Planet Atheism » Kazim

Social graces, who needs em?

Kazim — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:52:00 +0000

Russell here. I haven't really thrown myself fully into the Watson / Dawkins dust up, apart from a Facebook thread and a few choice remarks in comments. Rest assured, though, that I and pretty much every Atheist Experience participant I've seen in email agrees (as far as I can glean) with the main thrust of Martin's post on the subject, to wit: "Dawkins is wrong, Rebecca is right." We've gotten email trying to insist that we should inject some fake balance into this discussion, saying both sides have blown it out of proportion. Nope. IMHO, they haven't, all the proportion blowing out of has been in one direction.

A thread that is pushing towards 400 comments probably doesn't need more people repeating what's already been said, but I want to take some time out to address one of the most... confused... comments that I saw thrown out and repeated a few times in there. It's this:

This is embarrassing. I feel the need to comment on this because Martin, Tracy, and Matt are clearly being hypocrites here.

"Lets make a TV show where we call all religion false. People will feel offended/threatened/fearful for viewer's salvation, but in the name of free discussion, its worth it. After all, people don't have right not to be offended."

And now look whats happened. "Its good for Rebecca to set incredibly subjective social rules for all men (applying to all women as well) because she might be frightened."

Of course people don't have the right not to be offended.

And by the same token, people don't have the automatic right of association with people that they've offended.

Look, I don't spend time talking about atheism because I think it's naturally fun to offend people. I talk about atheism because I feel that it's an intelligent point of view which has been unfairly misrepresented by a large number of religious people. When I'm on the show I have different goals depending on who I'm talking to. The three most common goals, for me, are as follows:

Hello, fellow atheist! Don't feel bad that you're an atheist, because many other smart people agree with you and have good reasons for doing so! We support you and appreciate what you're going through.
Hello, theist! We may disagree with you, but we're not a danger to you. We have values, we don't harm people, and we aren't on a mission to destroy your freedom to believe what you want. We think your beliefs are wrong, but we'd like to discuss why rather than drawing the knives. Yay for pluralism, am I right?
Hey, audience! Get a load of this guy! His religion has caused him to have an extraordinary number of obviously false beliefs, so hilarious that they are transparent even to his fellow religious people! Let's all enjoy him for entertainment value, since it would obviously be a waste of time to try to convince him of anything.

That's the formula in a nutshell, and all three types of caller are valued. Caller #3 is the most likely to be "offended" by our topics, but that's okay with me. He is free not to watch, and if he watches anyway, well, offense is part of the package deal.

But I also don't expect to hang out with those people. I usually don't come into their church, tell them things from their pulpit that will offend them, and then get angry because they don't immediately hire me as the new pastor.

So the question is: do we, in fact, give a crap about having women like Rebecca and Tracie and and Greta and Jen Peeples and Jen McCreight feel comfortable as a part of the atheist activist and outreach community, or don't we? If several of our existing activists explain what it is that is making atheist conventions a potentially uncomfortable environment, are you gonna say "Suck it up, babe, I have the right to offend you"?

Well, yeah, you have the right to do it. But you're kind of like a guy who is sitting in a public place for hours making armpit fart noises. It's not illegal to make armpit farts, it's probably not "threatening behavior" per se, but you can rest assured that the vast majority of people will find you annoying and stay far away from you. Some might even approach you and say "Please stop doing that, it's obnoxious." As Richard Dawkins might point out, the amount of discomfort it causes people is quite trivial compared to what oppressed women in the Middle East have to go through, but it doesn't change the fact that it will cause a lot of people not to like you.

So if I say "Please stop with the armpit farts," I am not curtailing your free speech. And if you insist on your "right" to do it, and then as a result I choose to avoid you, I am also not curtailing your free speech. And if I later throw a party, and I say "Don't invite him, that's the armpit fart guy," I am still not curtailing your free speech. I'm just exercising my freedom of association because I don't like you.

Sometimes in the past I've talked about debating atheism as being a kind of competitive game, much like chess or poker or Starcraft II or football. In all competitive games, there is a certain amount of luck involved with the circumstances under which you play, but the main way to increase your skill is to play a lot. When you lose, you observe what your opponent did and see if there is anything you can specifically borrow from his style so that you improve the next time. When you win, identify why you won and keep doing that, but also review where you were weakest and how you can stop doing those things.

Being socially effective and well liked is no different, but this is a difficult thing for some atheists to get their heads around because a lot of us are -- show of hands, please! -- nerds. It's not a coincidence that there are strong nerdy tendencies among a group that emphasizes intellect, rationality, and scientific literacy. It comes with the territory. I'm a nerd, I'm engaged to a nerd, I love talking to nerds.

But one thing that characterizes some nerds is that they care more about their chosen area of passion -- whether it's physics or Greek poetry or getting really good at Starcraft II -- than about their personal interactions with other people. And that, of course, leads to frustration when they recognize that social acceptance doesn't come for free; you have to work at that too.

Let me throw out a chess analogy here. I prefer to use chess rather than other games because I feel most people (particularly nerds) are likely to have at least a little bit of familiarity with it. At all skill levels, most players start the game by moving the king's pawn. A smaller number move the queen's pawn first, often as part of a queen's gambit. It's also possible to open with any other pawn or even a knight, but it's very rare for good players to do this for a lot of reasons: you give up early control of the center, you delay your ability to move out key pieces on the board, etc.

Now suppose you're just learning to play chess, and you decide that you want to open every game by moving your rook's pawn, way over on the side of the board. After I watch your games a bit, I say "I think you should stop using that as your opening move, try something more traditional." A player who wishes to improve at chess will seriously consider this suggestion and most will eventually recognize it as correct. This improvement comes in two stages: first understanding the reasoning behind the strategy, and second, trying it out and observing that, yes, you win more when you do it.

But another reaction to this advice would be to throw a temper tantrum, saying "What an unfair demand! That's the problem with this dumb game, it's so rigid and has all these unspoken 'rules' that I'm expected to follow even though they aren't part of the official rules of the game! I think you're just imposing on my freedom to open with the rook's pawn, and you can go fuck yourself."

That player is always going to be bad at chess. He's right, of course, to think that you "have the right" to make a rook pawn opening. But what he's missing is that you don't have the right to open with the rook's pawn and then win the game. Being good at chess is not a right.

Forgive the incredibly convoluted analogy, but I do have a point. There is a way of acting which will be regarded as offensive and out of line by most people who give any actual thought to the matter. People who insist on their "right" to act this way do not have the right to be respected or appreciated for their independence, which would constitute "winning" the social game.

Periodically we'll see discussions going on about why there are so many white dudes in the atheist activist movement. Atheist men would like to have more women around. Atheist women, minority that they are, would like to have more women around. Black atheists, and non-racist white atheists, would like to have more black atheists around. We don't want that so that we white men can have more chicks to hit on, or so we can smugly say "I have some black friends!" It's because we would like atheist activism to be an open and inviting community for all people of like minds to be comfortable congregating and exchanging ideas. We don't want to be forever hiding our atheism because Christians are the only ones who know how to apply social pressure.

Because, see, Rebecca Watson does not presume speak for all women; but if you look around at the reaction to her story among female bloggers, you'll see that she obviously speaks effectively for a lot of them. The atheist community is either going to be a place that welcomes and embraces guys being obnoxious douches for the sake of celebrating their freedom to do what they want... or it's going to be a place where women like to be. It can't be both. You can offend people if you want, but you can't be aggressively, unapologetically offensive to people whom you then also hope will like you.

Those are the rules of the game. Sorry if it cramps your style. Learn to play or go find a different game that you're better at.

Open thread on episode 716

Kazim — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 21:26:00 +0000

Jen and I are starting in three minutes. We'll be talking about investigating some events of the Bible (specifically 2 Kings 24-25) for historical accuracy. Have at it!

A fairly typical email

Kazim — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:51:00 +0000

Nothing extraordinary here, no comedy, no ridicule. This is just a typical sort of message that we receive on a regular basis, and today I decided to give it a thorough reply. I thought I'd blog my answer today because it is a long form version of a conversation that lots of you probably have often, if you're an out atheist who knows some theists.

The original message is in block quotes; my replies follow each section.

I've been watching clips of your show on Youtube, and I have to say you've done a pretty good job in debating with theists thus far. It's a shame many of the ones I've heard on there don't slow down enough to think for a moment. Many of the points you guys have made appear to make sense to me as well.

Glad to hear it. We'd always rather be reaching out to a receptive audience with some disagreement than exclusively "preaching to the choir."

To start off, I'm going to say that I consider myself an agnostic theist; I believe in God or the possibility thereof, but in no position to make the assumption that there is one with no doubt. So I'm relying on the whole faith thing, which can only do so much for you.

Personally, I'd go farther than that. Not only can faith "only do so much for you," but deciding to maintain faith in something that can't be demonstrated is very likely to mislead you. I think there should, at a minimum, be a basic standard to decide whether something is likely to be really true or not. This isn't the same as "absolute proof," just some sort of reasonable evidence.

You might've answered this question in one of your episodes, I don't know, but you've repeatedly asked for evidence in proving the existence of God, which I perfectly understand and agree with. My question to you is what evidence would you need that would convince you to believe in "God", or better yet, just know without doubt? I don't expect you guys to know, as I wouldn't even know for sure.

Carl Sagan used to say that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." If someone came to you claiming "It rained every day in Seattle last week," you'd probably be comfortable believing them just on their word. If someone said "It rained every day in the Sahara Desert last week," you probably would not believe them until you looked up more information (corroborated news reports from multiple sources, pictures, etc). The more unusual the claim, the more information you need to confirm it.

With "God," at least in a traditional sense, we have an infinitely powerful being living outside of time and space who creates entire universes by saying a few words, tracks the lives of every human being on the planet, answers their prayers, and bends the rules of time and space to suit his will. I think you'll probably agree that if people didn't grow up assuming that being existed, they'd find that quite an extraordinary claim to process. It would need some pretty impressive evidence to back it up.

I confess I do not know exactly what sort of evidence that might be, although I would point out that God, being omnipotent, would probably know what to do if he existed. In the Bible, God does all sorts of impressive tricks: appears in front of people, performs miracles, parts seas, turns folks to salt. Unfortunately, the only source we have for the claims that those things happened is a very old book of questionable origin, so that doesn't help us much today.

If those sorts of things happened on a regular basis, it would help. Some atheists would say that even that's not enough to demonstrate INFINITE power, but I say it would be a good start. An example I always use is that if the stars one night spontaneously rearranged themselves in the sky, spelling out "I am the lord thy God, you fools, everything in the Bible is true" that would be a good effort. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so we couldn't really rule out the possibility that superintelligent (though not actually omnipotent) aliens were messing with us. But I still say I would be much more willing to consider the possibility that it's a god.

This is all academic speculation, however, because the evidence that people give for believing in God is nowhere near that interesting. As you said, people generally rely on "faith," which obviously wouldn't be necessary if there was anything approaching a good reason to believe in God. When they do try to present convincing evidence, it tends to be of a very mundane sort: They couldn't find their car keys and then they turned up; an earthquake happened in a place full of people they don't like; somebody was very sick and then got better; and so on. It's not enough. Not even close.

I think you'd have to start off with figuring out what exactly God is and work from there, which is difficult since there are so many interpretations that assume to be true. If I had to toss a theory for the sake of debate, I would guess "God" is just energy, which would explain the whole "eternal" or "always existing" part since it cannot be created or destroyed, according to the Law of Conservation of Energy. I won't add on the idea that this energy or "God" has to have a self-thinking conscious, which seems to be what many of us like to attribute when discussing the concept of a "creator."

Okay, if that's what you want to call "God" then you're welcome to do so. I think it's unnecessary, though. We already have a perfectly good word for energy. It's "energy." Why call it God? What new information does that label convey? If the god you're envisioning isn't intelligent or purposeful, then in what sense is it useful to apply such a loaded term? How is a universe where all energy is God different from a universe where energy is just energy?

I might've just gave the answer you would give (or a variant thereof), but if you have a different response, I'm curious to know, via email or on-air. Like you guys, I seek to know the truth, whatever it may be.

I don't see any reason to try to define God myself. If even the billions of people who believe in the concept can't agree on what it means, then why would I spend time trying to define something I don't believe? For any individual God claim, I'll be happy to discuss whether it seems to have any merit or not. What I've found so far is that the most impressive and specific definitions of God have no evidence for them; and for dull and uninteresting meanings of God (such as energy) I would say they may exist, but so what?

A fairly typical email

Kazim — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:51:00 +0000

I've been watching clips of your show on Youtube, and I have to say you've done a pretty good job in debating with theists thus far. It's a shame many of the ones I've heard on there don't slow down enough to think for a moment. Many of the points you guys have made appear to make sense to me as well.

Glad to hear it. We'd always rather be reaching out to a receptive audience with some disagreement than exclusively "preaching to the choir."

To start off, I'm going to say that I consider myself an agnostic theist; I believe in God or the possibility thereof, but in no position to make the assumption that there is one with no doubt. So I'm relying on the whole faith thing, which can only do so much for you.

You might've answered this question in one of your episodes, I don't know, but you've repeatedly asked for evidence in proving the existence of God, which I perfectly understand and agree with. My question to you is what evidence would you need that would convince you to believe in "God", or better yet, just know without doubt? I don't expect you guys to know, as I wouldn't even know for sure.

I think you'd have to start off with figuring out what exactly God is and work from there, which is difficult since there are so many interpretations that assume to be true. If I had to toss a theory for the sake of debate, I would guess "God" is just energy, which would explain the whole "eternal" or "always existing" part since it cannot be created or destroyed, according to the Law of Conservation of Energy. I won't add on the idea that this energy or "God" has to have a self-thinking conscious, which seems to be what many of us like to attribute when discussing the concept of a "creator."

I might've just gave the answer you would give (or a variant thereof), but if you have a different response, I'm curious to know, via email or on-air. Like you guys, I seek to know the truth, whatever it may be.

Open thread on Episode #713

Kazim — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:19:00 +0000

Oh, looks like people are piling onto the #712 thread because they have no outlet to discuss Jeff and Matt on episode #713. Here you go! Matt and Jeff discussed cosmology, a lot, and decided to give EvolvedAtheist / self-styled homophobic rapper hero Charlie Check'm, another round.

For people writing to request that Charlie never get on the air again: We heard you, and agree.

Open thread on Episode #713

Kazim — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:19:00 +0000

Where are the progressive atheists? Right here.

Kazim — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:34:00 +0000

I can't believe I actually have to work at an argument FOR the idea that atheists tend to be liberal, but I had to respond to this ridiculous article from an Australian columnist commenting on the supposed prominence of "right wing war-mongerers" in the atheist movement.

I would post this on the Atheist Experience blog, but we don't officially support a political persuasion in the group, and this is easier to discuss on my personal blog.

This is how I replied:

Hi Jeff, I'm a progressive atheist from Austin, Texas, one of the hosts of a show called "The Atheist Experience."

Your question about where all the progressive atheists have gone is a little odd to me. I can't speak to the situation in your country, but here in the United States, "godless liberal" is a term frequently tossed about as an insult by the far right wing, who are inextricably wrapped up in the religious right. Among people who claimed no religion in exit polls in our last two elections, 67% voted for John Kerry over George Bush in 2004, and 75% voted for Barack Obama in 2008. In both cases, this makes up a significantly higher proportion for the Democratic candidate than the general public. I'm willing to bet you'd find similar majorities in your own elections if you go by statistics rather than anecdotes.

In fact, I hope you don't mind my saying so, but your own penetrating analysis showing that atheists are right wing fascists seems to rely heavily on cherry picking a couple of individuals and assuming that they represent the entire group. There are two other atheists prominently featured at your link, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, both very strong liberal voices. Dawkins can be seen here calling for votes for the Liberal Democrat party in England. Gregory S. Paul recently wrote in the Washington Post, not only in defense of atheism, but also in favor of important progressive ethics such as civil rights, environmentalism, and opposition to US torture policies. Peter Singer, a prominent atheist philosopher from your country, is also generally considered extremely left wing. PZ Myers, one of the most popular atheist bloggers, is regularly attacked by the right wing for his outspoken liberal views.

To the extent that atheists could in any way be described as "anti-Islam," by and large we don't favor blanket military actions against them based on their religion, nor do we want to stop them from freely practicing their religion as they choose. Rather, atheists argue with the doctrines of fundamentalist Islam in exactly the same terms that we oppose the doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity: we don't want to see the curtailing of freedom of speech, or gender equality, and we think that nobody should fear a threat on their life for speaking out against harmful religious practices.

Christopher Hitchens is actually quite liberal in many other areas outside his foreign policy beliefs, describing himself as a "Marxist" as recently as 2006, and joining with the American Civil Liberties Union in the same year to oppose the Bush Administration's warrantless spying on U.S. citizens. His views on the Iraq invasion, while they have been as you describe, are by no means in the mainstream among the majority of atheists.

Where are the progressive atheists? Anywhere you find atheists, there they are.

We get email

Kazim — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:28:00 +0000

The Atheist Experience audience has made me extremely paranoid, since it is a virtual guarantee that every single theist caller or commenter who expresses their two cents will be called a Poe by somebody. To listen to them talk, you'd think that there is not a single True Christian to be found anywhere in the world, while the hills are teeming with atheists wearing jester caps who are keeping up a massive worldwide conspiracy to make you think that most people believe in God.

Even so, this email really takes the cake, so can you blame me for being a bit suspicious?

Subject: Please Read. Excuse my typos. This is what God spoke to me about personally. Heres my phone number , please call me anytime. [phone number redacted]

The Begining/Origin of Sin
Angels in heaven communicate using a different form of communication.
While speaking the celestial language,the form(the phonological or
orthographic sound or appearance of a word)of pronunciation, they
spoke in harmonys and understand eachother in harmony.They were
congruent with one another. Lucifer, Spoke in a very distinct harmony.
His language was not any different, but he regarded it with wonder
and delight. We become individuals do to the pace and speed in which
we process an idea or thought. Vision is a secondary form of sound; a
visable aspect whether inferior or superior, the apearence of sound.
In the celestial city, we are able to see at the sight of sound(Romans
10:17;So faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of
Christ).Sound and vision travel at the speed of light, light bieng the
condition of perfect awareness which is translated or restated in our
realm as a form of energy. Lucifer was created perfect. Lucifer brung
into existance the first contradiction by convincing himself that the
speed in which he processed a thought was superior to all other angels
and brung into existance this idea, that the quantity fulfilling his
desire to contradict God by bringing such a thought into existance was
sufficient and enough to lead(take, carry out, replace) all others.
This idea is the origin of sin, and how it became extant. How can he
speak a perfect language and still confuse and attempt to convince
others against God? Lucifer gave a secondary definition to every word
he came across while attempting to nullify the barrier and extent of
knowing given to him by God which was spoken in the celestial city.
Angels were given ideal structure that impedes greater extent of
knowing. Created to worship, and praise God Almighty knowing of
nothing more, never under an unsatisfied state. Prefixes were made by
lucifer, found in over 6900 languages in the world, they give a
secondary definition. By presenting all the content of his newly
created cognition which apeared to be orginized he convinced a portion
of the angels of God to turn against the creator and originator
Himself, figuratively assuming he will reach a perfect state of
imperfection, creating choices in the way we regard situations or
topics, presenting perspectives, placing in our surrounding the option
of his false wisdom. We perfectly make decisions, we accept
imperfection by choice. Musical compositions that do not worship God
Almighty become the voice of the beast which speaks a language that
ravels and convinces to turn against God and steadily keeps the soul
unstable.

The Conscience
PIPED OR HARPED
Genesis Chapt. 1 Genesis Chapt. 2
God JEHOVA God
Create Form
Male/Female Man/Woman
Angels(Perfect Word) Demons(Demonstration
of what not to act in)
Good(Beneficial for ones salvation) Bad(To be against,
contradict that which saves)
Right Wrong
Spirit Flesh
1st Corinthians 15:47
The FIRST man(Flesh,wrong doing) is earthly.The SECOND man is heavenly(Spirit)
Genesis Chapt 2:4
These are the generations/origins/account/
histories/births(Time
period) of the heavens and the earth when they were CREATED. In THE
DAY that JEHOVA God MADE earth and heaven.
"The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit/ Satan, The Beast, The
False Prophet"
"For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the
Spirit is life"
"the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is alive because of
righteousness"
"But indeed, O MAN, who are you to reply against God?"
"Will the thing formed ask him who formed it"
"That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of
the Spirit is spirit"
"For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh;
but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit."
"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are [these]; Adultery,
fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,"

Ask yourself, Why would God contradict himself? Genesis 6:6
"And it repented the Lord God that he had made man on the earth, and
it grieved him at his heart"? God "created" something He regrets
making? That would make Him imperfect! Jeremiah 26:13 "The Lord
repented him of the evil which he had pronounced against them." Exodus
32:14 "And the Lord God repented of the evil which he thought to do
unto his people." Impossible. Lucifer does not dress in black, He is
beautiful, and tries not to be LIKE God, but to be God himself. The
speed in which he processed any of his thoughts were created favorably
and delt with distinctively. These anthropopathic verses were inspired
NOT by God, but have been interpreted by a faulty mind over the years
and have changed and has given a different significance to the
original meaning/definition. Our insignificance doesnt allow us to
accept that because we have been clothed with this flesh, a formation
of the enemy, it is not possible for the enemy to "create" anything or
any sort.

I reply:

Hi,

Please forgive me, all the Bible quotes made my eyes glaze over and I couldn't read your message thoroughly enough to see if you were serious.

You see, we get self-styled comedians writing in all the time, atheists who think it would be funny to imitate a crazy person who claims to personally speak with God. Unfortunately, "Poe's Law" very much holds true in the sense that you cannot fake the crazy so strongly that you can't be taken seriously. Hence, if you're trying to be funny, the humor is being lost on your audience.

With that in mind, would you be so kind as to tell me whether you're just pretending to be a crazy person who talks to god, or you're the real deal?

He replies:

Excuse me? How faulty can your way of reasoning be! You think I'm kidding around with you? A JOKE? Please read what I wrote, that's is absolutely nothing more than my attempt to understand what Love has spoken to me. What I say is in no way a joke..

I think we got ourselves a genuine loon here, but I'm sure the Poe Theorists among you will be eager to disagree.

We get email

Kazim — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:28:00 +0000

Subject: Please Read. Excuse my typos. This is what God spoke to me about personally. Heres my phone number , please call me anytime. [phone number redacted]

The Begining/Origin of Sin
Angels in heaven communicate using a different form of communication.
While speaking the celestial language,the form(the phonological or
orthographic sound or appearance of a word)of pronunciation, they
spoke in harmonys and understand eachother in harmony.They were
congruent with one another. Lucifer, Spoke in a very distinct harmony.
His language was not any different, but he regarded it with wonder
and delight. We become individuals do to the pace and speed in which
we process an idea or thought. Vision is a secondary form of sound; a
visable aspect whether inferior or superior, the apearence of sound.
In the celestial city, we are able to see at the sight of sound(Romans
10:17;So faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of
Christ).Sound and vision travel at the speed of light, light bieng the
condition of perfect awareness which is translated or restated in our
realm as a form of energy. Lucifer was created perfect. Lucifer brung
into existance the first contradiction by convincing himself that the
speed in which he processed a thought was superior to all other angels
and brung into existance this idea, that the quantity fulfilling his
desire to contradict God by bringing such a thought into existance was
sufficient and enough to lead(take, carry out, replace) all others.
This idea is the origin of sin, and how it became extant. How can he
speak a perfect language and still confuse and attempt to convince
others against God? Lucifer gave a secondary definition to every word
he came across while attempting to nullify the barrier and extent of
knowing given to him by God which was spoken in the celestial city.
Angels were given ideal structure that impedes greater extent of
knowing. Created to worship, and praise God Almighty knowing of
nothing more, never under an unsatisfied state. Prefixes were made by
lucifer, found in over 6900 languages in the world, they give a
secondary definition. By presenting all the content of his newly
created cognition which apeared to be orginized he convinced a portion
of the angels of God to turn against the creator and originator
Himself, figuratively assuming he will reach a perfect state of
imperfection, creating choices in the way we regard situations or
topics, presenting perspectives, placing in our surrounding the option
of his false wisdom. We perfectly make decisions, we accept
imperfection by choice. Musical compositions that do not worship God
Almighty become the voice of the beast which speaks a language that
ravels and convinces to turn against God and steadily keeps the soul
unstable.

The Conscience
PIPED OR HARPED
Genesis Chapt. 1 Genesis Chapt. 2
God JEHOVA God
Create Form
Male/Female Man/Woman
Angels(Perfect Word) Demons(Demonstration
of what not to act in)
Good(Beneficial for ones salvation) Bad(To be against,
contradict that which saves)
Right Wrong
Spirit Flesh
1st Corinthians 15:47
The FIRST man(Flesh,wrong doing) is earthly.The SECOND man is heavenly(Spirit)
Genesis Chapt 2:4
These are the generations/origins/account/
histories/births(Time
period) of the heavens and the earth when they were CREATED. In THE
DAY that JEHOVA God MADE earth and heaven.
"The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit/ Satan, The Beast, The
False Prophet"
"For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the
Spirit is life"
"the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is alive because of
righteousness"
"But indeed, O MAN, who are you to reply against God?"
"Will the thing formed ask him who formed it"
"That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of
the Spirit is spirit"
"For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh;
but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit."
"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are [these]; Adultery,
fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,"

Ask yourself, Why would God contradict himself? Genesis 6:6
"And it repented the Lord God that he had made man on the earth, and
it grieved him at his heart"? God "created" something He regrets
making? That would make Him imperfect! Jeremiah 26:13 "The Lord
repented him of the evil which he had pronounced against them." Exodus
32:14 "And the Lord God repented of the evil which he thought to do
unto his people." Impossible. Lucifer does not dress in black, He is
beautiful, and tries not to be LIKE God, but to be God himself. The
speed in which he processed any of his thoughts were created favorably
and delt with distinctively. These anthropopathic verses were inspired
NOT by God, but have been interpreted by a faulty mind over the years
and have changed and has given a different significance to the
original meaning/definition. Our insignificance doesnt allow us to
accept that because we have been clothed with this flesh, a formation
of the enemy, it is not possible for the enemy to "create" anything or
any sort.

I reply:

Hi,

Please forgive me, all the Bible quotes made my eyes glaze over and I couldn't read your message thoroughly enough to see if you were serious.

You see, we get self-styled comedians writing in all the time, atheists who think it would be funny to imitate a crazy person who claims to personally speak with God. Unfortunately, "Poe's Law" very much holds true in the sense that you cannot fake the crazy so strongly that you can't be taken seriously. Hence, if you're trying to be funny, the humor is being lost on your audience.

With that in mind, would you be so kind as to tell me whether you're just pretending to be a crazy person who talks to god, or you're the real deal?

He replies:

Excuse me? How faulty can your way of reasoning be! You think I'm kidding around with you? A JOKE? Please read what I wrote, that's is absolutely nothing more than my attempt to understand what Love has spoken to me. What I say is in no way a joke..

I think we got ourselves a genuine loon here, but I'm sure the Poe Theorists among you will be eager to disagree.

Now is the end, perish the world

Kazim — Sat, 21 May 2011 16:00:00 +0000

To cheer you up for the end of times, have some Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

Ciao! (Thanks, dad, for bringing it to my attention.)

Non-Prophets episode 10.11

Kazim — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:47:00 +0000

Two weeks ago there was a great disturbance in the atheist community, like a million voices crying out in unison, then suddenly silenced. They were reacting to the news that it would be an estimated four weeks before the next official Non-Prophets episode would air.

Luckily, the guerrilla gorillas have been hard at work to bring you a brand new tin-cans-and-string episode. If you're subscribed to the podcast, you may have already known this. If not, check it out at the Non-Prophets audio archive!

All those Amway "loosers"

Kazim — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:53:00 +0000

Lynnea has been cleaning up my 15 year old Amway web page, and made a brief comment about the frequency of people who, in their hate mail to me, have misspelled the word "loser" as "looser." I've noticed this before and even mentioned it at the top of the site's guest book, because I don't see that particular typographical issue in many other places.

After some thought, I think I know why it comes up so often in this context. It's a unique meeting of three conditions:

"Loser," while it seems like a simple enough word to me, has an unintuitive spelling in the sense that a single "o" makes the "oo" sound.
People in written conversations don't use the word all that frequently. Amway people use it a lot because of the nature of the motivational material and how they're taught to regard those who criticize the group.
Not to overgeneralize or anything, but it seems like a lot of them are pretty dumb.

All those Amway "loosers"

Kazim — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:52:00 +0000

"Loser," while it seems like a simple enough word to me, has an unintuitive spelling in the sense that a single "o" makes the "oo" sound.
People in written conversations don't use the word all that frequently. Amway people use it a lot because of the nature of the motivational material and how they're taught to regard those who criticize the group.
Not to overgeneralize or anything, but it seems like a lot of them are pretty dumb.

On public arguments

Kazim — Wed, 11 May 2011 15:39:00 +0000

Today's email comes from Mark in Colorado.

I work in a Defense firm where everybody is either a fundamentalist Christian or Mormon. I got into a discussion with a mormon guy who is always spouting some stupid shit. Anyway, I confronted him about his ideas and after a few minutes of discussion he realized I wasn't a pushover, so he switched tactics and started bringing up quantum physics (he feels that proves everything), psuedo science, non sequiturs, real science mixed with nonsense -- usually in the same sentence. Just for an example, he said he believed in evolution but described a cartoonish if not naive version. I tried to correct him and tell him he had it wrong, but he switched scripts and said loudly, "You don't believe in evolution"! It went on with a lot of stuff like that to muddy the waters and it seemed to have impressed people in my group.

My question is, have you ever run across anyone like that and how did you handle it?

In a situation like that, my first rule is that it's important to keep your cool. I understand that it's difficult in this situation, but you should calmly step back and assess what you are getting out of the argument. There are, in my mind, three reasons that you would want to argue with somebody:

You think you can change that person's mind in some way.
You think you can influence the opinion of people who are observing the discussion.
You are genuinely interested in the other person's arguments, or would like practice responding to them for your own education. Or it's fun.

These three points boil down to a question of "Who's your audience?" The answers are, respectively, 1. the Mormon; 2. somebody else; 3. Yourself. How you answer the audience question will have a lot of influence on how you should approach the discussion.

If the Mormon is your audience, you've already decided that he is kind of an idiot, so obviously you're not going to make major gains with him. Your best bet is to find the areas where he's most badly misunderstanding mainstream science, point out what is wrong in a straightforward way, and steer him toward credible literature on how it actually works. In order to do this, you'll have to understand the real science well enough to break it down that way, so maybe some extra reading is in order.

If a third party is your audience, you can start out winning big just by keeping your cool. If the other guy is visibly upset, and you are not, then it's hard to side with him. You said that his rant seemed to impress people in your group, so it's possible that they were swayed by it. Maybe you're having your discussion with the wrong person. If you think there is somebody a bit more reasonable who is on the fence and simply doesn't understand the issues involved, I'd look for an opportunity to talk privately with that person (or people). By expanding your influence to other people and getting them on your side, you're less likely to find yourself alone in future discussions.

If you are your own audience, then go ahead and argue to a frustrating standstill, then evaluate the specifics of the conversation later. Toss out the points which sounded like a stupid waste of time to you, but remember the points that left you struggling. Maybe the claims about quantum physics sounded like bunk to you, but you couldn't express why they're bunk. In that case, it's time to educate yourself. Go find some real information about science, preferably from a good, well-spoken popular science writer. It won't help in the current discussion, but it will improve your broad base of knowledge the next time the discussion comes up.

If none of the above are a good audience in this situation, maybe you should check your motives again and see if it's really worth your time to be talking to this lunkhead. I wouldn't pick an argument with a homeless guy in the street shouting at people, and you shouldn't waste time in a situation where nobody has anything to learn.

Whatever the case, remember that a casual debate is a skirmish, not the war. You can lose a battle and it doesn't ruin you as a human being. Just try to bear in mind your long term goals: becoming a knowledgeable and well-rounded individual; and helping good and correct memes to spread through the general population.

Open thread on episode #708: The sublime and the ridiculous

Kazim — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:47:00 +0000

On yesterday's show, Don and I spoke for 40 minutes with Gregory S. Paul, an author who recently published an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post about our place in society as atheists.

We followed that up with a wacky call from a Canadian young earther.

Have at it!

And now, some politics

Kazim — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 03:54:00 +0000

I really need to get in the habit of blogging Facebook threads quickly. These days I'm not posting much here on Kazim's Korner, but I am having the occasional heated discussion on Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook posts are not searchable in any graceful way, which means that they become effectively impossible to find after a month or two has elapsed. These discussions are exactly the sorts of things I enjoy coming back and reading again a few years later, so I'm synthesizing the discussion from the one I just linked so I can have a record of it.

For starters, I recommend this article.

Liberals pride themselves on being tolerant. Are they really just suckers?

Good article. Hits many of the points that I like to highlight in my typical political posts. As I've said before, I am often frustrated by the fact that liberals (and, to a lesser extent, many atheists) are so married to the idea that they must be "reasonable" that they tend to try to compromise as quickly as possible. In falling all over themselves to give ground in every argument, they crippling their ability to negotiate effectively.

I often tell this joke about the kids haggling over a cake (see the post linked in the previous paragraph) to highlight a truism: if one side starts out taking at an extreme position, and the other side reasonably starts in the middle, then the extremist will usually be happier in the end. That's because if you start from the middle and then negotiate a "middle ground" between those positions, that ground must be much closer to the extremist's position than it is to the the reasonable person's position. Therefore, I would like people who agree with me to start out saying what they really want, and then fight to reach a compromise which is as close as possible to what they wanted all along.

Here's my party affiliation in a nutshell. I am a liberal because I believe two things. First, people should have the right to do pretty much whatever they want with their private lives that doesn't hurt others. Second, it is a demonstrable historic good to have a social infrastructure that provides education, roads, a social safety net, and pooled resources for scientific research, among other things.

When I look at the Democratic Party Platform, I agree with most of it. When I look at the Republican Party Platform, I disagree with most of it. Hence I am a Democrat. I do not start from the position "I am a Democrat" and then reason out my positions based on asking "What would my party do?" I am a Democrat because with any given issue I care about, I find that the Republican party nearly always lands on the wrong side of my beliefs.

I tend to get into political arguments with three kinds of people:

People who agree with Republicans on social issues (i.e., religious intrusion in government, abortion, gay rights, war on drugs).
People who agree with Republicans on economic issues (often libertarians, generally encompassing shrinking or eliminating social safety net programs, cutting spending on education and national infrastructure, replacing our existing tax structure with something far more punishing to people lower on the income totem pole).
People who do not appear to have any significant political principles, but are opposed in general to supporting any political party, in order to be contrarian.

I very rarely get into arguments with people who agree with Republicans on both social and economic issues, except in artificial situations such as taking calls on The Atheist Experience. This is simply because there is so little common ground between us that there is little to be gained from such a discussion. They are plentiful out there in the world, but they're a very small part of the universe of people I'd typically spend time with.

As a result, when I argue politics with somebody, it's nearly always someone who falls into one of the above three categories. It follows that those people are neither Republicans nor Democrats. Category 3 is, by definition, unaffiliated. Categories 1 and 2 can be shown not to belong to either party, because if they were Democrats they'd likely agree with me on both social and economic issues, and if they were Republicans they'd likely disagree with me on both social and economic issues. QED.

Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

To my friends who substantially disagree with me on economic or social issues, and cannot find a party to call home, all I can say is: You and I have fundamental disagreements on the best way to run a country, and I will never persuade you to vote for candidates that I would like. As the Republican party doesn't suit your needs either, all I can do is wish you luck in finding a candidate who matches your interests, although when you find such a candidate I will most likely vote against him.

But also, every time I do a political post, I can count on a number of people showing up from the third category. They seem to agree with me on what policies are desirable, but argue that the party platforms are trivial and irrelevant. Examples from the thread:

So is it worth associating yourself with the right or left? or any political parties in particular? I mean some Democrats have good ideas and not so good ideas. Some Republicans the same way. It really depends on the times you live in. To me it always seemed foolish to tout party lines or vice versa label (project your ideas) on someone who naively associates themselves with a political party.

And:

Both parties are crap. The only difference is that one is a pile of lying crap that wants to take away your right to abort a fetus, while the other doesn't.

The impending demise of reproductive rights

Let me get specific about what prompted that last qualifier. Pro-choice is one of my issues. As I recently discussed on the Non-Prophets, there has been a recent rush of state laws which deliberately violate Roe v Wade. This article by Dahlia Lithwick documents that:

Since the start of this year, 916 measures seeking to regulate reproductive health have been introduced in 49 states. According to the Guttmacher Institute, by the end of March, 15 laws had been enacted in seven states. These laws include an expansion of the waiting period in South Dakota from 24 to 72 hours and a requirement that counseling from "crisis pregnancy centers" include scientifically flawed data on risk factors. There are new regulations in Utah and Virginia governing abortion clinics. Legislation has been introduced in 13 states requiring that women have an ultrasound procedure before having an abortion—and in seven of those states, the woman must view the fetus and listen to a detailed verbal description as well. Measures have been introduced in 17 states copying a Nebraska law banning abortion at 20 weeks, on the theory—again based on questionable medical data—that this is when a fetus can feel pain.

As a result, abortion is rapidly becoming effectively illegal in many parts of the country right now, even though these statutes are deliberately running afoul of established supreme court rulings.

You would think that pro-choice groups like the National Organization for Women would be challenging these laws left and right, and you'd ordinarily be right, except for one tiny little snag:

The risk of challenging these clearly unconstitutional laws and then losing at the Supreme Court is evidently so high, according to Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, that it's not worth taking. As she explained last week to Rachel Maddow, the fear that Justice Samuel Alito would vote to overturn Roe is so deep that reproductive rights groups may be opting to leave the state bans in place. And, as she conceded in that interview, wherever unconstitutional state abortion bans go unchallenged, they become law.

In 2004, Bush beat Kerry and won a second term. As a direct result, Bush was able to replace two liberal-to-moderate Supreme Court justices with Alito and Roberts. They are now the swing votes that could strike down Roe if a case ever came before them that gave them the opportunity to reopen it. Therefore, pro-choice groups are afraid to challenge these state laws. However, if they don't challenge them, then the laws stand, causing abortion to become completely inaccessible to many women.

I draw a clear, direct line between the victory of one political party and the massive curtailing of women's freedom. If you don't think that is a bad thing, if you disagree with me on this issue, that's fine; you are in category 1, and this doesn't apply to you. But if you are not in category 1, if you are bothered by this curtailing of these rights, then you should not see the differences between the parties as trivial on this particular issue.

The ACLU and you

Another example. Most liberals are with the American Civil Liberties Union on most issues that I know of. They're the ones who focus on separation of church and state issues, free speech rights, allowing accused criminals due process of law, and so on.

Every year, the ACLU puts out a position paper indicating which issues they care about. In addition, they examine which politicians voted the way that they would like on key policy proposals, and give a rating.

This is the ratings list for 2008, which I think is fairly typical.

Read that list and you'll see an obvious trend. Among 390 total House members, Senators, Governors, and executives, on issues that the ACLU cares about, 105 of them were on record as voting with them 100% of the time.

Those 105 were all Democrats. Every single one. No exceptions.

On those same issues, 160 politicians were shown to vote with the ACLU 33% of the time or less.

All 160 of them are Republicans. No exceptions. Count em.

If you have serious disagreements with my desired political outcomes, I'm not talking to you. You're right, the Democratic party does not represent you. Yes, yes, Obama hates your freedoms, everything Congressional Democrats do is a secret Muslim Communist Satanist plot, etc. Vote for someone else, or protest and don't vote.

But if you want the outcomes that I want, you can't continue claiming that the difference between the parties doesn't exist. It is objectively false.

Do Democrats, as a broad group, suck at politics? Yep, they do. Do they act like pussies when it comes to defeating a bunch of loud, angry bullies? Repeatedly. Is it desirable, in the long term, to eliminate blue dog Democrats and bring in more liberals with spine like Bernie Sanders and Anthony Weiner? Hells yeah. And are there some Democrats who are genuinely more conservative than some Republicans? On an individual basis, there are a few.

Looking at the big picture as a purely statistical issue, though, party affiliation does provide a good indication of which side of the issues they are on, and it's clearly disingenuous to say they are the same. You can't teach statesmen the lesson that they aren't fighting hard enough for what you want, if your method is to sit by allowing the people to win who are actively fighting against what you want.

The adventures of nerd dad

Kazim — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 19:50:00 +0000

So I've got an Android Evo 4G from Sprint, which has now replaced my crappy old DumbPhone™, my iPod Nano, the GPS that I might have eventually bought otherwise, and the Palm Pilot of which I haven't owned a working model in probably five years or more.

Since the Nano is now obsolete in my eyes, I gifted it to Ben, who is eight. It is loaded up with pretty much Weird Al's entire discography and not much else. We had a conversation which is fairly typical of us, although probably not typical of many other father/son duos, as Ben pointed out.

Dad: "Here's the charger I forgot to give you the last time you visited. You will have to connect it up to a computer."
Son: "How do I do that?"
Dad: "It's easy, see this thing here? Just plug it into a USB slot."
Son: "Oh, okay."
Dad: "...That stands for Universal Serial Bus, you know."
Son: "What does THAT mean?"
Dad: "Well, serial is like..."
Son: "A serial killer?" (Ben's entertainment tastes, like those of many boys, are diverse.)
Dad: "Um... kind of. Let me see... you know your electronics set?"
Son: "Yeah..."
Dad: "You know how you can make a circuit with two different switches?"
Son: "Yeah..."
Dad: "Okay, if you plug one switch straight into the other one, and put those in a line with a wire back to the battery, how will you turn the circuit on?"
Son: "Both switches have to be on."
Dad: "Right. But what if you put the two switches NEXT TO each other, so that the wire splits and goes through each of them separately before coming back to the battery?"
Son: "I dunno."
Dad: "Will it turn on if one is on but not the other?"
Son: "I don't think so."
Dad: "Actually it will. If either switch is closed, then the electricity can get back to the battery, so either one makes a complete circuit."
Son: "Okay, I guess I see."
Dad: "So when the switches are next to each other, that's called being in 'parallel.' And when they are in a row, they are 'serial', which means they come one after the other."
Son: "Okay." (thinks) "So a serial killer kills people in a row?"
Dad: "Yeah, pretty much. If he kills just one person, he's just a killer, not a serial killer."
Son: "Does it have to be one person every day?"
Dad: "Nah. It's like, if the switches in your serial circuit were separated by ten miles of wires, they'd still make a circuit, and they'd still be serial as long as they follow each other. So someone would probably be a serial killer even if he only killed one person a year."
Son: "I get it." (pause) "Um, why are we talking about this again?"
Dad: "Well uh... oh right! Because your iPod charger works with a universal serial bus connection."
Son: "Okay." (pause) "You're not like a normal dad."
Dad: (laughs) "What? Why?"
Son: "I don't know, I don't think other dads talk about science and stuff. They probably like..."
Dad: "Watching sports and drinking beer?"
Son: "Yeah!"
Dad: "Well, do you wish you had a normal dad?"
Son: "No way!"

Following the script

Kazim — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:26:00 +0000

We got an excellent question from a fan in Perth, Australia, enough that I wanted to share my answer online.

A friend of mine regaled me with a tale a while back, about a theist spouting a well worn apologetic to a prominent atheist. Rather than shoot it down with a just as well worn counter, he simply replied with "did you really think that would work?" Now, I don't know the whole story, but apparently said atheist went on to berate said theist about stupid they were for thinking that of all the things that this atheist had heard and read, it was this one guy spouting this one thing that he probably got of some website that would change his mind. While I'm not a fan of berating people, It does strike me as a valid idea, the whole "do you really think that'll stump me" response.

However, following a lively debate with some fellow atheist friends a while back, I was on the receiving end of a sudden rush of perspective. You see, they were just saying the same old stuff as well. The usual cookies about the christian god being immoral, how many different religions there are all over the world, the nonsense of disregarding science just because it can't explain EVERYTHING... same old crap you hear from people with an education. It got me thinking, what if the shoe was on the other foot? My girlfriend's mother is an Anglican priest and I know for a fact that if I just spouted one of the usual chestnuts to her, she'd have an answer pretty quickly, probably one that'd get me off the script, if there is such a thing as an atheist script.

I suppose my question is, shouldn't a skeptic be trying to come up with new responses all the time, forever? I hate to go us vs them, but the idea of stock responses to stock questions and insular self congratulation seems very, very, well... dumb. In Perth, we don't have many fundies at all, but a lot of people are so vaguely middle class white spiritual, anti-science. The usual crap, "can't prove everything" what the bleep do we know pseudo-spiritual nonsense, and when I try to have honest discourse with them, it just descends into stock responses and I give up. It's very disheartening.

To condense it, my question is: As people who reject claims on the basis of logic and reason, is it enough just to have stock responses? Shouldn't we be trying to come up with new, better and always unexpected ways to exercise our skepticism? Hope you can shed some light on my ramblings.

And my answer is: Yes and no.

It is a mistake to completely dismiss the value of having an arsenal of sound bites. The thing is, you use your stock responses exactly as long as they work well. At the point where they stop working, you either enhance them or abandon them for something that works better.

For example. My stock response to "God must have created the universe because it couldn't have created itself" is probably always going to be some variant of asking, or leading into, the question "What created God?"

Theists don't like this. They ridicule it. They say it's like a question that a little child would ask. They come up with variants like the Kalam argument, in which instead of saying "Everything that exists has a cause" they say instead, "Everything that begins to exist has a cause" -- thereby creating a special pleading loophole. If you're attentive enough, then you can see where the sleight of hand occurs, much as you can look at a "proof" that your high school buddy used to produce showing that 1=2, and identify the fallacious step where he divided by zero or something.

The thing is, the fact that someone will ridicule and dismiss an argument is not, in itself, a demonstration that the argument is not working. I could enter a history class and loudly scoff: "What's that?! You expect me to believe that Henry VIII became the King of England in 1509??? You're so ignorant!" I don't doubt that if I tried this against a bunch of teachers, at least a few of them would be so insecure that they wouldn't argue with you, lapsing into embarrassed silence or changing the subject. This seems to be the disposition of many biology teachers today who would otherwise be teaching evolution.

Your atheist friend who says "Did you really think THAT would work?" is using a tactic. It is neither inherently good nor bad; it's just potentially effective or not effective in a particular situation. The tactic is a combination of poisoning the well and psychological intimidation. He wants to give the opponent and/or the audience the emotional feeling that the opponent is ignorant and the atheist knows more. That feeling may or may not be justified, and the intimidation may or may not work.

Like any tactic, this one has its strengths and weaknesses. If you pull this trick, and your opponent stammers out some apologies and tries to talk about something else, you've just gained a point of data saying that it is a good tactic for you. You pulled it off. On the other hand, do this in an inappropriate way, and you look like an arrogant prick. For an example where this approach bombed, check out the historical Bush/Gore debate, where voters came away with a lasting impression of Gore loudly sighing, rolling his eyes, and getting in Bush's personal space -- which was perceived as needlessly condescending, irrespective of whether Gore's impatience was warranted or not.

Scorning your opponent this way is like throwing a lot of money into the pot in poker. It may be that you are putting all that money in because you genuinely have a good hand -- i.e., you are armed with better facts, your opponent really is ignorant, and you can prove it handily when it's time to show your cards. On the other hand, it may be a bluff, and you're secretly hoping that your opponent will fold under your withering gaze so that you can collect the money without a prolonged fight that you stand to lose.

And yes, religious people apply this tactic all the time. Let me throw a few book titles at you:

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (Ray Comfort)
I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (Norman Geisler)
Evolution, A Fairy Tale for Grownups! (Ray again -- sorry, but that guy is a walking textbook on this technique)

So as you noticed, it happens on both sides. What, then, do you do when somebody attacks you with that "I've already heard that argument" line while showing obvious contempt?

I think the most important rule here is to keep your cool, don't flinch, and find a way to do a quick end-run around the brush off. The best way to do this, I think, is to highlight the person's arrogance as their weakness rather than their strength.

This is a place where the "reductio ad absurdum" technique often comes in handy. Ask yourself: "Okay, so this guy is acting as if my argument isn't even worthy of consideration. What implications also follow from his dismissal?" Highlighting obvious contradictions is useful, and so is the question "How do you know...?"

Here's a sample dialogue.

Theist: "Everything has a cause. Since the chain can't go back infinitely, there must be a God." (Note: oversimplified, in some cases.)
Atheist: "What created God?"
Theist: "That's a ridiculous question. It's something a child would ask."
Atheist: "Oh, so you don't think everything had a cause."

(Reversal. Instead of demanding that the theist acknowledge your point, you accept his dismissal and calmly look for a contradiction.)

Theist: "Well I don't mean that everything has a cause. Everything which begins to exist has a cause. But God is eternal."
Atheist: "How do you know that?"

(The theist just tried to inject an assertion, again counting on the assumption that it's so obvious that only a fool would challenge it. Don't be intimidated by this.)

The conversation may go in any number of directions at this point -- my money's on "science vs. faith as a means for knowing things." The important thing, though, is that you find a way around the theist baldly asserting a certainty that he has not earned.

As with any argument, it's a game. If you fold, then it doesn't matter how unsupported your opponent was in reality; you still lose. On the flip side, if your opponent calls you on your claim and you can't back it up, you may well lose worse, because then your opponent has condescended to you and then proven that the condescension was justified. That's the gamble you take when you are arrogant.

As you probably noticed, you very much should have an arsenal of "opening moves" that, by and large, don't have to vary much. If you trot out a move and you see your opponent driven before you (and, of course, hear the lamentation of the women!) then you keep doing that. To someone who doesn't argue on a regular basis, this can look easy, even lazy, and perhaps very risky.

The critical point here is that the opening is not the whole game. Good for you if you can occasionally checkmate your opponent in three moves and that's all it takes. (Fear Edward Current!) But if your opponent doesn't cave right away, then what is going to determine your success is your ability to defend the sound bite, to think on the fly and justify your reasoning, not just to quote it.

Developing opening moves does not necessarily have to be a solo, creative process. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you talk to a new person. You should by all means watch other people's debates, see what works and what doesn't, and shamelessly steal the stuff you like. That doesn't make you a mindless parrot, it makes you a smart shopper. But if you use these arguments and then you lose, you should always be willing to take a step back. Ask yourself: Did his response win because it really is actually logically superior? Has he actually made a point? Has he uncovered a genuine flaw in my thought process?

If that turns out to be true, it may well be that you have to dump that argument from your arsenal. The unfit do not survive, it's evolution in action. (And please note that this is intellectual Darwinism, not social Darwinism. I'm advocating the death and abandonment of ideas, not people.)

But that's not the only outcome. You can look for other cases where people have had to deal with that same argument, and find a response that will get you a step further in your next conversation. And in that case, you will become more confident and your response will be stronger each time you face that argument.

Ustream chat room moderation

Kazim — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 05:00:00 +0000

This is just a heads up. I think I've mentioned in the past that I kind of hate the chat room environment on Ustream. Ever since we've started there, we've gotten hundreds of people watching each show live. It's often kind of a free-for-all of random stream of consciousness babbling, profanity, trash talking, and the kind of explicit sexual comments that are unlikely to leave a good impression on casual viewers.

Up until recently we've fielded email complaints about this by stating that the chat room is a free speech forum and we don't have any responsibility for what people say. The upside of this approach is that nobody has to do any work. The downside is that, well, it remains an incredibly hostile place for new viewers.

So we've been experimentally moderating the chat room. I've done this a couple of times myself, on weeks when I'm not on the show just log in, and kick out people who are being disruptive. Several other regulars have also been in on the act.

Moderation is necessarily a subjective judgment call, especially in the situation where lines of text are being fired off so fast that they scroll off the screen within about ten seconds. As a result, it's inevitable that people who get kicked off for (for example) using "gay" as a swear word, or using language that would probably be used freely (but sparingly) on The Non-Prophets, or being one voice in a dozen people who are participating in a hilarious conversation about rape, will think they have been treated unfairly. If you get kicked for deliberately insulting a moderator, probably even more so.

My message to those people is: tough luck. The chat room is a privilege, not your graffiti wall. If you're a regular it's very unlikely you will be kicked, but Phil Plait's often maligned advice, "Don't be a dick," very much does apply here. If you've been kicked, you are welcome to keep watching the show without chat. If you decide that you refuse to watch the show anymore as a result of having been kicked, well you know... don't let the door hit ya, etc.

I'm confident that the chat room can become a friendlier place over time, but for now the phase one solution is that people will be watching and wielding the big stick to keep the annoyances out.

[Edit: Changed the post to say "Ustream" instead of "blip.tv", as I had the archive site and the live streaming site mixed up.]

Building your mental immune system

Kazim — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:19:00 +0000

When Mark from Stone Church called again yesterday, he provided a perfect example of something that I've been meaning to blog about for a few months. Namely, it is a tempting but extremely bad habit to only associate with people who agree with you all your life.

One issue that most Atheist Experience hosts feel passionately about, apart from religion, is the spate of anti-scientific attacks which have been leveled against vaccinations. When you vaccinate yourself, you deliberately expose your body to small quantities of a disease or virus, in order to train your immune system to recognize and attack that disease. If you don't get vaccinated, when the disease attacks you in its natural form it will likely be much stronger, and your body still won't know how to deal with it.

The fact that they may be adorable is only slight consolation.

Worse, by putting yourself at risk for this disease, you also become a carrier, which could increase its presence in the population at large. The more people there are in a given population who haven't been vaccinated against a disease, the more risk everyone takes of catching it, and the more common the disease comes.

Critical thinking, of course, is your immune system against bad ideas. Even if you have a general background in skepticism and logic, it can be hard to spot the flaws in a claim that you've never heard before. The first time anyone encounters a concerted efforts to discredit vaccination, or prove that alien abductions occur based on anecdotes, or claim that evolution is a scientific conspiracy with no more proof than Biblical literalism -- it's not as easy as you might think to see through those arguments.

It's really not good enough to say "That's stupid" and ignore them, because if you have a policy of treating ideas you disagree with that way, then you risk becoming so dogmatic that you wind up rejecting things that are actually true. Instead, skepticism is a habit that requires practice. It's good mental exercise to take such claims seriously, to ask yourself "What are the implications if this claim is true? Can I investigate it? Are there arguments against it already out there in the memesphere? If so, are they convincing, or do the debunking efforts rely on fallacies themselves? If there are none, why not? Is it not high enough profile, or is there something else going on?"

A lot of religious traditions -- like those practiced in Austin Stone Church -- reject this approach. Followers of such religions not only don't try to understand competing points of view themselves, they regard any efforts to do so with suspicion and fear. They may actually believe that it's a sin against God, or a trick by Satan, if you are even humoring a bad idea. Apologists will often seriously question the value of sending kids to college, because they might be exposed to "worldly" ideas. Cults sometimes advise their members not to read newspapers or watch TV, lest their minds be poisoned by outsiders rejecting their beliefs.

This is the intellectual equivalent of avoiding diseases by locking yourself in a hermetically sealed bubble for life. It can work, of course. As long as no germs can get inside the bubble, you can't catch anything. On the other hand, once you're committed to this plan, you can never leave the bubble for any reason. If you do, your immune system is likely to be so weak that you are especially vulnerable to any and all diseases you might encounter. Something very much like this is speculated to have happened to the relatively isolated Native American population when they first encountered European settlers who, by virtue of living on a much larger, more diverse, and densely populated continent, were relatively swimming in diseases regularly, and hence had much broader immunities.

Here, take this blanket. No really, I insist. We're not using it anymore.

So when you've been sheltered by fundamentalism your whole life, my feeling is that you have to keep sheltering yourself or become similarly vulnerable to invasion from foreign ideas. Which is essentially what Mark told us he does in our call yesterday.

Many emailers have homed in on the fact that Mark kept telling us what his church believes, as synonymous with what he believes. Tracie and I mentioned that the kind of evidence that we would need for God is not really all that strict, and that you don't need to pray or "have faith" in order to be convinced that your mom exists. When something is real and testable, it can be perceived independently by many different people in the same way.

Mark responded that everyone at his church believes the same thing about God, and he proved it by reading a "statement of faith" that all church members are required agree to. I said, "It sounds like you have to devote a lot of work to making people believe the same thing." And of course, there are 30,000 other Christian denominations in the US, many of which have very different perspectives on who this God person is.

I have long loved this interview that American Atheists spokesman David Silverman once did with Douglas Adams.

Above: A face that David Silverman probably did not have to make while talking to Douglas Adams.

In the interview, Adams elaborated on a great many of his atheist beliefs in a way that he has rarely done explicitly in his other work. One of the most striking and memorable arguments presented by Adams was in comparing religious beliefs to other types of scholarship.

Adams points out that if you wish to be taken seriously in the realms of science, history, or math, you should expect to be challenged constantly. Any claim you make, no matter how trivial the matter may look to those outside the discipline, will be subjected to withering criticism and debate, and the ideas that remain standing after this process, round after round, are the ones that can eventually be regarded as credible.

But religions don't accept that burden of proof. Quite the opposite, in fact; when someone promotes a silly belief as a statement of faith, we're asked to lend that faith some sort of automatic respect. Atheists who argue with the faith-beliefs of others are regularly regarded as being dicks.

Anyway, Douglas Adams concluded:

So, I was already familiar with and (I’m afraid) accepting of, the view that you couldn't apply the logic of physics to religion, that they were dealing with different types of 'truth'. ... What astonished me, however, was the realization that the arguments in favor of religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the robust arguments of something as interpretative and opinionated as history. In fact they were embarrassingly childish. They were never subject to the kind of outright challenge which was the normal stock in trade of any other area of intellectual endeavor whatsoever. Why not? Because they wouldn’t stand up to it.

And that, in a nutshell, is why it's not a good idea to show politeness and "respect" for people's beliefs. I try as much as I can to show respect for the people themselves, and appreciate the diversity of backgrounds that causes them to think the way they do. Greta Christina wrote a great article a few months back called "No, Atheists Don't Have to Show 'Respect' for Religion," which observes the same behavior. Greta says:

And, of course, it's ridiculously hypocritical to engage in fervent political and cultural discourse -- as so many progressive ecumenical believers do -- and then expect religion to get a free pass. It's absurd to accept and even welcome vigorous public debate over politics, science, medicine, economics, gender, sexuality, education, the role of government, etc... and then get appalled and insulted when religion is treated as just another hypothesis about the world, one that can be debated and criticized like any other.

It's not about making fun of religion just for sport. When you tiptoe around someone's beliefs, you're not doing them any favors. All you are doing is allowing them to stay in their little bubble for a bit longer, while enabling them to spread the idea that it's okay to be closed off to competing ideas.

Some thought experiments on "potential life"

Kazim — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 19:56:00 +0000

An ex-theist emailed to say that, although he has made a lot of changes to his thinking regarding gay rights and race issues since abandoning his theism, the abortion issue still bothers him.

The human egg and sperm are not in and of themselves able to "live" and reproduce/multiply on their own. Once they are joined, something happens that causes them to "become alive" and the cells will them multiply on their own without any external influence other than feeding off the body of the mother.

The glob of cells will in the vast majority of cases eventually become a human and the progression of its growth can not be physically stopped by the mother or father without the prescribed use of a poison pill, or physical instrument where a doctor must physically cut it or smash it until the growth stops.

I'm no legal scholar, but I can not see how this action can not be defined as anything other than "killing" an immature human.

Rather than just send him off to another site, I gave a little more thought to the implications of requiring the care of a fetus on the basis of it being a potential future life as soon as the sperm and egg join. For starters, you can't go wrong reading Carl Sagan's essay on abortion from Billions and Billions:

Despite many claims to the contrary, life does not begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain that stretches back nearly to the origin of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago. Nor does human life begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain dating back to the origin of our species, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg.

In some animals, an egg develops into a healthy adult without benefit of a sperm cell. But not, so far as we know, among humans. A sperm and an unfertilized egg jointly comprise the full genetic blueprint for a human being. Under certain circumstances, after fertilization, they can develop into a baby. But most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried. Development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg--despite the fact that it's only potentially a baby--why isn't it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?

For context, here's support for Sagan's claim of the frequency of spontaneous abortion from the University of Ottowa:
"The incidence of spontaneous abortion is estimated to be 50% of all pregnancies, based on the assumption that many pregnancies abort spontaneously with no clinical recognition."

So if a fertilized egg is more likely than not to not grow into an adult human being, why draw arbitrary lines in the sand saying that it becomes murder in that particular moment?

For the sake of argument, I'd like you to imagine that time travel is possible in order to consider the following eight thought experiments.

You go back in time and deliberately prevent somebody's parents from meeting. To be concrete, we'll call him "Biff". History has now changed and Biff is never born. Have you killed Biff? (If you're like me, the answer is "Maybe. I'll have to think about it a bit.")
Suppose that, instead of preventing Biff's parents from meeting, you go back to the night of his conception and strike up a conversation with them. The three of you have a delightful time until late at night, and they never get around to having sex. Again, Biff is never conceived. Again, have you murdered him?
Now suppose that Biff's parents were already actively planning to have a kid, and so they go at at the next night. A child is conceived but -- due to the statistical issues involved -- a different sperm implant in the egg, and the genes expresses themselves in very different ways. Returning to the present, you find that Biff doesn't exist at all. In his place, his not at all similar brother Griff was born. Is Biff now dead?
In order to fix the timestream, you travel back and prevent yourself from meeting Griff's parents, thus restoring the original history. Biff is born and Griff is not. Have you now killed Griff?
You and your partner discuss having a child of your own, and almost decide to do it, but in the end you decide that the cons just barely outweigh the pros. Had the argument gone a little bit differently, you might have had a kid. Have you killed your future child?
You (or your wife) are pregnant, but there are complications -- possibly not fatal, but definitely not something you would like to deal with. You agree to abort the baby and try again. The original fetus is never born, and the new baby is healthy, happy, and grows to adulthood. If you had chosen to bear the original fetus, you wouldn't have wanted any more children. By deciding not to have the abortion, would you have been killing the healthy baby?
Some religious groups teach that child bearing is a responsibility and a duty. Protection of any kind is never allowed during sex, and therefore they have fifteen kids. Compare them to a couple who bear two children by choice and then use protection for the rest of their lives. Have they killed the other thirteen children that they might have had? Do thirteen murders simultaneously occur as soon as the man gets a vasectomy? What if they decided to have no kids, is the murder count now bumped up to fifteen?
Similarly, is an abstinent couple committing murder by giving their future children no opportunity to come to life?

THE ATHEIST APOCALYPSE

Kazim — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:28:00 +0000

Attention all atheists:

ALL YOUR BLOG AM BELONG TO DM.

Are you listening to me now???

----------------------

PZ Myers, the little jerkface, time to bury him under piles of squid. I BET HE'D LIKE THAT!

Katy Perry has B**BS! And Elmo is looking! DON'T THINK WE AREN'T ON TO YOU, ELMO!!!

Can you hear me, you ill-begotten miscreants?

-----------------------

Just like this cat...

...We will trap all atheists... IN A BOX!!!!!!!!!!

Traitors!

********@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@***************

Screw all of you! I am OFF my MEDS and I couldn't be more ravenous!

He speaks the truth!

--------------------------

We will get you out LIKE MUSTARD!!!!!!!

Blah blah blah blah froth froth froth glurk argh splunge.

Watch out, Dawkins, I'm COMING FOR YOUR BLOG NEXT!!!!!!!

MANIACAL LAUGHTER! This will show them all. They're bound to take me seriously NOW.

[Update: Phew! April 1 is finally over, and I can change my blogger name back to Kazim instead of DM.

I hope it's obvious to all the commenters that I was in no way expecting to "fool" anyone, but I hope you got a laugh out of it. :)]

This blog is now mobile friendly

Kazim — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:18:00 +0000

Now that I have entered the ranks of the smart phone users, I see how irritating it is to try to read this blog on an Android. Luckily, blogspot has custom templates for mobile devices. It's activated now, so go ahead and read us on your phone, and you shouldn't have to twiddle your fingers quite so much.

Thanks for your questions

Kazim — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 02:24:00 +0000

I just want to say a sincere thanks to everyone who submitted questions under "Q for Ray" subjects. I know some people are disappointed that we did not directly read questions and attribute them to those who wrote in, but we did read through a lot of them before the show. I think everyone who watched the show would agree that the conversation was plenty jam packed without breaking to read a canned question.

However, both Matt and I read through several dozen questions, took notes, and found themes which helped us to formulate what to say. Some of you probably recognized pieces of your questions surfacing in the dialog. So... it may not have seemed like we were paying attention to you, but we were. Thanks for your support and we appreciate you.

The Atheist Professor’s Brain

Kazim — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 16:25:00 +0000

I had an exchange on a message board years ago, in which a theist posted one of those pithy "inspirational" stories about a Christian student getting the best of his bullying atheist professor. I wrote a response to it and then didn't think of it again for a while.

However, in more recent times several people have written to us at The Atheist Experience with almost the same story, and asked what we could say about it. Because it's easier to search this blog than that board, I am reprinting the exchange here.

First, the story.

PROFESSOR: "LET ME EXPLAIN THE problem science has with Jesus Christ." The atheist professor of philosophy pauses before his class and then asks one of his new students to stand. "You're a Christian, aren't you?"
STUDENT: "Yes, sir."
PROFESSOR: "So you believe in God?"
STUDENT: "Absolutely."
PROFESSOR: "Is God good?"
STUDENT: "Yes."
PROFESSOR: "Are you good or evil?"
STUDENT: The Bible says I'm evil."
PROFESSOR: The professor grins knowingly. "Ahh! THE BIBLE!" He considers for a moment. "Here's one for you. Let's say there's a sick person over here and you can cure him. You can do it. Would you help them? Would you try?"
STUDENT: "Yes sir, I would."
PROFESSOR: "So you're good...!"
STUDENT: "I wouldn't say that."
PROFESSOR: "Why not say that? Would you help a sick and maimed person if you could...in fact most of us would if we could...God doesn't"
STUDENT: [No answer]
PROFESSOR: The elderly man is sympathetic. "No you can't, can you?" He takes a sip of water from a glass on his desk to give the student time to relax. In philosophy, you have to go easy on the new ones. "Let's start again, young fella. Is God good?"
STUDENT: "Er... Yes."
PROFESSOR: "Is Satan good?"
STUDENT: "No."
PROFESSOR: "Where does Satan come from?"
STUDENT: The student falters. "From... God..."
PROFESSOR: "That's right. God made Satan, didn't he?" The elderly man runs his bony fingers through his thinning hair and turns to the smirking, student audience. "I think were going to have a lot of fun this semester, ladies and gentlemen." He turns back to the Christian. "Tell me, son. Is there evil in this world?"
STUDENT: "Yes, sir."
PROFESSOR: "Evil's everywhere, isn't it? Did God make everything?"
STUDENT: "Yes."
PROFESSOR: "Who created evil?"
STUDENT: [No answer]
PROFESSOR: "Is there sickness in this world? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All the terrible things - do they exist in this world?"
STUDENT: The student squirms on his feet. "Yes."
PROFESSOR: "Who created them?"
STUDENT: [No answer]
PROFESSOR: The professor suddenly shouts at his student. "WHO CREATED THEM? TELL ME, PLEASE!" The professor closes in for the kill and climbs into the Christian's face. In a small voice: "God created all evil, didn't He, son?"
STUDENT: [No answer]
STUDENT: The student tries to hold steady, experienced gaze and fails.
PROFESSOR: Suddenly the lecture breaks away to pace the front of the classroom like an aging panther. The class is mesmerized. "Tell me," he continues, "how is it that this God is good if He created all evil throughout all time?" The professor swishes his arms around to encompass the wickedness of the world. "All the hatred, the brutality, all the pain, all the torture, all the death and ugliness and all the suffering created by this good God is all over the world isn't it, young man?"
STUDENT: [No answer]
PROFESSOR: "Don't you see it all over the place? Huh?" Pause "Don't you?" The professor leans into the student's face again and whispers, "Is God good?"
STUDENT: [No answer]
PROFESSOR: "Do you believe in Jesus Christ, son?"
STUDENT: "Yes, professor. I do"
PROFESSOR: (The old man shakes his head sadly) "Science says you have five senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Have you seen your Jesus?"
STUDENT: "No, sir. I've never seen Him"
PROFESSOR: "Then tell us if you've ever heard your Jesus?"
STUDENT: "No, sir. I have not."
PROFESSR: "Have you ever felt your Jesus, tasted your Jesus or smelt your Jesus... in fact, do you have any sensory perception of him whatsoever?"
STUDENT: [No answer]
PROFESSOR: "Answer me, please."
STUDENT: "No, sir, I'm afraid I haven't."
PROFESSOR: "You're AFRAID... you haven't?" (The professor glides his bony hands through his balding head)
STUDENT: "No, sir."
PROFESSOR: "Yet you still believe in him?"
STUDENT: "...yes..."
PROFESSOR: "That takes FAITH! (The professor smiles sagely at the underling) According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. What do you say to that, son? Where is your God now?"[The student doesn't answer]
PROFESSOR: "Sit down, please." (The Christian sits...Defeated…. Another Christian raises his hand)
OTHER STUDENT: "Professor, may I address the class?"
PROFESSOR: (The professor turns and smiles) "Ah, another Christian in the vanguard! Come, come, young man. Speak some proper wisdom to the gathering."
OTHER STUDENT: The Christian looks around the room. "Some interesting points you are making, sir. Now I've got a question for you. Is there such a thing as heat?"
PROFESSOR: "Yes, son, there's cold too."
OTHER STUDENT: "No, sir, there isn't” The professor's grin freezes. The room suddenly goes very still. The second Christian continues. "You can have lots of heat, even more heat, super-heat, mega-heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat but we don't have anything called 'cold. We can hit 458 degrees below zero, which is no heat, but we can't go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold, otherwise we would be able to go colder than 458 - You see, sir, and cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat we can measure in thermal units because heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it." Silence. A pin drops somewhere in the classroom. "Is there such a thing as darkness, professor?"
PROFESSOR: "That's a dumb question, son. What is night if it isn't darkness? What are you getting at...?"
OTHER STUDENT: "So you say there is such a thing as darkness?"
PROFESSOR: "Yes..."
OTHER STUDENT: "You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and it's called darkness, isn't it? That's the meaning we use to define the word. In reality, Darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker and give me a jar of it. Can you...give me a jar of darker darkness, professor?"
PROFESSOR: Despite himself, the professor smiles at the young effrontery before him. This will indeed be a good semester. "Would you mind telling us what your pint is, young man?"
OTHER STUDENT: "Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with and so your conclusion must be in error...."
PROFESSOR: The professor goes toxic. "Flawed...? How dare you...!"
OTHER STUDENT: "Sir, may I explain what I mean?" The class is all ears.
PROFESSOR: "Explain... oh, explain..." The professor makes an admirable effort to regain control. Suddenly he is affability itself. He waves his hand to silence the class, for the student to continue.
OTHER STUDENT: "You are working on the premise of duality," the Christian explains. "That for example there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science cannot even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism but has never seen, much less fully understood them. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, merely the absence of it." The young man holds up a newspaper he takes from the desk of a neighbor who has been reading it. "Here is one of the most disgusting tabloids this country hosts, professor. Is there such a thing as immorality?"
PROFESSOR: "Of course there is, now look..."
OTHER STUDENT: "Wrong again, sir. You see, immorality is merely the absence of morality. Is there such a thing as injustice? No. Injustice is the absence of justice. Is there such a thing as evil?" The Christian pauses. "Isn't evil the absence of good?"
PROFESSOR: The professor's face has turned an alarming color. He is so angry he is temporarily speechless.
OTHER STUDENT: The Christian continues. "If there is evil in the world, professor, and we all agree there is, then God, if He exists, must be accomplishing a work through the agency of evil. What is that work, God is accomplishing? The Bible tells us it is to see if each one of us will, of our own free will, choose good or evil."
PROFESSOR: The professor bridles. "As a philosophical scientist, I don't vie this matter as having to do with any choice; as a realist, I absolutely do not recognize the concept f God or any other theological factor as being part of the world equation because God is not observable."
OTHER STUDENT: "I would have thought that the absence of God's moral code in this world is probably one of the most observable phenomena going," the Christian replies. "Newspapers make billions of dollars reporting it every week! "Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"
PROFESSOR: "If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do."
OTHER STUDENT: "Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir? (The professor makes a sucking sound with his teeth and gives his student a silent, stony stare) Professor, Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a priest?"
PROFESSOR: "I'll overlook your impudence in the light of our philosophical discussion. Now, have you quite finished?" the professor hisses. I believe in what is - that's science!"
OTHER STUDENT: "Ahh! SCIENCE! (The student's face splits into a grin) Sir, you rightly state that science is the study of observed phenomena. Science too is a premise which is flawed..."
PROFESSOR: "SCIENCE IS FLAWED?" (The professor splutters…. The class is in uproar… The Christian remains standing until the commotion has subsided)
OTHER STUDENT: "To continue the point you were making earlier to the other student, may I give you an example of what I mean?" (The professor wisely keeps silent. . . The Christian looks around the room)
OTHER STUDENT: "Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?" (The class breaks out in laughter. . .The Christian points towards his elderly, crumbling tutor) "Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain... felt the professor's brain, touched or smelt the professor's brain?" No one appears to have done so. (The Christian shakes his head sadly) "It appears no one here has had any sensory perception of the professor's brain whatsoever. Well, according to the rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science, I DECLARE that the professor has no brain." (The class is in chaos…The Christian sits... Because that is what a chair is for)

My analysis:

It's a charming little piece of fiction. Searching the net for keywords in the story, I discovered that this little piece is reposted on over 600 pages. It has all the classic elements of an urban legend...

In many cases the poster swears this is a true story.
None of the pages ever says what particular school this took place at, or what the name of the professor is.
Many of the minor details change subtly with each retelling. Especially, there are several different endings to the story. In your version, the student sits down amidst pandemonium. In some versions the professor rushes out of the room in embarrassment. One version concludes "... The student got an A in the class." Another has the professor go crazy and rush the student, only to die of a stroke.
Every character in the story is a caricature, starkly contrasting "Good, persecuted student" and "Evil professor".

I love the caricatures. The professor jumps in his class's face without provocation. He is described with such evocative phrases as "The elderly man runs his bony fingers through his thinning hair and turns to the smirking, student audience." (His bony fingers and baldness are described twice, just to make sure we get the point.) He shouts at his student for no reason at all, then sticks his face in front of the student. He's always smiling, smirking, and generally acting like a comic book villain. But when reacting to the other student, he sucks, hisses, freezes, gets angry, "goes toxic", etc. One wonders how in the world he ever got his Ph.D when he obviously has never received any criticism in his life and doesn't know how to deal with it.

The heroic Christian, of course, gets described with neutral words like "explains", "replies", "continues", "looks around". Unlike the prof, his physical features are never described, except that he grins once.

But the most salient feature of the story is that neither the professor nor any of his students have an adequate grasp of the most basic concepts of science. What kind of idiot is this professor, whose idea of science is that if you can't smell it, taste it, feel it, hear it, or see it, then it doesn't exist? If that's the case, then what happened to electrons, cells, Newton's laws of motion, living dinosaurs, black holes, photons, magnetism, infrared light, and general relativity? For that matter, what about abstract concepts like "harmonic chords" or "Thursday"?

Science isn't about what we can perceive with our five senses. If that were true we wouldn't need scientists, because most of us already HAVE those five senses. It's about organizing facts about the known world into descriptions that can explain the way things happen. These descriptions make predictions which can be tested, repeated, and falsified if they're wrong.

Of course, science can't actually prove that the professor has a brain. Just because every human or animal body that has ever been dissected and analyzed has always had a brain; just because countless experiments have demonstrated that the brain controls an organism's ability to move and speak and reason; just because an animal with a damaged brain becomes an inanimate mass of carbon... these things are hardly conclusive proof. What science can do is make predictions with confidence and high accuracy; it can prove things beyond reasonable doubt but it can't prove anything with 100% certainty. The fact that it is able to change and correct mistakes is part of what makes it a powerful tool.

If the professor had any kind of clue what he was on about, he could have explained all this. Of course, the problem isn't with the professor, who is after all only a fictional character. The problem is that the author of the story has never heard of or simply doesn't understand the scientific method. It's easy to make up little stories where the opposition is always an evil overlord who doesn't know how to argue and your side always wins. It's also easy to win at chess when you control both sides of the board.

Oh, and one final point...

"Wrong again, sir. You see, immorality is merely the absence of morality. Is there such a thing as injustice? No. Injustice is the absence of justice. Is there such a thing as evil?" The Christian pauses. "Isn't evil the absence of good?"

No, evil isn't the absence of good. An empty universe would be devoid of both good AND evil. A universe with no life or intelligence would not be good or evil. "Good" and "evil", assuming they exist, are not passive activities or "absence" of something else. A professor of philosophy should have seen through that immediately. But he doesn't because he, like the story's author, is completely out of his depth.

Unequally yoked: Advice for atheists in a relationship with a theist

Kazim — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:30:00 +0000

The following is a guest post by Lynnea, whom you probably know by now from The Non-Prophets. You can read her regular blog at http://everythingelseatheism.blogspot.com/.

The Atheist Experience TV show gets a lot of fans asking them for advice about how to deal with a loved one who is still into religion. The circumstances are frequently different: the atheist might have started out as a believer, or there might have been a known philosophical difference from the start. They might be considering getting more serious, or they might be already married with kids in the mix. It's always tricky to offer relationship advice on a problem that has been building and building. There are no simple answers for relationship compatibility issues, but I'm hoping to offer some concrete starting points where you can suss out the issues yourself.

1. Should We Stay Together?

First of all, don't consider your long term history together. This may sound strange, but dwelling on the past is not healthy, even if the past is positive. You need to be addressing the issues as they are now. Are the two of you getting along well? Is the religion issue making one of you hostile or walled off? Are you afraid of hostility or being shut-out if you were honest? If so, that's not a healthy relationship now. Don't consider how the relationship was years or months ago, and guiltily linger on that. Relationships should be continually developing and loving and giving, not something that just cuts off after a certain amount of time. There is no excuse, no reason that allows someone in a relationship to be treated poorly.

On the flip side, if the two of you are reasonable and caring to each other and you know about your religious differences, then you are at a good start. Relationships are built on respect and care, and if that's something you have then you are doing well. Being nice to each other a great indication of a good relationship, but there can still be some warning bells.

A slight caveat to considering your history: if things are peachy right now, but there's a history of extreme ups and downs then things will probably not get better. The cycle of abuse shows a relationship model of attacks, apologetics, happiness, tension building, and then more attacks, whether it's physical, psychological or emotional. If there's a history of domineering, disrespect, manipulation, hostility or other outbursts, then do keep that in mind. The cycle describes an relationship built on dominance and inequality, and the only way to break that cycle is to just get out. Watch out for a partner who refuses to allow your atheist books in the house, disallows you to go to atheist meetings, who forces you to come to religious worship, who tells you (with no remorse) that you deserve Hell, or doesn't allow you to talk about religion to the family. Those are all kinds of controlling behaviors, and abuse is about control. Here's a great guide about the kinds of relationship abuse, along with great extra resource links at the bottom.

Another warning bell to consider is if the two of you alright with your religious differences only because the differences are never discussed. Do the two of you avoid discing all difficult topics? When was the last time you had a serious discussion about politics, moral qualms, money, social problems, gender structures, etc? Do the two of you only talk about superficial stuff? If so, you might want to reevaluate if this relationship is really substantial or if you're just in the honeymoon stage of the relationship. If there's no deeper connection, no deeper common ground, then why would you want to be in a long-term relationship with this person? Seriously consider if you're there just because it's comfortable and tough to leave.

Now, it's quite all right to have topics that are avoided. If the two of you talk about social, financial, political and other issues issues, while religion is just the odd duck, then that's probably fine. Russell and I have topics that we've just agreed to disagree on and never bring up, because they're fruitless discussions (male infant circumcision, for example) but we are pretty much in agreement when it comes to other debates, and we enjoy those discussions thoroughly. There's only so much time we two can spend discussing World of Warcraft and other superficial things, before our conversations would go silent. Having these deeper connections keeps our conversations constantly new and fresh. Having deeper connections is important, and if those are lacking and have been lacking for quite awhile, then it's pretty easy to see where the relationship will go in the future: nowhere. It can be tough, but really look at these outside issues.

2. Trying to Deconvert a Partner is Usually Not a Good Idea

Perhaps a more popular question from atheists about religious partners is how to deconvert their theist partners. That's a much trickier topic to navigate.

The approach I take to this sort of question is to generalize it out. Instead of making it about religion, let's say instead, "I have a partner with a large character flaw. How can I fix that flaw?" It's the typical problem of starting a relationship with someone and then expecting them to change for you. Now, a small amount of personal change in a relationship is healthy and normal. It's part of being accommodating, loving and exchanging: imagine a relationship where Partner 1 improves zir habits about picking up the laundry, and Partner 2 works on their problem of calling when zhe will be late. Maybe one picks up bicycling in exchange for D&D and they both increase their sphere of hobbies. That's good. In a normal relationship, there is a certain amount of change that is willingly and happily made to accommodate and improve each other. It's a positive embracing of newer and better habits, hobbies and experiences. When it becomes unhealthy is when that change is forced or coerced, (or when the change is in forbidding previously enjoyed activities). If there is someone who feels continually pressured to change, then the relationship ceases to be based on mutual respect and love. Here, I recommend a deep evaluation of whether pressuring is an appropriate tactic. You might win and deconvert them, but more than likely you will just put an extra strain on the relationship.

And the thing is, religiosity is a very strong emotional and religious meme, and it is a tough thing to shake. In a way, it's like an addiction, as strong as an alcoholism. Try reframing this relationship deconversion problem as trying to get an alcoholic sober. You can see the problem, you can see the logical gaps, you can see how it's possibly destroying their lives and eating up their money, you can see everything. And you deeply care about this person, and would love for them to be freed from this one affliction that is ruining an otherwise perfectly good person. But anyone who has tried to help an alcoholic will tell you how fruitless it is. That person is in an addiction and sees no reason to change. You will have to accept that probably they will never want to see the light. You will probably have no influence on them leaving their religion or their alcoholism.

Now, this feels hypocritical for me to write, because I used to be a Christian who was in a relationship with atheists, and now I am quite the atheist myself, so I know change is possible. But I feel like my story is merely one anecdote, and I prefer to trust general facts instead of individual stories, even if that individual story happened to me. This is tough to do, but an essential part of being a skeptic. And looking back, I don't think I would have deconverted while I was dating my high school atheist sweetheart. At that time someone pointed out to me the bad things the bible says about women, and I had flippantly excused it with "Oh, that's only The Old Testament." I don't know that I was emotionally ready to deconvert, and any attempt to do so would have probably just made me feel hostile and disrespected. I did change my mind later, but that was only because it was something I came to slowly, and independently, through a love of skepticism and evaluation (and not until I was single). I changed not because of who I was with, but because I chose to follow the facts and they slowly led me to disbelief.

I don't think my story is all that typical of theists. After all, most of the theists I know are still theists. There are always those alcoholics who independently decide to kick the habit and cure themselves. There are those religious people who slowly realize that their faith is based on nothing. But it shouldn't be your job to sacrifice yourself on the unlikely chance that they will spontaneously change themselves, or that you can be the one to "fix" them. It likely won't happen. That spark and desire for change has to come within, and there's nothing you can do to put that into someone else's brain.

As another example, Russell and I took a premarital class to waive a marriage license fee, and in it the director gave a story about how on his honeymoon he flipped out and punched through the glovebox of the car. A scary story by itself, but then he then he continued that kind of behavior for 9 more years before finally figuring out that was unacceptable. He slowly realized he needed to change, and turned himself around. I'm glad that he had that self-realization, but would you have wanted his partner to have stayed through that for 9 years on the hope that he would change? Do you think that there was anything this woman could have said to make him re-evaluate his behavior, or would he just have ignored her? The truth is that something clicked in his head on its own, and he self-motivated his own change. A good method for self-evaluation is to pretend that a friend is in a similar situation, and ask yourself how you would give them advice. In my opinion, they shouldn't have stayed together. Take a step back and look at your relationship as if you were looking at a friend in a similar situation: would you advice your friend to wait it out? Can they be happy together if they stayed the same, for years and years? If you can't accept them for how they are now, then you need to re-look your standards or re-look your relationship.

3. Can Deconversion Attempts Be Acceptable?

I would like to point out a mitigating factor, even though I worry that it might just add confusion and false hope. Many people who are stuck in religion are there only because they've never been presented with contrary views or information. Their religion is treated with some sort of reverence that shields it against scrutiny, and they might be simply ignorant about their own faith. If they are the kind of person who cares about truth and knowledge and logic, then they might just need a bit of nudging in the right direction, and you never know where that nudge might come from. It might be from you, it might be from someone else, it might even be from someone religious. Faith is a Jenga tower, and you can never be sure which block will topple the whole thing down. In this case, it might be helpful for you to offer advice and arguments about religion and reason. Address concerns and doubts they have. Ask them the tough questions: always ask questions instead of telling them. Let them do their own research and point them in the right direction. Asking questions allows them to think about it themselves, telling them allows them to just shut it out. I recommend reading 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God, and The Demon Haunted World. And of course, Iron Chariots and TalkOrigins are fantastic guides as well.

Most importantly when communicating, evaluate how you have these kinds of discussions. Different ways of approaching a relationship disagreement can lead to vastly different results. If there is accusing, storming out, stonewalling, ignored olive branches or any other number of bad arguments habits, then you need to take a moment to work on your own communication skills. I highly recommend John Gottman's The Relationship Cure, which is all about how to communicate effectively, really in any situation. Interestingly, one of the best summaries of proper relationship communication techniques I could find quickly was in a section of a wikipedia article about open marriages (it's been flagged as inappropriately placed, so enjoy it while it's there).

As an atheist now, I frequently feel frustrated that I was a christian so long around so many atheists and skeptics who rarely questioned my faith, but on the other hand, I honestly could not tell you if attacks on my faith would have sped up my deconversion or whether I would have entrenched further. For example, this incredibly long YouTube series tells the story of a student decoverting after fervent debate with his professor, a guy who I would have chalked up as a lost cause. Meanwhile, as I've already said, I defended biblical subjugation of women with the dumbest argument that I actually believed made sense. I was a pretty hopeless case, and maybe I did benefit in some small way from having my faith prodded a bit when I was younger, but it took years after that. It's always worthwhile to try presenting arguments against religion: even if they fall on deaf ears now they might produce logical responses years down the line. Deconversion is a slow, gradual process that frequently requires input from multiple sources. They might thank you years down the line.

That said, I would like to reiterate that it is not your job and not your place to change and fix your partner. It might be possible to point them in the right direction, but if these debates go nowhere, then you really need to accept that this is how they are and this is likely how they will be for a long time. I've hesitated to give the above advice about how to deconvert a partner because I am worried that it might be used as a sort of grasping at straws for those who are in a relationship with someone who really is stuck. I'd say most people are in the kind of situation where their religious partner is not likely to be swayed. The majority of Christians I've ever known and discussed religion with are still Christians. And if you think that doesn't apply to your partner, then you're probably deluding yourself. Go ahead and attempt to change their mind, but be prepared for it to fail, and then be prepared to move on. You should not sacrifice yourself and your happiness to try and fix someone who is a lost cause. When was the last time you watched a romantic movie? They are formulaically based on the fantasy of changing a fundamental flaw in the love interest. That this is so attractive of a fantasy really speaks to how unlikely the chance for change really is. If you've tried to communicate your desire for a change, and that desire has been ignored, then you need to accept that this is a person with their own free will and thoughts and you might never be able to change them. Are you alright with coupling with someone who will have this attitude forever? Would this permanently leave your relationship more strained than positive?

4. Should I Just Go Through the Motions?

One of the side questions that gets brought up is that of going through the motions, for the sake of the relationship. Whether it's a religious ritual in a marriage ceremony or attending a religious service. If you are an out atheist to your partner, this pressure can feel uncomfortable. Perhaps you feel awkward about going through these motions, but are uncertain about why: after all if you don't believe that sprinkling water on a child does anything magical, then why not allow it to happen? This discomfort comes not from the actual act, but from the attitude of respect and mutuality in a relationship. The ceremonial implications with god might be imaginary, but the ceremonial implications between the two of you are very real. If there is a situation where you are expected to take the backseat and have no input, then that is being disrespectful to you. It is disrespectful to say that one person's views must be followed and the other person's must be ignored, for the sake of someone outside of the relationship. Here is where you need to find some sort of compromise that shows respect to your feelings and your partner's feelings. Have that wedding chapel ceremony, but exclude references to god from the vows. Compromise, and be wary of inflexibility. Inflexibility now means inflexibility in the future. It means you will be in a relationship where you will be pressured and coerced to continue going through the motions, and as we've already discussed, pressure to change is a real relationship-killer. Is that something acceptable to you?

Alternatively, if your partner doesn't know that you are an atheist, then you are in a bit of a bind. You are now in a relationship that's not based on mutual respect and trust, but instead lies and deceit. If you are afraid that telling your partner about your atheism will damage the relationship, then you have to examine how strong your relationship really is. If something like that can shake your strength, then be honest with yourself about if there are deeper issues: lack of deeper common interests, inabilities to communicate, etc. You need to ask yourself if this is a relationship worth keeping together on such shaky ground. Now sometimes relationships can be solid, but the religion has entrenched itself so deeply that even strong relationships will be torn apart by a commitment to the faith. In this case, it can be painful to admit that you are in a relationship with someone who would hurt you for something imaginary. But does that sound like a deep love, a faithful commitment? Does that sound like the sort of person you would want to rely on? Would you recommend a friend stay with someone who doesn't accept them, who has to lie? This can breed a relationship where you feel resentful and disrespected and trapped, and your partner feels an unknown distance growing between the two of you. It's much better to come clean, and then to accept the repercussions of that. Do it gently, if you are worried: say that you don't believe what you used to and that you're still the same person and that you care about your partner and will always be open to answering different questions, and that you hope they still care about you in the same way too. Give a negative reaction some time to cool off, but if there continues to be hostility, then realize that this is someone who does not respect you for who you are and is not contributing to a loving, respectful relationship.

5. What About Kids?

One of biggest and toughest questions I've saved for last: the issue of children. The easier issue of children comes with those who don't have them: discuss if you want children and come to some sort of agreement about how they would be raised, and how much religiosity they will have. Discuss schooling and strictness and punishment, really consider if you want to bring someone into the world who might be pressured into believing a religion. Can you accept watching your child be taught to believe for life in the imaginary? That's a pretty tough burden to accept.

If there are already children in the picture, it can be tough. Very young children really do benefit from having two parents, and you should consider the fact that splitting up might leave your religious partner as their primary source of religious information. Consider also that many atheists now are the children of very religious parents, myself included. All you need to do is instill a love for truth and knowledge, and atheism can come naturally later on its own.

When it comes to divorce, the damaging effects on kids is actually a bit overblown. The connection between emotional damage is actually with parents who are frequently negative and attacking of each other. If you and your partner argue frequently and heatedly, then a divorce might actually be more positive, because it would reduce that negative element by giving the two of you some space. Similarly, if the two of you have a loveless marriage, kids will pick up on that. Then, that sort of unfulfilling, unaffectionate relationship will be normalized for them. There's no positive in that.

If you choose to divorce, make a conscious effort to do so respectfully and calmly. There is a lot of societal/religious pressure to keep marriages together at any cost, but this might not always be healthy. Obviously it's not good to get flightily at the first few whiffs of trouble, and if trouble has just started then it might be a good time to look into relationship help. But if there are deep relationship issues, don't be afraid to break those off just because of children. Whatever choice is made, be sure to impress upon your children how much you care about them and reinforce that you will still be there in their lives because they are important; that's the biggest thing that kids need from their parents.

6. Where to go from here

I've covered a lot of ground here, but I hope that this can serve as a good starting point for those who are currently in a relationship and aren't quite sure what to do next. I find that frequently people know exactly what to do, but have trouble admitting that to themselves, and look for outside advice. So think about your relationship, think about the implications, think about the status of your relationship together. Think about how deeply committed and respectful and loving you are to each other. Think about how you would advise a friend in a similar situation. Think about what sorts of things you care about in a relationship. Think about if your decisions are influenced more by comfort or by true respect.

If you do decide to split up, don't focus on finding someone else. Focus on yourself; improve yourself; join classes and expand your interests and hobbies. Follow your passions and then if you are active with them, maybe you will find someone that way. If you don't, know that happiness and healthiness are more important than being in a relationship. There's plenty you can do to make the world a better place, and it's always nice to focus on ways you can improve the world.

A few words about the Zeitgeist sequels

Kazim — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:12:00 +0000

I've finally been goaded by Zeitgeist fans into looking into the background of the new movies, which are promoting "The Venus Project." It's a lengthy topic, and I wasn't sure whether to post it here as a personal commentary or on The Atheist Experience blog. TAE blog won in the end simply because it gets a lot more traffic, but I'm certainly linking it from here.

Go check it out.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repealed

Kazim — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 12:05:00 +0000

So it seems that I owe the president a little apology.

Back in October, I was somewhat perturbed at the Obama administration for their decision to actively fight the court-mandated cease and desist order for enforcing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. As I reasoned, all Obama needed to do in order to let the policy lapse was just accept the court order and let it go.

Sure, Obama said they were only appealing in order to get DADT repealed through proper channels, i.e., a bill passed through Congress. But, I reasoned at the time, this would never happen, not in a million years. Republicans would threaten to filibuster the action, Democrats would cave like always, the new Republican House of Representatives would push out the Democrats (it was already obvious at that point that this was going to happen) and there would not be another opportunity to repeal for at least two years and probably longer.

But they did it. They actually voted to repeal. So, hooray for gay rights! And may I say, this is a case where I am most definitely happy to have been wrong.

Even so, I can't resist a single sourpuss shrill liberal comment -- my moment of "What if Peter hadn't caught the wolf? What then?" This was by no means a foregone conclusion. Senate Democrats were racing the clock, it mostly didn't look like they were going to make it. Only some uncharacteristic party manipulation by Harry Reid as well as some frankly shocking heroics from Senator Joe Lieberman of all people (sole member of the popular "Connecticut for Lieberman" party) made this possible at all. Had this gamble not paid off, it's still highly likely that DADT would have remained a permanent fixture.

I would really like to have seen Barack Obama take a more active role in working to bring this down. Going into next year, let's not forget that Democrats still control a majority of the Senate in addition to the presidency. More than ever, passing any kind of desirable agenda will require better politics than just hopeful speeches.

Wikileaks vs. 9/11 truth

Kazim — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:31:00 +0000

I find this particularly side splitting:

It seems that 9/11 truthers were initially very excited about WikiLeaks, as they believed Julian Assange would finally blow the lid off the massive government conspiracy. Assange told them to bugger off, and so what did they conclude? Well, this headline from a few months ago pretty much says it all:

9/11 skeptics say Julian Assange being manipulated by the CIA

And what does Assange think of truthers?

"Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It's important not to confuse these two. Generally, when there's enough facts about a conspiracy we simply call this news." What about 9/11? "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud."

God damn those CIA agents they're everywhere! The one guy who seems to know actual government secrets and has been making them public just as fast as he can, and he seems to have no interest in finally proving that it was a controlled demolition, or invisible missiles from dimension X, or whatever. It can't be that there is no evidence of an actual conspiracy... clearly the only explanation is that THEY got to him first!!!

(Please note: I'm not in the mood to open this thread up to the crackpots. Any comments on how blind I am to the conspiracy will be moderated out. Anyone who posts such a thing on the associated Facebook thread will be defriended, immediately and with extreme prejudice. Know why? Because I'm secretly a CIA agent. BWAHAHAHAHAAAAAA)

Unilateral executive power? Don’t ask, they won’t tell

Kazim — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:41:00 +0000

'Kay, something political is bugging me, it's too long to encapsulate in a brief Facebook update, and this blog has been fallow (in favor of TAE blog and dropping my opinion on Facebook comments occasionally). Clearly this is the place to air this issue.

Last week Rachel Maddow did an interview with Walter Dellinger, a law professor and former solicitor general under President Clinton, to discuss the Obama administration's position on Don't Ask Don't Tell. First, she played a clip of this exchange:

Q I voted for you in the last elections based on your alleged commitment to equality for all Americans, gay and straight, and I wanted to know where you stood on “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I know that you’ve mentioned that you want the Senate to repeal it before you do it yourself. My question is you as the President can sort of have an executive order that ends it once and for all, as Harry -- as Truman did for the integration of the military in ‘48. So I wonder why don’t you do that if this is a policy that you’re committed to ending.

THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I haven’t “mentioned” that I’m against “don’t ask, don’t ask” -- I have said very clearly, including in a State of the Union address, that I’m against “don’t ask, don’t tell” and that we’re going to end this policy. That’s point number one.

Point number two, the difference between my position right now and Harry Truman’s was that Congress explicitly passed a law that took away the power of the executive branch to end this policy unilaterally. So this is not a situation in which with a stroke of a pen I can simply end the policy.

Here are the facts about what's happening with DADT right now, as far as I understand them.

Obama says he really wants to end the policy.
Most Americans agree with him. Polls show a 59% opinion that gays and lesbians should be allowed to openly serve in the military.
A clear majority of Congress supports it. A bill was introduced in the Senate that received 56 Yea votes, 43 Nay votes. Naturally, the Republicans filibustered it.
Without directly eliminating it, Obama could still order that enforcement of DADT be suspended. He has declined to do so.
On September 9 (my birthday, in a meaningless aside), a federal court ruled that DADT was unconstitutional and should stop being enforced.
The Obama justice department decided to appeal the ruling.

And that last one right there is the part where I say "WTF?!?!?" Because if
- the public wants to repeal DADT, but can't, because they don't have direct power, and
- the president wants to repeal DADT, but can't, because he can't override Congress, and
- Congress wants to repeal DADT, but can't, because a minority is using legal maneuvering to prevent all legislation of any kind, to the best of their abilities

...Then this court order would seem to be the last piece of the puzzle. Here is a perfectly good opportunity to take direct legal action to end the policy that just about everyone wants ended. Doesn't even require any action. Just do nothing. Court ruling stands.

So as I understand matters now from Walter Dellinger, Obama doesn't want to use overtly political tactics to end the policy when he feels that the proper course is to have Congress overturn the law.

As everyone who follows politics at all knows, that isn't going to happen. Democrats right now have the largest majority in the Senate that either party has had since 1981 (see chart) and they couldn't get it done, because Congressional Republicans have engaged in more filibusters than in any other session in US history (as measured by number of cloture votes, see chart). If the Democrats retain control of the Senate at all, it will certainly be a reduced majority. (Electoral-vote.com right now forecasts it at 51-48 Democrats with one tossup.)

So I can't imagine what Obama is thinking will change, when he says "But this is not a question of whether the policy will end. This policy will end, and it will end on my watch. But I do have an obligation to make sure that I am following some of the rules." As long as he leaves it in the hands of Congress and doesn't exercise any of his other legal options, it will most assuredly not end on his watch.

But where Dellinger's take on this gets especially weird is when he explains that the president must not refuse to appeal the ruling, because he wouldn't want to set a dangerous precedent. Imagine it's three years down the road, Dellinger says, with a Republican president in the White House. The president wants to overturn the national health care plan, but can't, for similar reasons. So instead, he finds a single federal judge to declare it unconstitutional, and then he... simply declines to overturn the ruling. Boom, unilateral power to do anything.

I don't actually know the answer to this conundrum -- does the president actually have this power of overturning things based on non-appeal or doesn't he? If he doesn't, then this is all a moot point, but he's doing a terrible job of explaining why it is legally impossible for him to not appeal.

But if he does have this power, well -- it's nice that he's taking the high road and all, but let's be serious. Do you think this hypothetical president will decline to use it? I mean seriously, let's follow through on Dellinger's scenario.

February 2013

Secretary of the Treasury Christine O'Donnell: "Madame President, a federal judge in Kentucky has just ruled that the national health care program is unconstitutional."

President Sarah Palin: "Hey, great news! Let's shut it down right now."

O'Donnell: "Wait, not so fast. Back in 2010, Barack Obama had a similar opportunity to overturn Don't Ask Don't Tell, and he didn't take it. Maybe we should reconsider."

Palin: (blink. blink. blink.)

O'Donnell: (giggles)

(They both laugh uproariously for two minutes straight)

Palin: (wiping her eyes) "Hoo boy, you had me going for a minute there, you betcha."

As I keep saying, the Democrats' constant refusal to win with the tools available to them does not make them smart or principled. It makes them scrubs in the game of politics.

So will somebody please explain to me what the hell Obama is thinking? Does he actually believe Congress will pull through, or is he just doing a dance to avoid responsibility for not repealing the policy? Are federal judges the arbiters of what is deemed constitutional, or aren't they?

I get other Amway mail

Kazim — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:55:00 +0000

Every once in a while I get mail that is just so awesome, it would be a real shame not to share it. (And this forestalls the need to apologize for not blogging in the last three months.)

Message 1:

Subject: FALSEHOODINESS

u r so foolish man. it seems u r the one who dnt need more money....gr8 u r the gr8st hermit of this century....actually i feel its u who is brainwashing people but actually digging hole for urself by wasting ur life. it seems u hve gud ways to earn millions n billions n a very noble cause to make people know dat they sud not earn so much. My dear Success goes to minority never in a ny place in world history has majority got success right beginning from school to career.

Message 2, four minutes later:

Subject: u r a lier

ur website is also unproffessionally maintained any high profile can judge the falsehoodness engraved in it. actually a child if taught can even make a gud website than u hve done. ur datas are also so malupulated u know it urself. u r just a masked man who is destined to failur in life.
IF u wud hve understood AMWAY u wud hve been a free man n helping thousands worldwide making charities.

I get Amway mail, part 3

Kazim — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Sorry for busting up the previous thread. A new Amway distributor showed up, one "IBO Fight Back," who runs a blog called "The Truth About Amway." He had a long series of posts arguing with my interpretation of Amway distributor performance, and noted that he has been planning on a detailed response to my site for years. As the issues he brings up are interesting, I responded to some of his arguments. It got too long for the comments section, so I'm starting fresh.

IBOFB, I wouldn't be opposed to linking a post of yours if you don't want to restrict yourself to comment format. By the way, I like your profile image of the Dread Pirate Roberts. However, I've spent the last few years building up an immunity to fuzzy math. ;)

We have similar backgrounds [as numbers geeks].

Oh yes? Always glad to meet a fellow nerd. I got my MS in computer engineering from UT in 2007, and did my Masters Report on data mining topic frequency from Google News and comparing it to Digg.

Sorry about the broken link, the one I gave should have worked. The other data on percentage qualifiers is supposed to be for "IBO eyes only" so to speak, so I'll have to sponsor you first ;)

I'll pass on that offer, thanks. Indeed, part of what raises suspicion for me about Amway is the way they keep their information so close to the chest unless you are paying them. People always say that you should evaluate Amway on the same basis that you would evaluate any other business, but that's not really possible. If you are dealing with a major corporation, you can actually check out their financial statements every year, and there are specific legal requirements on the truth value of what they are saying. Sure, there are loopholes by which accountants can paint a rosier picture than reality, but there is at least a baseline where if you lie in your financial statements you can eventually risk landing in jail.

There is no such requirement from Amway, obviously. As you point out later, some statistics can't even be gathered effectively, and what they do release is what they want to release, when they want it. For instance, how would I know that these "IBO eyes only" documents are accurate? Who is overseeing them?

I'm certainly not saying they're false documents, I'm just saying that a lack of open information that can be verified always feels like a warning flag to me. I don't know what you could do about that, however.

I'll drop you an email in the morning, but to be honest I'm hesitant as they too have their problems of interpretation. You might want to check out another post of mine on the problematic use of statistics - Amway IBOs get all their products free plus extra cash.

Okay, IBO, I have now read that page in its entirety, and I have to confess that the first time through, I had a critical failure of my sarcasm detector. I thought you were serious in trying to prove that people who are "buying from themselves" make that much money. Hence I spent unnecessary time trying to explain the flaws in your reasoning before noticing that it was meant to be satire.

So if I take your point correctly, your main concern is that one simply can't construct all of the big picture starting from averages. That is, of course, true to a point, and that's why I wish more detailed information could be made available.

But it seems to me that you're deliberately going way off in the opposite direction, into a kind of numerical solipsism, in which you can dismiss all numerical analysis as "damn lies and statistics." That's where we part company. While raw numbers never tell the whole picture, when you say "The average tells you nothing at all, and anyone who pretends it does is either ignorant or actively trying to mislead you" that is clearly equally naive. There is a middle ground between thinking that a limited data set is a crystal ball and thinking that it is completely useless.

You can't, on the one hand, instruct critics of Amway to analyze it like a real business, and on the other hand dismiss all efforts at quantification as stupid. If it's a real business, then the numbers that are available mean something, as they are the only data that can be applied. The other stuff, the intangibles like motivational hullabaloo and personal growth and so forth, that is all irrelevant to analyzing the business if your core claim is that you simply can't demonstrate whether it is generally a money maker or a money sink. Isn't that what we are talking about in the first place?

Really though, it all comes down to this question of yours -

does that data you have actually give a breakdown of time spent as well?

This information we pretty much don't have in hard data and it's difficult for Amway to get.

Well said. You've homed in on the key point of contention right there.

Some Amway distributors (a very small number) make money at it. Some Amway distributors (a very very small number) make a hell of a lot. Meanwhile, some Amway distributors (perhaps most) spend very little time on the business. I think these are all facts that we agree on. Based on them, though, you've combined them arbitrarily to make the following claim: "Some people make a hell of a lot of money while putting very little time into the business." This does not follow.

Indeed, after thousands of emails and guest book entries in the last fifteenish years -- and by no means are they all friendly to my position, mind you -- my impression has been that the set of people who are (a) making a lot of money, and (b) spending little time, is so small that they are practically disjoint subsets. Meanwhile, the set of people who are (a) making little or no money, and (b) spending a large amount of time is a fairly large conjunction.

There are very positive and upbeat distributors who write to me, to be sure, but quite a lot of them vanish without a trace at the question "How much are you, personally, making as a function of your time?" The ones who do claim to be making money almost always come across like Chris here, lamely repeating something like "I am so too making more than minimum wage!" and backing up this claim by saying that he knew some people who once made $100 in four hours. (Conveniently cherry picking a small window so as not to acknowledge the numerous hours when those same people were working for next to nothing. It's like hedge fund managers reporting their performance by annualizing the returns of their best week.)

You seem interested in proving me wrong, showing that seriously working the business is a sure path to wealth, but how can we even have common ground to discuss this if you're saying up front that no objective analysis of time vs money exists, or is even possible? Why would anyone consider joining a business in which even basic personal accounting can't be done?

Having said that, MonaVie, an MLM company which expanded primarily through recruiting existing "stars" from other companies, publishes more comprehensive statistics including average hours. MonaVie has the "advantage" of being a much more homogeneous company, with only a handful of products and thus approaches, and the stats have their own weaknesses, but as you can see even at significant income levels the average hours worked is quite low. There's no reason to believe Amway (or other MLMs) are substantially different.

Thanks for this link. Actually, the patterns that look interesting to me are different than what you're suggesting. The average number of hours worked increases as average income size increases. For people at the highest levels, this is clearly a full time job. A cushy full time job, I grant you that, but when you are talking about fractions of fractions of 1%, that's not all that interesting. I don't see any sign of your claim that people who STOP working continue to maintain income at a high percent of their former levels, and if they do, they must be balanced out by people who are working a lot more hours.

Meanwhile, it's clear that a solid 85% of people are making, at best, $35 or less for a typical 6 hours of work, which is substantially below minimum wage, just as I've been saying. Sure, they're not working full time (hence the common characterization by more senior distributors that they are lazy or stupid), but even given the work they are doing, they'd be better off working a single 6 hour shift at McDonald's, wouldn't they? Shouldn't the starry-eyed dream language include that hard fact for comparison's sake?

Finally, presenting the check size alone as the value of the work seems a little misleading. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears to me that the bonus check is not pure profit, but income. As with any business, profit is the difference between income and expense, and this table doesn't appear to reflect expenses at all. I sure don't know how much the profit margin is for the typical distributor, but I'm pretty sure the expenses are greater than zero.

Someone in the third bracket (Star 500, making $76 a week for 6 hours of work) appears to be making more than minimum wage. Not a lot more; $12 per hour is minimally skilled office worker territory, but it's something. However, if they spent just over $30 a week doing routine business tasks like driving to meet people or some similar thing, then their returns are back at minimum wage again, bringing you up to the 92nd percentile before business is better than a fry cook shift. And that's not even getting into the question of whether or not they are spending money purchasing stuff that they wouldn't have bought otherwise (more later).

Speaking of profits, when we say that the average distributor "makes" $115 a month (give or take), is that income or profit? I honestly am not sure.

For arguments sake I'd like you to just consider a scenario, and leave aside all other issues.

Imagine you have a range of products that are excellent quality and there is a significant market segment that would consider them good value. Then imagine you tapped that segment and introduced them to your products. They could then order them from your website, pay you, and have them delivered to their door without any further intervention from you, with all logistical type issues outsourced.

Why wouldn't that be a legitimate business model, that, given enough people using the products, couldn't develop a significant "passive" income?

Well, I know you said that I should assume your scenario is correct and leave aside other issues, but first I do want to voice one objection. Where you've described the products as "high quality," it seems that the metric you've applied in a previous post is that the products are popular. I'd argue that this is an invalid way to identify a good product when it comes to an MLM, because popularity is a self-fulfilling prophecy in this case.

What Amway and other MLMs accomplish for most people (i.e., the trivially "active" distributor who tries to sell to his brother occasionally), as we've seen, is not tremendous wealth, but fostering a buying mentality. Consumers will describe them as quality products, certainly, but I suspect that the real reason they are focused on buying things like Nutrilite (a product which is more or less off the radar outside the MLM community) is because they believe they need to buy products valued by Amway in order to boost their business. That's a damn fine argument if you're a manufacturer looking to sell stuff through Amway -- you have plenty of ready made customers who will buy your stuff and call it the most awesome thing ever, regardless of actual quality. For the rest of you, the old zero-sum problem shows up again.

So, that aside, let me answer your question. The reason it's not a realistic business model (IMHO) is that it purports to create money from nothing. I mean, look, we're at least ten years past the point where selling stuff on the internet is impressive. Can we agree on that? People can make their own Amazon store or even set up their own website on a shoestring budget, with a modest fee to a company that handles credit transactions. Delivering the items may take up a bigger chunk of your budget, but that's something offered through a wide variety of channels these days.

Amway (starting in the Quixtar era) provides the same package, online sales and delivery, and then claims that you the distributor will also get a passive profit via that process. Or in some cases, four or five distributors are all claiming a share of the profits. And all I want to know is: why?

Ultimately, what value do you, Mr. Distributor, provide to this product that I couldn't get by ordering my stuff on Amazon? If it's because there is stuff being sold through Amway that you can get nowhere else (i.e., Nutrilite)... why is that? Say I'm Nutrilite, and I've actually got a high quality product to sell. Why shouldn't I just cut out the distributors from the chain and keep more of the profits? The only reason I can see is that Nutrilite will sell more of their product through Amway because of brand loyalty and the proposition that each buyer will get wealthy. Great deal for a Nutrilite manufacturer! Selling more is good! Unimpressive for the bottom line of distributors, where adding more customers also adds more people claiming the bonus pool at the same time.

Finally, I want to address this question from an earlier comment which caught my eye:

From your various links and other posts you're clearly a secular "rationalist" much like myself. Tell me - if a study came out on say, homeopathy, and it was full of incorrect data, false comparisons, and false assumptions, how accurate would you consider it's conclusions?

Here's the thing. A hallmark of pseudoscience is not so much that it uses fake data, but that it is by nature unmeasurable. Following the scientific method requires you to come up with stuff that you can quantify. You say you can mix medicine with water and get super-medicine? And the more water you use, the stronger the super-medicine? Fine. Make me a hypothesis about what super-medicine does, create some viable experiments, and accurately report your findings regardless of whether or not they confirm your hypothesis. That's the way science is done when it's not faked.

Anyone who follows The Amazing Randi knows what pseudoscientists do when placed in the same situation. Either they propose an incredibly vague test that can easily accomodate confirmation bias, or they come up with some ad hoc explanation when the data doesn't support them. Oh, your negative attitude blocked my psychic powers, they'll say. The medicine would work better if a believer took it. Ah, there must be a hidden water pipe that is messing up my true Divination abilities. Like that.

The way I look at it, Amway is in this category. Critics of Amway make do with responding to what little data is available, but the data in support of Amway tends to be weak, unreliable, or behind a pay wall; or perhaps you're hesitant to share it "as they too have their problems of interpretation." Your page which "proves" that you can continue making most of your money after you stop working the business is a case in point. Like you said, you can't possibly gather enough information to objectively make that case, so you extrapolate from what an upline said as well as your personal feelings based on anecdotes of some people you know.

Similar to belief in God or supernatural powers or amazing medical panaceas, the claim that you can easily make millions without creating your own products or adding any genuine value to them is an extraordinary claim that should be backed by extraordinary evidence. Your main objection in most cases seems to be that I should find better evidence to refute.

I get Amway mail, part 2

Kazim — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:30:00 +0000

As promised, this is a followup to the previous email.

Listen I am not upset so when you read this don't take it in a way to make you upset. Remember you don't know me nor I you and if you knew me I love debating and we are two people with totally different views. You are hard core against Amway and I'm hard core for it. I am not looking for your approval or looking to win you over so it's cool. I'm just testing my knowledge and your ignorance :)

So lets get educated.

Bring it!

[In response to my point that the vast majority of people signing up dump money into it that they never see again.]

The reason behind this is because there are over 3 million IBO's or more by now. With this each has developed their own way to become successful using this business program. Some have developed their own teams and their own training material. With that said, this is why sometime you will find negative people out their because they base this whole business on what other people do and not on Amway itself. Amway never promises you anything the Team does, All Amway promises you is that if you order something they will send it to you, and if you earn a bonus then they will pay you. If you look at anything else out there you will find dumb people in all types of businesses that make a bad name for that business.

Amway must attract an unusually high number of dumb people, then, because the actual measurable success rate is abysmal compared to making a legitimate living.

Take, for example, these numbers that were put out by Britt Worldwide in 1997. (Note: I wish I could get you some more current stats, but Amway is generally pretty stingy with the figures. If you have something more recent to share, let's see it and we'll work with those.)

Approximately 41% of distributors were considered "Active" -- which means, they are not just the non-participants joining to get "discounts" on stuff; they are selling. So basically, guys like you.
Among the active distributors -- not all distributors, mind you -- only 2% of them reached the direct level which, as far as I can tell, is where you need to be in order to make any profit at all, even a trivial one.
Platinum, Emerald, and Diamond distributors combined make up less than 0.2% (one in 500) of active distributors, with Platinums accounting for most of those.
So, if you are in the top 0.2 percentile, you finally have a shot at making... significantly less money than I make now, with my worthless graduate degree and my soul-crushing J.O.B. Woohoo!

Amway folks like to tout the figure that 90% of small businesses fail. If that were true -- which it isn't -- then it would still mean that you are about 50 times more likely to run a successful business than you are to earn a decent living through Amway.

Also, the over priced items, have you ever heard you get what you pay for?

Ah, so you admit that they're overpriced. ;)

Well the items you buy from Amway are in the top Ten of most products^[*] out their such as Artistry which is in the top 5 makeup brands who sponsored Miss America, or Nutrilite which is the Largest Multi-vitamin company in the world and now is only sold online they have been around longer then Amway as well 75 years plus.

* Note: Rankings obtained from Amway Consumer Reports™, the official product rating magazine of Amway™. Ask for your subscription today!

They have sponsored major Athletics such as Marta Vieira, and Teams such as AC Milan, and many more. They just got a new ARTISTRY Creme LuXury with Sandra Bullock's name all over it.

Wow! I don't use Artistry Creme LuXury™, but if I did, I would know it was a quality product because some celebrity got paid for granting permission to use her name! How could I have been so blind?

[In response to my statement that the financial performance of investing in an Amway business is much worse than college]

College is just as bad if you don't use the knowledge you have learnt and just sat on you rear end with it.

Ah, I see what you did there. You want your Amway participation to compare favorably to education, so you decided that if you compare the laziest people who also got a degree to the most successful people in Amway, then the second group comes out on top. It makes sense that you want to skew the data that way, because otherwise you're stuck recognizing that a college education directly correlates to a substantial measurable increase in income, while the success rate of an Amway distributor is around 0.2%.

The main problem is that there are people who don't believe that there is something better out their then a dumb job.

And then there are the ones who have not-dumb jobs, and also know how badly Amway distributors do.

Amway isn't for everyone and their are few^[*] that truly make it BIG and that's because they are not willing to do more then the other guy.

* Extremely few.

Anyone can do this business to some level of success, but it takes a person to become a Leader to really make the income most desire and because of that people quit, or they lack faith in themselves to actually try to do anything Better then what they are doing now.

So you're saying that the vast majority of people who join Amway are not making it because they are huge failures. Unlike you, who's been seriously working it for eight whole months, and your income must be, what? Surely equivalent to minimum wage at least, am I right?.

I on the other hand would rather try to work for something that "could" be true then work for the rest of my life for a pay check that doesn't come close to what I am or anyone is really worth.

Are you worth the $100 a month that a typical distributor makes?

If you think Amway is a scam check out the Government and the Social Security. Look up the structure of Corporate America, Presidents make all the money and it takes forever to get an advancement to a better paying status. You'll have to work equally hard at that as you would this. I'd say that's more then a Pyramid then Amway.

You'd say that, of course, while conveniently glossing over the fact that even the lowest paid person in the company is guaranteed to make at least minimum wage. No employee is dumb enough to actually pay for the privilege of showing up for work every day. And stupid me, I waste my time in this foolish pyramid scam where I make more than an emerald (or at least a 1997 emerald), which means that a whole 0.01% or so of active distributors are totally schooling me.

Amway say you earn what you do and get paid for the volume you create for them.

And you fall for it!

Social Security is not going to be around for my generation and people think that they will work 40 years or more of their life and retire nicely. They are the ones in a pipe dream. Look up and see the numbers in that equation it will shock you on the % of people that actually make it on their Social Security Income.
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/ Look at the Average monthly pay out which is $1100 and lets double it to $2200 a month at age 65 that is still hard to live on if you tack on inflation and anything else you might have, such as medical bills and any debt you haven't paid off yet.

I'm not going to sugar coat things. You've made a lot of mistakes already in describing social security, but if you wind up living on nothing but social security because you do not save and invest any of your own money, you're not going to live comfortably. On the other hand, if you are one of the 98% of distributors who spends more money on Amway than you make on the business, then your position will certainly be that much worse.

[In response to my pointing on that I'm not someone who "failed at the business"]

First off I'm not bothered, secondly I skimmed through your story, and now look at what you just now wrote, let me highlight it for you. I can totally say this with utmost confidence, you have no clue about this business, your like a professor in college teaching his students how to run a business when he himself never ran a business. How does that make since, so you telling me you never even started and your telling other people why not to do this without even being involved in the business for yourself? Wow, that a mind blower, I mean does that really make since to you?

You know what's funny? When you first wrote to me, you said I wasn't qualified to have an opinion about Amway because I tried it and "failed." Now that you know I didn't do it, you think I don't know anything about it because of that. In essence, it's a perfect little self-perpetuating delusion you've set up. You believe that the only people who are qualified to tell you anything about Amway are the 0.2% of active distributors who are making a decent income at it. Of course, those are the ones with the most incentive to lie to you. It also means that you aren't qualified to tell me anything you know about Amway, since I'm assuming you're not platinum yourself.

Let me ask you this, though. Suppose, hypothetically, that Amway actually is a scam, not a good business opportunity, and folks at the top are actually not representing the opportunity accurately. Under the set of rules that you've constructed about who you are allowed to listen to, how would you ever find out?

[I'm an atheist]

Well I don't push my beliefs on anyone but I will tell you it doesn't matter what you believe either in God or not, personal beliefs are person beliefs and if someone were using this business in the wrong way then they will get what is rightfully due to them. Carma will find them. If not God will judge us all in the end for what we did with his gift while we are here on this earth. If you were wondering what I was referring to as a Gift it is you he created you if you like it or not, and if you Believe it or not.

While I'm always willing to have this conversation, I'm pretty sure that would take us off on a massive tangent that would make a completely different thread. Feel free to call The Atheist Experience any Sunday if you want that chat. Right now I'm passing.

[I'll be glad if people get driven away from Amway based on what I wrote]

Yet again like I said before you have no Idea what your talking about, and if someone would listen to you when you yourself have never even attempted this business, then they are not bright at all. Why I say this is because the people I work with teach a Win-Win scenario that if I help you succeed then in return I will succeed. Just like the great leadership speaker Zig Zigglar says " You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want." "Servant-leadership is more than a concept, it is a fact. Any great leader, by which I also mean an ethical leader of any group, will see herself or himself as a servant of that group and will act accordingly." ~ M. Scott Peck . That's what we offer people with this business Freedom of a Job and give them options to obtain Time & Money.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/z/zig_ziglar_2.html
http://www.twu.ca/academics/graduate/leadership/servant-leadership/quotes.html

Mmmkay. Thanks for the advice, now you be sure and let me know when you start making more than minimum wage.

[I'm not lying about Amway being a bad business.]

I really don't care if you choose to do this or not because it's your choice and God has given us all the Free Will to choose what we want to do in life. Like I said before this isn't to "Get You". There are millions of people out in the world who will do this and who I would want to work with to accomplish their Dreams what ever that may be. I look forward everyday to helping those who want my help and are looking to do more with their life then work a dumb job for the rest of their life. If it was a mistake or not only time will tell, but I would encourage you be more positive in life and help other be more positive because we have enough negative in this world.

I am positive! There are lots of things I write about with enthusiasm. I've got an education and an interesting job, I live in an era filled with cool technology, and I have a family that I love. I only say negative things about Amway because Amway sucks so much. :)

[Thanks for correcting the $500 figure.]

Your Welcome. Thanks for the Motivation to press on, people like you are the reason why I do this Crazy Business as some would say, to prove to all the haters that they are all wrong. But that's my opinion, just someone who has actually done this long enough to see a great return and a awesome impact to other people's lives in a positive way.

God Blessing be with you,

Chris

Thanks! And may the Flying Spaghetti Monster touch you with His noodly appendage.

Russell

I get Amway mail

Kazim — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:12:00 +0000

Some of you may remember I have a web page about Amway. Yeah, it's easy to forget since it's a topic that is now 14 years old for me, and I don't talk about it that much. I converted my mail posts to a guest book a few years back, and while I read the guest book semi-regularly, I don't spend so much time converting mails over and scrubbing the names, nor do I spend much time answering them except for an occasional brief note.

But I got a private email recently, and although I shouldn't really encourage it, I decided to answer it. I've gotten the writer's permission to post the replies on the blog, so away we go!

[Email begins]

Hello Russell,

My name is Chris [last name withheld]. I am a IBO with Amway, I have been signed up for 2 years and I have been actively pursuing this business for about 8 months outside of my current job at Olan Mills in Chattanooga, TN. I am not writing you this to "get you in" or to involve you in anyway or to offend you either. I know that this is probably a waste of time, but it's important. I wanted to write you to tell you that I do disagree with the meaning behind your story and your figures you wrote. I don't know what Team you were apart of and don't really care because I know the truth about this Business Opportunity. I think you just didn't grasp the meaning behind it all and you didn't fully understand why things were done the way they were."

Lets Evaluate it from a Traditional Business stand point and College:

I would ask you to compare the Amway Business to any other business and the start up cost involved to get a traditional business up and running. Those cost would be translated down to what makes this business opportunity work. Example the weekly classes which is exactly what they are CLASSES to train you on how to do this, and those rooms aren't Free so pitching in would be considered your overhead as it would be in a traditional business. You are currently successful in life because of the training and the many hours of School you took to learn how to become a Programmer. Tally what it cost you to do that and I would bet it wouldn't come close to the expense that it takes to get educated and to be linked up and working with the Team involved with Amway for the total amount of 10 years ( this would include the Classes, Functions/Conferences, Monthly Membership, and Educational Tools). If you worked this business for 10 years and attended every Class, showed this program to 5 people a week, Sponsored 3 IBO's a month, was on Membership for continual education for you, and went to every major function for 10 years your Total would be around 39k. Your income would be over 50k a year for sure, but most likely around a strong 6 figures. Now, this also would be with working hours of max 20hrs a week. With the opportunity to walk away from it forever if you wanted to. There isn't anything out there like it with what Amway has to offer and with the support that the Team gives you, trust me I have checked.

This analogy won't fly -- all the comparisons in the world to college don't get around the fact that Amway is at heart still a pyramid scam. There are actual statistics that you can track down directly correlating education level to earning potential. No such thing is offered by Amway, for the simple reason that once you start dumping money down the hole that is Amway's motivational system and overpriced catalog items, the vast majority will never see that money again.

It's financial performance that I'm interested in when analyzing Amway as a business -- not as a business for the owners of Amway, i.e., the DeVos's, etc., but for you, the guy who got in two years ago and is looking to make a buck. And the financial performance on that investment is abysmal, much worse than college.

The Reason why Amway is around today:

You see Amway as it is now, but not what it used to be, if you were to start one exactly like it you would see how difficult it would be to start one up and run such a large and impressive company. If you have done your research which you might have, this business was created by two friends in a basement. It was created to give every American an opportunity for success. Amway stands for the American Way, you probably didn't know that because your to smart to catch the true heart beat of this business and I don't mean that in a bad way. Most people that are really smart lack common since and read into things way to much which in turn makes things more difficult to comprehend.

Yes, I know what Amway stands for. Calling it something like "American Way" is a slick move, because faux patriotism helps to turn off the critical thinking facilities of people who might otherwise be skeptical of a business that isn't so "all-American."

While I will admit a certain morbid admiration for those two guys who, working in their basement thirty years ago, came up with such a sweet scheme to separate guys like you from your money, I don't see how that translates into any value for you getting involved.

Why you Failed as a Distributor:

The problem is that you tried it, and that your a programmer. Why I say the Programming part is b/c as a Programmer your always looking for the problem. The true problem (and this is something I tell everyone I teach on how to do this) is what you see when your looking in the mirror. You are the X factor in the simple equation of the Amway compensation plan, and not only that but in the Game called Life as well. What you do with it is up to you not other people.

Dude. I thought you said you read the story. I'm not a disgruntled Amway worker who gave up after pouring years of sweat into this so-called "business." I didn't get involved. I considered it, did some reading, and realized it would be a tremendous mistake. You, on the other hand, are sitting here after two years of working the business, trying to justify what you do because you were bothered by something that a stranger wrote on the internet.

As a side note about Amway saturating that is only Myth and definitely not true. Let me explain why, Jesus Christ is a great example. He sponsored 12 Disciples and 1 quit and today the world is still not saturated with Christianity. With that equation we are talking about a FREE gift. One with logic would think that would be easier to offer and more excepted then a business with costs involved and risk right? Of course because if you read the good book called the Bible it will tell you in there about the riches stored in heaven to the one who lived by the principles of what is written in the Bible that are much Greater then any treasure on Earth. I am a believer of God Word and I would say that even if I wasn't that I would still except a Gift that is Free no matter if the reward was real or not because then I would have HOPE for a better life in the end.

You're not winning me over with this analogy. I'm an atheist. Of course, religious appeals serve the same purpose as patriotic pitches. They lower your defenses. If somebody comes at you with a pitch and they present themselves as belonging to the same tribe, it makes you more willing to trust them, and not feeling like you need to waste energy trying to detect red flags. It's the oldest trick in the book for confidence men.

Why I truly wrote you:

Well I rambled on long enough, but I do want to say that what you say, the negative you speak about this company will be read by several of thousands of people and unfortunately the world is driven by negative influences and this could turn people away that could truly have what Amway promises if you work hard and stay consistent.

Good! I certainly hope they get driven away. There are lots of useful things those people could be doing to contribute to the world and their own financial well being if they weren't dumping their money into Amway. If those thousands of people wind up ditching Amway for something that works, then the time I spent writing this article all those years ago was well spent.

You might not care and yes you have a freedom of speech which you can express freely, but the thing is that what you speak is False and not 100% True. It may have not worked with you but it doesn't mean that you lie about it to others just because it wasn't right for you.

Now, friend, that's just getting personal. When you accuse me of lying, you are not only saying that I'm wrong, you're saying that I secretly know that Amway is a good business, but I'm trying to turn people away from it even though I know it's not true. That is clearly not the case. You may think I've made a big mistake, but I am being honest when I tell you that I think that the Amway business has very little to recommend it.

Now, if the numbers you wrote were correct then things have truly changed over the years because it doesn't cost $500 to go to a major conference with our team. I just believe do unto others as you would want them to do unto you, so if I offend you please forgive me for doing so but I had to speak truth to you and the truth hurts sometimes.

I'm checking for a source for those figures, and I have at least found this article. It suggests that a big shindig would cost around $100 for a ticket, up to $500 for travel, and money for hotel rooms. While this potentially brings the whole package up above $500, it doesn't cost that much just for the entrance fee. I will check the wording in that article and correct it if I've given a wrong impression. So, thanks for that.

I hope you read this if not at least I tried,

Thanks for reading,

Chris

Cheers!

[Email ends]

I've gotten a follow-up email, which I will reply to in a separate post. After that, I expect to keep the replies on blog comments.

Update: Follow-up message is here. Also, I'd like to mention that the wording in part 2 of my story was misleading and incorrect, so I've changed it to read the following:

"A small event costs you $10, a large event costs you maybe $50, and one of the nation-wide conferences can cost $100 a ticket; factor in travel and lodging, and you could be looking at around $500 or more. Obviously travel is a necessity since not all the meetings will be local, and there's also the kind of errands for each prospect that Ted was running for me: driving a half hour to my house, giving free goodies, and so on."

Play more video games with your kids

Kazim — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:27:00 +0000

Here's a great interview with Dr. Cheryl Olson on the effects of video games on young kids.

Drs. Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner are cofounders of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. They've written a book called Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, based on a study of gaming in individual families. Despite what the title of the book sounds like, it's not the usual stuff about how game addiction is making kids into little sociopaths and we should protect them from it.

My takeaway from the interview is this section:

First, play games with your kids. Find things that you both can enjoy. Young teens who took our survey (and boys in focus group studies) said that they rarely played with a parent, and most would like to. I think more families are playing together now that systems such as the Wii make games more accessible to casual players. If your child is a bit older, ask him to teach you how to play a level of his favorite game. It’s a healthy thing for parent/child relationships for the child to teach the parent something for a change. It’s also a chance for parents to learn more about their child’s interests and strengths.

When you buy games, look for ones that encourage kids to plan and problem-solve (that could be Zoo Tycoon or a Legend of Zelda game). Choose some that allow for collaborative play, with you and/or with friends.

Notice how games affect your child emotionally. A lot of young teens we studied used violent games to cope with angry feelings. That’s probably healthy in moderation, but might be a problem in excess. Some teens use zombie-type games to master fears, playing over and over until they beat the game completely. If a game seems to upset your child, put it away until he’s older. Keep your games with grown-up themes or scary content someplace inaccessible, and only play them when the kids are in bed.

Don’t worry too much about how much time your child spends with games if she has at least one good friend, does well in school, takes out the trash the 3rd time you ask, etc, but be alert to signs of problems. If your child often misses sleep to play games, loses interest in other activities, or is doing poorly in school, the game play may be a problem or, it may be a symptom of another problem, such as depression, that the child is trying to cope with.

As far as I'm concerned, that's all great advice.

(Note: the preceding link is nearly a year old. Since that time, Ben's druid has reached level 45, he's specced as a spellcaster, and his damage is stacking up well against that of many random dungeon teammates.)

Yeah, you can trust me!

Kazim — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:40:00 +0000

My goatee and mustache say that I'm pretty trustworthy, at least if Some Guy On The Internet is to be believed.

And really, would Some Guy lie to you?

However, I'm not quite as trustworthy as my dad, and not nearly as trustworthy as PZ Myers. But then again, who is?

Libertarians and health care

Kazim — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:45:00 +0000

I've been having an email discussion with a libertarian friend of mine about the recent passage of the health care reform bill. While the exchange is already too long to post in its entirety, I did want to put up some excerpts. It started when I received an email blast saying that the bill is an inappropriate use of funds to interfere with the functions of private enterprise.

The first thing I mentioned is that I have a personal interest in the bill's provision that patients cannot be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, as I have already gone through the experience of being denied coverage due to a mild case of high blood pressure that requires me to take some low dosage pills. Luckily, I got a new job later that covered me, and I can now extend the same plan under COBRA if I switch jobs. But it was a tense few months for me.

Later, I wrote:

Me:
Libertarianism has always struck me as a severe case of having only a hammer in your toolbox and perpetually seeking nails. Is the economy doing well? Then it's time to lock in those gains by eliminating regulations. Is the economy doing poorly? There are too many regulations. Is the economy still doing poorly after regulations have been gutted or deliberately unenforced in a particular area? The measures didn't go far enough; the solution is to roll back more of them. When I say that I am results based, what I mean is that you should be willing to actually compare economic conditions during different times or across different countries that have more or less regulation in these areas.

Libertarian "experiments" don't appear to confirm their hypotheses, because countries with varying degrees of regulation don't appear to reflect the claim that an unencumbered economy is a healthy economy. Let me demonstrate with a little on-the-spot research. The United States ranks 38th in a list of countries by life expectancy. Quick spot check. Among the top three countries:

Japan provides healthcare services, including screening examinations for particular diseases at no direct cost to the patient, prenatal care, and infectious disease control, are provided by national and local governments.
Hong Kong has a mixed health care system, with public hospitals being managed by their Department of Health.
Iceland has universal health care.

All three of these countries I just looked up have stronger government involvement in health care than the bill that just passed. By contrast, let's take a look at the bottom three.

In Swaziland, public expenditure on health amounts to 4% of the nation's GDP. This is less than the United States has now (a little over 6%).
In Mozambique, public expenditure on health is about 2.7% of the GDP.
In Zambia, public expenditure on health is about 3.4% of the GDP.

This is the kind of elementary research that I mean when I say that I would prefer evaluation to be driven by outcomes and evidence. Now, granted, health care isn't the only factor in life expectancy. However, there is a clear correlation that seems to belie the assumption that "more public involvement => worse results." Obviously I haven't done an exhaustive survey of all 195 countries on the list. But I'm willing to bet that a completed graph would retain the overall pattern that countries which spend more public dollars on health tend towards higher life expectancies, and vice versa.

Lib:
Of course people are healthier when there is more access to healthcare. The question is, who is better at providing the health care. Governments make the claim to cover everybody. But that's all it is, is a claim. We hear a lot about private insurance companies rejecting individual people's claims. But that's nothing to the number of people rejected by government plans. Just look at Massachusetts.

Me:
I think I've covered this question pretty well by my back-of-the-envelope survey of other countries. But all right -- I took you up on your request and looked. First thing I found was that Massachusetts has the lowest rate of uninsured residents in the country, at 5.5%. It was 8.7% in 2006, before the bill was enacted, so it has dropped significantly. The highest uninsured rate? That would be Texas, illustrious home of no state tax, clocking in at 26.9%.

I also looked for something to corroborate your implication that more claims are denied in Massachusetts than in most other states, but have so far come up empty handed. If you have evidence that Mass's system has enough negatives to offset the very excellent coverage rate, I'm sure you'll let me know. In the meantime, I'll continue my previous theme and take a look at life expectancy by state.

Huh... what do you know? Liberal Massachusetts with their public health program is fifth highest on the list. Texas, with the highest number of uninsured, comes in at 34.

Now, you might fairly regard this as a little bit of sleight of hand, since Mass only enacted their health plan a few years ago, and the results on life expectancy could hardly be expected to be measured thoroughly by now. However, Mass has always been demonized by economic conservatives as being an example of rampant "socialist" liberalism at its worst. So I'm content to have past results of this horror be reflected by the life expectancy now.

In a followup letter, this exchange occurred:

Lib:
The best analysis I've seen of [a nation's economic strength] is the Economic Freedom Index. The way I found out about this web site was a few years back when it made headlines (at least in Europe) that the US was no longer in the top 10...

http://www.heritage.org/index/Ranking.aspx

Me:
That's interesting, but it is begging the question. The Heritage Foundation is a well known conservative economics think tank. Any standard they use for measuring "Economic Freedom" is bound to involve qualities which are in line with the goals of the Heritage Foundation. Such a concept is inherently subjective, and assumes that the things that you want out of a government (i.e., lack of public funding for health care) are for the best. You can probably see why I'm hesitant to accept this as a neutral measure of how good those countries are.

Lib:
[I don't] value life expectancy if it interferes with quality of life. I had the privilege of sitting in on a health panel at Renaissance Weekend last year. There were many doctors and hospital administrators from Massachusetts. They were talking about a patient they refer to as the "Six Million Dollar Man" because there is no limit to what they are obligated to pay to keep this particular patient alive. To continue end of life treatment to this extreme will break the budget if everyone recieved such care.

Me:
You are, again, begging the question. I chose life expectancy because it is a relatively easy to obtain quantification of the overall health of the nation, one which is objective enough that it can't be easily fudged. If all else is equal, I assume you and I would agree that we'd rather live a longer life than a shorter one. (Or as Dave Barry once eloquently put it: "Son, it is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.")

But you've introduced a red herring, in saying "if it interferes with quality of life." Without providing any supporting data to show that quality of life suffers a lot from living in Japan, Hong Kong, or Iceland, this has nothing to do with what I said. If you'd like to pick another neutral measurement of quality of life, make a suggestion. But I'm not taking "The Heritage Foundation likes them" as an answer.

Here's an example of another standard you might pick for "quality of life." There is an organization that takes a snapshot of self-reported happiness by country.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lif_hap_net-lifestyle-happiness-net

DEFINITION: This statistic is compiled from responses to the survey question: "Taking all things together, would you say you are: very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?". The "Happiness (net)" statistic was obtained via the following formula: the percentage of people who rated themselves as either "quite happy" or "very happy" minus the percentage of people who rated themselves as either "not very happy" or "not at all happy".

In a similar vein to my previous message, I note that the top three countries -- Iceland, Sweden, and Denmark, all have universal health care.

Bob Corker challenges Chris Dodd to single combat

Kazim — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:36:00 +0000

I was struggling to remember what this reminds me of:

March 11 (Bloomberg) -- Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said he will release his version of legislation to overhaul financial rules, signaling that talks on a compromise with Republican Bob Corker have collapsed.

...

“I have been fortunate to have a strong partner in Senator Corker and my new proposal will reflect his input and the good work done by many of our colleagues,” Dodd said. “Our talks will continue and it is still our hope to come to agreement on a strong bill all of the Senate can be proud to support.”

...and I finally put my finger on it.

The Democrats have a lead in the House of Representatives of 253 to 178. To put it another way, there are nearly three Democrats for every two Republicans. By historical standards it is a fairly large numerical lead, greater than any advantage Republicans ever had while Clinton and Bush were presidents. And yet to Dems like Dodd, being "bipartisan" means one Democrat negotiating with one Republican.

What it reminds me of: In George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire book series (coming soon as an adaptation on HBO!!) many characters frequently challenge one another to single combat. This actually has a historical basis: sometimes during a war, the outcome would be determined by each side selecting a champion and letting them fight one other to the death. In some cases, the armies would agree to abide by the resolution of the fight, and the side with the losing champion would simply forfeit the battle.

There is a scene I love early in the third book, A Storm of Swords. Jaime Lannister, a prominent sometimes-villain of the series, is being pursued in a boat by agents of the enemy Tully family, who intend to catch him and bring him to justice. With capture imminent by a small squad of Tully warriors, Jaime taunts the captain, asking if he is brave enough to face him in single combat. Unsurprisingly, the captain shouts back words to the effect that he isn't that gullible, and he elects to keep his forty or so soldiers in the fight against three people.

Chris Dodd is that gullible.

Bob Corker challenges Chris Dodd to single combat

Kazim — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:36:00 +0000

I was struggling to remember what this reminds me of:

Presidential video… cute but not that funny

Kazim — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:05:00 +0000

So this video has been making the rounds on the internet. Am I the only one who doesn't find it particularly funny?

Ron Howard managed to pull together all the living past presidential impersonators from Saturday Night Live into one all-star sketch. That's an accomplishment in itself. And they apparently shot it in fifteen hours. Also impressive, or so I'm told.

I am a fan of old SNL and like every one of the performers -- yes, including Jim Carrey (the only non-SNL guy on set) as Reagan. Each guy goes through the motions of all the quirks they used to give these characters. Dana Carvey says silly disjointed things, Will Ferrell acts clueless, Chevy Chase falls down, etc. But it just seemed like they forgot to add any jokes. Also, the inspirational message didn't inspire me all that much.

As a nostalgia trip, thumbs up. As a comedy routine, not so much. Also, it goes without saying that I miss the late Phil Hartman an awful lot. His portrayals of both Reagan and Clinton could run circles around most of those guys.

Presidential video… cute but not that funny

Kazim — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:05:00 +0000

Social media resembles magically multiplying broomsticks

Kazim — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:53:00 +0000

For a few weeks I've been a member of Google Buzz. Because of my ever expanding list of automatically updated sites, here's how posting stuff works:

I write a new blog post.
The link gets forwarded to Twitter.
My Twitter feed in turn gets forwarded to Facebook and Buzz.
At that point, I am equally likely to receive comments on Buzz, FB, or in the comments of the post itself.

The additional exposure for said posts is quite nice, because there are people on each site who don't pay attention to some of the other three feeds. However, it is tough to converse about a topic when the discussion is split three ways. Also, the blog posts themselves look a lot lonelier with the shorter comment threads.

Social media resembles magically multiplying broomsticks

Kazim — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:53:00 +0000

For a few weeks I've been a member of Google Buzz. Because of my ever expanding list of automatically updated sites, here's how posting stuff works:

I write a new blog post.
The link gets forwarded to Twitter.
My Twitter feed in turn gets forwarded to Facebook and Buzz.
At that point, I am equally likely to receive comments on Buzz, FB, or in the comments of the post itself.

A comic genius has died

Kazim — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

John Reed Dies at 94

I won't be surprised if most of you never heard of the guy.

Here's a semi-obscure fact about me: I love Gilbert and Sullivan plays. Love em. I can rattle off the plot lines and characters of ten of their major plays, and have at one time or another memorized at least one song from each of these, and in many cases a significant chunk of the score. (But I'm not gay! Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

A large part of the credit goes to my father, who took my sister and me to see HMS Pinafore when I was eleven. The production was so good that he hired the director to handle a family-only production of The Mikado for my bar mitzvah, in which I played the role of Koko, the comic lead.

Dad was also an early adopter of the brand new audio technology known as Compact Discs, in the early 1980's. Some of the first CD audio recordings he bought for his extensive classical music library were soundtracks from the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and I think every single one of them featured John Reed in a major role.

See, G&S operettas are almost universally comedies, and I love comedy, but the major plot is usually some quasi-serious topic involving a love story with some significant and frequently bizarre obstacles. So there are a lot of famous songs that are essentially love ballads, and I tend to skip past those. The part that I like is where the funny guy shows up, who is either a walking satire of some trope of Victorian England, or makes wry and sarcastic observations about such tropes. This guy's signature song tends to be very rapid paced and difficult to say. Not only does he have to provide spot-on comic timing and delivery, but he has to flawlessly spit out tongue twisters, on pitch and at as fast a tempo as possible. These are called "patter songs."

That was John Reed's gig. If you know any of his material, it will probably be "I am the very model of a modern major general" from The Pirates of Penzance. He also played my role, Koko in The Mikado, and I'm sure that at 13 years old I shamelessly ripped off his performance as much as I was able to. His other roles included a prancing, self-absorbed poet who represented Oscar Wilde, a self-deprecating impoverished nobleman, and a lecherous old judge... among many others.

When I was a teenager I went to a summer camp in Colorado, and each year after the month of camp ended, we always went to the University of Colorado in Boulder where John Reed had taken over the theatrical organization and cranked out a new Gilbert and Sullivan production every year. He was about 70 years old at this point, but he kept on stealing the show when he managed to show up in his traditional parts, or wrung a similarly excellent performance out of whatever younger actor was available to replace him when he couldn't go on. A highlight of these shows was that the funniest songs would get a series of encores, each one more over the top and wackier than the last.

John Reed made to 94, and it seems to me like he had an unusually long, enjoyable, and hilarious career. So as a sign-off for one of my favorite performers of all time, I'll toss off a verse from Jack Point, his character in Yeoman of the Guard, for comedians and Fools of all generations:

I can set a braggart quailing with a quip,
The upstart I can wither with a whim;
He may wear a merry laugh upon his lip,
But his laughter has an echo that is grim!
When they're offered to the world in merry guise,
Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will -
For he who'd make his fellow creatures wise
Should always gild the philosophic pill!

A comic genius has died

Kazim — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

I can set a braggart quailing with a quip,
The upstart I can wither with a whim;
He may wear a merry laugh upon his lip,
But his laughter has an echo that is grim!
When they're offered to the world in merry guise,
Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will -
For he who'd make his fellow creatures wise
Should always gild the philosophic pill!

Starcraft II beta impressions

Kazim — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

I am in the Starcraft II beta thanks to a connection who shall remain anonymous unless he chooses to identify himself. Thanks, anonymous awesome guy!

I won't necessarily post many updates on this blog, but feel free to follow my initial impressions and the ensuing discussion on this thread at the Motley Fool. If any new threads start on the same board, you can keep an eye on my participation here.

Starcraft II beta impressions

Kazim — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Other blog activity

Kazim — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Just so you know I'm not slacking off on blogging as much as it may look like, I have a few new items on my ever growing number of different places where I write stuff.

New post Castles of Air: Angle math.

Four (yes really!) posts on politics and video games, at my new Daily Kos diary, which I have decided to refer to as "Politics in Plate Mail." Enjoy!

Also, I just joined Google Buzz with my gmail identity, russell.glasser. If you are on Buzz then feel free to add me. You probably won't learn any more from that than you would from reading my Twitter or Facebook feeds; they all update more or less simultaneously. But if you like to collect social media sources, there's another one for you.

Oh and one more thing... Lynnea and I will probably go watch Roy Zimmerman perform at a UU church on Sunday (Valentine's Day evening), assuming we can get tickets once we show up at the door. So if you like Roy, come on over and sit with us!

Other blog activity

Kazim — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Arianna Huffington was very, very wrong

Kazim — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:54:00 +0000

I heard something recently that reminded me of something that happened in the 2008 presidential race. During those last few weeks, Arianna Huffington (of Huffington Post fame/infamy) seemed to be appearing on every lefty radio talk show and news show to offer her opinion that Democrats were making a terrible, terrible mistake by focusing on Sarah Palin. They were taking the bait, so to speak. I don't want to listen to all those interviews, but here's an editorial she wrote:

Every second of this campaign not spent talking about the Republican Party's record, and John McCain's role in that record, is a victory for John McCain.

Her critics like to say that Palin hasn't accomplished anything. I disagree: in the space of ten days she's succeeded in distracting the entire country from the horrific Bush record -- and McCain's complicity in it. My friends, that's accomplishment we can believe in.

Then Huffington would go on to say that Democrats are only making themselves appear petty and perhaps sexist by focusing on the many, many shortcomings of the eleventh hour VP nominee that McCain shoehorned into his train wreck of a campaign.

But she was absolutely wrong. Focusing on Sarah Palin was awesome. Making the campaign all about Sarah Palin and the terrible error of judgment that McCain made in drafting her was much better than running a campaign against the perceived heroism of McCain himself. They exposed an obvious weak spot. And after all this time, it's become all the more clear that Sarah Palin just wasn't qualified for the job.

I hardly even think that's a matter of opinion anymore. After Sarah's hee-larious book tour in which she was caught reading crib notes off of her hand, popular perception of her has plummeted, to the point where a new poll shows that 55% of Republicans do not now think she is qualified to be president.

55%. Of Republicans. And the question wasn't "Is Sarah Palin the best candidate?" or "Would you vote for Sarah Palin over Barack Obama (or some other candidate). It was "do you think Palin is or is not qualified to serve as president?" And most Republicans don't think she is.

Look, there are not always two sides to every story. Sometimes an individual person just obviously is not up for the job. Sarah Palin appealed to a very narrow demographic which only got narrower, as fewer and fewer people were comfortable with aggressively defending this clueless loon as their future president, no matter how much she appealed to their jingoism. It's simply not a reflection on any broad category she belongs to (i.e., women) to point this out.

Arianna Huffington was very, very wrong

Kazim — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:54:00 +0000

Every second of this campaign not spent talking about the Republican Party's record, and John McCain's role in that record, is a victory for John McCain.

Her critics like to say that Palin hasn't accomplished anything. I disagree: in the space of ten days she's succeeded in distracting the entire country from the horrific Bush record -- and McCain's complicity in it. My friends, that's accomplishment we can believe in.

Olbermann vs. Stewart

Kazim — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:31:00 +0000

I watch The Daily Show on my laptop over breakfast each day, and then I listen to Countdown on my drive to work. So I followed both sides of this exchange in near real time after a short lag.

Jon Stewart was absolutely right to call out Keith Olbermann as crossing a line. As someone who has tried to cultivate his "Edward R. Murrow" persona of serious commentary mixed with a little rabble rousing, Olbermann should have known better. When you are reduced to complaining about swearing in front of kids, or not taking the time to disavow every crazy thing an audience member shouts, you're not pursuing truth, you're just grasping at something to justify your position.

It's Keith's response in the last 30 seconds of the clip, though, that makes him still a class act in my book. When Jon Stewart went after Jim Cramer, Cramer got involved in an embarrassing week long pissing match before ultimately coming on the Daily Show and admitting that he was, in fact, full of it. Olbermann actually listened to the criticism, thought about it, and backed off rather than escalating.

Extra kudos to Stewart for calling out a guy who would ordinarily be an ally, and for being right.

Olbermann vs. Stewart

Kazim — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:31:00 +0000

Whites-only basketball. You have GOT to be kidding.

Kazim — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:35:00 +0000

Via Think Progress:

“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here’s a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.” [...]

He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas’ indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans’ dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.

“Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?” he said. “That’s the culture today, and in a free country we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction.”

This isn't from the Onion, but I'm still suspicious that it's a joke. A joke that took in the Augusta Chronicle, sure, but as I survey the stories around the web they all seem to use that one article as a source. The guy who proposed this, Don "Moose" Lewis, appears to be a real person, a pro wrestler. Either he's really that stupid, or he's staging an event to deliberately foster an "evil" persona, for the ongoing soap-opera-for-men that is wrestling.

Whites-only basketball. You have GOT to be kidding.

Kazim — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:35:00 +0000

Via Think Progress:

“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here’s a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.” [...]

He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas’ indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans’ dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.

“Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?” he said. “That’s the culture today, and in a free country we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction.”

Breaking news: Democrats suck at politics

Kazim — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:37:00 +0000

Stuff like this makes me repeatedly bonk my head in annoyance.

Under Massachusetts law, it'll probably take 10 days for the election of Scott Brown to be certified and for Brown to be sworn in as a Senator. Nothing nefarious -- that's just how orderly transfers of power work in a democratic system. Consequently, Paul Kirk will continue to serve as Senator up until the point that Brown is properly sworn in.

Barney Frank, God love him, doesn't think Kirk counts:

"I know some of my Democratic colleagues had been thinking about ways to, in effect, get around the results by working in various parliamentary ways, looking at the rules, trying to get a health care bill passed that would have been the same bill that would have passed if [MA AG] Martha Coakley [D] had won, and I think that's a mistake," Frank said. "I will not support an effort to push through a House-Senate compromise bill despite an election. I'm disappointed in how it came out, but I think electoral results have to be respected."

Jim Webb agrees, except ever so more so:

"In many ways the campaign in Massachusetts became a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process," Mr. Webb said. “It is vital that we restore the respect of the American people in our system of government and in our leaders. To that end, I believe it would only be fair and prudent that we suspend further votes on health care legislation until Senator-elect Brown is seated."

I watched a Daily Show episode this week in which Jon Stewart said something along these lines: "Oh. So apparently what is going to kill Obama's agenda is having only 59 allies in the Senate, which is more than the number that George Bush ever had, back when he did pretty much whatever the [bleeped] he wanted."

But as dumb as the new normal is, where Senate Republicans filibuster every bill every time regardless of content, what is even more stupid is that even leading Senators find it so easy to cut and run.

If Tom Delay had ever commanded a filibuster-proof Republican majority, which was about to end in two weeks, would he have said, "Aw shucks fellas, I guess we'd better put all legislation on hold in order to be fair to the Democrats"? Fuck, NO. What Tom Delay would have done was rush to cram as much legislation as possible into the next two weeks, in order to take maximum advantage of the existing time window.

Look, Democrats. Do I like it that the Senate is now this cutthroat, where both parties need to use every possible political trick in order to gain the upper hand? No. But it is what it is -- if you don't use every opportunity to get what you want, then you get steamrolled by Republicans, who have no such scruples.

Why so many Warcraft pickup group players are bad

Kazim — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

I hate to indulge in another World of Warcraft post, but I don't have a separate gaming blog. Maybe I should start one, but I'm already stretched thin across three blogs, so it's going here. For you non-gamers, feel free to skip this post, unless it captures your interest. It's got some philosophical bits about teamwork and interpersonal relationships, so there's that.

I like patch 3.3, which introduced the ability to join random groups across multiple servers. Running instances is a lot quicker in general, and especially quick if you happen to be a tank, which I am. (Here's Vinpricent, level 80 protection paladin.) Lining up for a PUG (pickup group) takes about 20 minutes or so if you're a damage dealer, five minutes or less if you're a healer, and two seconds if you're a tank. I have at least one of each at various levels, so I've seen this difference frequently. It's because tanking is a more demanding and stressful role that most players do not like, but it's a ton of fun when done competently.

At least half of the PUGs I join have competent and friendly players, run smoothly, and are a pleasure to play. But I encounter bad PUGgers pretty regularly, and I think I've identified a common theme.

Many of these people are highly skilled as individual players, but they have a play style which does not tolerate any less than perfection from anyone else in the group. Everyone is assumed to be a flawless player, and if they fall short of this ideal, it is always the team's fault and not theirs.

Anecdote 1: The super damage dealer

I am training up a friend who is new to the game. He started a paladin of his own, so I encouraged him to try tanking. I was playing a low level mage with him.

We grouped with a low level hunter who was loaded to the hilt with heirlooms. I'm a pretty capable DPS ordinarily, but this guy is outpacing me by about 3-1 according to Recount. This is a big problem for an inexperienced tank, who cannot hope to keep with that much threat. Monsters are attacking him constantly. To add to the annoyance, this is another one of those guys who will race ahead and attack more groups first, if the tank is not moving fast enough for his needs.

I say "Look, dude, you have great DPS, but our tank is inexperienced and you need to let him establish threat a little more." He responds by saying that he ALWAYS beats everyone in DPS, and it's never a problem. He also does not want to turn off Growl on his pet, since he knows his pet will need to keep monsters off of HIM.

This is actually the most frequent kind of bad player I see. Some DPS players believe that maximizing damage is their only job, and they don't notice or don't care when their personal style is hurting the team.

Anecdote 2: The bully healer

Mistakes happen. People die. Sometimes it's easy to identify who's at fault. Sometimes it's not.

I'm tanking Prince Keleseth, a boss who freezes random players in ice tombs, making them take damage and preventing actions. Ordinarily the DPS should attack the tomb and break it. Unfortunately, the healer gets entombed, and nobody helps him. We have solid DPS and I can survive well, so we survive, but the healer dies moments before the encounter ends. There is no wipe.

He starts cursing and yelling that it's MY fault (bear in mind that he was nowhere near me when he got entombed). He demands the shard I won as "payment" for letting him die. I give it to him, not wanting to jeopardize the run over his tantrum. As the encounter goes on, he starts barking instructions and acting frustrated when they are not followed, even though we move through at a fairly rapid clip with no other deaths.

Finally, another player and I shut him up. I say "Listen, chill out or quit the group. I'm a tank, I can have another group in 3 seconds. You died once, it is not worth the emotional response you're giving." He says that when he's done he'll go back and play with his top tier guild, whose members are much better than me. Finally I say "Yeah, but you'll still be a big whiner." As we approach the final boss I tell our shadow priest out loud: "Please be ready to off-heal in case he rage-quits in the middle." He doesn't quit.

Anecdote 3: The lunatic

Another healer here, the instant the instance is entered he starts saying "Start chain pulling, this is too easy for me." Gamely I start establishing aggro on a group at a time, moving ahead before a group is fully beaten. He keeps saying "Full mana! I'm bored! PULL FASTER!"

So I pull faster. When there are too many mobs on us already, the group gets feared, pulling even more. I can't get enough aggro, the healer is too far away to be useful. Wipe. I feel stupid for listening to him.

The thing is, even if you have skills which work effectively with perfect groups -- high DPS, big mana pool for healing, the ability to chain-pull as a tank without regard for how well your healer is keeping up -- stuff happens. Patrols hit you, healers go OOM, the tank can't pull the mobs back from your overpowered leather-armor-wearing jerk butt. And when unexpected things happen, if you were playing to the point where you were just barely not dying, that will quickly change from "only mostly dead" to "all dead" pretty quick.

That's why I'm a conservative player no matter what role I'm in. I don't pull more than we can handle; I let my healer mana stay near the full end and don't complain; I watch Omen and switch targets or STOP dealing damage if we have a weak tank.

I just can't believe that so many players have a hard time comprehending the fact that if you have a play style which increases the likelihood of a wipe, you will progress MORE slowly than a group that is cautious and survives.

Festina Lente -- the more haste, the less speed.