Monday, June 13, 2016

Pluralism, Politics, and Belief; Or, Of Walking And Chewing Gum At The Same Time (A Twitter Essaylet)

at

4 comments:

  1. jimf8:39 AM

    > What we want from scientific beliefs. . .

    http://gizmodo.com/new-evidence-suggests-a-fifth-fundamental-force-of-natu-1778881644
    ----------------
    New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature
    ---

    By -- who else?

    ----------------
    George Dvorsky
    ====


    Now, before we all start chanting "All hail to the Divine Gordelpus[*]"
    it might be worth recalling the cold fusion brouhaha of 1989
    (something which Arthur C. Clarke continued to believe in to
    his dying day, which led me to wonder "Was he always that
    soft in the head?"); or the more recent "discovery" of faster-than-light
    particles (Ozzie SF author Damien Broderick, for one, has long
    been hankering after such exotic physics to base wanna-belief in
    precognition on -- a project he puts in the fictional hands
    of a couple of unattractively gay physicists in _Quipu_[**]
    https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/damien-broderick/quipu.htm ).

    For better or worse, the progress of science (in contrast to
    the "progress" of science journalism) does not depend on people
    pulling new forces of nature out of their, er, fundaments.


    [*] Yes, I've been re-reading Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_.


    [**] "[W]e have a highly ambivalent relationship. He's quite aware
    that I'm not queer, that on that level I'm no threat to his er 'marriage'
    with Paul. He strikes me as absurdly insecure, given his proven
    accomplishments in particle theory; I take it that he'll be the
    youngest person to have a high-energy physics Ph.D. in the history
    of the State. Still, he resents my presence ferociously because
    I distract Paul from total preoccupation with him. . .

    Energy might well travel faster than light, but matters here proceed
    slowly. . . Tom growls and stamps about the house, of goes off
    in trizzy fits to get plastered at some poofter pub or club.
    Hard to comprend that this is one of the prime minds of our
    generation. . ."

    https://books.google.com/books?id=gV-aAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT133&lpg=PT133


    ;->

    ReplyDelete
  2. jimf10:03 AM

    > Pluralists propose there are different sorts of beliefs
    > embedded in different sorts of ends and histories...
    >
    > Truth is that which is "good in the way of belief, and good,
    > too, for definite, assignable reasons."

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/opinion/a-party-agrift.html
    -------------------
    A Party Agrift
    by Paul Krugman
    JUNE 13, 2016

    This is not a column about. . . the fraudulent scheme that was
    Trump University. . .

    No, my question, as Democrats gleefully tear into the Trump
    business record, is why rival Republicans never did the same. . .

    I mean, it’s not as if any of this dirt was deeply hidden. . .

    Were they just incompetent, or is there something structural about
    the modern Republican Party that makes it unable to confront grifters?

    The answer, I’d argue, is the latter.

    Rick Perlstein, who has documented the rise of modern conservatism
    in a series of eye-opening books, points out that there has always
    been a close association between the movement and the operations
    of snake-oil salesmen — people who use lists of campaign contributors,
    right-wing websites and so on to sell get-rich-quick schemes and
    miracle health cures.

    Sometimes the political link is direct: dire warnings about the
    coming depression/hyperinflation, from which you can only protect
    yourself by buying Ron Paul’s DVDs (the “Ron Paul curriculum”) or
    gold shares hawked by Glenn Beck. Sometimes it just seems to reflect
    a judgment on the part of the grifters that people who can be
    persuaded that President Obama is Muslim can also be persuaded
    that there are easy money-making opportunities the establishment
    doesn’t want you to know about.

    There’s also a notable pattern of conservative political stars
    engaging in what is supposed to be activism, but looks a lot like
    personal enrichment. For example, Sarah Palin’s SarahPAC gives
    only a few percent of what it raises on candidates, while spending
    heavily on consultants and Mrs. Palin’s travels.

    Then there’s the issue of ideology. If your fundamental premise
    is that the profit motive is always good and government is the
    root of all evil, if you treat any suggestion that, say, some
    bankers misbehaved in the run-up to the financial crisis as
    proof that the speaker is anti-business if not a full-blown
    socialist, how can you condemn anyone’s business practices? . . .

    Finally, the con job that lies at the heart of so much Republican
    politics makes it hard to go after other, more commercial cons.
    It’s interesting to note that Marco Rubio actually did try to
    make Trump University an issue, but he did it too late, after
    he had already made himself a laughingstock with his broken-record
    routine. And here’s the thing: The groove Mr. Rubio got stuck in —
    innuendo that the president is deliberately weakening America —
    was a typical example of the political snake-oil the right sells
    along with free money and three-minute cures for high blood pressure. . .
    ====

    ReplyDelete
  3. jimf11:07 AM

    > I've been re-reading Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_. . .

    Speaking of which, there's a paragraph in today's New York Times
    that might be right out of Stapledon:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/opinion/orlando-omar-mateen-pulse-florida-donald-trumps-america.html
    -------------------
    Orlando and Trump’s America
    by Roger Cohen
    JUNE 13, 2016

    Omar Mateen, the Florida shooter who had pledged allegiance to
    the Islamic State, just ushered Donald Trump to the White House,
    Britain out of the European Union, Marine Le Pen to the French
    presidency, and the world into a downward spiral of escalating
    violence. . .

    Of course, these somber imaginings may prove to be no more
    than that. Mateen has not yet changed the world; he may never. . .
    ====


    "When your writers romance of the future, they too easily imagine
    a progress toward some kind of Utopia, in which beings like
    themselves live in unmitigated bliss among circumstances
    perfectly suited to a fixed human nature. I shall not describe
    any such paradise. Instead, I shall record huge fluctuations
    of joy and woe. . .

    One brief but tragic incident, which occurred within a century of
    the [First] European War, may be said to have sealed the fate of
    the First Men. During this century the will for peace and sanity
    was already becoming a serious factor in history. Save for a number
    of most untoward accidents, to be recorded in due course, the
    party of peace might have dominated Europe during its most dangerous
    period; and, through Europe, the world. With either a little less
    bad luck or a fraction more vision and self-control at this critical
    time, there might never have occurred that aeon of darkness, in which
    the First Men were presently to be submerged. For had victory
    been gained before the general level of mentality had seriously
    begun to decline, the attainment of the world state might have been
    regarded, not as an end, but as the first step toward true civilization.
    But this was not to be. . .

    [S]o strong by now was the will for cosmopolitanism that the upshot
    would almost certainly have been a triumph of sanity, had there not
    occurred in England an accident which tilted the whole precarious
    course of events in the opposite direction. . .

    At this point occurred one of those incidents which, minute in themselves,
    have disproportionately great effects. The unstable nature of
    the First Men made them peculiarly liable to suffer from such accidents,
    and especially so in their decline. . ."

    -- _Last and First Men_ (1930)

    ReplyDelete
  4. jimf11:09 AM

    I don't suppose this has even been on Donald Trump's
    reading list. ;->


    "[T]he best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. . .

    [T]heir genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely
    conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. . . But these
    best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated
    self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma
    was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was
    essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something
    lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks
    back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already
    woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate
    the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to
    rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it inevitably, through
    spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.

    Inevitably. . ."

    Op. cit.

    ReplyDelete