…sentences. My favorite in the self-defeating genre is one (perhaps apocryphally) attributed to von Braun: “You can’t make something fool proof, because fools are too ingenious.”
Also, how Buzz Lightyear made a child self-aware.
[Both links via Geek Press]
…without a creator. I agree that many people are too eager to attempt to use evolution as a proof for their atheism (i.e., a belief that there is no God, as opposed to skepticism on the matter). I agree with Derb’s comment, though.
Two chatbots being d**ks to each other. Are they really being emotional? Only Turing knows.
Twice this morning on ABC I heard the storm referred to as having emotions. “The ire of Irene,” (OK, I see the alliterary appeal) and “the wrath of the storm.”
Folks, don’t anthropomorphize rotational fluid dynamics. The storm didn’t really have it in for anyone, honest. Besides, it hates when you do that.
…have been laid bare in England:
The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.
What is not ludicrous and insulting to common sense in these propositions is contradictory in its own terms. There are indeed views of the human condition which hold that all species of wickedness are connected, because they are all rooted in the fact that man is a fallen creature. But somehow I doubt that the ardent liberal secularists who were piping up last week were believers in original sin or the machinations of the Devil.
The moral equivalence that they wanted to establish between looters and arsonists on the one hand, and the perpetrators of any other kind of bad behaviour you can think of on the other, was rooted in ideological, not theological, orthodoxy. The rioting gangs could not simply be what they seemed – what they so obviously were – because that would be a devastating victory for the judgment of popular opinion over the fantasies of liberalism.
There’s actually nothing “liberal” about it.
Sorry, no, it does not compel it.
…versus New Law School:
New Law School culture, growing out of the Critical Legal Studies movement that first surfaced in law schools during the 1980s, is quite different. In New Law School thinking, the law does not embody a rational system of justice—or even strivings toward such a system—but is essentially a political construct that has historically operated to keep the rich and powerful in their places of wealth and power and other groups—women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor—in their socially subordinate places. If this characterization sounds Marxist, that is because Critical Legal Studies—and its intellectual progeny, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory—grew out of the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, which viewed American governmental and social structures as systems of oppression. It has also been influenced by postmodernist literary theory, with its assumptions that there is no objective truth or reality. In New Law School thinking, reason, free will, and personal responsibility are illusions, for all legal battles are actually struggles of race, class, and gender, in which power, not justice, is the ultimate goal. In New Law School scholarly writing, rigorous analysis of court opinions and the drawing of fine distinctions underlying legal arguments have been supplanted by “story telling”: personal narratives typically involving the law professors’ own experiences as members of an oppressed group with the race-gender-class matrix that is the source of their oppression. Since a shift in the power structure, not justice, is the goal, any tactic that coerces the recalcitrant into conforming to the new power regime is permissible in New Law School thinking.
Somehow, I suspect that the current Attorney General of the United States is a product of New Law School, as is his boss in the White House. Speaking of which, here is the latest outrage in the federal gun-running program:
In a surprise move in a controversial case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona is opposing a routine motion by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry to qualify as crime victims in the eyes of the court.
…The maneuver by Burke appears self-serving: his office ran Operation Fast and Furious on the ground, and two guns “walked” under Burke’s command were used in the firefight that murdered Agent Brian Terry. Burke’s provocative decision to block a routine filing seems intended to protect him in the event of a criminal or civil trial…
Laws are for the little people.
It’s not about a Tea-Party Victory, but the death of the socialist left:
Most pundits are crediting this U-turn to the political muscle of the Tea Party and it’s true that President Obama would never have agreed to this deal if the Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives hadn’t engaged in the brinkmanship of the past few weeks. But to focus on the Tea Party is to ignore the tectonic political shift that’s taken place, not just in America but across Europe. The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer.
Let’s hope, though socialism is driven by innate human traits, primarily laziness and envy (and to be fair, misplaced compassion), so it will always rear its ugly head as long as we remain human.
[Update a while later]
Was this Obama’s “read my lips” moment?
And so we have the best of both worlds politically: a deal that leaves the Tea Party unsatisfied and therefore fired up for the next battles and election cycle, and a demoralized liberal base that can’t come to grips with the fact that socialism is over because we’ve run out of other people’s money…
Is it almost the end of the beginning?
I have more thoughts on Bob Ettinger’s deanimation over at Pajamas Media.
I’ll have my own obituary up at Pajamas Media tomorrow, but he’s an interesting example of a man who lived (and perhaps continues to live) by his own beliefs, never relinquishing them even as he approached deanimation.
Many more men are interested in cryonics than women (though there are many of the latter as well), and generally the explanation for this is that women tend to be less individualistic, and define themselves in terms of their relationships, particularly family. I recall, almost forty years ago, when a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and his mother said, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to live forever, or wake up in a future in which I didn’t know anyone.” That has never bothered me, and I have never had trouble meeting new people and establishing new relationships. I’d rather do that than give up my individuality and memories. But Ettinger got around it partially by persuading his loved ones to get aboard the ambulance with him (though as he noted himself, it will be interesting times if he gets revived with both wives).