HERE

Twit of the Day — 11/15/09

fanofhockey: UN used ‘climate change’ hoax to get more power over nations. Obama uses healthcare ‘crisis’ to grab more power over us. #tcot #tlot #ocra

(Strictly speaking, this was tweeted 5 days ago. Oh well.)

Dear fanofhockey,

Climate change? Not a hoax — no air quotes necessary when you speak about it. That’s the beauty of peer-reviewed empirical inquiry — the incentives bend towards discovering the truth. I realize such a thing must be very hard for you to understand, but there are people — unlike you, and unlike the people you must admire — who serve truth and thereby try to understand it, especially before spouting off without a clue.

As for the UN, you seem to have a deep misunderstanding of what it is. The UN is comprised wholly of member nations, and is thus incapable of getting “more power over nations” than it already has. Moreover, the UN’s climate change actions thus far have involved two types of activities: (1) commissioning scientific reports and analyses, and (2) booking glorified conference rooms so that said nations may work out agreements. To the latter, member nations have been asked to give input and come up with a common accord. This hardly describes a power grab. Your claim that member nations have “used” climate change to increase their own power over themselves is stupid enough; but it appears even worse when one considers the ineffectiveness of the meetings thus far. Private economic interests have been waging war against climate change measures, just as they have waged war against the common good throughout the history of civilization, and they have succeeded to this point.

Which brings us to healthcare reform in the US. Private interests are muddying the debate and hoping that people like you will give in to their prejudices about government, or liberals, or non-white people. Here is a dose of reality: the Congressional Budget Office, the non-political outfit that calculates projections on proposed congressional legislation, has projected that single payer (i.e. the most “extreme” public plan) costs the least of all possible insurance systems while accomplishing the most. Meanwhile, for the various plans put forth over the past few months, the closer they come to being single payer, the more efficient and effective they are. Of course, to thinking people, this makes perfect sense: health insurance is something we buy into collectively already, in order to reduce individual risk. The larger the pool, the lower the risk. If each and everyone of us buy into the same pool, the individual risk is lowest and the overall efficiency is highest (i.e. costs go down). This is not up for debate — this is how health insurance works. So tell me: why do you want to pay more for less effective insurance? Is it some mindless allegiance to corporations — corporations which would rather pump up their stock price than insure the people who have paid them for it? Is it some mindless allegiance to your own prejudices?

A parting thought: Those who would sacrifice the whole to indulge their own paranoid fantasies are among the lowest of the low. Mind your own honor, please.

Sanely yours,
Dan Mims

Do not hire

Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley have started a consulting firm “focused on helping U.S. companies doing business abroad — especially in key emerging markets.” (source: TPM)

I wonder: Would their demonstrated incompetence help or hurt as they attempt to help corporations exploit these emerging markets other countries? Perhaps destabilization is the name of the game. They’re experts at that.

Burden of Proof

According to UK outfit The First Post, recent scientific data demonstrates that certain religiously prescribed methods of slaughter cause pain for the slaughtered animals. I know what you’re thinking: who would believe otherwise? Well, for one example, there are the religious folks who believe that these rituals physically and morally minimize, or even neutralize, what they’ve done. Meanwhile, the author of the linked article only sees fit to raise less-than-urgent questions about human religious freedom, pivoting from the research to ask whether or not the British government should ban these ritual slaughter methods merely because they don’t jibe with other British laws, and despite a probable religious outcry. In fact, there is something much more significant to discuss: the anthropocentric standards of “proof” that implicitly dictate that non-human animals have nothing in common with humans, even pain responses, unless experiments show otherwise.

The concept of “burden of proof” is key in scientific inquiry (both in the formalized field of research and in everyday life). When examining the validity of any claim, the investigator makes a decision about which of the possible investigation outcomes is the more probable. This result, known as the “null hypothesis,” is assumed to be true until/unless the data suggest otherwise. For example, when testing a new medication, the null hypothesis is that the drug does not work any better than placebo. When deciding whether or not alien spacecraft have visited Earth, the null hypothesis is that they have not. Based on the data, these null hypotheses may either be rejected or not (for technical reasons, the null hypothesis can never be “accepted” because this implies certainty, and absence of evidence for something cannot technically disprove it). To reject the null hypothesis in the first scenario, the drug must be proven to work significantly better than a placebo. To reject it in the second, unambiguous evidence of alien spacecraft must be shown.

On the heels of the Enlightenment and before the concept of “common-ancestry” was vindicated by Charles Darwin, the prevailing consensus among scientists and philosophers — who were generally and not coincidentally religious at that time — was that humans are metaphysically distinct from all other animals, created separately and endowed with a proprietary and exclusive set of cognitive mechanisms like emotions, pain, consciousness, and so forth. Under this worldview, the “null hypothesis” for comparative scientific experiments was that non-human animals shared none of the manifest psychology of humans, and so the burden of proof fell upon anybody who believed otherwise. This is still the position of many individuals — scientists and laypeople alike — who approach animal research today.

This perspective is in direct opposition to a post-Darwinian worldview. It is accepted scientific fact that the essential human neural and cognitive structure is shared among all of our mammalian cousins; likewise for reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish, to differing degrees. The systems regulating pain and emotion must be present in other vertebrates, in some form, because these psychological features have been salient behavioral motivators for hundreds of millions of years. It would be improbable indeed to have survived very long without them. To posit that these brain features sprang into existence only after our lineage split from chimpanzees and bonobos should be ludicrous to any modern biologist.

Why then the constant surprise whenever studies find that animals can do things we can do? Why should we have to hurt animals to prove that they can feel pain? The null hypothesis should be that of course they can feel pain and fear, because human exceptionalism is now the more outlandish claim, in light of a modern evolutionary framework. If anyone believes otherwise, the burden of proof is on them—but I’d rather they not try to prove it.

—Daniel Glass

Daniel Glass, aside from having an awesome last name, is HERE.am’s newest contributor. We’ll have a bio up soon in our About section.

Label Without a Cause

“Resistance” is a fashion label. Though I can’t find a home website — which is amazing — I found some items from their recent line via an email from TheCoolHunter. [Sidepoint: TheCoolHunter folks have lost their aesthetic touch, if Resistance makes the cut — the execution is sloppy at best and, as one would expect, the items are blatantly over-priced.]

Anyway, I have to ask: What are you resisting, Resistance? Are you resisting… resistance? Because, when I see that 6 out of 7 of your tacky-as-shit featured items are made with feathers, wool, and/or leather — gleaned from unimaginable suffering and deepest usurpation at the hands of industrial fatcats — I can’t help but question your sincerity.

That’s phall-acious!

A lot of people try to make a moral argument in favor of eating meat by appealing to human biology or human evolution. They’ll say humans are biological omnivores, that eating meat is just a fulfillment of our biological nature. (Never mind the animals’ suffering and loss.)

To be clear, this is an absolutely fallacious rationale. It would be like saying: “I have a phallus; therefore I am morally entitled to fuck you (irrespective of anything else).” Or: “I have fingernails; therefore I am morally entitled to scratch your eyes out (irrespective of anything else).”

That said, even if narrow appeals to biology weren’t entirely inadequate in this case, the actual biological facts tell a completely different story (via fuckyeahanimalrights and goveg):

• Meat-eaters: have claws
  Herbivores: no claws
  Humans: no claws
• Meat-eaters: have no skin pores and perspire through the tongue
  Herbivores: perspire through skin pores
  Humans: perspire through skin pores
• Meat-eaters: have sharp front teeth for tearing, with no flat molar teeth for grinding
  Herbivores: no sharp front teeth, but flat rear molars for grinding
  Humans: no sharp front teeth, but flat rear molars for grinding
• Meat-eaters: have intestinal tract that is only 3 times their body length so that rapidly decaying meat can pass through quickly
  Herbivores: have intestinal tract 10-12 times their body length.
  Humans: have intestinal tract 10-12 times their body length.
• Meat-eaters: have strong hydrochloric acid in stomach to digest meat
  Herbivores: have stomach acid that is 20 times weaker than that of a meat-eater
  Humans: have stomach acid that is 20 times weaker than that of a meat-eater
• Meat-eaters: salivary glands in mouth not needed to pre-digest grains and fruits.
  Herbivores: well-developed salivary glands which are necessary to pre-digest grains and fruits
  Humans: well-developed salivary glands, which are necessary to pre-digest, grains and fruits
• Meat-eaters: have acid saliva with no enzyme ptyalin to pre-digest grains
  Herbivores: have alkaline saliva with ptyalin to pre-digest grains
  Humans: have alkaline saliva with ptyalin to pre-digest grains

Based on a chart by A.D. Andrews, Fit Food for Men, (Chicago: American Hygiene Society, 1970)

BOOM.

Twit of the Day - 10/21/09

biblejournal: 2 Peter 1:5 “and to integrity add knowledge” You need knowledge of God and the Bible to have integrity, otherwise it is meaningless…

To which I reply: “Please, do continue — I’m really interested in the ontological ideas of people who just make shit up.” Sarcasm aside, I am fascinated — morbidly — by people who strongly believe their own bullshit. Mr. or Ms. biblejournal doesn’t have any idea whatsoever what he/she is talking about, and they would know that if they had stopped to consider whether or not they could even define “integrity.”

In fact, the word “integrity” is ideology-neutral — it simply means “consistency.” When I say integrity is meaningful, it is because the presence of contradiction within a particular system entails that the system is false. Ascription to falsehoods, whether active or passive, is the #1 cause of destruction and evil acts in our world, so it’s extremely consequential whether or not someone has integrity or cares about embodying integrity. 

On a related note, the meaning-ness of a genuinely meaningful concept is, by definition, independent of whether or not it’s been asserted in writing — in the Bible or anywhere else. Indeed, the meaning or value of “integrity,” like all concepts, is independent of whether or not anyone ever acknowledged it in any way whatsoever. If something is actual or meaningful, it must by definition be belief-independent.

False equivalence and knee-jerk charitability

Talking Points Memo (TPM) is an important blog, but they have a… well, extreme… tendency to be too charitable regarding the transparency and legitimacy of the motives behind conservative acts and general whackery. This tendency usually manifests in two ways: (1) giving the benefit of the doubt in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary; and (2) asserting false equivalence. Case in point would be today’s article, “Poll Begs Question: Is Extremism Mainstream?.”

Setting aside the improper use of “begs the question,” the article falsely equates birtherism — a.k.a. the belief that Obama was born outside the U.S. and is therefore not a legal candidate for President — with trutherism, the notion that President Bush and/or elements in his Administration allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur in order to justify an invasion of the Middle East. The article reports the results of a poll in which 42% of polled Republicans ascribe to birtherism, while 25% of polled Democrats ascribe to trutherism.

Reality check: The Bush years gave us forged intelligence to doctor a case for war; windfall profits and no-bid contracts for Administration friendlies like Halliburton and Blackwater; ideologically edited EPA reports to hide the reality that climate change is happening; secret corporate visits to the White House; politicization of U.S. Attorney firings and hirings; massive violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources to aid electoral efforts; embedding racists and classists into the civil rights section of the Justice Dept; politicization of the Interior Dept, which, under Bush’s watch, rarely failed to champion an environment-harming industrial boondoggle; and, oh yeah, an ignored memo written a month before the 9/11 attacks entitled “Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

That is a partial list, and through it all, the Bush Administration and GOP-at-large did not budge one inch when it came to accepting accountability for their moral and legal crimes. And TPM wants to equate conspiracy theories about the Bush Administration with conspiracy theories directed at the virgin, entirely reasonable and far more transparent Obama Administration as though these theories both fall into the same category of “extremism?”

That is truly extreme, in its irrationality. We don’t need it from you, TPM. It’s infuriating enough to hear it from the greatest criminals and lunatics of our age.

NY Times eats Chevron’s whitewash

If you were to read the following headline and lede…

CHEVRON OFFERS EVIDENCE OF BRIBERY SCHEME IN ECUADOR LAWSUIT

The oil giant Chevron said Monday that it had obtained video recordings of meetings in Ecuador this year that appear to reveal a bribery scheme connected to a $27 billion lawsuit the company faces over environmental damage at oil fields it operated in remote areas of the Amazon forest in Ecuador.

The videos, together with audio recordings obtained by businessmen using watches and pens implanted with bugging devices, appear to implicate Ecuadoran officials and political operatives, including possibly Juan Núñez, the judge overseeing the lawsuit, and Pierina Correa, the sister of Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa.

…followed by this…

The recordings indicate that an Ecuadoran political operative was working to obtain $3 million in bribes related to environmental cleanup contracts to be awarded in the event of a ruling against Chevron.

It was not clear from the recordings and transcripts provided by Chevron, however, whether any bribes discussed in the recordings were actually paid or whether Judge Núñez was even aware of plans to try to bribe him. The tapes also did not demonstrate whether the president’s sister was aware of the scheme or had participated in it.

…you could be excused for thinking you’re on crazy pills.

First we’re told there is “evidence” that multiple parties, including the presiding judge, are being bribed by the plaintiffs suing Chevron. Then we’re told that Chevron has recordings of exactly one ”political operative” — singular — discussing a bribe. As in, one name-dropping asshole who would probably just as happily do dirty work for Chevron. In fact, he sounds like exactly the kind of asshole that corporations like Chevron hire all the time to derail accountability and reform. Of course, there is absolutely zero “evidence” of the other two people’s involvement — most importantly, the judge’s. 

If this is the best whitewash that Chevron can come up with, I feel pretty good about the odds for the plaintiffs — you know, the ones whose lives and environment were ruined by Chevron. The unknown number of non-humans whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed by Chevron won’t ever see justice, but at least the bastards might pay something.

Ross Douthat is unapologetically stupid

Gail Collins — progressive columnist — and Ross Douthat — conservative Catholic “intellectual” — recently “conversed” about animal cruelty in the wake of Michael Vick’s re-entrance to the NFL. Collins showed herself responsive to the facts in arguing that the moral outrage directed towards dogfighting ought to be expressed also towards the torture of pigs and other animals on factory farms.

Douthat, however, proved himself capable of extreme idiocy in trying to explain why one can condemn dogfighting but still support factory-farmed cruelty in an age of healthy alternatives.

Let’s take just one short passage from Douthat’s carnival of arbitrary arrogance:

I’m a (sic) unapologetic species-ist. I reject Peter Singer and all his works, I think that the value of animal lives is contingent and the value of human lives absolute, and I would leave a thousand pigs to die in conditions of absolute misery to save a single human infant.

Like many other Christians, Douthat pre-rejects everything Peter Singer touches, however reasonable it might be, because Singer hasn’t taken the easy path into the cult of absolute human sanctity — this despite the fact that Singer’s done more to alleviate human suffering than Douthat ever will.

(For the uninitiated, the distinctive language of “contingent” and “absolute” is a common Christian way of arbitrarily rationalizing both unlimited moral consideration for humans and limitless human dominion over the rest of the planet. In that constructed moral universe, a human embryo receives total consideration while a living, breathing, feeling, thinking pig gets no intrinsic consideration at all.)

But Douthat is terribly confused: even as he claims to reject Singer’s ideas and implicitly claims to be reasoning with “facts” that preclude non-human animals from being intrinsically worthy of any ethical consideration, he labels himself a species-ist — the term that Singer both coined and defined in Animal Liberation — thereby admitting that he’s making ethical determinations in a biased fashion without valid reason to do so.

Adopting this tack with pride, he goes on to make the wild argument that because some humans have bred dogs to be “friends” and pigs to be “strangers”, this gives dogs inherently greater moral standing. In other words, dogs are more ethically considerable only because Douthat’s morally superior humans give them better treatment.

Not only is this a completely invalid (and frankly insane) ethical formulation, but he’s breaking his own rules by making a religious idol of humanity and claiming the mantle of his kind of God: “Because I will it, it is so!” Clearly, man made God in his own image, and not the other way around.

But Douthat’s piece depends more practically on the completely false assumption that factory farming is necessary for humanity to exist, and it’s here that he demonstrates complete ignorance of the issues at hand. Here are some simple facts that devastate his stance:

1. Vegans and some vegetarians live perfectly healthy lives without contributing to factory-farmed cruelty, not to mention the serious human health problems strongly associated with eating meat in typical American quantities.

2. Raising animals for food is actually a huge drain on global food supplies. It takes an exorbitant amount of plant food and land area to raise tens of billions of livestock animals, all of which could be directed towards ending human famine if we were so inclined.

3. Industrial livestock production is not only a huge source of pollution, deforestation, and cruelty, but it is also the leading contributor to climate changes that threaten all of this planet’s ecological systems.

But hey, Douthat’s “unapologetic,” which means: don’t argue with my preferred, privileged, and completely twisted version of reality!

Way past ridiculous

Kenneth Gladney was one of the anti-healthcare reform protestors who scuffled with union members at a recent congressional townhall meeting. Now he’s soliciting donations from conservative admirers to cover supposed health costs related to his involvement in said scuffle — because he was recently laid off and no longer has health insurance!

Yes, these people are incredibly stupid.

link via TPM