Oslo

I've had over a week to digest this event.

From what I can tell this is the order of prejudices held by the terrorist.

1) Anti-social
2) Anti-multi-cultural liberalism
3) Anti-feminism/garden-variety misogyny.
4) Anti-Muslim
5) Anti-immigrant
6) Anti-government

Other notes. Quoting JS Mill out of context and spouting anti-government rants does not make somebody "libertarian". In the same vein, declaring that Europe should be a Christian enclave of some sort, however disturbing a notion Europeans (as well as secularists everywhere) may find it, is not the same as being a "Christian fundamentalist". If Bravik were such a creature, I would have expected to find a lot of Biblical quotations peppered in there instead of the heavy doses of Robert Spencer and a lot of other fellow screed-ers that were in there instead.

The random raving neoconservative or anti-Muslim right only somewhat learned its lesson about tarring entire groups of people as "enemy" in response to lone wolf activity (as a result of the nuances between the people writing about such things and the maniac who decided to shoot a lot of people while quoting them favorably). But I'm impressed that there are/were people in that category capable of learning anything at all.

One most interesting distinction: man who claims to be demanding some sort of conservative religious vision of life and then goes on to commit an atrocity upon any society, tends not to be a very religious individual themselves. This appears to be par for the course regardless of religious affiliations.

Other notes for people freaked out about Norway's criminal justice system: This guy, if convicted, is not getting out, at least not until he is good and old. They have a loophole for that. They just haven't used it. Norway's system also has a very low recidivism rate compared to ours. Even with these supposedly cushy prisons. The reasons have more to do with a stronger focus on rehabilitation and reintegration, immediacy of punishment rather than length, fewer people to police and less dense population centers, and stronger social welfare structures that decrease incentives for crime and criminal behaviors. Where we are distinguished from Norway is that we have huge incarceration totals and percentages, higher rates of recidivism, few incentives and programmes for reintegration (and various pointless license laws that further hinder this effort that Norway generally lacks), generally poorly designed social welfare programmes, less effective school systems, and a system preferring "throw away the key sentencing", which takes considerable effort and cost, rather than a focus on swift and immediate penalties for criminal acts.

In my opinion, if the cost of the Norway system is that a few genuine crazies like this have to be worked into a loophole in the maximum sentencing system we here in America would be so lucky to have such cushy prisons (not to mention our jails, where people are merely accused of crimes and may sit and rot for years awaiting trials and appeals).

List of events of which I have no comment

And am thus thoroughly annoyed take up valuable news time
1) Amy Winehouse death. I barely knew who this person was. I don't even need facebook posts about her, much less news stories. Thanks. Comparisons to Hendrix or Cobain et al seem really premature and overdone (and totally unsurprising, drug addicts often die "early", so to speak. This should be news to no one.)
2) News of the World/Rupert Murdoch scandal. This is journalists covering other journalists for doing things that journalists (sadly) do and thus is a masturbatory tale rather than important news.

I have no sympathy for Rupert and in particular his association with Faux. But unlike most of liberal societies, my criticism is of the PEOPLE who support by watching, not so much Faux itself, which is merely providing the service of telling such people what they want to hear (little different than their preachers or priests often do in a modern society with fluid religious associations). I see Faux as a follower, not a leader. The problem, as always, is other human beings, and not some criminal mastermind or organisation who is manipulating them. "They" are merely profiting by and exploiting the situation. "They" didn't create the demand for an alternative reality validating pre-existing beliefs.

The reason not to care about this as a problem is first that it's not a new problem (people telling us that it's caused by the internet for example should read Southern newspaper accounts during the antebellum period in US history particularly in relation to slavery and abolitionist movements and compare them to the accounts in Northern papers). Second, Wilde referred to it thusly: "Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community." Not only was that was over a hundred years ago, journalism has generally been used to provide not the service of reporting events to people that were not there, but to provide the service of confirming the pre-existing opinions of people who don't care to know what is actually going on. It's not a new story.

What is significant about the modern media climate is that it is reverting back to a previous state of peer-to-peer modes of information flow instead of the central model of news filtered through powerful media elites that came into being and prevailed through the industrial age of mass production. But that people have "news filters" which have often considerable biases and will seek out sources of information to confirm these biases as truth is not a new development. Pretending that it would go away if Rupert was somehow legally defamed and defeated is to ignore the problem: that there is an audience that Rupert's news organs are feeding.

How to properly insult a famous person

"Kevin Bacon of pseudoscience" indeed. Few people have profited more from well-intentioned attempts that will in fact harm other people than Oprah. There's certainly a few vaccine "skeptics" who do more actual harm (Bill Maher comes up for example), but they're not making as much money off the effort. They're usually donating time and energy in fact.

I also find the discussion on "alternative medicine" amusing. What do you call alternative medicine that works?: "medicine".

Note also, the debate on sexism in the skeptic/atheist/secularist community is very useful. As I'd note with the problems with right-wing Islamophobia, there is plenty of ruin in any nation, and plenty of problems to point out in any community that could be improved upon. People could still oppose genital mutilation of women in Somalia while also opposing ridiculous sexist behaviors of men in more polite, advanced societies. Just because something is "less bad" than the most terrible evils imagined, or in this case, real, does not mean it is somehow ennobled with the property of being a "good" about which we should say nothing. I compared this to the people who wished that we would stop complaining about the heat over the last week here, where heat indices were topping 100 pretty steadily and the temperature over night was dropping only into the 80s, because there were somewhere people who had heat indices around 130. It's still fucking hot people. It's not magically cooler just because somewhere, someone else is suffering more than you are.

On atheism

"so I consider myself an a-theist in pretty much the same manner in which most people are a-unicornists: they don’t believe in unicorns, not because they know that there aren’t any, but simply because they see neither evidence nor reason to hold that particular belief. As Hume put it, “A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence,” and when the evidence approaches zero..."

The comments threads included some gems.

"What ever the official etymology of "atheism" may be, in my experience most people who call themselves atheists are certain that there is no God. That is, they not only hold no belief in God, they hold the belief that there is no God, usually pretty darn strongly." - This is true, but as above, it is true largely because there is pretty strong evidence opposing the view that there is/must be/can be any deity in existence, and no evidence supporting this view. If we were to magically suppose that there were such evidence, many (not all, given the broad base of population) atheists would accordingly have different positions.

"The general atheist position appears to be an assertion about the fundamentalist God. So what? Everyone thinks fundamentalists are off their rocker." - More or less true. Except there are an awful lot of fundamentalists for the second part. And for the first, more generally MOST Christians tacitly if not explicitly accept some variety of mystical and supernatural elements of their underlying religious teachings. Since this is, in America at least, the preponderance of the atheist's experience, dealing with theists who hold something like a fundamental belief about the existence of an imaginary being, it is an unfortunate necessity to deal with the common-ness of those beliefs first before proceeding to more tangible and structural insights about theism more generally, including these more amorphous and impossible to define concepts about deities that are supposedly held by most religious people. Besides which, no evidence is provided to show that this is in fact the case for most religious people, in America at least, the experience is different in Europe or Asia. Most polling data I've seen suggest that belief in a "personal god" of the sort that atheists are explicitly arguing against by suggesting that such an experience is absurd (not to mention explained by some natural psychological and physiological elements of the "human condition"), is much more common as an underlying metaphysical assumption than mere belief in "god", as some sort of impersonal force or some such similar "lesser" confidence of belief. Usually the "personal god" question gets well over 50% in the US, I've seen it as high as 80-90% (In Sweden it is about 20%, for contrast). With this in mind, one has to wrestle with the notion that a very large percentage of the population takes considerable portions of the Biblical accounts of human existence (as well as divine existence) literally, despite often overwhelming evidence that it is in large measure false, and it is this position must be argued against.

"Granted all of that, doesn’t it still seem strange to define one’s life by a negative claim, by the non-existence of something."

"Atheism defines *my* life no more than a-leprechaunism--not at all. Along the lines of ianpollock's insightful comment above, only in the context of widespread theism would someone suppose that atheism is life-defining." - This is a crucial insight. Very, very rarely does someone's atheism become a life-defining element in the way that theism is often for the religious, particularly the religious fundamentalist. There are not, for example, universally held atheistic sentiments and behaviors. Some hold right-wing politics, others left-leaning, some are nihilists, others empiricists, some are big on science, others merely reject the version of a supernatural god but will still hold all manner of silly beliefs instead (ghosts, new age meditation, conspiracy of the week club, etc). There is certainly some notion that something like Skepticism is a life-defining element, and there's plenty of cross-over between Skepticism and atheism, but to suggest that the lack of belief, non-existence, matters to atheists more generally is a little strange. Atheism is not a very significant system and is more akin to a-unicornism as described above. It has very little of substance and importance to say on its own and without a subset of theists impressing their opinions and beliefs, would be inconsequential.

Similiarly, "The problem, of course, is that the concept of "God" lacks any rigorous set of identity conditions. The nearest "good faith" case for an atheist to make, given this state of affairs, is that insofar as the identity conditions of a god have been specified, there is simply no good reason to think that anything in the world matches them. This keeps the burden of proof where it belongs--with those arguing for the positive claim--while also eschewing the ontological grab-baggery that flies under the banner of speculative theology." - This has always bugged me about the situation of atheist-theist debates and does a great deal to define why I oppose religion as an organised social force. That is: the burden of proof should be on the theist to prove the existence of a deity, a positive belief, and in particular "their" deity, as opposed to some other deity, some other natural force, etc. Instead, the social force is angled for the atheist to prove a negative (generally this a logical impossibility). A defence of god-belief is rendered unnecessary by placing non-belief as the position requiring defence instead. This is only possible because the majority of people hold such beliefs of course, and is to me little different than any other occasion where a majority chooses to oppress unpopular views or minorities within its midst. Speaking up on such issues can, as a result, still lead to social ostracisation and general exclusion (much as a politician speaking about opposing the drug war does, again a position defensible on evidentiary grounds whilst the mainstream position is indefensible).

Concurrently, the same social force (organised religion) is motivated to create groups and foster group loyalties. In other words, the "strongest" arguments most theists will make in defence of their faith and beliefs is the size and broadness of their groups, which has little to offer in favor of the viability, utility, or truth underlying those beliefs. In so far as religion operates in an evolutionary aspect to foster group coordination, and that this function is a necessity for humans as a social species to form in some way, this is hardly surprising that it does pretty well at it, just as it also does pretty well at forming "out-groups" who must be opposed or even destroyed. What is surprising that it is then used as a supposed cudgel in reasonable debate that there are such groups based around such beliefs and that this is a meaningful proof of any kind.

Mental note to "the" media

When there's a terrorist attack and many people are dead.....

Don't tell us, or suggest to us, that it's an Islamic terrorist and put it on the front page until we have actually ascertained that it is, or some crazy Muslim claims they had a hand in it, something that verifies these latent biases and suspicions. Because the sort of right-wing nutjobs who actually want a clash of Islam and the West (on both sides of that "divide") are the same people telling us that "all terrorists are Muslims", or worse "all Muslims are terrorists" and other pieces of lovely sounding bullshit that can be debunked in about two seconds if one has the care to examine the evidence.

My immediate reaction after hearing about the Norway incident was very much like "Oklahoma City". And in turn my reaction on the news media was very much like this

"...I remember Oklahoma when they put out the blaze
And put Islamic terrorist bombing, on the front page
It's like saying only gays get AIDS, propaganda..."

Humorous footnotes

"Incidentally, I find it strange to recall that my education was utterly dominated by two stories: the Bible's and Rome's. Both were disappointing examples of history. One told the story of an obscure, violent and somewhat bigoted tribe and one its later cults, who sat around gazing at their theological navels for a few thousand years while their fascinating neighbors--the Phoenicians, Philistines, Canaanites, Lydians and Greeks--invented respectively maritime trade, iron, the alphabet, coins and geometry. The other told the story of a barbarically violent people who founded one of the empires that institutionalized the plundering of its commercially minded neighbors, then went on to invent practically nothing in half a millennium and achieve an actual diminution in living standards for its citizens, very nearly extinguishing literacy as it died. I exaggerate, but there are more interesting figures in history than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar."

It's very possible that the (American) focus on Rome instead of Greece or the Phoenicians or Carthage, much less other powerful and/or influential historical cultures and states like the various Chinese dynasties, Shogunate Japan, Prussia, or the Ottoman Turks, in world history courses is due to the specific importance of Rome in the Christian dialectic and that these two end up twinned in over-importance. One obvious reason to note this is the decreasing importance of Rome in casual historical study as it moved to the East and became a Christian empire (the Byzantines). Almost nobody spends a lot of time looking at the sieges of Vienna or Constantinople in a high school history course, for example, relative to the amount of time spent on developments much further in our history, like the various Mesopotamian empires. So yes, when Assyria and Nebuchadnezzar take up more time than, say, Suleiman in our collective lore, there's a problem.

But, to be fair to Rome and Christendom, they're also very long-lasting developments and thus have considerable sway over history as a whole.

Belief is belief

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Usually it's bunk too.

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This is more or less how it works in debates with average conservatives on economics. Conservative economists are at least better informed and able to argue more substantively on tax policy, but the rank and file takes this sort of thing on religion and seems quite content to worship Reagan as a deity rather than to note what he actually DID during his administration (or be aware that most of it was Volcker and not Reagan, much as much of Clinton was Greenspan and some/much of Bush's problems were likewise, Greenspan and then Bernanke).

Now of course, Stewart's "cut taxes to zero" retort is pretty much par for stupid arguments also.

Another thought on language

If by "ghetto" people are describing a cultural enclave, principally composed of poor-ish ethnic minorities/immigrants (Asians, Blacks, Caribbeans, Latinos, etc), and thus a strange but possibly very interesting place within a city, fine with me. The historical references, especially relating to Jews, are pretty horrible, but it's at least a reasonable use of the term.

I don't think that's what they mean when they say it. My impression is that it usually means "part of the city that looks like shit, has too many "brown people" in it, and thus is where people should avoid because they, personally, are afraid of it" (or alternatively, people who look like they would "belong" to said locale). Which might be true that it would have more crime than the rest of the city, but unless you actually lived there, then I don't see what danger you are actually in as a traveler or tourist passing through it or even visiting it intentionally.

For example, a good portion of the murders in urban environments are of low level drug dealers (because we've criminalised drugs and created a huge and lucrative black market worth killing others to protect or to gain access to in impoverished neighbourhoods). Most people using this sort of terminology are not low level drug dealers and thus unlikely to attract bullets or even hostile attention. Alertness in a higher crime area is certainly sensible, particularly at night (when alertness generally is useful anywhere). Genuine fear and even hostility toward its residents is not.

A note on google plus

So far, the main distinction there I've noted is the intuitive interface relative to how information or posts are shared. Facebook's main complaint (at least of people willing to stay on it and use it) is the arduous loops that one must go through to filter information and keep some of it private from, say, a boss/co-worker/professor/parent and yet still share it with actual "friends".

Google took all that problem of going into the privacy settings, setting up groups of friends, etc, and made it a visually satisfying drag and drop system. This has little impact on me since I don't use facebook to share photos and post what I'm eating for dinner or if I'm out and about, and instead am the annoying political facebooker that I'm sure most people filter out, but to whom most of my posts are readily visible. I don't care very much if people know I'm an atheist or know I'm libertarian, and so on, and these are the things I post on there. What concerns me is my actual private life, which I don't post on there.

It's possible this would be a distinction with google plus for me that would be worth using, but I imagine this difference is far more important and noteworthy for the average facebook-er. At least until (if?) Zuckerberg figures out that this is the principle market share problem he has going forward. Complex privacy settings and poor filtering controls that can be simplified into an intuitive interface? Check. Google's got that.

Otherwise, it's pretty much the same sort of stuff. "+1" instead of "likes" is a little more satisfying. More of a novelty satisfaction than a meaningful one. Other than the difficult decision of "liking" some story or post about something saddening or tragic, in the same way that Netflix users indicate that they "like" Schlinder's List but end up watching "Fast and the Furious" or some similar piece of crapulence. Or people listening to the car stereo self-report listening to more talk/news or jazz than the popcorn syrup stuff that they actually do listen to most of the time. This semantic change allows us to preserve our outward signaling that we are not all self-absorbed egomaniacs while the interface change allows us to continue being self-absorbed egomaniacs.

Bottom line: I suspect it will end up being more popular as it's more in line with human nature than total openness and transparency.