From Music Row: Music City Walk Of Fame Announces 2024 Inductees The Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp have announced the Music City Walk of Fame will induct Jimmy Buffett, gospel quartet The Fairfield Four, Ryman Hospitality Properties’ Colin …

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From Rolling Stone: Kenny Chesney, James Taylor Salute Jimmy Buffett at 2024 Rock Hall Ceremony. Dave Matthews, Mac McAnally also appear as late singer-songwriter receives Musical Excellence Award at Cleveland ceremony. Dave Matthews, Kenny Chesney, …

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From the Tennessean: Jimmy Buffett, Fairfield Four among quartet inducted at Music City Walk of Fame ceremony Nashville’s 2024 Music City Walk of Fame ceremony highlighted all corners and eras of the city’s multitude of …

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“Skinny Boy,” the new single by Original Coral Reefer Guitarist, Roger Bartlett and Steven Taylor, is now available for download exclusively at The Songwriters Joint. Featuring an all-star lineup including TC Carr, John Frinzi, and members of …

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When I worked as a respiratory therapist part of my responsibilities was to keep flowsheets for the mechanical ventilators I worked on. That’s a record of what the machine was doing with a time log. And when I gave a breathing treatment to an asthma patient I recorded the details of that treatment, the time,...

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What a week. I can’t capture the totality of the current moment. In times like this I appreciate being able to read the thoughts of Mark Evanier. He’s a reliable attendee of San Diego Comic-Con. I remember seeing him host panels back when SDCC was held at the San Diego Civic Center at First and...

Once McDonald’s fries were something that plenty of people enjoyed, even if they were a bit dubious about the hamburgers, to say nothing of the McRib (if there ever was an item on the franchise’s menu that the term “mystery meat” could apply to, that’s the one), which apparently will soon be coming back to an Arches outlet near you.

But last week Lamb Weston, the largest french fry producer in the U.S., announced it has closed a plant in Washington state because people are opting for small fries, not medium or large.

According to McDonald’s:

“Everyone wants to know why McDonald’s French Fries taste so good—it’s a simple answer. McDonald’s World Famous Fries® are made with premium potatoes such as the Russet Burbank and the Shepody. With 0g of trans fat per labeled serving, these epic fries are crispy and golden on the outside and fluffy on the inside.”

Evidently the notation about the lack of trans fats isn’t enough to convince people that the 480 calories of a large order is something they want to eat, premium potatoes notwithstanding. (A bag of small fries is 230 calories.)

Time change, and with it things that were once familiar.

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Full disclosure–hell, this whole article is a full disclosure–Tiny Jackets is a project fronted by Kelly Simmons, who I played with in the band Daystar.

Some time ago I moved from Portland back to my hometown in Michigan and while we kept Daystar alive through those years (including through the pandemic lockdown), Kelly naturally got restless and started a new project called Tiny Jackets. 

Now, here’s the thing: Tiny Jackets is exactly the band I would have loved to be in. They have big hooks, big harmonies, occasionally jangly guitars, and clever lyrics. That sounds like me, right? 

Well, Tiny Jackets has a new single out called “My Own Dark Age” and it has all of the above plus a nifty outro that would sound natural on a banger from Waxwings (another band I wish I was in!).

Tiny Jackets Release Party

The Fixin’ To in Portland, Oregon

6:00 pm

Pre-order “My Own Dark Age”

Photo credit: Sarah Almedia

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POLJUNK, the National Affairs desk of Glorious Noise

Here we are again. In the year of someone’s Lord 2024, we are back in time. We had a slight reprieve with four years of competent governing that resulted in record economic growth, withdrawal from historically disastrous military entanglements in the mideast (brought to you by the formerly worst president in US history), and at least some sense of normalcy, but I guess we are going back. This was after what many thought was an aberrant Trump presidency–surely that was a blip in the American experience, right? As it turns out, the aberrant is the accepted. It’s America’s true face, one we occasionally veil but never actually change.

I could list all the reasons Donald Trump is a terrible person and worse “leader,” but we all know them. And that’s the point: This isn’t some unknown or misunderstood element. This is Donald Trump. We know him and unfortunately, he knows us. Better than many of us know ourselves.

Trump isn’t some genius, he’s just a guy who is willing to do what others won’t because most of us live between imaginary lines of decency.

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Andrew Bowler, Academy Award nominated filmmaker and writer-director of Time Freak, sat down with DVD Talk writer and film...

DVDTalk.com staff writer and film critic Neil Lumbard has compiled a list of some of the best releases of...

What are 'quackbusters', you might ask. Well, Tim Bolen has the answer to that question. On his site (quackpotwatch.org) he explains: The "quackbuster" operation is a conspiracy. It is a propaganda enterprise, one part crackpot, two parts evil. It's sole purpose is to discredit, and suppress, in an "anything goes" attack mode, what is wrongfully named "Alternative Medicine." It has declared war on reality. The conspirators are acting in the interests of, and are being paid, directly and indirectly, by the "conventional" medical-industrial complex. These so-called quackbusters seem to be a branch of a larger movement, the "skeptics". Their website at www.skeptic.com/ shows who they are. Skeptics think of themselves as having opinions based on scientific 'truth'. They are very outspoken and very much "out there" to disabuse the rest of us of any idea that does not fit into their version of the scientific world view. While real scientific procedure requires there to be observation and experiment, formation and testing of hypotheses, and open discussion of both experiment and theories, the skeptics have firmly made up their mind on a number of issues. And they don't hesitate to tell us where we are going wrong... Mercury and fluoride for instance are not poisons for skeptics, and anyone who thinks they are must clearly be a conspiracy nut. Vaccination is good for you, as are chemotherapy and radiation cancer treatments offered by conventional medicine. If you oppose either of them you are simply a 'quack' or at the least you are an easy target for those who take advantage of your stupidity. The practices of alternative medicine, including "chiropractic, the placebo effect, homeopathy, acupuncture, and the questionable benefits of organic food, detoxification, and ‘natural’ remedies" are a favorite subject of the skeptics. They know that only mainstream medicine should be relied on and everyone who is into those practices really needs to have their head examined....

This is a reasoned argument by Joanna (Why I Don't Vaccinate My Children) posted on Erwin Alber's VINE facebook page which was started in 2009, to help parents make an informed choice on behalf of their children. Image credit topnews.ae Joanna responds (below) to a lady who published an article saying that unvaccinated children are the cause of recent increased pertussis (whooping cough) outbreaks in areas where vaccination is actively pursued......

Many thanks g to Cristina in Greece for her report on this - originally published on her justiceforgreece blog as A seed For Change a documentary project by Alex Ikonomidis and the declaration on seed freedom Alex Ikonomidis is a Greek film maker who lived, studied and worked in Lebanon. After returning to his native Greece and serving his time in the military, he took up his profession there and was happily going along, producing in the world of media and advertising when, suddenly, the economic crisis hit. Through the crisis, Ikonomidis recognized that when money becomes more and more scarce, it is important to be where food is grown. This brought him to embark on a documentary project. A Seed for Change is his soon-to-be-released feature length film documenting why agriculture must start with seed freedom. Chemical inputs are often toxic and are disruptive to human health and the environment. "Standardized" seeds, as imposed by the agro-chemical conglomerates through legislation pushed through in much of the civilized world, are destroying our heritage of biological diversity, created by nature and harnessed by farmers for producing our food over thousands of years....

The European Union on Tuesday took the debate about genetically modified crops to the public with a survey asking citizens to share their thoughts on organic farming, reports Phys.org in a recent article titled EU asks citizens to join debate on GM food Image credit: americanoverkill.com The article continues ... The bloc's 500 million consumers are invited to complete an anonymous online questionnaire on the European Commission's Agriculture and Rural Development website (ec.europa.eu/agriculture/consultations/organic/2013_en.htm). The consultation, which ends on April 10, is part of a review of European policy on organic agriculture. The survey is available in all official EU languages. English is the one linked here, but other languages are available from a drop-down menu at the top of the page. The Phys.org article, putting emphasis on the GM angle, goes on to say......

More and more evidence is coming to light that Dr. Wakefield was on the right track when he researched the connection between the MMR vaccine and intestinal inflammation in the vaccinated children. Was Dr. Andrew Wakefield Right After All? Wakefield’s Lancet Paper Vindicated New Published Study Verifies Andrew Wakefield’s Research on Autism But how did Dr. Wakefield first get into the sights of the UK vaccine industry and how was the campaign against him mounted? Martin Walker, the author of "Dirty Medicine" and a number of other books on health, closely followed the case that eventually resulted in Dr. Wakefield's exile from the UK. He describes how it all happened and how the vaccine manufacturers were able to bring down the full weight of government and the courts against both Wakefield and the many parents who were suing for recognition of the damage vaccines had done to their children. "As a campaigner of 40 years, I think that what surprises me most about Dr Wakefield’s case, is how easily and how completely we were defeated by the pharmaceutical companies, how over a thousand parents and children were written out of history together with their adverse drug reactions. Part of this defeat for the parents, the children and the doctors concerned was grounded in an unfortunate understanding that pharmaceutical company executives were decent people and humanitarians. In fact the pharmaceutical companies, their corporate structure and their relentless pursuit of profit, their fraudulent practices represent one of the last remaining shibboleths, in our society which need to be completely reformed, democratised, divested of vested interests and made public from top to bottom." We do learn from experience. That is why we should pay attention to how this case went so wrong and why the campaign to ruin those researchers and to leave the damaged children by the wayside was mounted in the first place. So it won't happen again. Here is Martin Walker's essay....

Cory Terry Died After Drinking Red Bull, $85 Million Wrongful Death Suit Claims, is the title of a recent article in the Huffington Post that reports on a rather unusual death. Cory Terry downed a Red Bull when he finished a basketball game and a few minutes later he died of a heart attack. Red Bull comes in different formulations, the dark blue normal and a - supposedly more healthy - 'diet' or sugar free version, which is the light blue one. To be sure, we don't know which one Terry preferred. Was it the normal or the diet version that killed him? Betty Martini believes it was 'diet' and that the damage was done by a specific ingredient: the aspartame that supplants sugar in the diet version. Betty says she knows of other cases of athletes having heart attacks after consuming soft drinks that contain aspartame. She has been trying to alert press and authorities to the dangers of the methanol-containing sweetener. I am reproducing her lengthy email here because she goes into considerable detail. If you love diet drinks or know someone who does, read this or let them read it. The data might save your life. Here goes Betty Martini......

After conducting "one of the most comprehensive risk assessments of aspartame ever undertaken", the European Food Safety Authority has released its verdict on 10 December 2013. The agency came to the conclusion that aspartame and its breakdown products are "safe for human consumption at current levels of exposure". The EFSA press release says that this was an important step forward in "strengthening consumer confidence in the scientific underpinning of the EU food safety system and the regulation of food additives". So the message seems to be that we should all just move on to other things. Leave aspartame alone and better yet - drink some of that "diet" Coke. But should we really? Could perhaps the power of money and influence behind big food have had a determining effect on that decision? We cannot be certain what exactly caused the EU regulator to give aspartame a clean bill of health rather than to acknowledge the sweetener's widely known dangers. Fact is - they disregarded every single study that showed aspartame to have adverse effects. Prof. Erik Millstone of the University of Sussex Science and Technology Policy Research Unit believes that EFSA has arrived at its conclusion by opportunistic interpretation of the studies that were reviewed. Most of the industry funded studies were given straight A's, while independent studies were - without exception - given an 'F' rating. Millstone says that "The EFSA Panel opportunistically accepted at face value almost all of the studies suggesting that aspartame is harmless, while entirely discounting every single study indicating that aspartame may be harmful, even though the quality, power and sensitivity of many of the studies that were discounted were markedly superior to those of the contrary studies deemed reliable."...

About a month ago I wrote this entry which was, I think, somewhat misunderstood, at least by the one confirmed reader of it. In it I tried to argue that there are some fundamental problems involved in conceptualizing time which, in my mind, appear intractable, and hence its existence as a concept contradictory, impossible. To which it was replied that of course time has an existence, as a social convention, a mental framework. Of that I have no doubt-it would be impossible for me to refute even if I wanted to. My point was about metaphysics, not sociology, and in that regard I don’t think it was that much different from that expressed by St. Augustine regarding time: “if no one asks me what it is I know what it is, but if someone asks me I don’t know.” Or, even more notably, Kant, who regarded time, in addition to space, not as an entity, process, or property of the physical world, but as a filter of percpetion, the mental framework which orders our experience of the world.

Which brings me back to science. I just finished reading The Evolution of Physics, by Einstein and Leopold Infeld. Of course Einstein is justly famed for, among many other things, pioneering the idea of space-time. However, I was quite intrigued to discover, while perusing the science section at the National Library in Paris, that Gödel claimed that his late work on relativity and physics, upon which I touched in my earlier post, was inspired by an intense study of Kant. Now, assuming such a dour man as Gödel was not simply being facetious, the implications of this are immediate. In the (apparent) somewhat paradoxical act of tearing down the structure of Einstein’s work while bringing some of its deepest tendencies to fruition, he was working under the influence of a theory which denies the type of external, property-based existence which Einstein implicitly ascribes to time (and space)! As I understand special relativity (always a dubious premise, I grant you), it holds that space and time, as properties of the universe, are perceived differently at every point of view, or coordinate system, as he calls them. But for me it seems a question of the simplest explanation: if everyone is in a relative frame of reference with respect to space and time, is it simpler and more likely that time and space are real properties which are different at every point in the universe, or simply that they are perceived differently by each observer? It seems to me that if one takes Kant’s idea of space and time as elements perception and not of external reality, none of these problems come up, although there may of course be others. Again, it’s hard for me to say what Gödel’s interpretation of all of this is, since no one seems to have engaged and propogated his work on this subject much, but if he was following in the line of Kant’s thinking as well as the tradition of relativity, it would be interesting to see the resuscitation, by “a commodius vicus of recirculation,” of a very powerful and cogent point of view which has nonetheless been largely dismissed by scientists as non-pertinently metaphysical. Perhaps interesting also to note that, in dealing with Kant last year, I protested against his classification of space as a perceptual framework, and even managed to convince my philosophy professor that it is rather the fundamental visual property, before reversing myself and concluding that light is actually the fundamental visible property. Light is also in some ways the fundamental property in Einstein’s system, or at least the one constant in all of the warping of space-time, which somehow doesn’t seem so surprising now…

p.s. For all of those intersted in Spanish literature (which at this point probably composes nearly 100% of our readership), I also came across this article with the following sub-headline: “It is the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote, a more important work than all of Einstein’s theories.” To the extent that the article follows up on this point, I think the claim about the inevitability of scientific discovery is at the very least highly disputable (and even if Cervantes’ work is more inimitable, that does not in itself mean that it is more “important”), but nonetheless a provocative idea, and gratifying to my humanities-leaning heart.

I may have bored everyone to death about this topic, but I have my last exam tomorrow, so here is my final thought about what distinguishes science. Most of the descriptions of science that I know of don’t really explain how science progresses without falling into a quaint mythology about approaching some metaphysical truth. Kuhn doesn’t, Popper doesn’t, Pierre Duhem doesn’t, and I myself have neglected to account for it to some extent.

I think the key is that science, at least experimental science, is essentially concerned with predicting the future. Every hypothesis, in essence, is a prediction about the future. What distinguishes science from other forms of prediction is the emphasis on verification, the insistence on framing predictions in such a way that when they are tested they can be decisively answered positively or negatively. In other, the goal is not to not be wrong but to achieve a definitive positive answer. Even a definite negative answer is preferable to none at all.

Some philosophers, like Duhem, claim that individual hypotheses can neither be verified nor falsified, because a whole body of theories and assumptions lies behind, and is implicated in, every hypothesis, and thus one can never be sure just what has been validated or failed. While that’s true, it is also nonetheless true that when the result of an experiment does not match a hypothetical prediction the hypothesis has been proven invalid as it stands. In other words, no matter what went wrong, the body of theories and assumptions that led to the hypothesis do not work as they now stand. Thus, things will have to be changed until they produce accurate predictions. Conversely, if a hypotheis is corroborated with a positive answer, the theories behind it stand validated until a hypothesis receives a negative answer.

In other words, experimentation does not serve to lead by induction to new theories, but rather theories serve to make possible specific predictions about the future which can be verified decisively. This at least is the goal. The goal is not a description which is true or corresponds to the truth, or at least that is not the immediate goal. When the facts or events are given, anyone can interpret them, and the fact that these events are known can mask the relative merits of the theory which interprets them. The idea that theories are validated by their correspondence to experimental results is tautological: the first condition of any theory is that it accounts for the experimental results that gave rise to it. But the only way to determine whether it is simply a theory to fit the facts or whether it is truly generalizable is to test it against unknown facts via prediction. Of course, predictions are almost always only approximately true, so the specific point of acceptability is not provided for by the general concept, but, at least in theory, decisive verification of predictions provides a simple, clear, and immensely useful criterion by which to evaluate theories. In my opinion, this explains much of the evolutionary capacity of science (I mean evolution in the more contemporary sense of diversification and selection rather than the old idea of teleological perfectibility).

If experimental prediction is the mark of science, this leaves the question of whether purely descriptive disciplines like zoology and areas like quantum theory where predictions are inherently statistical and ambiguous are scientific. Zoology and the like I think are, because hypothetical prediction inherently implies classification. In other words, by saying “under these conditions, such an event will happen,” one classifies, in other words sets parameters. The goal of zoology seems to be not simply to describe members of a group but to describe all the characteristics which define the group, set the parameters of the group, which is the first step towards making predictions about the group. So it is an element of science, but incomplete. As for quantum, I avow my profound ignorance of it, so let my opinion be taken in that light. As far as I understand, the stastical laws in that realm allow predictions in aggregate, so I am inclined to view it as still within the domain of science, at least in spirit, but of course the lack of decisiveness of statistical predictions gravely weakens the predictive power of science in this area, and I have already suggested that the rise of relativity and quantum in my view are intimately tied to the waning of the scientific age. Finally, it should be noted that while making correct predictions is the goal of science, that should be qualified by saying that the predictions are intended to answer general questions concerning the nature of things and establish specific knowledge. Optics or engineering, for example, are not science, although they once were, because all the major questions have been answered, and they no longer concern gaining further knowledge of the future and the universe, but rather in applying that knowledge to constructing specific objects.

So the goal and value of science is in predicting, and thus establishing knowledge of, the future, and the scientific method is the means of arriving at correct predictions. This is not to discard my earlier contention about the ideological basis of science, because the efficacy of prediction is based on the relative value of induction, and successful induction relies on the essential regularity and stability of the universe. In other words, in order to draw a general theory from a specific experimental result and vice versa, the universe must be considered as basically the same everywhere and at every time, which in turn implies that it be material, matter being defined as that which cannot change itself and is therefore static. It seems to me that if in quantum theory, for example, phenomena become genuinely dependent on the observeer in ways that are neither generalizable nor predicatable, it cannot continue to remain truly a science. It would seem to me that the branches of physics which are entirely theoretical are for practical purposes basically metaphysics.

This model depends on a linear notion of time. It might seem the opposite, that if the physical laws are eternal and universal time is actually opposed to this insofar as it represents dynamism, change. But in reality the sameness of the universe upon which science is predicated is not a a sameness at any particular moment, but rather a sameness of behavior. In other words, a view of the universe from a materialist perspective at any given moment shows that everything in the univese is different in the sense of being distinct. However, the idea is that under the same conditions all matter (or whatever you call the fundamental substances) will act in the same way. Without the steady march of time, this unity of behavior disappears, and there are simply a million disparate entities. Thus, space (and time) as properties of the universe are essential to science.

As for what the value of science is, I’m afraid I can’t generalize about that. From reading my recent posts one can most likely guess at my views, but I will simply say that one’s view of the efficacy of science in making the universe understandable will probably depend on entirely on whether one a) believes that linear time is a real property of the universe and b) if so, whether true induction is possible.

p.s. I should note that Henri Poincaré anticipates me in seeing the epistemological value of science as consisting mainly of its ability to make predictions rather than its descriptive correspondence to reality. However, he also thinks that theories are conventions and definitions of concepts, not true descriptions of physical phenomena based necessarily on experimental results. He thinks the conjunction of these two make theories relatively independent of their experimental bases, which he regards as a good thing because it creates a body of stable principles in which we can trust. I think that that is neither true nor a good value. The emphasis is on predicting correctly, not creating stable beliefs (if you want unchanging beliefs, what not join the Church?), and if generating true predictions is the goal, theories should be more rather than less sensitive to their experimental roots.

p.p.s. Since my exam was about scientific laws and causality, I should add that while scientific activity depends on a belief in time, not all scientific theories do: the law of conservation of energy, for example, I believe is essentially atemporal.

At the conjunction of this critique of reductionism in physics and this interview with Benoit Mandelbrot I think one sees the same basic dynamic at work: a devaluation of simplicity and generalization in math and science, what I suppose Mandelbrot might call “smoothness,” and a preference for the complex and the multifarious. To some extent this seems to cut against the basic scientific impulse to simplify, to generalize, which is what a law or an equation generally does. In Laughlin I think there is even a certain disillusionment with realism perhaps not totally dissimilar from that in the analysis of language by dear friend Wittgenstein. Although, by encouraging investigation of the specifics and intricacies of phenomena which seem to be superficially covered by the most general and basic laws and to give up idle speculation about the far nether regions of the universe in space and time which cannot in any way be corroborated, he seems to be trying to bring physics back into the solid world of relative certainties and reasonable evidence, it seems to me that this is a tacit admission that the theories which seem to cover and explain adequately all phenomena except for those extreme edges are in actuality insufficient to represent the richness of even the most mundane levels of reality.

Just as in the case of the over-heated discoveries of Wittgeinstein and Cambridge group, this sudden realization that the broad and universal physical laws established and the abstract shapes used to represent them don’t really reflect the full multiplicity of reality seems a little phony to me. I mean, isn’t that the entire point? Isn’t that abstractness and simplicity supposed to yoke all of that complexity within a reasonable level of comprehensibility sufficient to possibly predict other phenomena, or at least relate them to what we have already seen? Now maybe we see a revision in the valuation of these ideals, and in both Laughlin and Mandelbrot a movement away from final solutions, formulations and summations. Seemingly nothing out-of-the-ordinary about that, but if one ceases to regard oneself as capturing the essence of a phenomenon in an equation or image describing it, then that necessarily leads to a re-evaluation of the type of work one is doing and the standard by which it is judged. Let’s put it this way: although there are many rules which often govern both the form and content of a form (some, granted, quite idiosyncratic and individual), it would be quite ludicrous to suggest that a listing of those rules would be an adequate reflection or description of the poem, let alone itself be a poem, or equivalent to the poem.

Philosophically, I’m not troubled by this as many scientists seem to be. Despite the many declarations that Newton had discovered the very mechanism by which God controlled the universe, he himself complained famously that he felt like a dilettante on the shoreline picking up stones and shells that amused him while neglecting the vast ocean before him. This seems unnecessary if one regards theorems as essentially creations, not mirrors of nature, and hence judge the cathedral of scientific knowledge by its height above the ground rather than as an incomplete ladder to the heavens.

It’s almost comforting that such invidious fluffy-minded sludge as this is floating around, as it seems, like religion, to keep the middle-brows hypnotized by “beautiful sentiments” which are so vague as to keep them from actually getting together and doing anything. It’s sort of weird to hear this weakly Marxist social-democratic pap which used to be shouted from the rooftops now being whispered in a low monotonous whine. The author avows his fealty to Jeremy Bentham, not Marx, and calls it utilitarianism not Marxism, but there are many illegitimate fathers along this line of thought.

The root of the idea is that, now that neuroscience has supposedly made it possible to actually identify what makes us happy, the idea of happiness has become quantifiable, and hence a program of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people has become objectively possible. However, the author does not make the slightest effort to apply these wonders of modern science to actually determining what the alleged sources of human happiness are. The neuroscience tack is really just a defensive ploy to ward off the eternal charges that utilitarinism is simply a euphemism for an authoritarian imposition of values. As for espousing his positive program for what constitutes human happiness, it is simply the usual liberal middle-class canards, with not surprisingly a socialist edge: more time to spend with family, a decent wage for everyone, blah blah blah. But he seems to make two pretty criminally unsubstantiated assumptions: one is these sources are essentially the same for everyone, or at least could be under certain conditions, and the other is that they do not inherently conflict with anyone else’s.

I say under certain conditions could be, because in evaluating our current society he seems to privilege envy of other’s material well-being as the principal determinant of happiness. His theory is that above a certain level of material subsistence people are motivated primarily by status-seeking and the desire for a high rank within their social group. Therefore, the increasing wealth of the society will not increase happiness because people measure their well-being relative to the group, not by their absolute prosperity. This is always been a flaw in the concept of the “war against poverty”; I’m not sure it’s much of an argument for socialist economic redistribution. But actually if you read his section on the value of income taxes carefully, he doesn’t even seem to be arguing that they are useful insofar as they can be redirected to the less prosperous, although he does evidently believe that a certain amount of money contributes more to the happiness of a poor person than to a rich one’s. Rather, he seems to think that taking money away from the properous is valuable in and of itself, because it will supposedly make them less focused on the “rat race,” more family-oriented, etc., etc. In short he seems to be advocating a net impoverishment of society.

All of which may be consistent with the program of a good little socialist, but does not necessarily accord marvelously with his own evidence about the supposedly quantified happiness of humanity. The research that he cites non-specifically supposedly indicates that people’s feeling of happiness has not risen in the last half-century, but he does not cite anything which indicates that it has necessarily declined. He cites rising rates of depression and crime as presumably implicit indicators of greater unhappiness, but he does not seem to acknowledge the possibility that in our hyper-medicated and surveillance-based society perhaps people simply report depression and crime more. In any event, if roughly similar numbers of people today as in the ‘50’s report themselves happy (and we believe them), despite the increase in prosperity, that might perhaps indicate that happiness is not fixed to material well-being. Which may be consistent with his general point, but not with his idea of increasing happiness by manipulating income levels.

And even if it did, it seems rather difficult to countenance any social program predicated upon appealing to one of humanity’s most depraved instincts, namely envy. The author acknowledges that his ideal of taxation is mainly motivated by the desire to pander to people’s envy, but he seems to think that their envy will be sated by the loss of prosperity of those around them and that after that point there will be no more. So the envy of the less prosperous will be satisfied by the losses accrued by the more prosperous, which will somehow not be counter-balanced by the chagrin of the more prosperous at the prospect of seeing their status diminished. Very logical.

One of the more egregious presumptions of utilitarians is that non-utilitarian social systems somehow aren’t concerned with seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. On the contrary, that’s the defining problem of practically every social and political theory I can think of, and they all either seek or claim to have found the answer—whether such a solution exists, I have my doubts, but that’s why I’m a skeptic about politics. This is a handy trick by utilitarians: they say “I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Which is practically begging the question: “As opposed to whom?” It’s useful because it tends to conceal the fact that their real agenda is generally somewhat more specific, and tends to consist in the autocratic notion that one or two measures of social living can be authoritatively determined to be the sources of happiness, and then divided up in a centralized fashion. Those that are the most insistent on the idea of liberty are generally those that are the most skeptical about the possibility of the notion of happiness being either quantitatively defined or generalizable. In other words, only indviduals can determine their own sources of happiness.

For the author, on the other hand, the fact that certain stimuli trigger certain areas of the brain at the times when test subjects profess pleasure has solved the problem of determining happiness. Of course, as mentioned, he never really bothers with the results that those studies have yielded. Somehow the fact that he considers envy to be a principal element of human happiness does not place very severe limits on the harmoniousness of individual happiness. Nor does it constitute a tyranny of the majority, because he claims that in an ideal utilitarian society the happiness of the most unhappy would be considered of pre-eminent importance. Of course, at the beginning of the article he cited the equal importance of each individual’s happiness as the fouding tenet of his theory, but I’m sure it all sorts out in the end.

Among social factors responsible for unhappiness, he cites divorce and unemployment as of pre-eminent importance. Of course, rates of both divorce and unemployment in the crassly materialistic and religious United States are much lower than in the much more overtly utilitarian-embracing Europe, but it would be a bit embarassing for him to admit this after avowing that all traditional value-systems outside of utilitarianism and “individualism” are dead.

Personally the question of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people doesn’t exactly compel me constantly, although the issue of personal happiness tends to impose itself intransigently. I would have thought that evolutionary biology would have provided an adequate explanation of this, as well as the recurrence of what we call altruism. But such an idea of course suggests that happiness, whatever that is, is not really the point of our little existences, and that the more imperious competitiveness of life will ultimately subvert all of these little trifles of pleasure and pain. But in the meantime, we have these debased statistical notions of happiness to amuse us in an idle hour.

It seems to me that if one’s “objective” measure of happiness is electrical stimulation in the cerebral cortex, the most efficient utilitarian solution to the problem of human happiness would be strap everyone onto hospital gurneys and stimulate the “happiness” part of their brain all day long. If one does not wish to be this deterministic about it, perhaps one should allow more latitute to individuals to discover their own conception of happiness. Personally, I have found happiness generally to be an idea for the unhappy and something rarely spoken of by the happiness; mention of practically guarantees that it is not present in the environment where it is uttered. I don’t deny that what you might call love is the real bridge between personal happiness and moral obligations, and the only true means by which the desires of oneself and of others are united, but such a sentiment can never be mandated; it is entirely resistant to intellectual compulsion. Utilitarianism, which sometimes does a decent job of faking morality, is nevertheless ultimately predicated on the pleasure principle, and hence is wholly inadequate to uniting the moral and the pleasurable except when love truly pertains. In that case, of course, political theory is entirely superfluous, which is why this is all a waste of time.

p.s. I don’t claim that people’s behavior necessarily reflects what really would make them happy, but presumably it does at least reflect what they consciously value. Hence, if I were the author I would have been a bit skeptical of using the results of “surveys” of what people claim to value when the results don’t correlate with their behavior, i.e. they claim that spending time with family is most important, but they spend a disproportiante amount of time working (at least according to him). So either people are not really being forthright (consciously or unconsciously) in responding to surveys, or there is not actually a problem of priorities. In either case, he’s way over-valuing surveys as a guide to what will make people happy.

Over at Catallarchy, Micha Ghertner discusses “How To Tell You’ve Won An Argument;” namely, when your opponent concedes that his position is less coherent than your own, you’ve won. Now, I don’t want to dispute his point, but rather to question how relevant it is. I’ve touched on this before, but I’m a bit dubious of the notion that the “correct” position is the one that wins arguments between advocates of two different positions.

Obviously, in the first place, there’s nothing to prevent both arguers from being wrong; the relative lack of coherence of one of their positions means, at best, that the other’s position is “less” wrong (assuming that even makes sense and assuming that coherence is a measure of correctness).¹ But this is somewhat superficial (and besides, already mentioned and acknowledged in the comments to Ghertner’s post); more importantly, I want to cast doubts upon the parenthetical assumption I made above, that coherence is some sort of infallible metric for measuring correctness/validity.

In fact, Ghertner (perhaps unconsciously) alludes to this very issue when he quotes Wittgenstein’s famous seventh proposition from the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Within the context of the Tractatus (as an attempt to construct or at least describe a perfect language), this supports the notion that being right and being coherent are synonymous, but Wittgenstein himself later rejects this perspective and, to me, the more apropos quotation is: “Explanations come to an end somewhere” (Philosophical Investigations, I§1). That is, no argument (and certainly none about abstract principles) is completely coherent; we always run up against that whereof we cannot speak and therefore must be silent. The question is simply at what stage in the investigation we enter the realm of unsupported assertion.

And even if we scale back our expectations and choose to embrace the position that manages to maintain coherence as far back as possible, there’s still no guarantee that we’re on the right track. Although much of the world can apparently be explained without the need to stipulate a deity, this doesn’t really make it any less likely that theism is right. In the words of Chuck Klosterman:

Math [or, perhaps more fittingly in this context, logic] is the antireligion, because it splinters the gravity of life’s only imperative equation: Either something is true, or it isn’t.

In fact, if we really want to get all Wittgensteinian about this (not that we necessarily should), we might even begin to question those positions which do appear to be coherent:

In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed. (PI, I§426)

Anyway, getting back to whatever semblance of a point I was trying to make, when someone admits that their position is incoherent, that does indeed mean that they’ve lost the argument, but I just wonder how important that really is. Giving up your high-paying job and live-in girlfriend to go back home and take care of your sick mother isn’t going to win a lot of arguments if we’re taking logical coherence as the criterion of victory (seriously, think about it), but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do. That doesn’t mean that coherence is totally irrelevant to what is right/correct, either (and, I should point out, in the above example helping your sick mom isn’t necessarily the right thing to do; as is almost always true, it depends on the circumstances), but let’s not give argument-winning more importance than it merits. Or, as some smarmy new-age intellectual might put it, in the pursuit of knowledge, our goal shouldn’t be to win arguments, but, rather, to discover truth.

---

1. Since I’m quoting Wittgenstein anyway, I might as well include the relevant quote for this as well:

The law of the excluded middle says here: It must either look like this, or like that. So it really—and this is a truism—says nothing at all, but gives us a picture. And the problem ought now to be: does reality accord with the picture or not? And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how—but it does not do so, just because we do not know how it is to be applied. Here saying “There is no third possibility” or “But there can’t be a third possibility!”—expresses our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture: a picture which looks as if it must already contain both the problem and its solution, while all the time we feel that it is not so. (PI I§352)

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Everyone on the Internet fears the day that Google will enter their market. Today the fear was tangible for Rollyo and Swicki. The Financial Times reported that Google will launch tomorrow (Tuesday) "...a customisable search engine that users can carry on their own blogs and other websites..." and compares the new service to Rollyo.

Matthew Ingram carries the photo of a shark on his post about this development. Ingram points out that when Google entered the calendar market, competitor Kiko gave up and sold themselves. He asks whether or not this was the right decision -- pointing to Paul Graham's post at the time "Google Does Not Render Resistance Futile."

I find myself agreeing with Paul and Rex Hammock puts his finger on it when he writes:

There’s a social networking aspect of Rollyo that probably won’t be a part of the Google product, however the Google product will likely offer publishers, including bloggers, an instant way to monetize narrow search in the Adsense program they’re already participating in.

For all of the things that Google has done right in technology, they have done very little well in the category of social. It isn't too late for them to learn but if history is any guide, they will miss the importance of the social network in search as well.

And frankly having a strong competitor forces you to do the two things which you most need to do in any case when you are a small business -- innovate constantly and be 500% better than your larger competition. Then Google can educate the market about why the market needs your product and then you can deliver on the market's expectations. That is what YouTube did.

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