What do the gods believe? Exactly what I do, of course!!

Below is part of a commentary from this blog (the commentary on this post is also worth reading):

For many religious people, the popular question "What would Jesus do?" is essentially the same as "What would I do?" That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago.[1] Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people's mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point, which colours their final conclusions. Epley found that the same process happens, and then some, when people try and divine the mind of God. Their opinions on God's attitudes on important social issues closely mirror their own beliefs. If their own attitudes change, so do their perceptions of what God thinks. They even use the same parts of their brain when considering God's will and their own opinions.

Religion provides a moral compass for many people around the world, colouring their views on everything from martyrdom to abortion to homosexuality. But Epley's research calls the worth of this counsel into question, for it suggests that inferring the will of God sets the moral compass to whatever direction we ourselves are facing. He says, "Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs."

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[1] Nicholas Epley, et al., "Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 21533-21538.

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More important than the 2nd Amendment

Here is another clear example of how Supreme Court decisions undermine the democratic process[1]:

The Supreme Court threw out a 63-year-old law designed to restrain the influence of big business and unions on elections Thursday, ruling that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress. . . .

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, speaking for the four other conservative justices, had the audacity to characterize the thin framework of campaign finance regulation in this country as "censorship" that was "vast in its reach." Let me try to understand this reasoning: Setting up a framework to keep multi-billion dollar corporations from literally purchasing their candidates of choice is censorship, but ignoring voting irregularities in Florida in the 2000 presidential election is not censorship, somehow.

I agree with Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote in his dissent Thursday that "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation." It is precisely these kinds of Supreme Court decisions that erode the fundamental meaning of "democracy." This decision fosters and perpetuates inequality by eroding even the thin veil of illusion that elections in this country are open, fair, and representative. Because corporations are considered legal entities, they are afforded access to the election system that is equal to any citizen of this country. To put it in stark terms: The Supreme Court has just ruled that multi-billion dollar corporation Wal*Mart has the same right to contribute to election campaigns as the single mother of two children living in poverty and receiving food stamps. It takes no specialist in political science to see that this "equality" is, in fact, state-sanctioned egregious inequality.

This kind of Supreme Court decision is vastly more relevant than any kind of restriction on Second Amendment rights, yet will likely not receive anywhere near the public outcry that, say, an attempt to remove the "gun show loophole." It is more relevant because a political system open only to the rich will establish policies and influence media representations to perpetuate this restrictive system, and the fact that there are tens of thousands of people scattered throughout the country with white-knuckled grip on their pistols and rifles, concerned only with protecting their selves and small fiefdoms, will matter not a whit -- particularly if these gun owners are convinced to continue to vote to support the system because the media they receive about elections is not balanced in any meaningful way by a functional campaign finance reform structure.

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[1] Others include: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); Texas' 2003 congressional redistricting plan; and, of course, Bush v. Gore (2000).

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Environmentalism as a secular religion

Below is an interesting post that came over the H-Enviro list serve recently, inviting other scholars to put together a panel of 3-4 papers to be delivered at the upcoming American Historical Association (AHA) conference. The author of this post, Prof. Richard Deese (History, Northeastern University), raises some interesting questions.

One source I have read that addresses similar points is: Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest, Seattle, Wash., University of Washington Press, 2004.

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From: RS Deese rsdeese@gmail.com
Date: 1/12/2010 10:08 AM
Subject: AHA 2011 Panel Proposal: Environmentalism as "Secular Religion"

"There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible." ----Freeman Dyson, "The Question of Global Warming" New York Review of Books, vol 55, no. 10. June 12, 2008

In recent decades, the environmentalist movement has been branded as a "secular religion". I would like to put together a panel for the 2011 AHA in Boston that addresses this framing of environmental activism and explores the following questions, among others: First, to what extent is the label of "secular religion" merely a rhetorical device to undermine the scientific credibility of environmentalists, and to what extent is it an accurate description of the movement, or influential factions thereof? Second, what elements of religion, if any, are influential in environmental discourse, and what elements are not? And, third, are the religious dimensions of environmental thought and activism, if they are in fact significant, a liability or an asset in achieving the goals and objectives shared by most environmentalists?

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The Value of Nothing with Raj Patel

Raj Patel was on KUOW's Weekday program recently, speaking about his new book, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy.

Raj Patel argues that we need to change our current economic system and find new ways of assigning value to the world's resources.

Among the things he discussed was the idea of the commons. One of his arguments is that there is strong evidence of effective communal management of resources, disproving the contention of Garrett Hardin and other economists that there are only two possible ways to avoid "the tragedy of the commons": the preferred "free" market system and the reprehensible government regulation & oversight.

Patel also discusses food systems & regional agriculture models, such as food policy councils.

Raj Patel's blog.

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"The greater demonic scheme being played out in the 'last days'"

In the interest of providing you all with light Sunday afternoon reading:

Transcript of Christopher Hitchens' interview with Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell for the Jan. 2010 issue of the Portland Monthly.

A response from Tom Krattenmaker in the Oregonian.

(How does one say "can of worms" in Español?)

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What is "Public History?"

The recent issue of the National Council on Public History's newsletter drew my attention to the "public history" page on Wikipedia. The NCPH has this to say:

Projects like Wikipedia may be the ultimate in "shared authority"--vast collaborative knowledge projects that invite and incorporate a wide range of voices within a more-or-less agreed-upon framework of presentation. Less than a decade old, Wikipedia is now the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, and surely one of the most contentious. Techno-visionaries praise it for its radical openness (its content is created and edited by users) while educators bemoan the uncritical way that many students have come to use it for one-stop information-shopping. It is a world not unlike public history and it's also one of the most frequently consulted online sources, so whatever definition of public history appears there is a visible and potentially influential one.

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Bamboozling in its purest form

Wow . . . almost unbelievable.

After you visit this link, you're likely to have a similar range of thoughts.

It astounds me that there are people and groups out there who peddle such blatant lies, given that anyone with an Internet connection can do 15 minutes of research to expose them. Either they're stupid, they're betting that we're stupid, or they're just pandering to knee-jerk conservatives who won't question the commercial when it comes across their screens between segments of American Idol.*

This part of the link is my favorite:

If they're [the No on 66/67 gang] so concerned with creating jobs in Oregon, why didn't they film the spot in Oregon?

The answer, of course, is that the "the No on 66/67 gang" doesn't actually care at all about jobs & small business vitality in this state -- they're only blowing smoke to cover for large corporations.

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* Maybe all three.

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Learn to Speak Teabag

Haha! This is funny:



Of course it's over-simplified and left-leaning, but not without it's grain of truth:



. . . check out this one as well:



(Hmmmm . . . maybe the cartoon is not an oversimplification, after all?)

Here's the apology from NPR for hosting the cartoon in the opinion section of their site.

What do you all think of the NPR Ombudsman's take on this issue, in response to people who criticized the cartoon?

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Aha! Global Climate Change and Media Mis-Representation

This article makes a point that I've heard about for years but that I hadn't yet taken the time to research to any significant degree. Specifically, this article "demonstrates that US prestige-press[1] coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse."

The above quote is from the article abstract. The rest of the abstract is written in academese:

This failed discursive translation results from an accumulation of tactical media responses and practices guided by widely accepted journalistic norms. Through content analysis of US prestige press . . . this paper focuses on the norm of balanced reporting, and shows that the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.

The takeaway here his that these researchers have found evidence that the print media's top-of-the-food-chain has misrepresented scientific evidence on global climate change[2] to make it seem as if the issue is much more scientifically contentious than it is. What this means is that the general public does not have as complex or complete an understanding of climate science as it should have. This suggests to me that there are underlying political, religious, and economic factors at work here that override scientific evidence.

I'm not at all naïve enough not to understand the repercussions of Thomas Kuhn's work, nor the basic Marxian interpretation of the influence of capital on media systems. This said, it still strikes me as highly lamentable that the masses in the U.S. can be so easily manipulated, and that the media in this country tend to be so corrupt.[3]

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[1] Meaning, in this case, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

[2] AKA "global warming." Don't get me started.

[3] Yes, I was just born yesterday.

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Fringe Conservatism

David Greenberg discusses in Slate.com the phenomenon of far right-wing conservatism [italics mine]:

But when we're caught in the throes of our own contentious moment, it hardly seems possible to separate the political need to fight irrationalism and zealotry from the psycho-sociological project of distilling the motives of extremists. It's natural, even necessary, to try to make sense of a movement that appears--to many of us, at any rate--delusional. But the most that history, or historians, can do is what [Richard] Hofstadter did in the first half of the "Paranoid Style": point to the many antecedents of today's right-wing fantasies and, by putting them in historical context, making them more comprehensible and perhaps less fearsome.

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Such pretty colors, and such interesting repercussions!

This Polish electoral map of 2007 echoes division between imperial German and imperial/soviet Russia. It's a fascinating study of how contingencies in time represent themselves in space, and how pretty colors and lines on maps can highlight these contingencies and tell us a thing or two about a thing or two.

The blog post highlighted above is much more articulate about the specific time and space considerations involved, trust me.

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Beer Mapping Project. Yum.

Portland Beer Mapping Project.

So many colorful dots, so little time.

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Museum of the City

The Oregonian today featured Chet Orloff's Museum of the City project:

The Museum of the City will be on the Internet. The project, with international backing, will create a Web site that visitors will enter through a "lobby" leading to the museum's "wings" and "galleries" then to exhibits, the number of which could be infinite.

But unlike a traditional museum, Orloff says amateurs will be welcome. Along the same lines as the Web resource Wikipedia, anyone anywhere will be able to submit an exhibit to the Museum of the City, and if the professional curators approve, it will join the collection, and the author will become an assistant curator.

"I have this belief," Orloff said, "that the more people know about the place where they live, generally the better they can take care of it. I have another belief that the better we understand how our communities work, the better informed we're going to be and, theoretically, the better citizens we'll be."

This is an intriguing project, in-line with the goals of making history more accessible and making the generation of historical narratives more democratic.

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Fixing Congress

(Below is in response to a forwarded email I received, titled "This is How You Fix Congress." Full text in many places, including here.)

Congress definitely needs some fixing, that's for sure. In the midst of the pre-holiday health care bill wranglings in December, I read interesting opinion pieces by E. J. Dionne and Paul Krugman (that I reference here). Regardless of one's opinion about the substance of the health care bill, a key point that Dionne and Krugman both made was to show how anti-democratic are the rules of the Senate that enable a single Senator to hold up the entire legislative process in order to receive pork/kickbacks/bribes (etc.). One way to fix Congress would be to make impossible this kind of shenanigan.

A diet to address deep human needs of some kind

The first section of dana's EotAW post "Quickish hits" comments on the caveman diet. She provides an outline of a "fad diet" that the caveman and other diets seem to comply with, to wit:

If we analyze it conceptually, we can see a fad diet consists of the following elements: a) a ban or near ban on pre-packaged foods b) a ban or near ban on one kind of macronutrient c) some form of calorie restriction d) an exhortation to exercise and e) a story about why this is so, the more romantic the better.

I wonder to what extent you think this outline corresponds to other fad diets -- the misuse of the Master Cleanse, for example? If this outline applies broadly, what is it about this structure that fulfills some human need and is, therefore, prone to repetition?

I invite people to include comments that list other such diets.

Dana's outline above reminds me of part of what Lady Presenter said at the end of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life:

Now, here's the meaning of life. . . . Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations . . .

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Toot the "country folk" horn instead

There's a section in the Oregonian editorial below (highlighted in bold italics) that is composed of a number of fallacies and is, therefore, inaccurate in its details. However, in its substance and structure it is illustrative of a few important points.


First, the fallacies:

** "A lot of us country folks . . ." is an argumentum ad populum, or appeal to the people to assert the rightness or correctness of something.

** "A lot of us country folks . . ." is also fallacious because it's based on anecdotal evidence: Where's the data to back up this assertion?

** ". . . as far back as when 'green' was simply a color, not a statement. Back then . . ." is an argumentum ad antiquitatem, or the assertion that a thing is right or good because it's old.

** The sentence "it seems to me that everybody recycling an empty toilet paper roll expects to get a Congressional Gold Medal" is an example of an argumentum ad hominem fallacy: Undermining the value or integrity of an individual or group as a way to support one's argument.

** The letter as a whole illustrates an implied fallacy of bifurcation in that it attempts to set up a false dichotomy: contemporary urban people who think they're being sustainable are not sustainable, whereas "us country folks" are sustainable and have been for a long, long while.

** The letter as a whole also illustrates the straw man fallacy, because by using anecdotes and over-simplifications, the writer misrepresents the position(s) of people trying to incorporate more sustainable practices into contemporary society; these misrepresented positions are then much easier to debunk ("everybody recycling an empty toilet paper roll expects to get a Congressional Gold Medal") than the fully articulated and contextualized positions of the advocates.


Now, some of the interrelated points this editorial illustrates:

** The propensity to over-simplify positions of those they see as opponents (the "straw man" fallacy).

** The propensity to mythologize historical developments ("us country folks have been 'environmentally friendly' as far back as . . .") so as to characterize their position as preferred to another.

** The propensity to assign superior moral attributes to one's point of view ("'common sense,' . . . or just 'the right thing to do'") while belittling another's point of view.

These patterns seem to repeat themselves in all kinds of subject areas debated in the public sphere. It's disheartening. As often as I see this kind of thing, I'm compelled to conclude that a significant portion of the voting public isn't adequately prepared to participate in the democratic process because they lack the critical thinking skills to be more than pawns for one ideologue or another.

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Stop tooting green horn

Thank you so much for your recent report on sustainability. It has greatly inspired me, up to the point to where I seriously considered cancelling my subscription to The Oregonian. You see, taking the weight of Friday's paper at 10.7 ounces as an average, I could save a good 244 pounds of paper each year, maybe even more. (I'll let your green experts figure out how many trees or partial trees that would make).

A lot of us country folks have been "environmentally friendly" as far back as when "green" was simply a color, not a statement. Back then, it was called "common sense," "saving money" or just "the right thing to do" (a k a "decency"), and nobody bragged about it.

Nowadays it seems to me that everybody recycling an empty toilet paper roll expects to get a Congressional Gold Medal. Naturally, they would then loudly broadcast the fact that they recycled the bubble wrap it came in.

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Hilligoss, Hillygus

I must be related to Candace Hilligoss some how, as well as Sunshine Hillygus.

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Green Garbage

Here's a fascinating project: The Green Garbage Project[1]:

Welcome to the official Web site of the 2009-2010 Green Garbage Project. This site will chronicle a year in which a (fairly) typical American married couple endeavors to live for a year without throwing away … well, anything. Impossible, you say? We don’t think so, but we aim to find out.

For one year, from July 6, 2009 to July 6, 2010, we aim to live without producing garbage that winds up in a landfill.

May be inspired by the film "Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home.

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[1] I found this link through this article in the Oregonian.

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Portland's Zidell Marine site on the South Waterfront

The Oregonian recently ran two articles (here and here) about the Zidell Marine site in Portland's South Waterfront area. The site is on the west side of the Willamette, bisected by the Ross Island Bridge and abutting the north edge of all those new towers down there.

The issues raised in this and this article involve at least two complex and longstanding themes that reflect society's changing values. One theme is the conflict that often arises as land uses change over time, pitting long-established uses with more economically lucrative development opportunities. The other is the need to clean up environmental hazards based on previous land uses. It's here at the pivotal moments of these changes & conflicts that we historians like to poke around a bit, write up some things, and, thereby, try to make some sense of.

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What might the Ukraine & the U.S.A. have in common?

This is kind of haunting and I wanted to share it.

I won't pretend to be able to offer the kind of analysis on the topic of our involvement in Afghanistan that so many other people are much more qualified to offer. However, I can't help but feel like we're in an end-of-empire-style quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq.

With all due respect to our brothers & sisters in arms: G. W. Bush* is a lamentable & unforgivable buffoon for getting us involved in this quagmire.

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* By which I mean, of course, the entire entourage of neoconservatives & power-hungry war mongers who got us involved in this mess, of which G. W. was the most visible icon.

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Science Friday Archives: The Evolution of Beer

(history + genetic science)beer = Fun!

Science Friday Archives: The Evolution of Beer

Posted using ShareThis

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A Jebus by any other name . . .

Here's an interesting piece on the frequency of the name Jesus back in Jesus' day (and before).

I'm particularly fascinated by the part about the name Jesus being derived from the name Yehoshua, which, in turn, is also translated as Yeshua and Joshua. These different translations came in to the Bible when written in different languages -- Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, English -- and illustrates, once again, the substance of one of my primary critiques of Biblical literalism: How can literalists & fundamentalists be so certain that the Bible condemns abortion, considers homosexuality a sin, and generally supports Republicans, if even the name Jebus itself is open to so many interpretations?

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The Big Questions

Fascinating show on Talk of the Nation the other day about "Tackling 'The Big Questions' of Life" featuring Steven Landsburg's book The Big Questions and his blog, thebigquestions.com/blog.

Referring to the radio segment, I find fascinating Landsburg's proposition that most debates occur between people who don't really know what they're talking about and center on belief claims that people don't necessarily hold very strongly (with strength of belief defined as to the extent that the belief guides all aspects of their lives). From this proposition, Landsberg then argues that if debaters held more allegiance to truth value and less allegiance to the primacy of their egos there would be much less conflict and much more agreement in the world. All of this sounds plausible to me.

However, in reviewing some of the entries and discussions on Landburg's blog, his goal is to reduce all things to expressions of mathematics & logic. This can be a fun game to play for people equipped with sufficient education & privilege, but it seems to me that such things quickly get to the "how many angels on the head of a pin?" kind of discussion (see the comment thread on this post, for example).

Undoubtedly, I don't grasp fully the scope and repercussions of complex mathematical theorizing, so I'm likely missing something. However, it's fun to give myself these kinds of intellectual cerebral electroshocks from time to time!

On another note, what about the comment Landsburg made toward the end of the radio segment about it being fallacious for someone to assert an allegiance to a religion and at the same time admit any kind of truth value in any other aspect of any other religion? He says that belief in a religion by definition means the belief that all other religions are false. On one level this seems like a plausible conclusion to me, because the Judeaochristlamic religions, in particular, refer quite explicitly to the kinds of deaths that will befall unbelievers in the present world and the hereafter. But what about B'hai, Buddhists, and Unitarians? These religions seem to approach the issue differently. Maybe Landsburg doesn't see these latter three spiritual practices as "religions" in the same sense?

The deeper issue for me in this example is the notion that one can't simultaneously hold two mutually exclusive beliefs in one's head. I'll write about this some more some time in the future, because it seems to me that people do, in fact, do so, but I don't have time to write about this now.

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"Because the environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America . . ."

Who do we blame when we're looking for ways to reduce complex, multi-variate, living systems to soundbites & platitudes?

The scapegoats, of course!

These rascally scapegoats always seem to be the ones to which simplistic, ideologically-driven explanations will adequately apply.

In the case of the forward-forward-forward email that Seth alerted me to (produced below for your reference), it's those dastardly "environmentalists" and the evil, catch-all "others" who are standing in the way of American progress.

You'll find Seth's reply to this email in a comment to this blog post. He approaches the substance of the email with the logic that when a system in equilibrium receives a quantitatively significant amount of input, the laws of physics tell us that the system will go through a transition period before settling in to another, different, state of equilibrium. In the case of the Earth and CO2, the new state of equilibrium that we may possibly see could involve the inability to sustain human life, or at least human life as we've known it. As soon as ideologically-driven climate change denialists come around to understanding this and wanting to join the rest of us in finding solutions, we'll all be much better off.

I welcome your comments! I'm particularly interested in comments that include references and links to concrete examples of the many, many, many ways that "environmentalists" are actively involved in finding ways not only to decrease our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, but from petroleum products as a source of energy altogether (such as biofuels, wind generation, wave generation, efficiency, electric vehicles, increasing CAFE standards, etc. etc.).

This evidence may help people move beyond trying to find scapegoats.

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Here's the forward-forward-forward email, edited for length while retaining substance:


About 6 months ago I was watching a news program on oil and one of the Forbes Bros. was the guest. . . . The host said to Forbes, ". . . how much oil does the U.S. have in the ground[?]" . . . [the Forbes representative] said, "more than all the Middle East put together."

The U. S. Geological Service issued a report in April ('08) that only scientists and oil men knew was coming . . . It was a revised report (hadn't been updated since '95) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota, western South Dakota, and extreme eastern Montana . . .

The Bakken [oil field] is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska 's Prudhoe Bay, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable, at $107 a barrel, we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.

“This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years,” reports The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. . . . the “Big Oil” companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken's massive reserves, and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels [that] will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL! . . . enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight.

And if THAT didn't throw you on the floor, then this next one should - because it's from TWO YEARS AGO!

“U. S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World!” (Stansberry Report Online - 4/20/2006)

Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. In three and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted. With this motherload of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling?

They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates:

- 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
- 18-times as much oil as Iraq
- 21-times as much oil as Kuwait
- 22-times as much oil as Iran
- 500-times as much oil as Yemen
and it's all right here in the Western United States .

HOW can this BE? HOW can we NOT BE extracting this? Because the environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil! Again, we are letting a small group of people dictate our lives and our economy.....WHY? [Italics & bolding mine]

Don't think OPEC will drop its price - even with this find? Think again! It's all about the competitive marketplace, it has to. Think OPEC just might be funding the environmentalists? [Of course, a conspiracy! Italics & bolding mine]

Got your attention/ire up yet? Hope so! Now, while you're thinking about it .... and hopefully P.O'd, do this:

Pass this along. If you don't take a little time to do this, then you should stifle yourself the next time you want to complain about gas prices, because by doing NOTHING, you've forfeited your right to complain

Now I just wonder what would happen in this country if every one of you sent this to every one in your address book. By the way...this is all true. Check it out at the link
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911


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