851. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135965 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 11:36 am

Admittedly the concept of sport hunting is one which gives me significant pause. Viscerally I do not like it one bit - the idea of killing other animals solely for one's own pleasure repels me - but I understand that there are very strong cultural and even instinctive factors behind it, and I am always wary of telling people that they can't do things just because I don't like them. One raised to treat it as normal, unremarkable and harmless fun is not to be criticised for their upbringing. Rationally I can find no justification for it, unless one's pleasure is to be rated higher than the lives of the animals one hunts. Hunting for food is, I guess, much easier to rationalise since we farm and kill animals for that anyway, and the wild existence of a deer is probably much more comfortable than that of a caged venison calf at any rate.

Drag hunting, or clay pigeon shooting, or some other non-lethal alternative which provides similar ballistic challenges (maybe using paintballs, I don't know) seems to me the way forward.

852. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135951 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 11:23 am

Alexander,

Once again I reiterate that I was not trying to imply causation, merely point out correlation. Since you failed to notice this I must come to the somewhat uncharitable conclusion that you were deliberately reading my posts with an eye to finding something to disagree with.

Continuing in this vein I must also note that you have quoted what I said but failed to read it properly, and in so doing come to a somewhat distorted appreciation of my sentiments. I was merely pointing out that there are prevalent negative stereotypes of the military in this country, not that I necessarily believe those stereotypes to be accurate. You might have noticed that I said "they're seen as" rather than "they are", and I followed up with "It's an unworthy and outdated stereotype I know, but it's the one many of us have". Quite how this can be interpreted as me assenting to the stereotype I am at something of a loss to understand.

Furthermore, none of this has even the slightest bearing on my main point, which is that firearms are, de facto, more lethal than pretty much any other type of weapon, and reducing the overall numbers of them available in society will therefore reduce the overall lethality available for consumption. It might also help to breed a culture where firearms and violent methods of problem-solving are not fetishised, and thus improve the overall stability, civility and pleasantness of society.

And, yes, the successful criminals will inevitably manage to acquire the illicit firearms for themselves, but a) with fewer available the less adept and more amateur criminals, who make up the majority, will not, and b) in a culture where firearms are considered unecessary for criminal activity (such as among the Japanese Yakuza) they will be less frequently employed and loss of life will be much lower.

Furthermore, Alexander, I would like to chide you on your terribly bad form. Resorting to base insults when my own post was nothing but civil - tut, tut, how rude. Assuming that I "must have known" about crime statistics for places like Sweden and Mexico is a leap too far on your part - I did not, and I thank you for pointing that out to me as much as I upbraid you for trying to tar me with the brush of dishonesty. I would be the first to admit that my knowledge of the issue is not that great, and if there is proper, well-founded statistical analysis which substantiates the claim that reducing the number of weapons available will not reduce their employment, then I would be more than willing to investigate it and change my mind. On a site like this I believe that goes without saying. Such contemptible incivility as you have demonstrated does you little credit.

853. Fleabytes

Comment #135875 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 10:11 am

I don't believe in god because I have seen the difference he has made in people's lives...

854. Fleabytes

Comment #135867 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 10:03 am

Atheism is not a choice - it's an inescapable conclusion

855. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135847 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 9:46 am

I am all for a sophisticated and thoughtful approach, based on careful, in-depth studies, to the reduction of violent crime. I agree that there is no logical path from simply having guns to actually using them on people.

But in societies where there is a tendency for violent crime, I think that limiting the potential for lethality is a helpful stopgap measure until the underlying tensions can be resolved. If this results in us permitting the Swiss and the Japanese free access to guns but not the Americans and Israelis then that seems a perfectly pragmatic and sensible solution to me, and to hell with the macho posturing and whining of the Charlton Heston crowd...

856. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135833 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 9:38 am

Actually, Al-Rawandi, I was not making any statements about causation. I simply said that there was a correlation between easy availability of weapons and incidence of violent crime. This might be the availability causing the crime, or the desire for crime causing the production and hence availability of weapons, or it could be (and I think it almost certainly is) a complicated nexus of factors resulting in this particular phenomenon. My point was that the opposite assertion - more guns makes society SAFER - doesn't even have the evidence of a correlation that MIGHT indicate causality. Switzerland is a very peculiar outlier as far as the general trend goes.

Of course the incidence of violent crime is mainly linked to societal stability and economic disparity - I wouldn't claim otherwise - but if so and the availability of guns has nothing to do with it then what advantage can there be to having them all over the place and exacerbating the problem by increasing the deadly power each criminal can possess. Without guns violent criminals would use whatever weapons they had to hand, and knives, fists, coshes, chair legs and what have you are far less deadly than machine-tooled modern instruments of death.

And, actually, no, I don't own a car. In fact I am petrified of road travel and generally walk wherever I need to go if at all possible. I use public transport when this is not possible. I think a massive reduction in the number of personally owned vehicles would be a very good thing for both safety and environmental reasons, not to mention the reduction in oil dependence that would emasculate the power of the Middle East oil barons, so yes, if I had my way cars would be banned or severely curtailed. But cars do have a function apart from killing people. Guns don't.

857. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135785 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 9:11 am

Ugh! What is it with Americans and their guns?

Why is it that people who live in the civilized nations of Western Europe, most of East Asia, Canada and probably many other places don't seem to feel the need for copious quantities of firepower in every home, yet for the belligerent tribes of Merica it is considered vitally important?

Well, actually I can answer that question to my own satisfaction. I'm more pointing it out to flag up the vast difference in the tone of the debate either side of the World Pond. It has an awful lot to do with historical devlopments, social memory and self-identification. It probably stems from the fact that we Europeans acquired firearms in the late middle ages and had a strong tradition of centralised governmental control over force following the medieval experience of rogue barons and feudal underlings trying to challenge the power of the king with their armies. Contrawise the United States had a settler mentality, and in many ways still does, where armed citizen militias were considered the order of the day.

I have spoken to numerous Americans about this, and it never ceases to amaze me just how unremarkable the possession of deadly weaponry is taken to be among them. In England at least, and I suspect in most of western Europe, most people are frightened of guns. I know I start to physically shake in the presence of them, even in museums. They are seen as sinister and sordid tools of brutish violence - the preserve of the criminal underclass, the thuggish paramilitaries and the only slightly less thuggish scions of the military itself.

I guess the military is rather more respected over there too - here they're seen as a bunch of thick, interfering buffoons who are ill-suited for anything other than mindless square-bashing and causing international relations disasters. It's an unworthy and outdated stereotype I know, but it's the one many of us have. In modern Britain it's only really military families and the far right who laud soldiers as "heroes". That mentality seems far more common in the states. As far as I can tell the soldiers themselves just see it as a job to be done.

Mind you, it seems that we Britons are far more enamoured by the archetype of the dashing James Bond style spy than the yanks, most of whom see spies as deeply sinister and corrupt, so we do have some gun-friendly popular images in our national consciousness.

As for widespread gun ownership making people safe from violent crime, I think the statistics firmly confound that assumption. Just look at Japan, where violent crime rates are among the lowest in the world, and private gun ownership is both illegal and considered deeply suspect. Even the Yakuza, the Japanese organised crime syndicates, hardly ever use guns. I remember my brother telling me once about a Japanese criminal who held up a bus driver using... his fist! Obviously there are social and cultural differences, but generally speaking the most violent societies are the ones where weaponry is freely and readily available.

858. Fleabytes

Comment #134485 by Cartomancer on February 27, 2008 at 9:44 pm

The bible is like hollywood - it takes in obscene amounts of money every year but very rarely produces anything worth watching twice?

It's rapidly being challenged by gaudy, culturally-specific Asian alternatives with a more conservative attitude to sexuality...

It only mentions gay people four times in its entire extent, and all of them negatively...

It's all crass special effects these days (mostly computer-generated crowd scenes and fire-and-brimstone explosions) with no appreciable character development or emotional engagement like it used to have...

Well-spoken British people are always cast as the bad guys (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Rowan Williams...)

The sequels keep getting worse and worse, with more violence and gaping holes in the plot...

859. Church is paying a high price for its celibacy rule

Comment #133511 by Cartomancer on February 26, 2008 at 9:11 am

The Avignon period, as far as I can tell, did not see a great deal of change in matters of doctrine, rather, the concessions to the French Kings were mainly about temporal authority. The period of papal dependence on French support really started toward the middle of the fourteenth century when the temporal power of the popes was much reduced - in 1305 the papacy still had strong ties to most christian rulers in Europe and significant temporal assets of its own on which to draw. The original move to Avignon was mostly about the interests of the new French popes and getting away from the dynastic disputes between the Colonna and Orsini princes in Italy who were both trying to get as firm a grip as they could on the papacy, much to the chagrin of the conclave. Nevertheless, even at the nadir of their authority the popes tried to garner support from the kings of England, and oppose moves within the Empire to reject temporal dependence on the pope as the French king had done. The main doctrinal and spiritual concerns of the fourteenth century papacy seem to have been with the increasingly luxurious lifestyle led by the Avignon popes and their households, and with stamping out Catharism and its like. The hypocritical life of luxury led by the Avignonese popes seemed a stark contrast to the apostolic simplicity they preached, and the filthy, squalid conditions of the plague years for the majority of their followers.

Incidentally Jacques D'Euse (pope John XXII from 1316) was the one who excommunicated this site's favourite razor-wielding scholastic thinker William of Ockham, along with the similarly critical Marsilius of Padua and Eckhart von Hochheim when they criticised the excesses of the Avignon papacy. Doesn't seem that our friends at St. Peter's have learned very much in the intervening centuries about the effects of living in opulent splendour while their subjects suffer from deadly killer diseases does it?

860. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #133195 by Cartomancer on February 25, 2008 at 7:49 pm

Mitchell Gilks, comment #38 -

Yup, that's me on both counts. Where do I pick up my copy?

861. Church is paying a high price for its celibacy rule

Comment #133187 by Cartomancer on February 25, 2008 at 7:09 pm

Castration. They definitely don't like that one. Origen tried it. Nobody liked him after that and it cost him a place as one of the great Doctors of the Church. Peter Abelard tried to rehabilitate the Christian Eunuch in the twelfth century too, after his own unplanned castration incident, but nobody liked him either, so it never really caught on.

It's got a lot to do with ideas about the wholeness of the body and the value of resisting sin. If you disarm the tempter then it doesn't quite have the same spiritual value, and if god had wanted people to go chopping off bits of their genital anatomy he would have made them jews. Besides which, in late antiquity the majority of castrati were temple eunuchs and prostitutes from the blasphemous east, and it didn't help that Augustine had a thing against the flouncing, transgendered priests of the Magna Mater in classical Rome. Stern Roman moralists were generally always disdainful of anything which reduced male virility, and Augustine had drunk deep of that particular tainted amphora.

Mind you, much later on when the castrato voice came into vogue among church music fans, the more problematic aspects of pudendal butchery were quietly swept under the carpet. Sometimes castrato choirboys would grow up and want to become priests, so their testicles were saved and kept in a jar, which they could then carry around with them - to prove that they were all there after a manner of speaking...

862. Church is paying a high price for its celibacy rule

Comment #132927 by Cartomancer on February 25, 2008 at 12:11 pm

As always there is a combination of factors at work in the whole clerical celibacy thing. Al-Rawandi has covered a number of them already. The earliest evidence we have for the prohibition seems to be the discussions at the Council of Elvira in 305 AD, where it is considered a matter of holy continence and the need to lead an elevated lifestyle. Later councils in the fourth and fifth centuries came up with similar conclusions. Theologically it is often justified by the old testament story of the inheritance of the tribes of Israel - the tribe of Levi were given no land (and hence unable to go and raise families like the other tribes) so they became the priests, with god as their inheritance (now that's what I call a bum deal).

The catholic church before the mid 11th century was nowhere near as powerful and organised as it became after that - the later eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a massive entrenchment and professionalisation of church institutions at all levels. This goes hand in hand with greater bureacratic sophistication in most other areas of society, increasing economic prosperity, growing populations, etc. Prior to the eleventh century this sort of business was conducted on a local basis - big centralised proclamations from the pope were rare, and the issue wasn't one which it was felt necessary to have a definitive policy on. In practice it seems most priests did pay some lip service to the ideals of celibacy, shored up by the very ancient and powerful european association of virginity and celibacy with special supernatural status. As far as inheritance is concerned the lack of descendants certainly helped the church to maintain a hold on its lands and possessions. The church pretty much insisted on the non-division of its property when it had the power to do so, and this central canon law fiat technically had legal precedence over the civil laws of the land, but individuals might be tempted to go against the church's wishes to feather their own nests, so celibacy was certainly a convenient tool to prevent this. The struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor abated toward the end of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the process of establishing the legal rights of canon versus civil law began in earnest. This is the time of the great decretal collections of Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, where canon law was codified into a coherent form, and the church began thinking seriously about its institutional presence for the first time.

Actually the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a considerable rise in concern over the lax morals of many of its celibates - particularly monks and nuns but the secular clergy too. The crackdown is perhaps best seen as the church getting its act together and beginning to behave like the multi-national corporation it had become, rather than leaving everything up to local initiative.

As far as I am aware, however, the injunction on celibacy is not a doctrine, which even the pope could not overturn, but a matter of papal policy, which he could do away with at any moment.

863. How he was sentenced to die

Comment #132506 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 9:54 pm

I am rarely outraged, but this kind of thing makes me furious. Sentenced to death for downloading an article on Women's Rights? Even the Nazis or Soviet Communists would have balked at something like that.

How can people live this way? How can this sort of thing happen in the twenty-first century? I am at a total loss to grasp just how differently these people think from the way I do, just how skewed and twisted and poisonous their minds have become. I simply do not understand this.

Why?

864. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132428 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 6:34 pm

Incidentally, I am amused that many atheists still call those individuals whom the catholic church has beatified by their title "Saint", when there really is no good reason for still doing so apart from the fact it is culturally ingrained. I've even caught staunch protestants doing it too, when they of all people have a good reason not to buy into the church dogmas.

865. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132419 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 6:20 pm

Literary and legal theorist? I smell the cloacal whiff of postmodernist claptrap here...

I do wonder, though, how this man thinks he can catch Richard out with the baseless assumption that he is impervious to any contrary evidence? It is a nasty thing to do, tarring Richard Dawkins with the same brush as Aurelius Augustinus - the latter claimed quite openly that he would interpret his evidence according to his preconcieved notions, the former claims just as openly that he will not. The only way this could be used to accuse Richard of hypocrisy is if he actually had dismissed something of the magnitude of a direct celestial visitation as hallucination. He's pointed out that hallucinations are commonplace, sure, but has he explicitly said they do account for everything and there is absolutely no empirical evidence which would change his mind? Not to my knowledge he hasn't.

Surely this man is not saying that there are no objective empirical standards of evidence at all is he...?

866. Fleabytes

Comment #132392 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 5:32 pm

Parchment and Quills! Papyrus and brushes! Working it out in your head!

867. Fleabytes

Comment #132384 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 5:15 pm

I have yet to have my computing virginity popped it would seem. What a relief, then, that I have a working knowledge of Medieval Latin verse composition - otherwise I would have nothing to say on here at all...

And I laughed out loud at Geoff's comment about wooter. Thanks for that.

868. Fleabytes

Comment #132376 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Well done Brian, by the way, I would have let you carry on if I had seen your post before I began mine...

Your memory of the Lingua Latina is obviously not nearly as corroded as you make out!

869. Fleabytes

Comment #132374 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:45 pm

Well, given that part of the conceit was that Mr. Beale is very unlikely to understand what I have written, I am a tad loath to furnish a translation, but, well, my vanity has got the better of me...

The vicious flea wrote a book,
In which he says nothing new,
He gives us now, this inept poet,
Sophisms, not truths,
He thinks he has refuted
all the arguments put to him
yet he has committed a culpable act,
in his fatuity,
His book is, in the end,
the ad hominem attack of a complete wanker*
He hates our Richard Dawkins too much,
heedless of the bounds of reason,
Why he thinks this way I do not know,
unless he carries a delusion,
a virulent virus in his mind,
which suddenly makes him
become arrogant
all the while his head fills with air

Goodbye flea, you worthless man,
your book is incredibly vain!

* I have professor Andrew Lintott of Worcester College, Oxford to thank for the translation of "Nugator" as "complete wanker".

I should really try getting the English version to rhyme as well to be consistent, but I do theoretically have other things to do with my time...

870. Fleabytes

Comment #132364 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:24 pm

The modern usage may prefer the C, but all true Romans know it is a dirty foreign word, and thus spelled with a distinctly un-Roman K!

871. Fleabytes

Comment #132360 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:18 pm

Karthago Delenda Est!

872. Fleabytes

Comment #132358 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:12 pm

That's not a version of history. History is written by the victors...

873. Fleabytes

Comment #132351 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:08 pm

Do you think that maybe I should have a go at translating TGD into Latin, for the benefit of all those poor benighted souls up in Popetown?

874. Fleabytes

Comment #132346 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:00 pm

While we're on the subjects of Latin grammar, showing off and self-aggrandizing internet fascists:

http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,2192,Irrational-Atheist-trounces-God-deniers,Wold-Net-Daily,page4#117919

875. Fleabytes

Comment #132336 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 3:51 pm

I just felt left out because somebody had got to Richard Dawkins's Latin mistake before me...

Oh, and using qui to start a subordinate clause is perfectly fine Latin grammar, even in the classical period!

876. Fleabytes

Comment #132328 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 3:45 pm

In taberna... is the beginning of a famous drinking song from the Carmina Burana about everyone in society getting drunk and being hypocritical about it, but taking it out on the poor saps at the bottom of the heap.

877. Fleabytes

Comment #132326 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 3:42 pm

Surely, "Est diabolus sub mensa qui felem meam terret"?

(sub with accusative indicates movement under, whereas it needs the ablative for simple position under)

I guess you could use the late medieval "Cattus" rather than the more usual "feles", but if so then it should be in the accusative as the direct object of terret and would thus be Cattum".

878. Fleabytes

Comment #132322 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 3:37 pm

In taberna quando sumus...

879. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #132305 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 3:16 pm

Given that all my favourite books are cheap fantasy novels that nobody has ever heard of I shall refrain from following suit here...

880. Over half of Britons claim no religion

Comment #131508 by Cartomancer on February 22, 2008 at 1:38 pm

Hmm... free-floating leather elbow patches with no tweed jacket for them to go on. Interesting. I guess a bare torso with strap-on leather elbow patches could be the next big thing in edgy academic fashions. It'd go quite nicely with the crotchless leopard print scholar's gown and studded PVC mortarboard I've got already...

881. Over half of Britons claim no religion

Comment #131487 by Cartomancer on February 22, 2008 at 1:22 pm

Special leather gear to show off their bare intellects?

What, you mean the elbow patches on the tweed jackets?

882. Over half of Britons claim no religion

Comment #131480 by Cartomancer on February 22, 2008 at 1:18 pm

A special Atheist version of Cluedo where the Reverend Green did it every time?

883. Over half of Britons claim no religion

Comment #131478 by Cartomancer on February 22, 2008 at 1:17 pm

Atheist cinemas showing specialist atheist films with no gods in them? Maybe ground-breaking atheist cinema, with films showing the exotic, forbidden rationality of two atheist cowboys discussing Spinoza in a tent far from civilisation every winter? Atheist TV programmes such as "Atheist eye for the godly guy?" where Steve Zara, Paula Kirby and Diacanu go round altering churches to be more to their tastes?

884. Over half of Britons claim no religion

Comment #131471 by Cartomancer on February 22, 2008 at 1:10 pm

Advertising the "Atheist Lifestyle" eh? I wonder if we're going to get "atheist villages" springing up in town centres, with atheist bars, atheist clubs, atheist bookshops, solicitors and estate agents catering to the atheist market (houses that most expressly don't align with Mecca?), special atheist magazines all about which gods we don't believe in this month, and atheist pride parades every July?

885. Moral thinking

Comment #131318 by Cartomancer on February 22, 2008 at 8:42 am

hungarianelephant, comment #14

I think there very much is. A quick off-the-top-of-my-head series of examples brings up Classical Athens versus Classical Sparta, Post Conquest versus late twelfth / thirteenth century England and those schoolboy favourites, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Fascist Italy.

Athens' political stability in the fifth century BC was based on its own naval supremacy in the Aegean, its democratic constitution and the instruments of state stability acquired throughout the previous centuries under the Peisistratid tyranny and going back to Solon and beyond. As such it developed a culture of philosophical speculation, a strong tradition of satire in Old Comedy and societal self-examination in its Tragic theatre, and even some measure of equality extended to slaves and foreigners. Sparta's power was based on a precarious and often brutal suppression of its helot neighbours and a very strained series of social structures designed to keep people in conformity with state policy, particularly state military policy. As such it produced no philosophy, satire or liberal values of any description, save perhaps in the realm of women's property rights.

Likewise, immediately after the conquest English society is somewhat strained and illiberal, especially under the harrowing of the north and in the Danelaw. The literary and cultural output of the country trickles down to almost nothing for a while, and Anglo-Saxon literature is severely curtailed. But once political unity and stability returns, the Anglo-Norman polity becomes slightly more permissive, and among other things satirical goliardic poetry flourishes and satirists such as Walter of Chatillon have a realistic chance of acquring royal patronage whereas before it went to laudatory chroniclers and poets attempting to shore up the regime with panegyrics on the new rulers and attempts to play down the indigenous culture. Similarly there is a revival of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle tradition and a strong antiquarian interest in pre-norman society, indicating a fair degree of confidence on the part of the rulers and ruled in the stability of their society. English common law, magna carta, the origins of parliament and the theory of judicial equity at the court of chancellery emerge in this period, and English scholars develop a tendency to travel far and wide in search of new knowledge from the Greeks and Arabs because they are dissatisfied with the extent of their current Latin traditions, traditions which suited their monastic, pre-conquest forebears adequately enough.

I'm sure the inter-war dictatorships are too well known to need exposition.

886. Over half of Britons claim no religion

Comment #131313 by Cartomancer on February 22, 2008 at 8:22 am

Was I the only one who noticed the significant non sequitur here. The article starts off talking about the accuracy of census data and then suddenly, after a few lines, turns into an ill composed collection of thoughts about the problem of Islam in modern Britain. Then about two thirds of the way through there is another switch from terrorism and police powers to the Rowan Williams and sharia law fiasco. I can see why this ended up in some forgotten corner of the Times website rather than in the newspaper itself.

887. Moral thinking

Comment #131303 by Cartomancer on February 22, 2008 at 8:08 am

Pah! We historians have known about the tendency towards liberalism and freedom of dissent in stable societies for ages!

Though I am intrigued by this association of liberality and loneliness. The article doesn't quite say which way Wilson and Storm think the causation runs however - whether liberality causes loneliness or whether loneliness causes liberality. Or, indeed, whether there is another, independent, factor causing both concurrently.

I am also amazed at just how little time these student respondents actually spend alone (I assume they were students, as the guinea pigs for university psychology experiments almost always are). Even granting that this study only covers the respondents' waking hours (which seems very likely given that sleeping hours are always spent alone and it is very difficult indeed for teenagers to function on 6 or 4 hours of sleep per night respectively, and then they would need to spend every hour they are awake with other people) 75% of one's time in the company of others seems an awful lot to me, especially for students. My own figure is somewhat closer to 20% of my time spent with others, and when I was an undergraduate it was virtually 0% - don't these people have any books to read or essays to write or other work to do, or even any hobbies? Does that also make me so hyper-liberal it hurts? By American standards I guess it probably does...

I would also be fascinated to see a similar study where the variables are religious affiliation or lack of it, though finding a satisfactory control group would be difficult I admit. Such studies might also be a good indicator for where exactly conservatism / liberality are pitched in a particular society. If these values really are human universals brought about by mathematically demonstrable optimal survival strategies then they would be an effective yardstick for comparing the way the political discourse runs in countries.

888. Fleabytes

Comment #131063 by Cartomancer on February 21, 2008 at 9:05 pm

The man I love most in all the world bought me a copy of McGrath's Dawkins Delusion for my birthday last year as it happens. I really am not sure what to make of that gesture from someone as atheistic as he...

Either way, I'm glad somebody has spent the time dissecting the fleas in depth. A true Hookean Micrographia for the digital age!

889. Why Darwin matters

Comment #128966 by Cartomancer on February 18, 2008 at 11:31 am

Ahh, Wadham, the glorious People's Republic of Wadham! (stands to attention for the obligatory rendition of "Free Nelson Mandela" by the special AKAs). Thanks to the untimely death of my laptop I am typing this very message from deep within the bowels of the place right now!

890. Why Darwin matters

Comment #128955 by Cartomancer on February 18, 2008 at 11:00 am

Ah, Alice in Wonderland. I see...

Though I generally try to avoid Christchurch for everything but theology lectures. The sort of jokes everyone else makes about Oxford students in general being stuck-up toffee-nosed ingrates, we make about those students who go to Magdalen and Christchurch.

I also tend to catch fire when I get too close to places of worship, and Christchurch has its own cathedral built in.

Interestingly your description of anticipating or forcing your opponent's moves in fencing resonates with memories of games of paper-scissors-stone I have played with my brother. Mirror neurons eh? well well, you learn something new every day...

891. A match made on RichardDawkins.net?

Comment #128937 by Cartomancer on February 18, 2008 at 10:17 am

Aww shucks, I had a fiver on Paula Kirby and wooter tying the knot first...

Oh well, I'll just have to find a more realistic way to make riches beyond my wildest dreams than stupendously high-odds betting.

Congratulations on the impending nuptial frivolities by the way!

892. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting

Comment #127028 by Cartomancer on February 14, 2008 at 5:32 pm

I'm not entirely sure there is anything more than a semantic disagreement here either to be honest.

I suppose I am still trying to come up with a wording that applies to both the casual observer and the scientist. Perhaps "different levels" should be abandoned, rather than abandoning "satisfactory". Perhaps we should talk of "different approaches" instead, since "levels" suggests some kind of easily defined hierarchical relationship. The approach of the scientist is essentially "I will find out whatever there is to be found out, that is my purpose", while the approach of the casual observer would be more along the lines of "I will find out enough to satisfy my idle curiosity" or "I will find out as much as I need to solve my problem in the here and now" or "I will find out as much as I can before I get bored".

Perhaps the former can in some way be seen as a higher "level" of engagement with the problem (the highest level even), but I am not sure these speculations are entirely germane to my original point - which come to think of it probably doesn't apply to scientists qua science anyway.

893. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting

Comment #127019 by Cartomancer on February 14, 2008 at 5:09 pm

But the approach of the research scientist applying himself to a particular problem is itself a different level of explanation to the approach of the inquisitive man in the street to the same problem. Or of that same scientist with regard to tangential phenomena he is not investigating but simply needs a basic working knowledge of.

894. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting

Comment #127013 by Cartomancer on February 14, 2008 at 4:54 pm

"satisfactory" was a carefully chosen word, though perhaps not carefully chosen enough.

I did not mean to suggest by it that the proper way to approach a problem is always to look for the bare minimum "what will do" explanation. I simply tried to convey the idea that there are different levels of explanation appropriate for different circumstances, and we should alight upon the one which we want or need rather than always throwing our hands up in the air and waving the problem away as "much more complicated".

What a scientist considers "satisfactory" in terms of his explanation of the world is very different from what our man in the street would find satisfactory. In fact most scientists are very rarely satisfied with their explanations - "vision" as you put it is just setting the satisfaction bar high enough.

Maybe "appropriate" would have been better. I guess I lost clarity in trying to cover both scientific endeavour and everyday inquisitiveness with my speculations. Isn't peer review a wonderful thing?

895. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting

Comment #127003 by Cartomancer on February 14, 2008 at 4:16 pm

I'm not entirely sure that Ms. Bunting's resort to "but surely there are different kinds of truth" can be reduced to mere evasion or fudging. That would imply that she either really does or really does not believe in the virgin birth, and is trying to conceal the fact. I don't think she honestly knows what she believes in concrete terms.

Among many modern people of an intellectual bent there is a powerful, almost instinctive reaction to bald claims of fact stated in simple terms. I like to call it the "but surely things can't really be that simple?" urge. I suffer from it myself all the time. I think it is picked up during our formative years at school for the most part. We start off in infants school with very simple explanations for the world around us and the phenomena we encounter, and as we grow up we are increasingly shown that those simple explanations are inadequate to really describe the situation.

As the explanations get ever more complex and we become used to having our simple, comfortable world-view challenged time and time again, the sensitive ones among us come to realise that this state of affairs may well carry on indefinitely. We begin to see even the new explanations as potentially flawed, as simplified models, as tentative provisional abstracts. We come to expect that behind every bald statement there lurk countless exceptions, nuances, subtleties and shades of grey. Generally this is a healthy mind-set to develop and proves a fertile breeding ground for an admirable scientific skepticism - it encourages us not to be satisfied with simple answers where we need more complicated ones.

Nevertheless, it can go too far. If the "but surely things can't be that simple" urge becomes the first and foremost reaction to any and all statements, it can supplant skepticism and the urge to find out the details and become a self-serving pseudo-explanation all on its own. People lose sight of the primary aim - to achieve a satisfactory level of explanation - and begin to exalt complexity and intricacy above honest understanding. Suddenly we don't have to rate a claim on its merits, judge it as true or false in the context we receive it and work with it as it is, because the real situation simply has to be much more complicated than that, right? Eventually we get to the ultimate explanatory poverty of the postmodern mind, where nothing is true and everything is so much more complicated than we can ever imagine it to be.

As such, it seems that Ms. Bunting's thought process runs something along the lines of "But surely the true nature of truth can't be that simple? Therefore it isn't. Therefore there must be different kinds of truth". This last equivocation tactic is a classic trick of scholastic thought by the way, and with it you can reconcile even the most contradictory of statements. Now, a philosopher or scientist might take their "but surely it must be more complicated than that" and look for ways in which it could be more complicated. The average journalist or man in the street, however, would probably just leave it at that and refrain from doing the follow-up work.

896. Why Darwin matters

Comment #126663 by Cartomancer on February 13, 2008 at 8:18 pm

Well, the phrase "Utrum Chimera bombinans in vacuo possit comedere secundas intentiones" - is probably best translated as "whether a Chimera making a nuisance of itself in a vacuum is able to consume the indirect objects of thought".

It is, of course, a satirical question sending up the subtleties of late medieval scholastic thought. It comes from the title of one of the scholastic books in the library of the school of St. Victor, which Gargantua and Pantagruel visit in Rabelais' comic works of the same name. In fact the title of the book also tells us that this was considered an extremely subtle question, and that the theologians at the Council of Constance (1414-1418) spent eleven weeks debating its intricacies!

Chimeras were popular fodder for logical questions because they do not exist in reality (in re extra), but only in the mind. As such their ontological status is generally quite unusual. Centaurs and Goat-stags (hircocerva) are often used in the same way.

The vacuum was a tricky problem for medieval physics. Aristotle says that such a thing is impossible - the world is a completely full plenum - but various medieval thinkers suggested that it might be possible after all, if only through god's limitless power. The Paris condemnations of 1277 prohibited the thesis that it was impossible even to god (who could do it through such expedients as immediately moving the entire universe horizontally a bit to the left). Edward Grant's "Much Ado About Nothing - Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1981)" is the definitive work on this topic.

"Second Intentions" is a very technical part of scholastic psychology. It has nothing to do with purpose or intent as we might expect from our use of the word "intention". Basically "intentions" are the objects of thought, in the same way as physical objects are the objects of sight or another kind of sense perception. The term "intentio" was first used in this way in the latin translation of Avicenna's De Anima (c. 1170 by Avendauth and Gundissalinus), but gets used in various different ways throughout the next two centuries. "Second" intentions appear in Aquinas, Scotus and others much later, and are one stage removed from normal intentions in the hierarchy of accidents.

I must say I am stumped by the little green door and the figures in the glass though. Unless the latter is a "figuras in speculo" reference talking about medieval optics and the former a reference to the 1921 novel by Zoe Meyer?

897. A Tyrannical Romance

Comment #126597 by Cartomancer on February 13, 2008 at 4:06 pm

Wouldn't the female one be a Tyrannosaurus Regina?

898. Murder plot against Danish cartoonist

Comment #126596 by Cartomancer on February 13, 2008 at 4:04 pm

Raspberry Jam! It simply has to be seedless raspberry jam. And Earl Grey for accompaniment. And if you disagree with this peerless revelation from on high then my sinister cadre of fanatical inquisitors will see to it that you are the one who is toast!

899. Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science

Comment #126594 by Cartomancer on February 13, 2008 at 3:58 pm

God? Are you kidding? He might have designed all the science, but the books he writes about it are appalling!

900. Cal scientist reflects on Darwin's genius

Comment #126263 by Cartomancer on February 12, 2008 at 8:30 pm

The article does seem subtly biased in favour of the religious crowd doesn't it? The first bit on the massive impact of Darwin's ideas is good, but I fear that the "other side" angle was put in purely out of journalistic desire to talk up a conflict and a misguided attempt to give equal time to both sides of the debate. Obviously there is nothing like parity between the arguments of science and the arguments of rabid crackpottery, and any sensible journalist worth his salt ought to recognise that fact and communicate the true situation accordingly.

Actually, I would be willing to let it go if it were just a misrepresentation of the feebleness of the creationist position and an attempt to suggest through omission that evolution by natural selection is on a less firm footing than it is. The paragraph on the "heartless ills of society", however, borders on the deeply irresponsible. Technically it does not state outright that the list of ills actually are ills, merely that they are demonised as being such. Nevertheless there is nothing by way of correction to point out which phenomena are terrible societal afflictions and which ones are the undeserving victims of vile immoral oppression. For my money, any list that lumps together atheism, homosexuality, and stem cell research on the one hand, with Nazism, Communism and the curtailment of freedom on the other, is at best supremely disingenuous and at worst outright discriminatory.

The bottom line is that it is perfectly possible to read the passage as an endorsement of the position of the demonisers - a dangerous and ignorant position that we all have a responsibility to oppose. It is not enough in situations like this that both sides are presented impartially - some issues are so important that failure to condemn a position is simply too much endorsement to give it. In my opinion, this is one of those issues.