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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

Palin resigns, rambles on

I’m sure everyone has tumblogged this already, but I was away from the internet yesterday.

As I thought about this announcement that I would not seek re-election, I thought about how much fun other governors have as lame ducks. They maybe travel around their state, travel to other states, maybe take their overseas international trade missions. I’m not going to put Alaskans through that.

Now she can just sit back and enjoy the millions while her book gets written by someone else… and plan her future political plays. I betcha we haven’t seen the last of her as a politician.

Yep, this lady is still idiotic and unabashedly self-serving, whatever lofty reasons she strains to cite for her behavior. I urge everyone to watch the rambling video.

Update: On the subject of rambling, Paul Begala eviscerates:

Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin’s official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words — still no exclamation points. …

Gov. Palin’s official announcement that she is resigning as chief executive of the great state of Alaska had all the depth and gravitas of a 13-year-old’s review of the Jonas Brothers’ album on Facebook. She even quoted her parents’ refrigerator magnet. (Note to self: if one of my kids becomes governor, throw away the refrigerator magnet that says: “Murray’s Oyster Bar: We Shuck Em, You Suck Em!”) She put her son’s name in quotations marks. Why? Who knows. She writes, “I promised efficiencies and effectiveness!?” Was she exclaiming or questioning? I get it: both! And I don’t even know what to make of a sentence that reads:

((Gotta put First Things First))

Ponder the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s Harper Collins publishing house is paying this, umm, writer $11 million for a book. Ponder that and say a prayer for Ms. Palin’s editor.

Mayor Mike cancels summer

justinday:

Mayor Bloomberg announced today that summer in New York City would be cancelled due to budgetary constraints. “It simply costs too much to run all those air conditioners.”, Bloomberg said at a press conference given today. The city plans to set the dial to cool and rainy until winter, even going so far as to establish a deal to sell excess rainwater to the sun parched southwest.

Good stuff, and it reminds me…

Humans have somehow got it in their heads that they are both masters of the universe and subject to the whims of forces ultimately beyond their control. This blatant cognitive dissonance is sustained by the small-picture, often psychological utility of each contradictory stance at different points in space-time.

We trumpet human dominionism whenever we are exploiting something else, and then we talk, amongst ourselves, about how “life is full of surprises” and “the more you know, the less you know” and “life is one long education.” Meanwhile, our “ingenious” “solutions” are only solutions for so long before they are revealed to be even greater problems than the ones they meant to resolve. (Fossil fuels and global warming, anyone?) David Ehrenfeld’s The Arrogance of Humanism is a phenomenal and timeless expression of this idea (see Seminal Reading link in the sidebar).

Despite our many self-indulgent pretenses, we do acknowledge that we cannot control the weather. Duh. Yet passages like the above are still funny to us, because they call out the lies we live. They call out the fact that we are emperors without clothes, and what can we do but laugh about our own failings?

Well, maybe we could try to change. If we stopped pretending to be great in order to justify our various thefts and usurpations, we would still have things to laugh about. I promise.

Submit or die.

From the NY Times:

In recent months, Sumatran tigers, which face extinction, have killed illegal loggers pushing into the animals’ territory on the island of Sumatra and have been killed in turn by villagers.

You see, the tigers have a choice: die because they’ve run out of livable habitat, or die because they fight to keep their home. Humanity’s message to all creatures (using “or” in the inclusive sense):

Submit or die.

We are the terrors we imagine.

re: “April 15th”

Jakob Lodwick says:

Recall that, by your nature as a human being, you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and no reason exists why these rights can be taken away from you. [original emphasis]

I imagine Mr. Lodwick intends this as a profound and rational offensive against the collection of taxes (hence the title, “April 15th”.) Not only does his sentiment extend far beyond the scope of mere tax collection, but every shred of meaning in this sentence is eminently challengeable. A sampling:

• One is not entitled to ask readers to “recall” something that one has not yet genuinely proven or justified.
• A rote appeal to “your nature as a human being” requires extremely deeper preface than is provided. As it stands, it is indulgent, ambiguous, and, if I read between the lines correctly, fallaciously exclusionary with regard to other species.
• If Lodwick means “rights” here as inalienable pieces of “human nature,” without which the human thing itself does not exist, then he would be committed to the absurdity that an animal which is biologically human in all ways, but fails to be as free as he would like, is in fact not a human. On the other hand, if Lodwick means “rights” as in legal protections, then these are by their nature alienable, and thus do not derive from “human nature” as they “can be taken away from you.”
• “No reason exists why these can be taken away from you.” Actually, plenty of reasons may exist, depending upon the circumstances. If this is supposed to be shorthand for, “No good reason exists…”, that isn’t true either. Individuals’ pursuit of their own small-picture happiness, for example, is precisely why our natural world is being destroyed at an exponential rate. For a smaller example, I think Lodwick would agree that a serial killer shouldn’t be allowed to pursue his own happiness, despite Lodwick’s insistence that his right to pursue happiness either cannot or should not be deprived.

Lodwick’s sentiment — and it is sentiment, not reason — is extremely common and destructive. As you may have noticed, it fails to acknowledge a limited pool of resources by which we can experience life, liberty, and happiness — thereby failing to acknowledge that one man’s “life,” “liberty,” and “happiness” is necessarily satisfied to the detriment of the rest. Obviously a balance can be struck, and that is what nature accomplished pre-civilization, over the course of billions of years.

In a stunning show of hubris, Man has decided He knows better. He has fucked nature’s balance precisely by assuming His own “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — again, to the inevitable detriment of all others, fellow Men or otherwise, whether or not He is aware of this reality. Those of us who fail to recognize this crucial fact are understandably unable to determine the eminently unassailable reasons for why Lodwick’s sentiment is so false and destructive.

It’s really important to figure this out. Like yesterday. But hey, Lodwick doesn’t want to pay his goddamn taxes. That’s really important too.

NYS Senate flipped

WTF:

Republicans seized control of the New York State Senate on Monday, in a stunning and sudden reversal of fortunes for the Democratic Party, which controlled the chamber for barely five months.

A raucous leadership fight erupted on the floor of the Senate around 3 p.m., with two Democrats, Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens, joining the 30 Senate Republicans in a motion that would displace Democrats as the party in control.

Are these guys aware of how big a mess they’ve just heaped on the already-huge pile of shit for this state to work through right now? Are they aware that our state legislature has garnered a fitting reputation as near-completely dysfunctional during the last 40 years of Republican senate control?

And it gets pettier, narrower, and crazier: apparently, a major motivation to defect for these two Bible-thumpers — both subjects of separate corruption investigations — was a growing sense that the Democrats were poised to bring gay marriage equality to a vote.

Do you feel SORRY?

Okay, John Tierney, now you’ve done it:

If you own a dog, especially a dog that has anointed your favorite rug, you know that an animal is capable of apologizing. He can whimper and slouch and tuck his tail and look positively mortified — “I don’t know what possessed me.” But is he really feeling sorry?

Could any animal feel true pangs of regret?

Predictably, the rest of the article is similarly full of self-sycophantic, pseudo-scientific know-nothingness. When it takes a thousand concurring studies for even relatively intelligent humans to grant a single non-human species 0.01% of the value we see in ourselves, we aren’t practicing science anymore.

“Could any animal feel true pangs of regret?” I’m sorry, are humans not animals? In spite of Mr. Tierney’s blatant speciesist prickery, he surely knows, since he is a science-y writer for the venerable New York Times, that humans are biological creatures — you know, animals. Perhaps he needs a refresher in Biology 101, not to mention the rules of logic, neuroscience, animal psychology, ethics — basically, everything having to do with the subject matter he has elected to discuss.

What I want to know, Mr. Tierney, is this: Do YOU feel sorry for the atrocities that humans commit against those mere animals?

Do you feel “sorry” for this?

Or this?

How about feeling “sorry” for this victim of humanity, you smug prick?

Of course, saying you’re sorry is not nearly enough. The nature of such crimes is that nothing — nothing — can ever atone for them. To put it more nicely than I should:

BILLIONS OF ANIMALS ARE LIVING HELL ON EARTH BECAUSE OF SPECIAL, ENTITLED OVERGROWN CHILDREN LIKE YOU.

So fuck you and your precious “humanity.” I’d rather be an animal.