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2.8.02 VVV No-Respect Politics To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. And Krauthammer goes on to say that the fact that liberals think conservatives are evil proves that conservatives are right in thinking liberals are stupid. This column is a good illustration of a basic law of commentary. In quasi-mathematical format, it goes like this: If argument f states that conservatives are X or that liberals are Y, then f is false. I should send Krauthammer the hundreds of columns I've read in which conservatives decry the way (presumably evil) liberals are destroying the moral fabric of society, or the hundreds in which liberals justify the "ivory tower intellectual" stereotype by railing about how conservatives are blind to obvious facts because of their ideologies. If commentators could stick to making specific and substantive criticisms of policies rather than knocking down overgeneralized caricatures of their supposed opposition, the political climate would be a fair bit healthier. But then there would be an awful lot of out-of-work pundits, and as a bleeding-heart liberal I wouldn't want to put my colleagues on the streets during this recession. posted by Stentor Danielson at 22:59 -- link -- VVV The Book Of Mormon -- Artifact Or Artifice? If you attempted to produce something like the Book of Mormon today, using the best science fiction writers, fully aware of all that we know about the culture of Meso-America, fully aware of everything that we know about how you create a fake document, it would still be obvious, if not immediately, then within 15 or 20 years. The cultural assumptions behind the book would reveal themselves, showing clearly exactly when the book was really written. But the Book of Mormon has been around a lot longer than that, and believe me, folks, I really do understand a lot about how science fiction is made and I can't find anywhere that it's done wrong. Search all you like through that book. I have, and I can't find a flaw. Yet we should expect to find a consistent pattern of getting it wrong. Not just one example, but thousands of examples within a book that long, but -- they are not there. This essay inadvertantly illustrates how impossible it is to prove or disprove the authenticity of a document based on internal evidence. When I read the Book of Mormon, it seemed to be quite transparently the invention of a 19th century Christian. But to a devout Mormon like Orson Scott Card, it sounds too good to be faked. Arguments like the ones Card makes boil down to second-guessing the autor, trying to guess how well he should have been able to pull off a hoax and what a real document would look like. To every point that Card says "Joseph Smith ought to have made a mistake here, but he didn't," a skeptic can reply "well, if you noticed that, why couldn't Smith have noticed it and properly faked it?" (Many of Card's points seem to me to assume that Smith was unjustifiably naive about the universality of 19th century cultural norms, and the source for many of these supposedly impossibly alien ideas can be found right in the Bible, which a hoaxing Smith would have been consciously imitating.) And to every assertion of a mistake, Card could claim that it crept in through translation. Of course, in the case of the Book of Mormon, there is plenty that can be verified by outside sources. Not a single bit of Israelite metalwork, architecture, livestock, or crops has been found in a pre-Colombian archaeological context, despite the supposed centuries of great Nephite and Lamanite populations in the New World. Now, that may seem an unnecessarily harsh indictment of someone else's religion, especially given the scientific and archaeological impossibilities in the first dozen or so chapters of Genesis. But Scott gets to the heart of the matter at the end of his essay: The Book of Mormon only matters because it's a life-changing book. The truth, the important truth of the Book of Mormon is only understood with the Spirit through faith. If you don't believe in the book, it's not going to change your life. And I mean believe in it in a way far different from believing it's a genuine artifact. You have to believe in it also as something meant for you as a guide to your life. So, I have very little interest in attempting to prove the book. I haven't proven it here. The only real proof is when you prove it with your life, living the gospel it teaches and participating in the Church that was established with that book as the mortar holding it all together. Whether a tradition is true or not isn't the issue. It's whether it gives you the vocabulary to express something more important than where the ancestors of the Native Americans came from. posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:46 -- link -- VVV (insert blurb about not usually doing quizzes) I am STUPID AND EVIL. posted by Stentor Danielson at 10:27 -- link -- 1.8.02 VVV According to CNN, pretty much everything is "under fire." Pollution Controls Under Fire, President Bush Under Fire, Colorado Firefighters Under Fire. But I suppose that beats their other option -- bad puns. posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:47 -- link -- 31.7.02 VVV My schedule for the remainder of the afternoon: 3:10: Click "Post & Publish." 3:15: Publishing complete. Click "view web page." 3:17: New window appears on screen. 3:22: Blog finishes loading in new window. 3:23: Click on Outlook in taskbar. 3:26: Outlook comes to the front. Click "Send/Receive." 3:28: Send/Receieve box appears on screen. 3:37: New mail received. 3:39: Send/Receive box disappears. 3:41: Screen refreshes to show new mail. Click on one message. 3:45: Window for new message appears on screen. 3:47: New message visible in window. It's a person who wants to subscribe. Click to close window. 3:50: Message window gone. Drag message over to "subscribers" folder. 3:51: Cursor actually moves. 3:55: Message moves into "subscribers" folder. 3:57: Screen refreshes to show new mail, minus the subscriber message. Click on next message. 4:00: New window opens. 4:03: Message opens in new window. It's from the guy who has the theory about the dinosaurs being killed by a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. 4:04: Pick up lamp. 4:05: Insert lamp into computer screen. 4:06: Call the helpline: "I'm sorry, but I think I may need a new computer." posted by Stentor Danielson at 15:11 -- link -- 30.7.02 VVV An open letter to Nigerian Scam writers posted by Stentor Danielson at 10:04 -- link -- 29.7.02 VVV Whenever I read the news in Spanish, I always wind up reading the story about the Pope. posted by Stentor Danielson at 17:19 -- link -- VVV So here we are at the new address, with the new look. I've moved all my stuff from my personal site (well, most of it -- I'm not used to having a memory space restriction) over to brunchma. If any of the links aren't working, let me know. posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:17 -- link -- 28.7.02 VVV The Importance Of Speaking English The Brown County Board of Supervisors in Green Bay, Wis., home of the Packers, has declared English as the official language of government. There are many ways to look at the same thing, and our land is famous for the freedom of doing so. Alas, the right to free speech does not come with guarantees of rational thought, or even the assumption that people will necessarily speak the truth. Jodi Wilgoren, writing in the New York Times, and Karl Txajkaug Thoj, director of the Hmong Association of Green Bay, are competing for my "Most Inappropriate Response" prize this week. "The movement [adopting English as the official language] has gained strength in recent years as part of a backlash against growing numbers of immigrants," writes Miss Wilgoren.... ...Instantly prohibited [when first the Nazis, then the Communists, took over his native Hungary] was any contact with the English-speaking world. Listening to an English-speaking broadcast would land one in jail more certainly than serious civil crime. Target practice from age 14 upward meant shooting at images of the current American president. "If their chief enemy is the same," I reasoned, "then their underlying philosophy must be the same." Thus the conventional wisdom of Nazis on the Right, communists on the Left, and America in the middle was rather short-lived for someone of my experience. More realistic was the image of Nazis and communists on one side, the English-speaking world on the other... ...If properly examined, it will become clear the purpose is not to "make life easier for immigrants." Nor is the purpose "diversity." The purpose is to do away with the powerful concepts that English, and English alone, transmits across generations, across the globe. No other language, certainly not Spanish -- the primary weapon in this battle -- can imbue a person with a sense of fairness, because no other language has that word. It's impossible to translate legal concepts such as "reasonable doubt," or "unreasonable searches and seizures," because it never occurred to possessors of power in the countries from which we immigrants come to behave reasonably. So the people defending the status quo (i.e., no official language) are the ones who want to fundamentally alter the nature of America. And because the Communists and Nazis didn't like English speaking countries (seeing as neither the US or UK was ever communist or nazi), therefore everyone should speak English. And allowing people to speak non-English languages is actually an insidious way of introducing newspeak that makes them unable to express free and democratic ideas. I think this guy needs to stick to being a concert pianist. posted by Stentor Danielson at 16:41 -- link --