A Curious Little Blog

I dissent from what appears to be general support for President Trump's designation of Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.  There are several layers to unwrap in this dissent, however. First, the cartels are obviously criminal organizations, and I support whatever we can do to combat them within the existing law (which, I imagine, is a fair amount, at least as far as their American activities are concerned). Second, it is possible that the cartels meet the definition of a terrorist organization under whatever act it is that authorizes the designation of terrorist groups.  As far as I can tell from the State Department website , the three criteria for the designation are that an organization (a) must be foreign, (b) must have the capability and intent of engaging in terrorism, and (c) must threaten the security of the U.S. or of U.S. nationals.  The first and third are undisputable.  The second is probably true, insofar as the cartels use "terrorism" ...

I like to give credit where credit is due, and therefore I will point out a place that I agree with William James.  He writes, When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_," I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? I appreciate that, because many people who study religion try to reduce it to something easily explainable, something where they do not have to grapple with the question of divinity, and here James shows how little sense it makes to ignore divinity, or to add it in only as something inescapable but not really tangible. On the other hand, James himself reduces the mystical union with God to a person's union with his own unconscious, which seems to be going in the same directionl.  He says, Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whateve...

I am almost done with William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience."  Up until the last few chapters, I found it a fair-minded discussion of religion.  James seems not to believe in a religion, but he goes out of his way to treat it seriously.  The book provides a lot of interesting examples of conversions, spiritual despair, saintliness, and mysticism.  (Almost all but the last are from Christians.) Then he gets to a chapter on religious philosophy, and he burns through all the good will I had developed for him.  He begins by giving some academic theology by John Henry Newman about God, such as this:  "This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself."  (He cites Newman at some length, which I will not do because it is boring.)  And he concludes that Newman's theology is fairly abstract and pointless, which I find difficult to argue with.  How...

Allegedly, President Trump has inquired about buying Greenland from Denmark.  Most people mock this idea, but in fact I don't see anything wrong with it in principle.  After all, a large portion of the current United States's land area was acquired via four different sales:  the Louisiana Purchase, the Adams-Onis treaty (for Florida), the Gadsden Purchase, and Alaska.  Admittedly, the last of these was over 150 years ago, but otherwise they were similar to Greenland in being large (except Gadsden), sparsely populated areas that offered strategic advantages.  Since Denmark granted Greenland a significant degree of self-rule in 1979 and again in 2008, and since the population of Greenland are largely Inuits rather than ethnic Danes, the national allegiance of Greenland would not seem to matter much to its inhabitants.  The security of the island would surely be better protected by the United States.  From a Danish standpoint, apart from national pride, i...

I have every possible sympathy for the protesters in Hong Kong.  In 1997, when Britain returned sovereignty of the island to China (following the expiration of a 99 year lease), I thought Britain was wrong not to grant asylum to every Hong Kong citizen who wanted to immigrate to England.  This could, theoretically, have led to a flood several million non-English speaking people into the United Kingdom, and I can see the problems (not all that difficult to anticipate) if that had happened.  I thought Britain had a responsibility to those people who had been born and raised as British subjects not to turn them over to Chinese despotism.  I wonder how people on the Left would feel about such a situation today.  In general, they seem to support unlimited admission of asylum seekers, although only those who can find their own way into Westerns nations by walking or other means (I haven't seen any suggestions that we should fly those who live in the shadow of poverty ...

Considering how obsessed the Left is with race, one would think they would have a working definition of racism.  But apparently they don't. The lead story on CNN when I checked concerned Trump's weekend tweets.  Here's a section from it: So, telling them to go back to their "totally broken and crime infested placed from which they came" makes very, very little factual sense. But Trump isn't terribly concerned with the facts here. It's the sentiment that matters to him. And that sentiment is racist. Again, this is not an opinion. This is a fact. Trump is telling 4 non-white women that they aren't from here, their views aren't welcome here and they need to get out of here. Rather than staying here, they need to go back to the hellhole countries where they are from. How does that behavior not fit the textbook definition of racism? (That definition, according to Merriam-Webster : "A belief that race is the primary determinant of...

In spite of the fact that I consider my two previous posts on the "Raven paradox" to be correct as far as they go, I have still been drawn to this problem because I have not addressed a central issue:  namely, how can enumerating non-black objects possibly prove that all ravens are black? To restate the issue, stating that "all ravens are black" is supposed to be logically equivalent to "all non-black objects are not ravens."  Therefore, if I find a non-black object and ascertain that it is not a raven, I have, theoretically at least, contributed to proving that all ravens are black. This seems counterintuitive, since I haven't even seen a raven and yet I have somehow helped to prove that all ravens are black.  Let's reduce the problem to marbles.  There is a bin filled with marbles, some of which are translucent, which we will identify with "ravens," and some are opaque, which correspond to "not ravens."  There are 100 marb...

I feel like the arguments I advanced against the Raven Paradox yesterday are valid, and yet not completely satisfying, because they do not address its strictly logical sense.  In other words, I think statements like "all ravens are black" are not categorical and thus can't be proven in the sense that mathematical theorems are proven; nevertheless, I feel that there is a deeper logical inadequacy in the raven paradox that would invalidate it even if it did not have this deficiency. The basis of the raven paradox is that the statement "all ravens are black" should be logically equivalent to its " contrapositive ," "all non-black objects are not ravens."  Nevertheless, there seems to be a difference between the two, because the first statement asserts something about ravens and the second does not.  To illustrate, let's consider unicorns.  Suppose I say that "all unicorns are white."  The contrapositive is that "all non-whi...

I have been enjoying the "Up and Atom" videos on YouTube, which discuss various logical questions.  I particularly found the Raven Paradox interesting.  The principle is pretty simple:  if we think that all ravens are black, then seeing more black ravens helps confirm our hypothesis.  However, saying "all ravens are black" is logically the same as saying "all non-black objects are not ravens," and therefore, seeing non-black objects that are not ravens would also seem to confirm our hypothesis.  Which seems weird, since it means that seeing, for example, a white shoe would help confirm that all ravens are black! There are actually several different ways of approaching this question, but I want to address Karl Popper's argument (raised in the video) that we can never positively prove anything, we can only disprove things.  As the approximately, um, zero people who follow my blog are sure to know, I have been interested in Popper's assertions for ...

I like reading books about mistakes people commonly make:  logical fallacies, bad mental shortcuts, tricks that advertisers use, and so forth.  It is obvious that our minds are not perfectly logical, and I like to be aware of my illogical inclinations so I can prepare for them.  Economists, psychologists, and mathematicians are among the people who write books on this sort of thing. The economic angle gets a lot of attention these days because of the work of Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-prize winning economist who studied ways that people behave irrationally, allegedly contrary to economic principles.  I say "allegedly" because I believe that consumers are not expected to behave rationally according to an absolute standard of maximizing utility, because consumers define utility by their choices.  If I buy a cheap product that falls apart in a year rather than a somewhat more expensive product that will last for ten years, it may appear irrational to a neutral obser...

I went to a physical therapist on Monday, the first time I had been in this medical complex.  I pulled in a random parking place and figured I would walk to where I needed to be.  The building in front of me was clearly labelled "545."  I checked the address:  also 545, I was in luck.  As I approached the door, a saw a sign that it was only for orthopedics; all others should use the next entrance to the left.  I checked the therapist's titles; "orthopedics" was mentioned twice, so I continued in.   There was a woman behind a desk right at the entrance who informed me that I needed to go to the next entrance, second floor. No big deal.  I walked a couple of hundred feet to the next entrance, also well labelled ("515").  I saw no signs on the way in, but I did see stairs, so I proceeded to the second floor.  I found myself in a hospital ward:  patients lying on beds in rooms, nurses bustling around with medicine.  This wa...