Analytics

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Miscellany: 12/15/15

Quote of the Day
The grand aim of all science is to cover 
the greatest number of empirical facts 
by logical deduction 
from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
Albert Einstein

Tweet of the Day
Image of the Day


My Greatest Hits: Dec. 2015
Political Potpourri

The bifurcation of Iowa caucus results continues (remember the earlier duel between Trump and Carson trading trading leads?), today the PPP having Trump 3 over Cruz and the Loras College having Cruz at 30, 7 over Trump. The Loras poll is the second recent poll putting Cruz in the 30's, in fact over the past month Cruz has been at 20 or better, remarkable considering 2 months ago Cruz was struggling to reach double digits.

The latest national ABC poll has Trump at 38, once again lapping the competition and more; Cruz was at 15 and Rubio and Carson tied for third at 12 each. I'm still struck by the bifurgated clusters of Trump at 27 vs. 40.

I did watch the GOP debate tonight as my later tweets above reference. In many ways, this was the best, most entertaining debate although to a large extent there wasn't a lot to differentiate among the generally interventionist, Big Defense, anti-immigrant, anti-Obama/Clinton perspectives. I've got a couple of one-off posts in process, one of them on the debate, which I hope to publish this week.

Libertarian Squabbles: Reflections on a Prior FB Exchange

There are various squabbles among libertarians on a lot of issues--abortion, immigration, ancaps vs. minarchists, intellectual property, etc. (There are dominant positions, of course, and I, e.g., as a pro-lifer, am on the minority side.) IP, for example, is a big debate; I understand that libertarians may not be happy with the chilling effect of IP enforcement on independent discoveries and innovation. I happen to be a supporter of IP rights, although I think reforms should be considered. Why am I discussing IP? I belong to an invitation-only FB group in favor of IP. There are a couple of name libertarians who supported IP rights: Lysander Spooner (a prominent abolitionist and one who also attempted to test the USPS monopoly) and Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand, noted for novels like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,  in particular promoted her own philosophic system, called Objectivism. I'm not going to discuss Objectivism in detail here (I'm not an Objectivist, although there are a lot of her pro-capitalist insights I share), except to note that it is explicitly atheist.

I have had a lot of libertarians shoot back at me, most of which I don't publish in my relevant FB Corner segment. For example, AnCaps love to mock minarchists on a slippery slope to authoritarianism. The Pauls and their followers think open borders is inconsistent with private property rights. I've had my share of spats with Jeffrey Tucker and others on IP rights.

Now just to provide the setting, I am used to challenges from Catholic progressives who remake Christ into some meek, humanist, socialist preacher, which I find totally disingenuous. Lawrence Reed of FEE published a relevant critique, and I've written a one-off post and multiple FB exchange on related issues. I've occasionally seen atheists post mocking comments in these threads, re: sky daddy or the like. I don't have a problem with atheists expressing their point of view; what I find irritating is the juvenile dismissive tone.

So over the weekend the We Are Capitalist FB group published a FEE-like thread on the Jesus being a socialist theme. In hindsight, I should have probably inferred this one commenter was an Objectivist; he specifically suggested that he favored WAC's perspective on most issues, and he used the term 'altruist' which is a big construct in Objectivism. At the time, my immediate reaction was to take the author's 'altruist' as yet another "progressive" Christian reducing Jesus to a do-gooder humanist/teacher, stripped of religious significance; he didn't use the typically dismissive language I've seen from atheists. But, in Objectivist circles, altruism is considered morally defective; at the risk of oversimplification, a man should pursue his own best interests in place of suboptimizing incoherent principles.

The troll was so incensed by my response, he tried to message me directly vs. respond in the thread. (I don't always go back to the original thread to look for responses; some FB replies spawn an email notification but not others). It's possible he did respond to the thread, but all I saw was his message, and FB noted that he was in the same pro-IP FB group. The message made it clear that he considered calling Jesus an altruist was not intended to be a compliment.

I didn't respond back, because I know there was nothing I could do or say that was going to convert a committed atheist or vice-versa.

Political Cartoon
Courtesy of Henry Payne via Townhall
Musical Interlude: Christmas Hits

 Zooey Deschanel & Leon Redbone, "Baby, It's Cold Outside"

Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,