A Curious Little Blog

 Here's what I don't get about people defining their own pronouns (and I use "their" advisedly):  If I am talking to you, your pronoun is "you."  No one disputes that.  If I am talking about you to another person, the pronoun I use to reference you is none of your business.  I am in a conversation with someone else; you are not a party to it, and you are not entitled to impose rules on it.  Ideally, you will never know what we say -- but if you do find out, it doesn't matter because the pronouns I used were for my convenience, not for your feelings.  Heck, I may not even have met you, may not have any idea what you identify as or even what sex you really are (as sometimes happens when people have names like "Leslie" or "Ashley" that get used for both sexes, or foreign names that I am unfamiliar with).  So mind your business and there will be nothing to get offended about.

Presumably everyone is aware by now of Biden's comment that lifting mask mandates is the result of "Neanderthal thinking."   It is only marginally surprising to see a Democraic President insult Republican governors in this way.  It would have been more surprising, perhaps shocking, 25 or 50 years ago, but hardly unusual these days.  (Although it may be the first use by a major public official of "Neanderthal" as a pejoritive; at least, I can't recall any others.) What could he have said?  How could Biden have phrased his comments differently to make the same point but without the contemptuous overtones?  It isn't all that hard to come up with something.  "I realize that it is tempting to open up public spaces and get rid of mask mandates as soon as possible," he might have said.  "We do need to get to that point, but I think we aren't there yet.  The dangers of premature opening are too great, and the goal of having universal vaccinati...

I have many opinions on politics, but one of my firmest principles is that language should not be abused.  You may be aware of George Orwell's famous essay, " Politics and the English Language ," in which he argued that people use language to obscure political realities more than to clarify them.  I can't speak for his day, but it is certainly common now, when you commonly hear "speech" equated with "violence" and violence (by the correct side) equated with legitimate protest. This morning, I was eating breakfast in a hotel and I saw a segment on CNN about the Capitol "insurrectionists" on January 6th.  (I can't find an article that uses that word in the headline as the news story did, but there are many articles on CNN that make liberal use of that word, e.g. this one .)  CNN has put a lot of effort into maximizing the potential danger from the riot that day, but I don't think any amount of rationalizing would equate what happene...

I disagree with the Black Lives Matter movement on just about everything, but I admire their brilliant choice of a motto.  They've picked something that no one could possibly disgree with.  Of course black lives matter!  But what does that mean?  Well, it was started in reference to police killings of blacks, so it must imply that we have to cut down on that.  But how?  Defund the police?  That doesn't follow, and it's far from something everyone would agree with.  Somehow, however, people who agree that black lives matter find themselves swept up in the defund the police movement.  And since police obviously aren't going to be totally defunded, they start thinking about what else they can do to stay on the right side, the safe side.  That begins by putting "black lives matter" on all their web sites and telling people that we must do more to stop racism -- which is quite a jump from the bland assertion that black lives matter. Saying ...

No one has anything good to say about hypocrisy, but I am going to argue that it is best left out of political debates -- for the most part. Dave Rubin relates a time that he lost patience with an old friend of his.  They were debating a subject over a meal, and his friend insisted that Rubin's motives must be something other than whatever argument he was making.  Rubin stopped him and asked (roughly), "Are you willing to grant that I believe the things that I say with the same sincerity that you believe the things that you say?"  The friend would not concede that, so Rubin walked out of the restaurant and ended their friendship. I have faced similar accusations many times.  Often, friends will phrase it so that it doesn't apply to me directly:  "I believe you," they effectively say, "but I don't believe anyone else who makes the same argument." The tactic of accusing someone of insincerity or hypocrisy is possibly the lowest form of argument. ...

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 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 am strangely attracted to the concept of Taoism.  I say "strangely," because I normally have no interest in mystical thought.  I was nearly an adult when "The Tao of Pooh" became a bestseller, and I was not impressed at all.  Somewhere along the line, however, I found myself attracted to Taoist thought, in particular the concept of wu-wei.  When I recently read the Tao Te Ching, therefore, it was not the first time I had done so.  It is a challenging work, deliberately so, and one can read it repeatedly without fully comprehending it.  Fortunately, it is also very short and therefore easy to re-read.  The real question is whether there is something to understand at all, or whether it is a lot of nonsense. I have not devoted myself to understanding Tao the way I have to Christianity, but I have been curious about it for a long time and so I was happy that recently I could read some excerpts from the work of Zhuangzi, a Taoist thinker who lived about...

I have taken a small detour to read some Chinese classics:  the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, and Sun Tzu's Art of War.  They are all short works, but challenging. I thought about trying to learn Chinese once, but I don't think I'm cut out for it.  On one hand (and feel free to correct me if any of this is wrong), it seems to have a very simple grammar:  no cases or declensions, no real verb conjugations, no moods, simple markers for tenses.  On the other hand, the very simplicity of it makes it difficult to interpret.  I saw the following example of a Chinese sentence, each word translated directly into English:  "Tiger father no dog son."  I stared at it for some time without having any idea what it meant.  The explanation:  "if the father is a tiger, his son will not be a dog" -- i.e., the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  Now that I know it, it makes sense, but I suspect that in reading there must be many cases wh...

I read a lot about people concerned with our "divisive" political culture in this country (the U.S.).  This is particularly interesting because it is almost always used as a criticism.  One almost never hears someone say that his own party is deepening the political divisions in the country; it is always the other side.  In other words, the problem of divisiveness is used in a divisive way. It may seem natural that people would see the other side as the source of the problem, but compare this to issues like military armament.  It is not difficult to find people urging unilateral disarmament on their own governments, as though the military problem would disappear if one side had no way to defend itself.  On the other hand, I have yet to hear someone urge his party or faction to stop using divisive language even if the other side continues to take advantage of it.  Arguably this was the tack Hilary Clinton was taking in her presidential campaign when she re...

While I was visiting Thailand last year, I came across a sign for the Monoceros Resort.  I was interested because I wrote a post on this blog nearly six years ago about the surprising fact that the mythical horse creature with a single horn is almost always called the unicorn, not the monoceros, in spite of almost all other mythical animals having names deriving from Greek. So I was shocked to find this resort going by the name of "Monoceros" instead of the more common "unicorn."  Well, I was almost as much shocked to find a resort with either name in rural Thailand as I was of anything else.  It is not hard to find via a Google search, and in fact appears to be a popular resort , at least for Swedes.  It was a small sign and I had no chance to get a picture of it, but you can see their logo below, and it does appear to be some sort of unicorn.  (I don't know what else it would be with that name; perhaps it could have been named after the constellation.) ...

My most popular post by a huge margin is on Hume and Popper , although I'm not sure if it gets so many hits because it is insightful or because philosophy professors keep sending their students to it as an example of how not to analyze philosophy.  I finally got around to reading Hume's famous work "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" and I was curious whether it would cause me to rethink my other post.  In a word, no, because that post was mostly (I realize now) about Popper.  But I'm still glad I read it. After slogging through Spinoza and Leibniz, I can't say what a pleasure it was to read a book in the Anglophone tradition, where the author's primary effort is to be understood.  That, and Hume's empiricist outlook, make this book a pleasure to read even where I disagree with it, and that does not include his generally sceptical approach. Hume tries to show that we can only ever assume causality, never know it directly, which is unobjec...

The mascot question has become much more acute since I wrote about it here 7 years ago ( Offensive mascots , 11/27/09).  The NCAA has imposed penalties on teams with Native American nicknames and mascots, and the pressure on the Washington Redskins has become much greater, including many networks that will not say the name on air. A new poll highlights the stupidity of the whole effort:  Native Americans overwhelmingly don't care.  They either aren't offended or actually like the names.  Which should be obvious, since team names are taken not to mock a culture, but to hold it up as a symbol of pride. I doubt this will shame any of the people campaigning against Native American names into minding their own business, because they do not have a normal sense of shame when it comes to their touchstone issues.  You're either right, or you're a racist/fascist/sexist.  I don't know what they would say to Native Americans in this case; perhaps they would argue ...

What is real, the things we see and touch around us, or the ideas of those things?  It seems obvious, but Plato argued that things, being merely transitory, don't really exist in the same way that eternal ideas do.  Ever since then, this "idealist" position has been a major branch of philosophy. It always bothered me, and I am thinking about it again as I read Schopenhauer make the same basic argument.  If something exists in time, it is by definition transitory; everything in time is constantly changing, and there must be a time before and after it existed when the object did not exist.  But the idea of this thing, the template for it, always exists; it even exists outside of time and space.  Therefore, the idea is more real than the thing. I have trouble with the concept of anything "existing" outside of time and space, but that's another argument that I'm not prepared to make at the moment.  My more pertinent objection is that it is too hard to de...

If someone asked what kind of person you are, what would say?  "I like horses, ice hockey, and red wine, and I hate skin care products"?  You might think that reveals a lot about you, but your likes and dislikes are not necessarily that helpful for someone who wants to know what you are like as a person. Let me tell you what kind of person I am -- and I'll warn you, it's not pretty.  You know the song "Stranglehold" by Ted Nugent?  Great guitar song, really rocks.  The lyrics are kind of weird, arguably misogynistic, but I can ignore that.  I ignore all kinds of annoying lyrics in songs I like; they won't be my favourite songs, but if they have a nice sound, I will still like them.  What I can't ignore is the line where he sings, I've got you in a stranglehold baby You best get out of the way. WTF??  If you have someone in a stranglehold, it is way too late for him to get out of the way.  Suggesting that he (or she) do so is a sign th...

What my last post failed to address is the question of whether ideas "exist" in a meaningful sense.  In one way, my explanation seems to support Plato's belief that ideas are the only thing that exist, and everything else is merely a poor imitation.  The idea of a triangle, for example, is clear and precise; triangles in the real world, however, by definition are never as precise as the ideal triangle (remember, lines have no width in geometry).  And if everything has only a relative existence, measured against an idea, it seems logical to say that ideas exist more completely than the material things of which they are copies. This might be true, except for two things.  First, we don't have such a precise definition of most things as we do of triangles or other geometric concepts (and geometry, of course, was central to Plato's philosophy -- the words over the Academy read, "Let none ignorant of geometry enter here").  For example, we know that a chair ...

I have been reading a lot of philosophy recently, and that has got me thinking about the meaning of "existence" and "being."  Some philosophers make a great deal of existence (e.g. Heidegger, whom I have not read), and of course some of the great debates of history have concerned the reality of concepts (Plato and Aristotle, Realists and Nominalists). I have always thought that existence is synonymous with physical existence. What does it mean for non-material objects (Congress, the mind, a word) to "exist"? They exist as a series of relationships, e.g. Congress is a building associated with a number of people who are related by their position and responsibilities. In that sense, it can be said to exist only relatively, i.e., to the extent that the relationships may be considered coherent. (In other words, Congress exists "more" than society, because there is a relatively clear set of rules defining Congress, whereas society is a much...

A few smaller categories of vocabulary words to close out this brief series. "Gnomic" and "sententious" both describe someone who writes or speaks in aphorisms, while an "atticism" is a concise and elegant expression, not necessarily aphoristic. A "sybarite" is someone devoted to pleasure, while a "feckless" person has no sense of responsibility or is just lazy.  "Otiose" can describe someone at leisure, or a lazy person; or it can mean ineffective, futile, or useless -- I'm surprised we don't see this word more often, as it seems to cover a number of common insults. I found three words that begin with the prefix "pleo-," whose meaning I did not know before.  A "pleonasm" is the use of unnecessary words, such as "will and testament" -- which essentially mean the same thing -- or "burning fire."  "Pleochroic" describes something (often a crystal) that appears to be...

I seem to have come across an unusual number of words associated with the heavens (literal or metaphorical) and with religion, Christianity specifically.  This is a little odd because I haven't read any theology at all -- these words all came from books on other subjects. supernal - celestial or divine welkin - the sky beatific - blissful or bestowing bliss empyrean -  the highest heaven.  (In spite of its -an ending, this word is actually a noun, not an adjective.  It was an ancient term for a region containing pure fire -- the element that rises the most -- and was adopted by Christians.) numinous - spiritual; supernatural; mysterious; beyond comprehension paraclete - an advocate or intercessor; when capitalized, the Holy Spirit theophany - an appearance of a god to a person afflatus - inspiration, especially a divine imparting of knowledge.  (This word comes from the Latin meaning "to blow on," so it has the bad association in my mind with som...