The Tongue Tied blog has been, “carping about the excesses of clueless crybabies since the turn of the century.” It’s a daily round-up of news stories about people who clearly don’t have enough to worry about; perfect for those with low blood pressure.
Link courtesy of Dale Amon (in a roundabout sort of way).
Update: Tongue Tied has put me onto the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency website, on which you can read all about the complaints they receive, the decisions they make and the reasoning behind them.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 11:04 AM EDT
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There’s a nice little debate going on about the compatibility or otherwise of an omniscient god with free will. It started out between The Raving Atheist and Michelle of And Then?, and has continued over a few days with other people joining in.
The debate is of unusually high quality, given that it’s between theists and atheists, who normally end up arguing over the exact definitions of words or accusing the other of evangelism, or quoting scripture. Some highlights occur in the comments section of the World Wide Rant post.
Brent concisely states the atheist viewpoint:
Can you do something that God does not know you will do before you do it? If the answer is no, then free will is but an illusion. If the answer is yes, then your god is not omniscient.
Steve Polson hits back with,
It would only be a problem for free will if the Creator knew your choice BECAUSE he was making it for you. But if you are the one freely making the choice God’s knowledge is the consequence of your free choice, not the cause of an unfree choice.
Before I deal with this, some background: I’m not entirely convinced that there is such a thing as free will. There is very little evidence for it; I can’t go back and change a decision I made and see what would have happened. At any given moment we only get to choose one option, and our choice could just as well have been the result of deterministic laws of nature as of free will. The only evidence for free will I can see is my own personal experience of it, and not only can I envisage mental mechanisms that would cause the illusion of free will, even the experience of it is far from perfect.
Consider waking up in the morning. You wake up, you decide to get out of bed, and some time later (in my case quite some considerable time later) you find yourself getting out of bed. In that time between deciding to get up and actually getting up, there doesn’t seem to be much free will involved at all. A more mundane example is the way our emotions can make us behave in ways we rationally would rather not. Occasional failure of self control does not suggest free will.
So much for that. The reason theists, in particular Christians, need free will is that they use it to explain evil in the world. Bad people can exist even though God is good because God wants us to choose whether to be good. This is known as the free will theodicy, and there are all kinds of problems with it. For one thing, it is quite possible to concieve of a world that has free will and still has no pain and suffering. For another, you can’t have a god who knows everything and still have free will.
Steve Polsen argues that God can know what you’re going to do in advance without that affecting your choice. His knowledge is the consequence of your free choice. This gets the argument backwards. God cannot predict random events in the same way that he can’t create square circles; it doesn’t make any logical sense. Therefore if God knows the future then it logically must be because the future is determined.
This in no way proves there is no god. It does limit the kinds of god that are possible, and opens theists to the kind of argument presented by Niclas Berggren:
even if god was unaware of what would ensue after his having created the universe, he is still admitted by the theist to know what happens spatially, i.e., at any point in time, as happenings are, indeed, realized. If so, god would have known, a posteriori, what his creation had given rise to, and hence could have rectified anything with which he was discontent (due to his omnipotence). This he has not done and thus is blameworthy for evil.
Update: Some more excellent arguments on this subject in a posting at dustbury.com, in particular in the comments section.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends at 8:36 PM EDT
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The BBC have one of their Have Your Say items on the subject of ID cards. Many of the people in favour of ID cards seem to be idiots with no imagination. Darren, UK, and numerous others peddle the nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear argument. Natalie Solent has come up with a dozen reasons a law abiding person might have something to hide, and plenty to fear.
Chris Pope, England, is clearly not engaging his brain when he writes, “Anything that could possibly be used to reduce illegal immigration and that could help to cut crimes such as credit card fraud should be embraced whole heartedly.” The emphasis is mine. I don’t think it needs further explanation.
A couple of the comments more or less summarise my own views on ID cards. Paul, UK writes about the risks:
Just ask yourself this: do you trust the government? Local government? The possible next government, or the government after that? Do you trust the police? Do you believe that the government has YOUR best interests at heart all the time? Do you believe that the system will never ever make mistakes? Surely you should bear all this in mind when you demand ID cards, because people are not infallible - what if a mistake is made somewhere? Your ID card might accidentally get mixed up with that of a wanted criminal, or a terrorist. People who want ID cards are naive and dangerous and don’t believe in freedom.
Kevin Crocombe, UK, writes about the lack of benefits:
A card will clearly not deter criminals (why would it?) and most illegal immigrants work illegally without any paperwork, so it won’t deter them and it’s doubtful that an NHS hospital is not going to refuse treatment to someone in great pain regardless of what a piece of plastic says. So what have we got? Not a lot - another erosion of what few rights and freedoms that we “subjects” not “citizens” have.
Update: White Rose has a cautionary tale about the dangers of CCTV. A man is accused of vandalism because he appeared on a CCTV tape near a car that had been keyed.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Privacy at 11:30 AM EDT
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Joyce Lee Malcom’s Guns and Violence: The English Experience is a history of English firearms laws and their effects on crime.
It begins in the violent, pre-gun middle ages with an examination of the rate of crime and how it was handled. The violence of the middle ages seems to be a result of the various wars that were going on, and the economic situation. Guns became commonplace in the sixteenth century. It was an Englishman’s right to be armed, and many were. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, violent crime decreased dramatically.
The eighteenth century saw the introduction of the Riot act and the Black act. Despite the Riot Act, an emergency measure passed in response to Jacobite risings, no attempt was made to prevent people from carrying arms. The Black act introduced the death penalty for a variety of crimes, and made it a felony to appear armed and disguised (although not to be merely armed). Mostly because of the harshness of the punishments, very few people were prosecuted under the Black act. The individual’s right to be armed remained, and the the homicide rate declined throughout the century.
The nineteenth century saw the introduction of police forces across the nation, and attempts at introducing gun laws by those who didn’t like the idea of poor people carrying revolvers. The 1870 gun licencing act was the first hint of govenment gun control. Initially it was proposed that all guns would be licenced for a fee of one pound. Many MPs saw this as opressive meddling in people’s rights. In the end only guns taken outside of dwellings had to be licenced and the law in any case was not enforced. At the end of the nineteenth century, armed crime rates were lower than ever.
Gun control really began with the Firearms Act of 1920. It was introduced out of the fear of unrest caused by the political situation of the time. The rise of Bolshevism, the growth of the British Communist Party and the threat of civil war in Ireland all played on the government’s collective mind. The 1920 act left it up to the local Chief Officer of Police to determine who was fit to carry a firearm. At first anyone could still obtain a licence, but a series of secret Home Office directives to Chiefs of Police gradually took away their discretion. By 1937, the Home Office was advising that firearms certificates should not be issued for purposes of protection. By 1969 this was forbidden.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, attacks were simultaneously made on the right to self defense in general. The 1953 Prevention of Crime Bill banned the carrying of all offensive and potentially offensive weapons. The 1967 Criminal Law act introduced the notion of “reasonable force” when considering self defense. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the effect of these acts is with an example from the book (in turn quoted from the New York Law Journal:
In March 1987 two men assaulted [56-year-old British Petroleum Chemicals executive Eric] Butler in a London subway car, strangling him and smashing his head against the door. No one in the car came to his aid. Later Butler testified “My air supply was being cut off, my eyes became blurred and I feared for my life.” In desperation he unsheathed a sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of them “as my last means of self defense,” stabbing the man in the stomach. The assailants were charged with unlawful wounding but Butler was also tried, and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.
Guns and Violence contains several examples of similar cases.
Shotguns had up until now been exempt from other firearms laws, being as there were thought to be around three million in legitimate use, making certification of them too expensive. In 1966 two policemen were shot with a handgun, so naturally shotgun certification was introduced to dispell public outrage.
The 1968 Firearms Act consolidated all the firearms legislation to date. Further restrictions were put in place after the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres, again to dispell public outrage (that the assailants had been able to obtain weapons, not that no-one was able to stop them).
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, crime rates inexorably rose. This may have been at least partly caused by a trend of reducing sentences that began in the 1950s, and falling numbers of police in combination with a disarmed populace. (For example, “the Sunday Times in April 2000 found Southampton, a city of 215,000, frequently able to to muster only 7 officers to patrol the streets…”)
The book concludes with an examination of the effects of guns on violent crime, including comparisons with other countries, including America. It is noted that the overall crime rate in England and Wales is 60% higher than in the United States. Thirty-three states, “are required to grant residents who meet the basic standards the right to carry concealed weapons.” The book points to evidence that the armed civilians in these states reduce crime by deterring it.
Joyce Lee Malcom analyses and interprets evidence from the last 400 years. She examines individual cases and describes the parlimetary debate on and public reaction to all the relevant acts of parliament and their consequences. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Guns and Violence makes for an easliy accessible read.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Reviews, Self Defense at 10:52 PM EDT
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Today is international Talk Like a Pirate day.
Related link: User Friendly.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 9:57 AM EDT
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Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher who wrote The Wealth of Nations, about free trade and market economics. The Adam Smith Institute is a UK think-tank that comes up with practical economic policies by the truck-load. They were behind many policies in the early 80s that turned around the high inflation, high public spending of the 70s.
Now they have a weblog, and it teems with eminently sensible ideas. For example, on welfare:
…if the welfare budget were simply divided up between the poor, they would all be rich.
The best welfare scheme ever devised is called a paying job. No government scheme has ever approached it. […] Instead of raising taxes to pay for more welfare, government should be lowering them to create more jobs. A dramatic cut in the top rate would paradoxically help the poor more than the rich. The flood of new jobs it would create would do more for them than any welfare programme yet has.
On free trade:
Mr Annan is correct to oppose to protectionism by the developed world. Yet many people believe that only rich countries should open up. Poor countries, they think, would be better off keeping their trade barriers. This view is mistaken. When poor countries open up to imports, they grow faster.
On vouchers for public services:
even if services are paid for through taxation, the state doesn’t have to run them (ie mess them up). Leave the choices to the local community - or better still, to individuals themselves.
On what to do about postal strikes:
…Postcomm should inform Royal Mail and the CWU that if the strike lasts for more than one week, Postcomm will lift all restrictions on carrying mail completely and permanently. At that point serious competition should enter the market.
On the housing shortage:
We could make a modest contribution to the UK housing shortage by encouraging people to increase the living space of their existing homes. If we reduced the 17.5% Value Added Tax to zero on attic or basement conversions, or on conservatories, many people would choose to expand their houses.
On how to escape the heat death of the universe:
Sorry, I made that one up.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 9:25 PM EDT
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The courses at Thunder Ranch look like immense fun. You can learn defensive handgun and rifle techniques on a variety of realistic ranges, including simulated urban and interior settings. Where do I sign up?
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links, Self Defense at 8:02 PM EDT
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At university I shared a house with a Finnish guy. Whenever he phoned home, the rest of the housemates would all listen in, finding amusement in the way he would intersperse English words throughout his Finnish sentences. We even nicknamed him Hoolio, after the half Spanish, half geordie Fast Show character. He said that some things were just easier to say in one language or the other.
The ability to switch between languages in speech is apparently known as codeswitching. Jason Kottke has a fascinating article on just this subject, in which he asks many pertinent questions, and gets many of the answers.
Update: Lost in Translation will take an English sentence and use Babelfish to translate it through five different languages and back to English again, with interesting results…
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 5:02 PM EDT
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I read a comment on a Catholic weblog today that got me thinking about why people try to be good.
Why bother “living life to the full as long as you don’t hurt anyone else”? If you honestly believe there is no afterlife, no “final Judgment” and all that exists is this present life, why would it make one rat’s behind of a difference whether you hurt anyone else or not? The true philosophy of an atheist should be “don’t get caught.” Anything less is a lack of faith in your atheism.
I responded to the comment, but I’d like to explore (read ramble incoherently about) these issues more deeply here.
I’ve come across the argument before. I find it unsatisfactory for various reasons. Plenty of atheists are good people. While I can’t be sure that they are not being good due to a “lack of faith” in atheism, I can be sure about myself. I don’t refrain from stealing because I’m afraid an omniscient being will see me. Rather, it’s partly out of fear of being caught by humans, partly because I don’t want to make others feel bad by stealing from them (altrusim), and partly because I like to keep the moral high ground in arguments like this.
The notion that the only reason to act morally is out of fear of punishment in the afterlife is supremely cynical. How can the actions of someone who holds this view be anything other than selfish? It is only a short step from here to the view that anything that happens on Earth is unimportant compared to what happens after death. One US judge famously defended capital punishment by arguing that the deaths of innocent people due to incorrect verdicts were no big deal. After all, these people would be correctly judged by God.
If life really is all about following the correct set of rules so that we can get into heaven, why aren’t the rules more clearly laid down? The Bible seems somewhat vague about what they are, hence all the different denominations of Christianity and sectarian in-fighting. Competing religions clearly have different ideas about the specifics of what is right and what is wrong.
On the other hand, atheists have a good reason to be concerned about the wellbeing of others. Since everyone only gets one life, it is very important for the sake of your fellow humans not to go around making them unhappy. In this respect, atheism seems to allow more scope for altrusim.
This, conveniently, leaves the wellbeing of others as a good benchmark for objectively defining what is right or wrong.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends, Introspection at 11:06 PM EDT
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White Rose is the civil liberties wing of Samizdata. It covers issues like ID cards, and can make for a somewhat depressing read.
In it, we learn:
Worst of all, it seems as if no matter how much people protest and complain to get legislation thrown out, the government never gives up. Will there eventually be nowhere to hide?
Correction: Blunkett does not want to read your emails (yet), he merely wants to retain “catalogues of Web sites visited, records of e-mail recipients, lists of telephone numbers dialled, and the geographical location of mobile phones at all times they were switched on”, according to The Register.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Privacy at 10:10 PM EDT
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The Alan Bown Set Before and Beyond
