periods of militant extremism, often associated with their transition to the status of an established religion. From a sociological and historical perspective, the mechanism is pretty simple to understand. Initially the cult is harmless, most often dismissed as a lunatic fringe. As the cult grows, it may become a threat to the existing society, usually to the religious institutions but sometimes to the existing government itself. If the threat is imaginary or weak, then the cult will soon be crushed and disappear, but in many cases the threat is quite real, and the suppression of the cult fails. Quite often the self-defense period includes a militaristic response by the cult, initially just for survival, but then that same successful military organization is often used for aggressive expansion. There are many examples throughout history, and Professor Dawkins even cited some of them, though he didn't consider them from this perspective. He did consider the technological ramifications, however, and it was technology that made the scale of these recent crimes possible. It would have been hard for Hitler to create a factory for the mass production of death until after Henry Ford had created the concept of a factory for the mass production of cars... The technology remains morally neutral, and we can only speculate what Genghis Khan would have done with a nuclear weapon. (At the same time, I would argue that technology is, on the long-term average, more often used for good purposes than evil ones. The latest example is the mostly successful handling of the H1N1 influenza, which I believe had the potential to be far worse than the Spanish Flu epidemic after WW I.)

The other aspect is the change in the kind of religions which appear in the form of cults. My semi-humorous version is that "the standards of historical scholarship were very lax in those days" when the old mainstream religions were crafted. The book does talk a little bit about the historical process of editing the New Testament, but I'd have liked to see more about the Old Testament and the Koran, too. In particular, I've read that most of the Old Testament seems to have been assembled into its current form by two editors, with the first one focused on the five main books of the Old Testament, mostly drawing on Sumerian sources, before the more famous 'Redactor' did the final editing. However, those sorts of stories and fables just wouldn't work these days, and modern religions have very different bases, though several recent religions (such as the Mormons) have copied much of the archaic style. Religions like Lenin's flavor of communism or Hitler's Nazi Party were mostly economic religions, but they were following the traditional historical trajectory of rapid growth followed by suppression leading to a militaristic and extremist response.

Covering these topics properly would have greatly extended the book in this non-biological direction, so perhaps that is why Professor Dawkins treated the topic in such a shallow manner. However, I want to go even further and consider a fundamental paradox that I feel should be addressed. If the religious people insist on rejecting science and the use of our human intelligence to deal rationally with the world, then they condemn us to follow Mother Nature's path--the path of evolution. In the normal course of evolution, there is no planning. Every population struggles at the edge of starvation. The evolutionary process is to let them breed as much as possible, which naturally maximizes the evolutionary competition leading to improvement--though Ma Nature doesn't see it that way. Life is just about finding new niches to exploit, and Ma Nature doesn't worry about the casualties. Plenty more life where that came from--but it's a mighty tough life for those that are living it. (Give the Christian Scientists credit for illogical consistency--but they'll never catch on more widely. Most religious fanatics are quite willing to rationalize to allow for the use of antibiotics over God's will.)

As I was working on this review I checked Google Books (in my Internet lobe), trying to locate a specific quote in the book (only to discover that their page numbers don't match my edition). However, I think it is worth noting that a number of the books I did find were religiously motivated attacks on this book. Professor Dawkins has evidently touched quite a nerve. Actually, he mentions some of his critics within the book itself. I was actually kind of amazed that the fanatics think they can address reason with faith. What are they so afraid of? Yes, I'm personally sure that objective reality will eventually grind their fantasies to dust, but that's the way of the world, after all. (I was not amazed that none of those critics apparently believed in their own criticisms strongly enough to make their books freely available via Google Books. Then again, I'd be unlikely to read one, even if it was free. Right now I'm reading a Buddhist book, which is evidently a response to that popular Christian book about the purpose-driven life.)

Just as evidence of the closeness of my reading, I'll note that on page 175 the word "unparsimonious" was spelled incorrectly, without the first "n". I also was interested by his cryogenic freezing comments on page 402, in conjunction with a note I made considering death as the loss of a unique and inexplicably beautiful pattern.

Once again, to review my overall conclusions, I think this book is an interesting and thoughtful summary of many complicated topics. If you're interested in these topics, and I admit that I am, then you'll find it a good use of your time. However, I'm somewhat befuddled what all the fuss is about.

A Study in Scarlet

In the strangest places... Not even sure what pricked me into reading it, but I just finished the very first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet. It was probably first published in 1887, but it bears shockingly hard on the American political insanity of 2008, and for that reason I encourage you to read it. It's actually an excellent story in its own right, but...

One of the leading (=least implausible) neo-GOP presidential candidates is Mitt Romney. So far he's been doing a pretty good job of distancing himself from his Mormon background, and this book helps explain why. More concretely, it led me to understand one of Romney's more mystifying comments. Do you remember when Romney said that polygamy was the most evil thing? Why not unnecessary war or genocide or slavery or mass murder? What is it about polygamy that bugs him so much? Well, evil is in the eye of the beholder, and polygamy is the specific evil that could hurt Mitt, so no wonder he regards it as the #1 evil. This old classic from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reveals why Mitt thinks polygamy is the #1 evil: Because the Mormon history surrounding that practice could prevent him from becoming president. Ultimate horror!

I actually thought I was someone who knew a fair bit about the Mormons. I even knew a few of them when I was young. They have this thing about mingling with the infidels, befriending them, and converting--but certainly *NEVER* marrying a gentile. Actually, such unholy marriage is a violation of old Rule 13 of their original holy code as written by Joseph Smith (and now repudiated--at least in public). That's just one of the interesting tidbits in the book, along with my first introduction to the Danite Band AKA the Avenging Angels. Now that I know where to look, I was able to find out quite a bit of ugly information--but mostly I was impressed by how skillfully the Mormons are suppressing that part of their still recent history. Yeah, everything's on the Web, but some data is much harder to find than other data...

In conclusion, I encourage you to read this book and to pass the word around (even though his landscape is rather hyperbolic at the start of Part 2). I had certain reservations about Romney before, but they are greatly increased. We do *NOT* need another religious lunatic anywhere near the White House. If Romney isn't a religious lunatic, then he's a coward who's too afraid of the Mormons to get the heck out of that pseudo-church. <joke type="nuts versus loonies">After all, the Catholics assure us they have a monopoly on all this religious stuff.</joke>

Next strange topic for discussion: Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Ever heard of her? I'm in the middle of her old Gift from the Sea, and it seems to be a very impressive piece of philosophy... Light reading, and maybe it drowns in the philosophic shallows a bit farther on, but so far I'm finding it quite interesting and somewhat thought provoking.

Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran

First a production note about these reviews. The main reason for switching to this blog-based approach is that the large single file was becoming too awkward to work with. Close to 300 KB now. Some secondary reasons are that the blogging approach is basically mechanically easy and that these reviews are essentially chronological, reflecting my mental model of that book at a certain moment.

Review of Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran by Barry Rubin

This is not a new book, but it certainly should have been on Dubya's required reading list before he started his little war against Saddam. It basically gives a lot of the background that led so many of the regional experts to oppose the little adventure. Though it was published in 1981 and therefore stops at that point, it still manages to lead toward a number of obvious lines of analysis that lead to unpleasant conclusions--which are now being proven valid. Sure, Dubya has found some new mistakes to make, but why did he have to repeat all of these old ones, too? As a result of reading this book, I feel like my thinking has developed along three major lines of analysis:

1. Before reading the book, I thought the three-way partition of Iraq was basically inevitable as the natural least-effort solution that would come closest to satisfying the largest number of the most directly affected people. However, that was also based upon my belief that the Shia majority would think rationally about the costs of an extended civil war to impose their will on the old Sunni rulers and the Kurds. My main concern was the desire for revenge factor, but I thought that the Shia might be reasonable and let it go in exchange for the oil. This book led me to feel that the main religious leader in Iraq is quite probably trying to play the same game as Khomeini played so successfully in Iran, and that game included brutal and ultimately successful suppression of secessionist movements. From that perspective, the Shia leaders are only toying with the US, and using Dubya's incompetence for their own purposes--and there's quite a bit of evidence in favor of that theory.
   
2. In many ways, there are strong similarities between Khomeini's religious-based philosophy and Dubya's proto-philosophic rantings. Unfortunately, where they differ, it seems that the ignorant and poorly educated Khomeini had the better grasp of reality.
3. I wound up with a weird image of Saddam and the Shah of the Iran as the evil stepfathers of Iraq and Iran, respectively, with the US playing the role of some kind of wicked wizard. I guess that leaves the innocent people of those countries in the role of Cinderella or Snow White?
   

Not sure how to review the book in more detail... It is basically a historical account, and the early parts of the book seem very solid as background information. From the perspective of how things developed after 1980, I was looking very closely for mentions of Iraq. However, in the context of the times, Iraq is mentioned as a threat, but not a major one. The Soviet Union was taken much more seriously, and the author spends a lot of time trying to consider why the religious fundamentalists were basically ignored. I feel he does a pretty good job of covering the older history, and it's natural that he can't get the same degree of clear perspective on the more recent events. The book basically ends during the hostage crisis, though the final time line extends to the release of the hostages, so I think that was tucked in just as the book went to press. There are also some problems in the time line that may have been related to other last-minute additions.

Especially since the author has a name that sounds Jewish, I was looking carefully for pro-Israeli bias, but I didn't feel like there was much of that. It seemed like a very even-handed treatment, though I felt like the Israeli contributions to the broader regional mess might have been a bit understated. However, that does not seem unreasonable since the focus here is Iran, which hadn't had much involvement with Israel. (More recently, the Iranians have found it politically expedient to start beating on that drum, too... It would have been nice if the book had given some insight on the degree of their sincerity in attacking Israel, but I was left with the impression that they'll attack anyone if it suits their purposes, but their purposes are mostly focused internally towards maintaining their own power.)

The author does show some pro-American bias, however, basically assuming that America's motives are pure. That part looks rather naive from the current perspective. His presentation is that Carter was sincere in not wanting to interfere with Iran's internal affairs, and that the Iranian fears were falsely exaggerated to build up their domestic support. However, the Iranians are not going to interpret things that way in light of the war with Iraq that followed. Seems downright reasonable for them to feel that America was attempting to use Iraq to punish them, and America would have been glad if Saddam's efforts (while he was still America's friend and puppet) had resulted in the collapse and defeat of Khomeini's Islamic revolution. I suppose the Iranian's were especially angry that the Americans were providing weapons to both sides of that conflict and helping them to kill each other--and now there are reports the Iranians are supporting at least two of the sides in Iraq and helping them to kill each other--with the Americans in the middle of the mess.

The book had a lot of interesting background information on Ruhollah al-Musawi ibn Mustafa ibn Mustafa ibn Ahmad al-Musawi al-Khomeini, which is apparently Ayatollah Khomeini's complete name. It could have been deeper, but it did give a good overview of his religious philosophy and political strategies, both leading to the extremely confrontational approach he took against the Shah and against America. I was especially struck by this passage on page 275, which reminded me of some of Dubya's most extreme supporters: "Those who criticize or try to block this single voice, therefore, cannot be true Muslims: dissent equals treason." Later, on page 303, there is this sentence that reminds me of how many critics describe the Bush administration: "The concept of ideology first (in Maoist terminology, "politics in command") pervaded their thoughts and actions." However, this "their" was Khomeini and his followers, no matter how suitable it seems for Rove and Cheney.

I feel like I should include a brief overview of the history in terms of the blame for he mess, based on the impressions the book left me. That basically translates into how the relevant presidents steered American foreign policy vis a vis Iraq. My conclusion there is that there were basically two major sins of commission, one by Eisenhower and the other by Nixon, and a major sin of omission by Carter. The other presidents basically had a kind of skeptical attitude about the entire country and didn't want much to do with it. I think Truman probably gets credit for the only episode that really seems successful, which was getting the Russians out after WW II while not really increasing America's involvement. However, that minimalist approach could be linked to Eisenhower's mistake, which was also a kind of minimalist idea. Eisenhower wanted to leverage dissatisfaction with the Iranian nationalists and allowed the CIA to intervene at the critical juncture to overthrow that government in favor of the Shah--thus allowing the later Iranians to blame America for the Shah's incompetence and abuses. At the time, it looked like a bargain, with minimal American involvement for what seemed to be a preferable outcome. Nixon's mistake was to unleash the Shah, basically declaring him our best friend in that region and allowing him to buy any weapons he wanted (except for nuclear weapons). The Shah had always had militaristic leanings, and without the leash holding back his military spending, he managed to bankrupt the country in spite of all of the oil revenue. The book left me feeling like Carter must have made a sin of omission, but I also have to say that I'm not clear what it was. I guess my feeling is that if Carter had quickly realized that the Iran's problems were internal, then he could have applied more pressure for reforms that might have prevented Khomeini from taking over... However, the book actually provides quite a bit of defense for Carter, emphasizing how the intelligence community failed to assess the realities of the time, and it even suggests that America's external leverage was much more limited than many people, including many Iranians, believed it to be.

Not really sure what to offer as an overall conclusion. The book does have a lot of important background information, but it ends just when things are getting interesting, so to speak. Basically it leaves me wondering about how things turned out, and even though I know a few of the outcomes from the perspective of the quarter century since the book was written, I'd like to see a sequel or two. However, one thing seems absolutely clear: Dubya (and his handlers) never read it.