Say Anything Blog

Here.

He is the 18th teenager to be shot or stabbed to death in London this year.
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Shakilus was attacked four days after 16-year-old Ben Kinsella was knifed to death in Islington, north London. Three teenagers were appearing in court on Friday charged with his murder.

Later the same day, the bodies of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, both 23, were found riddled with knife wounds after a flat fire in New Cross, south east London.

Tunisian national Hamouda Bessaad, 34, was stabbed to death on Old Kent Road, south-east London, on Monday, while Dee Willis, 28, died after a knife attack in Peckham a day later.

Here.

One employee told investigators he simply liked looking up the records of professional basketball players.
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The 192 million passport files maintained by the State Department contain individuals’ passport applications, which include data such as Social Security numbers, physical descriptions, and names and places of birth of the applicants’ parents. Otherwise, the files provide limited information; they do not contain records of overseas travel or visa stamps from previous passports.
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To test the extent of the snooping, investigators assembled a list of 150 famous Americans and checked how many times their files were accessed over a 5 1/2 -year period. Investigators found that the records of 127, or 85 percent, had been searched a total of more than 4,100 times.

The report said that “although an 85 percent hit rate appears to be excessive, the Department currently lacks criteria to determine whether this is actually an inordinately high rate.”

But one official said there would be little reason to look at the files unless a passport was being renewed or information was being updated. “It should be zero or one time over five years for the normal average American,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“The United States, which has been driving much of the world’s drug research and drug policy agenda, stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, despite punitive illegal drug policies, as well as (in many U.S. states), a higher minimum legal alcohol drinking age than many comparable developed countries,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the July 1 issue of the journal PLoS Medicine.

“The Netherlands, with a less criminally punitive approach to cannabis use than the U.S., has experienced lower levels of use, particularly among younger adults,” they added.

A little response to Rob’s post. After Ahmadinejad saw this clip of Assad and his lady, he thought… “No, hell no.”

My first post on this theme received so much attention that it would just be foolish not to reprise it.

“Okay ladies, now its time to do it all by yourself.”

A short while ago I had the pleasure of attending a lecture titled “The Evolution of Irrationality, Insights from Non-Human Primates” by Dr. Santos from the Comparative Cognition Lab at Yale. She discussed three different studies that she has been working on including this one. Here’s the abstract:

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species?
We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys, and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles. We show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks, but display several hallmark biases when faced with gambles, including reference-dependence and
loss-aversion. Given our capuchins’ inexperience with trade and gambles, these results suggest that loss-aversion extends beyond humans, and may be innate rather than learned.

They taught Capuchins to trade, then they compared the risk-taking tendencies of humans to those of the Capuchins and found that, low and behold, they display the same asymmetrical biases we do. Amazing. The implications are that we, as a species, acquired that bias at some point in our evolutionary history roughly 35 million years ago. Soon denying evolution is going to have some serious economic disadvantages. I recommend y’all get in at the ground floor. This is cool stuff. You should have seen the footage of these guys making buys. They trained them will little wallets full of mock currency. Again, amazing. Also, notice that one of the authors of this paper is from the School of Management. Cool stuff.

I was thinking and…

Wrestling is a performance art. It is blatantly fake, often incorporating adolescent soap opera-esque narratives involving love and betrayal and folding chairs being smashed over someone’s head. Wrestling is marketed to ‘Marks’ and ‘Smarks’ by ‘Insiders’. Marks are the young, the ones who believe its real, who watch it all the time on cable. The Smarks are the ones who know its fake, who used to wake up early on Saturday to watch it before there was cable; but enjoy it for the aesthetic qualities nonetheless, much like attending a play and knowing its not King Lear on stage. Most Smarks are former-Marks and former-Insiders, but some began watching as Smarks and continue to enjoy the drama as Smarks. The Insiders are the wrestlers, the script writers, the announcers, the CEOs, and so on. Many could be double categorized as Smarks.

Politics, I offer, is not so different from wrestling. The only problem is that there are no Insiders, as this is a people’s government. That leaves us with hordes of Marks and Smarks. Now, the problem I see is that most of our politicians think that we are all Marks. How does it feel to be treated like a Mark? To be marketed to? To have the drama foisted on and be enticed into buying a t-shirt or donning a bumper sticker? To have emotional puff fluffed around for you to become mentally lazy in, to get caught up in the little narrative the Smark in the back room is writing?

Perhaps the country has some sort of schizophrenia where large portions of us switch back and forth from being Marks to being Smarks to being Marks again. That is my current favored theory. What do you think? It strikes me that if you feel I should include Insiders in my schema, you are just a lowly Mark. Is there a difference between Mark pride and Smark pride? Patriotism?

What do you think?

Two former hedge fund managers at investment bank Bear Stearns were arrested Thursday morning after a federal criminal probe into the collapse of funds they oversaw, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The [two] are expected to be indicted and arraigned on securities fraud charges.

[They] oversaw two funds whose collapse last year helped kick off the credit crisis after the meltdown of the funds stoked widespread fears about investments linked to risky subprime mortgages.

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The indictments are expected to cite a personal e-mail sent by one manager to the other that appeared to suggest the Bear funds were in difficulty, days before one of the managers told investors that he was comfortable with the holdings…

Wow. This takes one big, tough man to pull off. Or three trucks full.

The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.

An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.

The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.

Mrs Chipiro, 45, a former pre-school teacher, was the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.

Shit. This guy is worse than Saddam. We’ll be in there in no time.

Right guys?

Any minute now? The INJUSTICE?

I mean, what about objective morality and all?

Here.

Helicopter gunships and troops with small and heavy arms blasted a valley in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday as local and NATO forces launched a huge offensive against hundreds of Taliban insurgents…

The developments in Kandahar come amid rising violence in the past two years, the bloodiest period since Taliban’s removal from power in 2001 in Afghanistan.

The last two years have been the bloodiest yet? Oh. Maybe we should see about finishing that project instead of band-aiding it and ignoring it.

The WSJ has it.

“The secretary was very jealous of other agencies,” he said. “It would have been unthinkable...to say to the secretary that, ‘Well, you know, the people who are really good at this are law enforcement. We should talk to the FBI, talk to DEA, talk to other law enforcement agencies that have been conducting interrogation for their entire careers.’”

Why second guess someone who is wrong? Oh, he’s grumpy. What a bunch of invertebrates, eh?

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while the [Red Cross] is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques.”

"Run away, run away!”

Carrick and I were having a particularly productive spat on an admittedly antagonistic post of mine recently. Carrick took the time to type a thought out responce regarding his views on morality which I thought worthy of importing into a whole new post in order to keep the discussion going, minus the stigma of posting on one of Sparkie’s admittedly antagonistic posts. I’ve always felt that one doesn’t get good answers until they push a little. Well, Carrick stepped up. Thanks Carrick. Now to provide a response with a little more thought and class than I usually display… to practice reciprocity.

Sparkie, I don’t have too much time to go into the tenants behind an objective basis for morality, but it exists not the less.  The same is true (and is a related statement) that there is an objective basis to science.

While we understand that Carrick’s position is just a quick sketch, its usable. Also, we should make note that this view of science is contested, if not among scientists, clearly among the clergy, and many others, including Tom Kuhn (circa 1962. he hedged a bit in the late sixties.).

The fact is no statement in empirical science can be proven true beyond any possible doubt, yet there are true statements.  Empirical science is the process by which we beat around in the bushes, over time getting closer and closer to the “real” real.

True, but unjustified statements. The kicker is that lots of people feel that justification is needed. Also, empirical science has brought us phlogiston, ether, N rays, magnetic rays, and countless other fictions. The continuity and building on the past idea is true, but there is lots of rubbish that we throw away. Gradual arguments are nice, seem to make sense, but have the unsavory upshot of not being able to point to the content of our current theories that will not be thrown out. Who knows what we will disprove next? Also, objectivity is a wholly bogus notion. We have no ‘god’s eye’. Among scientists, the best we are going to get is intersubjective agreement. This falls well short of objective. Its real, but not the real real, so to speak.

The same is true for morality. For a given moral equation, there is objectively a best possible outcome and a worse possible outcome.  The “best” outcome is the one that does the most good and the worst is the one that does the most harm (by some measure).  What I’ve left intentionally ambiguous is the whom the good/harm is being done for/to. So morality thought about this way depends on the context in which it is being applied.

This is like a folk version of Mill. Also, how do you avoid the relativism? Where is the foundation or justification? Also, how far into the future do we let the repercussions roll? The causal upshots of our actions, be they individual or state actions, have seemingly infinite causal futures, do they not? On this basis, the embargoes against Saddam and Castro were probably immoral, were they not?

What we might do if we need only consider ourselves is very different than what we might do if a group of people are similarly affected by the action.  Put another way, an act of morality for an individual is different than the act of morality for a group (or a nation, or a planet).  This for example is why Jimmy Carter was a terrible president:  He conflated what was right for him to do (in his case, I am convince, what was “right” is what “felt good” to do), with what was right/necessary to do for the common good of the country.

Do you feel there is a difference in responsibility? Moral valence?

Thus you as an individual probably wouldn’t send 3000 soldiers to their death to protect you.  But you might send the same number if the lives of all Americans were similarly threatened.

I might, but then there would need to be a bona fide threat to all Americans.

That’s an example of a moral equation/dilemma that has a definite right answer and wrong answer to.

Clearly.

Briefly how one determines analytically what is the best approach to take is mostly an experiential one (what has worked in the past, the historical approach).  Generalizations of moral outcomes from a particular action to be our “code of ethics”, part of which is codified e.g., in our Judeo-Christian belief system, part of which is passed on as “lore”.

but what all these have in common is pretty minimal. which one is objective? for example… what is the objectively moral thing to do with the dead? bury them? burn them? harvest their organs? according to your theory we should do the thing that makes for the most ‘good’ and the least ‘bad’, perhaps construed as pleasure or pain… but that’s circular and you know it. you haven’t said what is good and what is bad. failing that, you are a relativist like me.

As time passes on, our ethics becomes more and more refined and our ability to predict the outcome from a particular choice gets better.

i disagree. our ethics is no more refined than it has been. this is especially fallacious when it comes to international policy. we gave up the ‘prediction’ programme in the 60s.

However, an act may always simultaneously be moral and unethical or immoral and ethical.

You would need to differentiate those for all of us or provide an example.

Pretty much this is the same thing that happens in physics:  As we push our knowledge base further with new experiments, we always find “warts” in our existing theories.  These don’t overthrow our original theories, they just get refined with the new knowledge.

incorrect, as i pointed out above. no one believes in phlogiston, ether, etc. anymore.

I think the same thing happens with ethics.

woah woah woah. is ethics a science? wishful thinking.

Older theories of ethics get replaced with new, more refined ones, but the foundations of the old ideas don’t get tossed out, they just get tweaked.

and we will eventually get objective ethics? what percentage of our current ethics is objective, were you to guess? how will we know if a given tenet will be discarded or proven immutable? are we talking real real?

This happens to be the basis for moral conservatism by the way:  We mostly have things right in our ethics, but we recognize a need for flexibility as new circumstances unforeseen by our ancestors arise.  And so forth (out of time)…

Big disconnect there. If that’s the method we use with science, we’d be nowhere. It strikes me that if we can overthrow the ancestors theories with ones that work better, and are totally different, then we will. Also, you ignore the other sciences. Why physics?

The bottom line is that moral relativism is every bit as wrong as social relativism applied to science.  It is just an excuse for not doing the hard work of figuring out what your best moral option is given a particular moral dilemma.  There is an absolute framework for defining good and evil, it will never be known exactly, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist or that we shouldn’t strive to realize it.

I think you are being honest about everything but the existence of good and bad. I look at those as normative ideals, not as objective parts of reality.

Take, for example, a gas efficient car. When we get one with 1000mpg rating will it be the gas efficient car? No. when we get to 5000mpg will that be THE GAS EFFICIENT CAR? No. We will improve. It is an ideal that we strive towards, building on improvements, but never reaching. The form of the perfect gas efficient car need not exist in the heavens for us to work towards gas efficiency.

Also Carrick… physics is practiced around the globe. Granted it is a european phenomenon originally, and until almost the 19teens (there was a bright Japanese guy before then, and maybe one Indian one). Morality, if we use your provided explication, as corrected overtime by the global community… must involve a minimal amount of content. Do no kill, do not lie, and maybe feed your kids until they can feed themselves. If we add to much more, there is no consensus, no intersubjective agreement, no objective content. Does your concept of objective morality include more than that?

Lastly, I just want to know why it has to be objective? What’s wrong with the ideal, the gas efficient car, having a non-existent status? It still does the same work doesn’t it?

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

It’s time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation…

But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

Some of the conservative commentators here on SA are obviously the biggest victims of terrorism stateside. They see enemies everywhere. M_z, r108, Neiman, many Churchs, many labor Unions, Presidents, and other figures and groups… have joined with al Qaeda in the quest to scare and control you.