Demoralizing and Condescending?

or Constructive, Reductive and Balanced

Since the election of Barack Obama, I have heard raised anew the question of Affirmative Action. I think this is a fine development as I am against the policy in question. Not because with the Obama presidency all inequity has been rent. That would be true only upon at least one condition and that would be that the subject of his race (and Hillary Clinton's sex in the primaries) had never been brought up. My current position predates his election by roughly a year. Nor am I against it because of any ideological bent. I seek only as unfettered an understanding of this world as a human mind can manage and so my position is borne of no interest but knowing the state of reality for it's own sake.

So called "Affirmative Action" is no kind of answer to the problem of discrimination in the workplace:

1) Assuming that the reason we some of us think that prejudice in choosing a new employee (for instance) is wrong is at least in part because it is not fair to qualified individuals, then how is it in service of that quest for fairness (and of maintaining a logical consistency without which our meaningful quest would become senseless) for the most qualified to be passed up based on a demographic when that is the very problem that led to the action being undertaken? It's something like bearing witness to the running down of a hapless animal in the street and then trying to undo the damage by bringing your own car around and backing over the corpse! Not only is the damage not undone but a worse than before mess is left on. The only course that I can discern is to ensure that the qualified prevail by attacking that which is halting that outcome presently. Namely, ignorance. It is true that until that problem is overcome, qualified people will suffer. But they are now and the idea is to halt it, not to spread the misery to a wider demographic. I suppose I'll have to add that our definition of "fairness," in so far as it is to be brought about, does not include making it so that everyone is experiencing unfairness equally. The person for the job is the one most qualified. I feel safe using binary logic on this point.

2) Assuming again that the idea is to right wrongs, and having established that the wrong of unfairness is left not unaddressed but actually doubled, what of the wrong that is discrimination? A case could perhaps be made that AA is not an undertaking whose purpose is to bring about the end of discrimination. That it is more localized. Meant to deal with instances and not causes. If that is so then minorites ought to be furious. They should be as outraged as they would be if they knew for a fact that they hadn't been hired for discriminatory reasons. In this new light, AA could be seen as nothing more than a superficial placation. Look how wonderfully magnanimous we are, the powers that be, to see your plight and do this for you! Nevermind that nothing is actually being done to make it so that the need for a policy like this would be as foreign to human understanding as the languages spoken on Arcturus 4. I can only hope that there was nothing so insidious in any of the minds that have been in favor of this policy as the idea that advocating a policy such as this would save the beneficiaries of the status quo from being confronted with actually having to do something about prejudice, but one never knows.

3) In a way this third point is an extension of the second but it stands on its own with steady legs. Or so I think. Not only does the policy in question do nothing that is constructive, reductive and balanced, but it is what I would call "highly likely" that it can make the problem worse. Point 1 shows that this policy does make things worse even when attention is constrained to that which AA is supposed to address. It is my contention that overall the problems of prejudice and thus discrimination are exacerbated by the ire that is stirred in some people in the reality of what is undertaken as per this policy. I have little doubt that some people who are already prejudiced in their thinking become all the more hardened in their views and that some people who never gave it much thought now do.

Those are my thoughts, such as they are, on that subject. For now, anyway. I'm sure I'll read something one day that will help me see something larger in defense of this policy than the only positive I can think of at the moment. That is that it must be heartening to an individual of a repressed group to see another of that group do well in a position that had been typically off limits. That is certainly not insignificant. Those seeds grow too. But wouldn't it be better if those seeds were no longer necessary?

Where Lies the Line?

The impetus for the writing of this lies here in the comments section. Not that I wouldn't eventually have written here on this topic given enough time. Ironically, then, this shouldn't take long at all.

For me, the easiest way, indeed the only way, to determine when it ceases to be an option to terminate a pregnancy is to look at your ethics regarding how you treat humans and take it back until it no longer holds up. Similar to my Collective Epistemological Perspective Imperative (sweet! I devised a principle!), it does not make sense to look at this from the time of the fertilization of the egg, when said egg is naught but a few cells and thus clearly carries no more ethical implications than do the cells you wash down the drain during a shower, and say that since it is OK to terminate then then it must be logically sound to say that it is moral to terminate so long as the would-be human is in the womb.

If you understand my reference to the EPI then you should see that the problem with this position is that it is ignorant of the fact that we have reason to think that things will change over time. What was once cells that I could not ever in good faith claim to be deserving of human rights becomes a human and though the line will ever remain somewhat blurred as no case is identical to another, this is the point to which we go back with our morals pertaining to the treatment of humans. I have found this point to be at the time when a fetus has developed to the point that it does not necessarily need confines of the host in order to survive.

The idea behind basic human equality is that while humans are not equal in their abilities, no human is more human than any other. While I find the idea of an eight month and two weeks pregnancy being terminated to be as abhorrent as the termination of a two week old baby, I can at least say for these faulty reasoners that they are honest and they are trying just as I am to discover, or perhaps determine, the "right" way to live and to behave towards others.

(9/22/08) I recently thought of something that should complicate things nicely. Actually, it serves as support in my way of thinking but I wager it will seem a mess of gray to anyone of a conservative bent.

The idea is that if a woman intends to bring a pregnancy to full term, then even if the creature in her womb isn't viable on its own, she has to behave towards it in such a way as if it was. By this I mean that according to the method I advocate for determining proper treatment of an individual by an individual(s), if a woman is two weeks pregnant, and just looking at that fact, the collection of cells has no rights; but if a woman is two weeks pregnant and intends to have the baby, then she must behave in a manner consistent with the rights of that individual that she intends to make happen.

This, I think, is a more comprehensive look at the situation as it factors in the variables. I think that it is an adaptive look that holds up under more and more complex factoring. I think the above scenario is a good example. It might have been tempting to criticize and say that an absurd consequence of my ethics was that it would be OK for a woman to smoke and drink alcohol etc. during the conception-to-viability period of gestation but that would have failed to account for the passage of time and what we could reasonably expect to come to be from that. I am aware of no absurd consequences thus far.

"Folks"?

Where the hell has the use of the word "folks" come from so suddenly and completely? I hear it and see it everywhere and I have to tell you that I really can't stand it. What I haven't been able to tell, because I have not known, is exactly why it grates so well.

The first person in this recent revival I remember using it is none other than Barack Obama. I cannot of course claim that he started it because I don't know. He may have been exposed before I was and either wittingly or unwittingly began to use the word. His being the first I remember necessitates nothing as evidenced by my seeing this here just today and if you go here you see that she said that pre-1990. Which suggests that at work is that old phenomenon we all know where, when you become aware of a thing you begin to see it everywhere. But that doesn't matter. This only establishes when the phenomenon began for me. Not that I was going anywhere in particular with that fact. It is only there as the precursor to the next memory which is that it wasn't long after his continual use of the word that I started to hear and read it more and then more again.

It may be that I am simply wore out on it. Hear it too much and it gets old. "Respect my authoritah!" anyone? And that is true, I am wore out on it. Or it on me. But I have not thought that that is all that was at work here. There was something that was wrong with the use of that word.

Then I saw Susan Jacoby on Bill Moyers Journal and to my delight, a better mind had yet again figured it out for me. My disdain was coming from an unarticulated understanding that this word subverts my passionately held position that people need to stand the fuck up and seize their responsibility for themselves and then take control of their government and world for which we are also all responsible. The use of that word in the way it is so often being used these days serves to make people feel that it is OK for them to let themselves be passengers in the car of life, if you will. That it is OK for them to do nothing more than choose between the people they are presented with for voting into office. It renders them sheep who are allowed to choose their shepherd and suggests that that is acceptable.

I saw this when it aired and I was satisfied that someone who is heard (at least more than I can ever hope to be!) was talking about it. Then this morning I was looking at the Washington Post online and there was a quote in which the speaker used that word and I just had to give voice to this myself.

It is, I think, a complex of honesty, acceptance of responsibility and a constant and lifelong pursuit of learning (as well as many other things) that would make the world what I would call a just place. Any thing that subverts that is a thing that sticks in my craw. I'm not sure where my craw is but wherever it is, this word "folks" is firmly lodged.

Edit: I find it humorously ironic that, given my outlook on the world and humans needing to accept responsibility and the use of the word "folks", the article in which I read the word, and thus wrote this piece, was this one. This goes on because we are complacent.

TWaWotA"I" x2

"I would never have thought that one of the major lines that divides us as humans is the line between fantasy and reality. I do not know if I am now more amazed that it is true or that I still find it to be so surprising."

I have been a fool all my life. I look back at the things I took for granted. I look back and wonder was I believing a notion fed to me? Or did I take what I thought must be true, based on my experience with figuring out the truth of a thing, and slap it down on the world never thinking to make sure it was flush? How did the idea get in my head that people, as a rule, were interested in finding the truth, whatever it may be, rather than in finding a way to make themselves and others continue to believe that the ideas that were dreamed up to explain things before we knew anything were true?

As with so many of these polarized was-it-this-or-was-it-that dead horses that we humans love to beat, I suspect that it is a bit of both above suggestions and likely so many other things that will never even occur to me. However I came to that conclusion, I was wrong and very much so.

We humans are like a great big dysfunctional family in that we all act like everything is OK and that nothing is amiss in the way we conduct ourselves regarding the truth of things. We cannot, as a whole, admit that there are some seriously glaring problems with the methods (to use the term loosely) we use to determine whether a thing should be accepted as true.

Part of the problem is that we think in terms of "true or false" rather than "probably true or probably false or who the hell knows". Then there is cognitive dissonance which few are aware of and fewer still would accept as something they do. But the real elephant in the room, or the reason we act like we don't see it anyway, is that no one wants to call anyone else out on anything because they would then open themselves up and have to deal with their own nonsensical views.

So we promote the attitude that all views are equally relevant and have merit based on the idea that one persons truth may not be another's truth. Which can be true when dealing with subjective topics such as whether a movie is good or poi is actually dog snot. But some things are either true or not true. The difficulty for me at this point is defining the difference. For now I would say that it is that if it can be said to be a "question" that persists without the human mind then it is an objective question. That is, if it is independent of the human mind. Like the existence of Mars. Whether or not the Beatles are the best band ever is, however, not going to survive the human mind.

Either way, there was a time (those four preceding words begin the story of many assumptions I have operated under as if true) when I thought all people were a part - as opposed to "apart" - of the endeavor to discover truth. What more to say?

Trust in What?

Atheists An Increasingly Outspoken Minority

"Where do you place your trust in times of need? Where do you place your hope in the time of a crisis of confidence?"

There aren't any satisfactory answers that can be given, regarding these questions, to a person who already assumes that there is something out there to be trusted in and I'm not even sure what that means. Why would I ever think that there would be some "thing" I could "put my trust into" as a vessel to carry me through my problems? Or, more precisely, a vessel to carry my problems away from me. Why would I think such a thing likely?

The problem with these questions is that, like the question about why the universe is so fine tuned as to support life, the answer comes before the question - if you do not being by thinking you already know. The universe is not fine tuned to support life. Life is fine tuned to exist in this universe. The universe is here and we have come up in it. Likewise with the former; the question is rendered moot by the fact that the assumption that there is something to place your trust in is born of the teleological idea that the universe is here for us to be in.

We could go into all of the reasons humans have for thinking like this. Genetic behavioral imperatives, indoctrination, fear of responsibility for ones own existence and so on. But I'm not picking that nit today. It's a big nit and I have things to do. So I will answer these questions but it won't satisfy anyone who is determined to hold onto their beliefs and most others will be like "duh..."

These so-called "times of need" are taken care of long before even their incipience. In fact, they are prevented. I do not know if "degrees of indispensability" makes sense or not but nothing is so indispensable as starting with utter intellectual honesty in all matters. If you start out that way, and you practice it in "good faith", then I think you'll never allow yourself to believe the things it takes a belief in to make a person think what they think that allows the "time of need" to occur.

There are a few features of this first article that are implied but not stated specifically and I should do that now. It first implies acceptance in general and again more subtly in a couple of ways. 1) You can recognize a thing as true and yet not accept it and move on and 2) you may at any time be wrong.

The general acceptance could be left alone and the gist of what I'm trying to get across would be intact. You fairly obviously have to accept a thing as true if you are practicing good faith. That is, if you are seeking understanding in good faith then you will be presented with points at which you must change your mind about something. It is only mentioned because there is another level of acceptance that has nothing to do with finding a thing to be true and that is what I am thinking of as emotional acceptance.

Emotional acceptance would be the ability to find a thing to be true and if it isn't what you wanted to be true, still not let it make you unhappy. I did not want to begin losing my hair at 21 years old but it insisted on simply not growing anymore. Now, what should I do? Should I spend the rest of my days mourning my follicles in the cul-de-sac of discontent that would be the top of my head? Or, should I understand that this is the way it is; that it says nothing about me that my hair won't grow and that it says a lot about me by how I react; that, like dying, I am so very much just one out of so many who have gone and who will come and so...big deal about the hair! I could spend the rest of my life in a misery of wishing for hair and of feeling self-conscious and of combing over in clever disguise. Or I could just accept it for what it is - insignificant - and move on.

Now, for the second implication. The notions of possibility and impossibility are really quite mistaken. Literally anything is possible. Anywhere there is a gap in knowledge there is room for doubt. I'm not sure if the reverse is true (or possibly true!) and that anything might also be impossible. I'll have to think about that. But it doesn't matter because the point here is that what we need to look to is probability. The best any of us can ever do is try to determine to the highest degree that we think we can whether a thing is more or less likely to be true. And we will be wrong. I may be wrong about that, but I am probably right because I have been, what I have determined to be, wrong in the past which makes it likely that being wrong can happen and if it happens then it could happen to me - again.

The next most indispensable article is the pursuit of knowledge subordinately to the first article. What I mean by that is that knowledge, as such, is of no use if it is not examined most critically and so the pursuit of knowledge is very much dependent on being honest and unbiased in what you accept as true. I have no doubts that evolution is true. I have read a lot on the subject and am at the point at which I feel like I can say that. However, I still read about it and of course I read the critical every bit as closely as I read the supportive because my goal is to know what is true and not simply to be right. I would change my mind if there was any reason to. That is why any information is as good as any other if there is no dedication to accepting what appears to be true even when it is contradictory to something else you think is true even when that is as important to your world view as whether neo-Darwinism is true or whether one of the gods is true.

Where do I place my trust in "times of need"? Where do I place my hope in the time of a crisis of confidence? I leave it where it is. The place I put it before anything trying occurred. The place I put it when my thinking was clearest and probably not clouded by wishful thinking. I trust myself because I think I am being honest and I hope that I am right and when I am in doubt then I am right at home.

The Wit and Wisdom of the Analog "I"

Sometimes I come across something I jotted down at some point and only know as mine by the handwriting. Well, that and the detail of it's being amongst my things. So maybe when I come across one I haven't cannibalized into something larger than a maxim I'll share it? Who knows? Maybe if I can become reasonably sure I am not ripping someone off who said the same thing better.

Who am I kidding - I wouldn't have brought it up if I wasn't going to share:

"Spirituality is emotion in funny glasses."

That one seems totally ripped off from somewhere but I can not think where from. I do not recognize it at all. It just seems too clever and on target to be all me. Maybe it's the "funny glasses" reissue?

The Time Is Always Now

We have never known more than we do right now. That would be true every time it was spoken, no matter when it was spoken, if it was spoken. The trouble is that people do not say it and it is transparent that this is because they do not know it. I have no real education in epistemology so I do not know if this has been addressed and what the outcome may have been thus perhaps I am wrong in some way I cannot even as yet fathom.

The trouble as I see it is that we instinctively build things from the bottom up. You start with nothing and then add to it. You have a foundation that typically will be composed of units that are best suited to hold the weight of everything that will be placed upon them. The other materials and their structures are obviously important but everything depends on a foundation that is stable.

But knowledge, I think, is different and so does not lend itself to starting with, as a foundation, whatever it was that came before. And that is what it seems to me we are using as the brick and mortar in the foundation of our collective world view. The idea that it is a good thing, a show of some character that is to be encouraged even, to be able to defy any and every thing that tells you an other thing is not true, is a product of this. If the first maxims we were taught were the maxims discovered that day instead of the ideas of men with no names and no understanding of the reality in which they found themselves, then of course no one would feel OK proclaiming that they believe a thing for which there is not only a lack of evidence but even good reasons for thinking probably untrue. Sadly this is not the case.

What we ought to do, if we desire to find the truth of matters, is to rebuild from the bottom up every day. And what a fantastically easy thing to do! Though we do neglect unto ruinous consequences some of the finer of our mental abilities, we are still of the utmost capability in the manipulation of objects in the space of our minds. It is not unlike the cut-and-paste I use so often with this machine I type on or like the insert button used similarly.

It isn't as if one has to sit and reassess the threads of everything they know. One need only plug in the new fact and then go on about their life until the appropriate time to utilize the insertion. But even "utilize" is too strong a word as the use of the new data is as automatic as the insertion of a bit of new code into a computer program. Even as transient as the foundation necessarily is, it is the best way for those who need to feel they have a foundation to achieve that need.

Instead, we are largely fighting to maintain concepts that were devised in the minds of men who knew nothing as the filters by which new information is assessed. The foundation of all the knowledge of the significant majority of humanity is the ignorance of ancient men.

(This will almost certainly be added to in the future...but now that I say that I'll never touch it again.)