Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Pie On Donald Trump's Election


Jonathan Pie on how and why Donald Trump won the election. I think he nails it.



Saturday, November 19, 2016

The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Prevent Climate Change


Whatever position you have on man made climate change — even if you think it's a Chinese hoax —you'd think that a rational person would agree that we should treat the planet with respect. We shouldn't dump toxic chemicals in the waters, we shouldn't destroy ecosystems beyond repair. We should respect and preserve habitats. It's juvenile to think we can pollute as much as we want without consequence, regardless of your views on climate change.

I think man made climate change is real and the evidence shows it. And I recently did the single biggest thing you can do to stop man made climate change if you care about it: I stopped eating meat. But I know there are many people who care about the environment who just aren't willing to do much about it and who say that the taste of meat is just too good to give up. I was like that for a long time. It's just too hard for many of us to sacrifice something we enjoy and actually do anything for the betterment of our planet.

Consider this analogy. Imagine if I was passionate about preventing rape, but I didn't want to do anything about it. I never spoke out or argued against it. And if a friend of mine told me he thinks it's OK to sexually assault or rape women I never try to convince him that way of thinking is wrong. Instead I do absolutely nothing to change my lifestyle to affect the problem of rape. Would that make any sense? No, it wouldn't. But for those who are passionate about preventing climate change and do not stop eating meat, it makes just as much sense.

As I sometimes say, being against man made climate change while being a meat eater is like being against date rape and being Bill Cosby. Watch the NatGeo documentary Before the Flood on YouTube which goes into the effects eating meat has on the environment. It argues that you should at the very least cut out beef from you diet and switch to chicken, as chicken production's carbon foot print is much smaller than beef's.

Steven Pinker Explains The Human Brain



This is an excellent introductory video on the human brain and how it functions. What's fascinating is how images we see are physically superimposed on the brain as a reflection. I had no idea that occurred. Neuroscience will slowly unravel the mysteries of the brain, revealing just how our thoughts are encoded in its tissues, and hopefully that will illuminate the nature of consciousness.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Why Trump Won


It was the unthinkable. His candidacy was the butt of many jokes. No one took him seriously at first except for a handful of people. And then his popularity soared to number one, and he began winning primary after primary, but they said he would never win the nomination. And then he won the Republican nomination. And then they said he would never win the presidency.

And now he has just won that.


The critics had been wrong over and over again this election. Including me of course, but I was just going by the projections, and they failed miserably. This is a year when the things that they said couldn't happen, happened. And so early next year we will have President Trump in the White House. It doesn't sound right. It is only now, a full day after he won, just starting to sink in.

So now what? First, how did this happen? In short, the Democratic establishment pushed a corporate friendly centrist who took large amounts of money from banks, who praised free trade like NAFTA and the TPP, and who chose another corporate friendly centrist who loved the TPP as her running mate. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine were the epitomes of the establishment wing in the Democratic Party who lost touch with working class voters. And so in those critical rust belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Donald Trump's promises to renegotiate NAFTA, pull out of the TPP negotiations, close the border and bring manufacturing jobs back into the US appealed to voters in a way that Hillary Clinton couldn't. And so working class white voters — hundreds of thousands of them who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, took a gamble and voted for Trump this time. And that was enough for him to carry those states. That defeated Hillary.

That's the main reason why Hillary lost. The Democrats became too detached with working class voters, particularly white ones, while Trump appealed to them with his promises. This is why I think Bernie Sanders should have been the Democratic nominee. He appealed to white working class voters more than Clinton and he would have likely won those four critical battle ground states in the general election.

Second, I don't know what this means for secular liberal atheists like myself. Certainly it means we're going to have challenges that we wouldn't have had under Clinton. Mike Pence is a super religious conservative who seems hell bent to push through his conservative religious ideology into law. And with Republicans controlling the House and the Senate, and with Trump appointing at least one conservative Supreme Court Justice, things will be tough. I also fear the death of intellectualism in politics, where having a detailed understanding of policy gives way to cult of personality and simple minded catch phrases, and that this becomes the winning formula from now on. That scares me deeply.

We will have to see what happens. Get ready for the greatest reality show on earth.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Election 2016 - Who I'm Voting For & My Election Prediction


This Tuesday is election day and I find myself for the first time in a troubled situation. There is no one on the ballot that I really support. Unlike in 2008 and 2012 where I was a pretty strong Obama supporter, this year there isn't anyone I'm enthusiastic about.

Obviously this election is different than most years because of Donald Trump. It's the first time we have a major party candidate who has no political experience I think since George Washington. He's rambunctious, foul-mouthed, unconventional, and a little crazy — to say the least. Trump becoming president is terrifying on so many levels. He lies through his teeth so blatantly and with such utter disregard for truth that he's taken the concept of the "lying politician" to a new level. Indeed, his brain seems to be impervious to facts. He's proposing filling the Supreme Court with Scalia clones, which if another justice dies in the next four years will tip the court conservative enough to reverse Roe v Wage and Obergefell v. Hodges, effectively turning abortion and same-sex marriage back to the states. Trump has no serious knowledge of the way government works, or the world, and he as all but the most simplistic understanding of the political issues our next president is going to have to deal with. He's a wild card, unpredictable, capable of undermining our democracy and stability, and his VP pick Mike Pence is one of the most conservative members of the Religious Right in the nation.

If Trump is going to win he has a narrow margin in the electoral college. Here's a possible winning scenario for him. Trump would have to win Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan. If not Michigan, he'd have to win Pennsylvania. He also has to win Iowa. Or if he loses Iowa, he has to win New Hampshire and all the typically Republican states. Hillary Clinton just has to win just two of those states and Trump's done. The electoral college heavily favors democrats.


Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Maajid Nawaz Makes The Case For A Secular Islam



Across the secular web there has been an uproar over the Southern Poverty Law Center's recent decision to add Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali to their list of "Anti-Muslim Extremists." Now I've followed both of them for years and read their work, listened to their speeches and lectures, and I know for a fact that neither of them are anti-Muslim extremists. 

Maajid in particular is a true Muslim reformer who wants to modernize Islam for the 21st century. He's an ardent secularist who wants a brand of Islam that is compatible with secular democracy and modern liberal values like gender equality, freedom of speech, equal rights for gay people — all the things left-leaning organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center should be for, not against.

But because Maajid is occasionally critical of Islam, Islamic history, and what Muslims have done in the name of Islam (and in many cases still do today), he's been branded by some on the left as anti-Muslim, despite being a Muslim himself. And so they've written critical pieces against him in left-wing syndications that exaggerate or outright lie about his deeds and intentions, and the SPLC picked up on that and branded him an anti-Muslim extremist without clear justification.

Regressive leftists like CJ Werleman have called Maajid a "House Muslim" because he's willing to take the "extreme" position that there is a link between Islamic beliefs and terrorism and because he challenges Islamists and engages with atheists. Instead, "true Muslims" according to regressives must be the kind that deny theology can have any influence whatsoever on anyone's actions — unless they're good of course. And "true Muslims" must be the kind that blame Western foreign policy for all the problems in the Islamic world and who deny groups like ISIS have anything to do with Islam.

So watch the video above. Tell me this isn't the work of a true Muslim reformer who's trying to find the difficult path on getting Islam updated for the 21st century — which all liberals should realize is desperately needed. The SPLC made a bad decision, and there is a petition on change.org to get both Maajid and Ayaan removed. I urge all of you to sign it and share it on Facebook.


Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Why Brute Facts Are Unavoidable


If you're a naturalist like myself you have most likely come to the conclusion that the existence of the universe (or multiverse, if there's more than one universe) is a brute fact. A brute fact is a fact that has no explanation in principle. It's a fact that cannot have an explanation. There are many facts that do not have explanations, but can in principle. These are not technically brute facts, but are just unexplained facts. They can be explained, at least in principle, and many of them will be explained eventually. There is another category of unexplained facts that can be explained in principle, but not in practice. For example, a fact for which all the evidence proving it is destroyed might leave us no possible way to explain it, even though it would be in principle explainable if we just had access to the evidence. These are what you can call epistemic brute facts.

So we have three categories of facts here defined as such: (1) a brute fact: a fact that has no explanation in principle, (2) an epistemic brute fact: a fact that cannot be explained in practice but can in principle, and (3) an unexplained fact: a fact that can be explained both in principle and in practice but simply isn't. In addition to this there are three positions one can take on brute facts: (1) brute facts are impossible, (2) brute facts are possible but they don't exist, or (3) brute facts exist.

Now many theists argue that not only do brute facts not exist, they are in fact impossible. That is, they entail some sort of contradiction that prevents their existence. Many theists will also often try to argue that their worldview has no brute facts, and not only that, they can logically explain their worldview in terms of necessity. This is usually done by some sort of argument that attempts to conclude their god's necessary existence, along with the tacit assumption of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), which says that for every fact, there is a reason for its existence. Needless to say, the PSR and brute facts are not compatible.

What is an explanation is also important. An explanation is generally defined as a statement or account that makes something clear. It makes something understandable, intelligible. For example, the explanation of the existence of the human species is that we evolved over millions of years from another species of hominids. Explanations tell us the how and why a thing came to be, or exists at all. It is to me an open question whether or not all explanations are causal explanations. In other words, when we say X explains Y, are we always just saying X causes Y? Now I have written that causality exists differently from how it is commonly understood, but on my definition things are still explained in the traditional cause and effect notion. You just have to understand these relationships a bit different.

In this post I'm going to challenge several often heard claims about brute facts. One, that brute facts are logically impossible, and two, that believing in a god allows you avoid brute facts, by arguing that not only are brute facts possible, they are indeed unavoidable.

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