Recommended : Qassams Fired on Central California

I recommend Linda Halderman's latest post: Qassams Fired on Central California: What happens when terrorism comes to a small town.

There are those who see war crimes in every accidental civilian death that accompanies the actions of Western armies. Strange that they don't seem to see such war crimes in the deliberate and planned random civilian killings by the terrorists, or those NGOs and states that support and arm them.

Pseudo-science and intelligent design

In all the fuss over creation “science” and its new alias, intelligent design, one point keeps getting missed. The essential difference between real science and a pseudo-science like creation science is that proponents of real science are seeking the truth, while proponents of creation science are certain they already know the truth.

For real scientists, the theory of evolution is simply the best guess we have now that seems to fit the evidence. No doubt it is wrong in some details, if not wholly, but as more evidence accumulates and alternative theories get tested whatever errors there are will eventually get sorted out. Scientists are humble (well, most of them are) about what they think they know, and willing to change their minds and adjust their theories on the basis of new evidence.

Believers in creation science, however, think God has revealed the truth to them, and they are just trying to cherry-pick the evidence to support what they already believe to be true and give it some respectability. There is no evidence that would change their minds (well, maybe if God herself spoke to them….).

Followers of creation science and intelligent design are like peddlers of fad diets – they cite evidence that supports their product but carefully ignore the greater body of evidence that wouldn’t support it.

If we in America are foolish enough to force our schools to teach our young people this sort of religion-based pseudo-science, we will deserve the unpleasant consequences of letting ignorance rule our lives.

Moral hazards

“If you are continually willing to protect people from the consequences of their own errors, your benevolence will be factored into the future decisions of the persons rescued. In the long run, they will make even more errors.........(You are) creating a moral hazard.” This quotation from Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute summarizes quite well the essential problem with many of the government’s social and international aid programs, and the reason why, despite the best intentions of well-meaning people, such programs more often than not exacerbate problems instead of solving them.

If the government will take care of me in my old age, why should I save money now for my retirement? If welfare will pay my bills, why should I work? If hospital emergency rooms have to treat everyone, regardless of ability to pay, why should I spend money on insurance? If colleges give scholarships on the basis of need rather than aptitude, why should I put any money aside for my children’s college bills? If government policies make it hard to fire me, why should I try to excel in my work?

The problem with the sort of cradle-to-grave “nanny state” that many European countries have, and that some would like to emulate in this country, is that protecting people from the consequences of their own shortsightedness does nothing to encourage them to improve.

But the situation is far worse than that. Such programs are unsustainable in the long run. These days the demographics (an aging population) work against us. So having lured people into depending on the government instead of their own foresight and efforts, we will someday (perhaps soon) have to pull the rug out from under them because we can no longer afford to maintain these programs. That is the real immorality of such programs!

Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions…….

Recommended: High Anxiety

I recommend Bruce Thornton's recent piece "High Anxiety: How Modernity feeds Arab anti-Semitism".

It has always seemed to me that Israel isn't treated evenhandedly in the US or the world press, or by the international community. Not that Israel hasn't made some mistakes, just like every other nation. But the number of times, for example, that the UN has tried to condemn Israel for some action while completely ignoring the Arab attack that provoked that action shows the one-sidedness of much of the world on this subject.

Our worst nightmare….

Imagine one of our worst nightmares – a nuclear-armed Muslim superpower, immensely wealthy from its vast natural resources, led by a government publicly committed to religious principles, advised by fundamentalist theocrats, absolutely certain that its way is the best and its religion the only true religion, determined to impose its culture and its system of laws on the rest of the world, and willing to send its troops anywhere to further that cause. Sounds pretty terrifying, doesn’t it?

Now change the word Muslim to Christian and you can begin to understand how some of the rest of the world sees us. We are some other people's worst nightmare.

Think about it. These days we fit that description a little too close for comfort.

The importance of assimilation

America’s great success, up to now, has been the ability to absorb masses of immigrants from all over the world and assimilate them within two or three generations into a more or less homogeneous American culture, with reasonably common shared values and cultural expectations and world views. Immigrants often preserve and contribute to the rest of the American culture wonderful parts of their own cultural heritage such as second languages, local customs, and regional cuisines, but at core they eventually become Americans.

Europe seems to be having trouble doing this. Immigrants, especially North African and Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants, seem to be settling into European countries in enclaves where instead of assimilating they preserve their culture and their languages intact, becoming small offshore extensions of their own home countries. In some places the national police can’t even operate safely within these enclaves. In some places repugnant customs from the home country, such as honor killings or blood feuds, have been transplanted wholesale into a European country.

If this persists, these European countries face a difficult, divisive and dangerous future. Such enclaves, usually with very high rates of unemployment, become nurseries for breeding dissatisfaction, radical movements, and revolution.

We in America need to pay attention to this, and not let this separatism breed here as well, or we will face the same sort of dangerous and divisive future. On the one hand we need to be sure that our immigrants can get jobs, have equal access to the American dream (whatever that may be), and are not hampered by prejudice and bias. On the other hand we need to insist that if people want to immigrate to America, they are willing to become part of the American culture, learn English, and abide by American laws and customs, rather than walling themselves off from the rest of America.

Language is one of the key factors here. We certainly ought to encourage immigrants to maintain their own language as a second language if they want to. Far too many Americans speak only one language as it is. But we ought to have one and only one common nationwide official language to bind us as a nation. Well-meaning attempts to give Spanish or other languages equal official standing are, in the long run, dangerous and lead to the sort of separatist problems Canada has with Quebec.

Education is another key factor. We ought to be careful that large numbers of immigrants aren’t opting to educate their children outside of the American mainstream so as to preserve their original national identity instead of assimilating. This too in the long run will lead to the difficulties and divisions of separatism.

Multiculturalism, though it is promoted by people with the best of intentions, is a danger here. Certainly we ought to celebrate the diversity of our roots, but that is not the same thing as encouraging people not to assimilate but rather retain a separate identity as something other than Americans.

America is a large nation. Its strength is that despite its great size it is culturally one nation, though with some regional differences. If it ever succumbs to separatism it will fracture and divide, and a Balkanized America will no longer be a superpower.

Pans narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee

I enjoy “hard” science fiction, meaning stories based on believable science rather than on fantasy. Some years ago I skimmed one of Terry Pratchett’s “Diskworld” books and thought it was fantasy, full of magic, and not of interest to me. Some years later I happened across the “Science of Diskworld” series of books co-authored by Pratchett and two brilliant scientists, the mathematician Ian Stewart and the reproductive biologist Jack Cohen. In these books a Pratchett Diskworld story is interleaved, chapter by chapter, with Stewart and Cohen’s witty but ultimately profound observations about science. And that’s when I finally realized (duh!) that Pratchett’s stories are not really fantasy at all, but brilliantly done humorous explorations of ideas and concepts in science and philosophy, using the magic in Diskworld as a foil for the scientific method.

In The Science of Diskworld II: The Globe the authors introduce “narratvium”. Narrativum is an element in Diskworld that gives events their story. Humans love stories. In fact, human minds organize everything into a story, or narrative imperative. That’s what, for example, feeds conspiracy theories. Something awful happens and there doesn’t appear to be any reason for it, so we construct a plausible conspiracy theory to explain it, and then believe our theory because it is so logical and believable (just as we constructed it). We organize everything about our lives and our world into plausible stories, filling in the gaps with assumptions and changing or forgetting the inconvenient parts that don’t fit so that the story hangs together and is believable, whether it is true or not. Stewart and Cohen wryly suggest our species ought to have been named pans narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Why is this observation important? Because in fact there is always a great deal we don’t know or understand about the world and events around us, so the stories we create are always wrong to some degree, if not wholly. But because they hang together so well, just as we fashioned them, we tend to believe them anyway.

This is not a defect we should or can train ourselves out of. It is simply the way we are wired, and it serves useful purposes. It seems likely that stories provide the mental scaffolding upon which our minds can hang facts and memories and later retrieve them. Memory courses often teach people to remember names and faces and facts by associating them with something else, and plausible stories are one of those things one can remember and associate other things with.

And in fact a scientific theory is really nothing more than a plausible story we have constructed to explain the facts and data we have accumulated to date. In science, we keep changing and adjusting the story as we get new data, in hopes that we are getting closer to the truth. In most fields people don’t do that – they just keep believing the old story and try to ignore the new data if it doesn’t fit. In fact, humans hate to give up a good story, especially if they created it.

But what is important here is that we should always be aware that just because we have constructed an appealing and plausible story about something, that doesn’t mean it is correct. In fact, given the fallibility and limited knowledge of humans, it probably is at best a very rough approximation to the truth and at worst completely off the wall. It’s a well known trick in the intelligence field to feed one’s opponents misinformation as a plausible story – the strength of this approach is that if one’s opponent detects any inconsistencies in the story, they are very likely to simply adjust the story in their minds to fit their preconceptions, rather than to question the whole story. And con men know that a good story is an essential tool to drawing in the mark.

So just because a story or an explanation seems plausible, or fits what we would like to believe, that doesn’t mean we should believe it. In the real world, because of our imperfect knowledge, accurate stories will have lots of gaps and ill-fitting parts and vague sections and inconsistencies. If the story all hangs together too neatly, distrust it.