John & Belle Have A Blog

Can I Freak Out In February?

Mixed Metaphor alert at the WSJ:

Great investors are taught to listen to the market. Each tick of the tape has something to say about expectations for growth, inflation, policy changes and looming recessions. The stock market is like a giant mass of pulsing plasma doing price discovery and a game of hot potato, getting stocks into the correct hands with the right risk profile. It's way too big for any one person to manipulate, let alone touch directly. Instead, millions of us provide input with our buying and selling decisions.

This explains a lot. There's no reason the expect a giant pulsing mass of plasma that's playing hot potato to behave predictably. Seriously, though, where are we headed with this, Dow 3600? I was always the bearish one, and now it's already gotten worse than I thought, and there's no reason to expect a quick turnaround. So I've revised my bearishness: bottom at 5800.

UPDATE 30 SECONDS LATER: That was depressing. Why don't you go watch the trailer for Isaac Hayes' thriller Truck Turner. See? All better now.

Israelites

Just the other day I was thinking about how I don't really know any proverbial sayings or stories from the Qur'an. So when I saw some childrens books at Mustafa Centre in the series "Quran Stories For Little Hearts" I decided to spring for the 6-book box, at $24. A couple of them are beautifully illustrated, while the rest are standard crummy kids' book stuff. It's interesting to see the devices used to avoid illustrating people; in "Uzayr's Donkey" the donkey appears in all the scenes while Uzayr himself is only implied. Likewise in "The Treasure House" we see lots of camels and buildings, but no wicked Qarun (although we do see two servants from behind as they carry the keys to his treasure house--Qarun is so rich that several men are needed just to carry the keys.) What I found interesting is that of the 6 books, 2 are set in Pharaoh's (Firawn's) Egypt, where the children of Israel are in bondage. Qarun is a rich child of Israel who has forgotten his people and become an advisor to Firawn (at first I thought this was going to be about Joseph, but it's not). One of the other books is about the escape from Egypt and the prophet Musa's (Moses) parting of the red sea. I knew that the patriarchs of the old testamant, as well as Jesus (aka Issa) himself, are part of the Muslim tradition, and one hears about the whole "People of the Book" thing, but I was suprised to see so much focus on Allah's special relationship with the people of Israel.

Left Way Behind

Well, so, today I read Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' "Left Behind". I know, I know. You're thinking, "Belle, you could have used that time for quality looking at blogs on the internet, or cooking food, or alphabetizing your socks!" Yes, yes. Let's just consider this my little Red State outreach project, mmmkay? And I did cook some tasty curry, and went swimming, and read various speculations about the Plame case. I even worked in time for some wet dreams! Trust me, reading "Left Behind" is not an all day project.

Show Respect

Mark A.R Kleiman is definitely right about this. On a separate, but related point, Zoë has so thoroughly internalized the inside=no shoes thing that it's hard to make her keep her shoes on in the doctor's waiting room, or the taxi. It's hard to explain religion to your children when you don't believe in god. What is it that people think they are up to? We often walk down the street to the Indian temple at the end of Depot road. Zoë loves to look at the statues, although she's afraid to enter the dim interior. We peer in at the priests, threading jasmine into ropes, their foreheads emblazoned with crimson and saffron. Zoë wants to know if they think the statues will really eat the food they offer. Weelll...should I say they it's a kind of special play, where they pretend to think the statues will eat the food? Or should I say they know the statues won't really eat the food, but they are just trying to say they respect the people whom the statues represent? But, they aren't actually people? Or...Christians believers, help me out here. C'mon, Russell Arben Fox, let start a dialogue.

UPDATE: read the comments for some helpful answers. Ancient Greek people sacrificed food in the same way, that is, the gods ate the savory smoke and the worshippers the specially blessed remains. I asked Zoë about it today and she said she thinks it's kind of like magic. Well, that's on the right track, I guess.

The Gay Marriage Thing

You know, I think I could teach an entire course on informal reasoning - with emphasis on avoiding fallacies - with nothing as a (cautionary) text except every editorial against gay marriage the NRO has ever published. What you need, for such a course, are simple, OBVIOUS - so that even a child can see them - examples of classic ways reason can betray itself in incontinently shameful fashion. Which brings us to Jonah Goldberg's silly thing. Oh, Andrew Sullivan has already laid into it. As has Ted Barlow.

There seems to be something about gay marriage that brings out the fallacy in folks. Even Stanley Kurtz, usually the irenic voice of reason over NRO way. I mean: I usually disagree with whatever the NRO crew are arguing about whatever, but they aren't dummies; its ONLY when they get onto gay marriage that I am really struck by the fact that their writings ought to go into the "Big Book of Thought" chapter on "How Not To Do It".

Let me forego the traditional methods of the fiscatore and proceed positively, geometrically even:

Either marriage is, in its nature/justification:
1) A religious institution.
2) A civil/secular institution.
3) A mix of religious and civil/secular. (Let this be a slider, as it were, running from 99% religious to 99% civil/secular. That ought to cover things to a nicety.)

Obvious 3) is the right answer. But let's be thorough about this.

If 1), then the question of who can marry whom ought to be left to individual churchs, denominations, religious leaders, private consciences of believers, so forth. There is a thing called religious freedom, after all. And there is such a thing as the establishment clause in the Constitution. (Of course there are limits and complications. But since there is no direct harm to others, and since two men/women getting 'married' bears a strong family resemblance to a man and a woman getting married ... well.) CONCLUSION: if marriage is a religious matter, the government ought to be quite generous in allowing varieties of union, if religious people want them, as it is in allowing varieties of ritual observance and so forth.

If 2), you check your inspired religious texts at the door, obviously. If you then tot up all the advantages to government/society of santioning and otherwise providing minimal legal support for the existence of these things called families - well, you will find that a preponderance apply to same-sex unions. Yes, no children. But adoption. And sterile people/old people can marry as it stands. CONCLUSION: it would be more arbitrary to deny than to allow, from a purely civil/secular standpoint. And, and federalism.

But the answer is 3). Marriage is an uncertain mix of religion and civil/secular. But since 1) and 2) independently support gay marriage, how can 1) and 2) together go against? I mean, without commiting lots of fallacies so as to rig that result

Too simple, obviously. For instance, I just legalized polygamy. But, you know ... I don't like polygamy, but I'm OK with that result.

Experimental Theater

I'm getting ready to teach Meno next week, and there's a bit that often rubs readers the wrong way. Truth be told the whole virtue-geometry-virtue sandwich sticks in everyone's cognitive craw. Never mind that. I'm thinking about the bit where Socrates criticizes Meno for liking Empedocles' theory of perception (i.e. that there are 'effluvia' off objects that fit our eyes, ears, so forth.) Socrates dismisses this theory as 'theatrical' [tragic, poetic], even though it seems not half bad as an empirical hypothesis. We read this today as a symptom of the weakness of Plato's anti-empirical view of science. Which is fair enough. But he's actually got a baby in all this bathwater, like so. In fact all Meno is interested in is theatrical 'plausibility'. He isn't interested in taking it to the next level of experiment, confirmation, so forth. It wouldn't occur to him that this is a research program, let alone that there might be expert knowledge to be attained. Skip ahead more than a thousand years - and three weeks in my syllabus - to Descartes. Here's a funny passage from Richard Popkin's book, The History of Scepticism From Erasmus to Spinoza:

If We Must Have Intelligent Design, Let's Not Let It Be A Stupid Accident On the Information Superhighway

It occurs to me my previous post will perhaps be misread in a way that's interesting enough to preempt.

I will be read as assuming that arguments from design are every bit as disreputable as, say, rank crop circle crankery. It is not the case that I am assuming this. (Proving this is so is left as an exercise for the interesting reader.) In fact, I have a great deal of respect for arguments from design. They have a storied and philosophically honorable past, stretching back to Aristotle. Hume's vegetating library is a wonderful thought-experiment. Paley was a wonderful writer. Contemporary advocates are, at times, rationalistically ingenious in ways that make the brain tick over healthily. Arguments from design have interesting forms, and they lead in lots of interesting directions. In fact, I think a good case can be made for including discussion of such arguments in high school biology textbooks, if folk are so head-up they simply cannot bear the thought of their innocent children being deprived of such good stuff.

Which sounds truly schizophrenic, in light of my previous post, but let me explain my position.

Cooking Primordial Soup, Texas-Style

I've been following Brian Leiter's righteously indignant (and rightly so) series of posts about the Texas textbook controversy. For those of you unfamiliar: a perfectly good study question about recipes for primordial soup is losing out in the struggle for life. This is what heaved itself up out of the roiling political slime instead [usually Belle does the cooking blogging around here, but I'll make an exception]:

20. Finding and Communicating Information. Use the media center or Internet resources to study hypotheses for the origin of life that are alternatives to the hypotheses proposed by Oparin and Lerman. Analyze, review, and critique either Oparin’s or Lerman’s hypothesis as presented in your textbook along with one alternative hypothesis that you discover in your research."

Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks; be bright and jovial among your guests to-night.

Here's how and why Michael Rea should have won his exchange with Daniel Dennett (instead of committing the technical foul of quoting him somewhat out of context.)

The crux of the problem with Dennett's position, as Rea correctly notes, is that he comes out and demands “to be treated with the same respect accorded to Baptists and Hindus and Catholics, no more and no less.” Yet Dennett himself is highly disrespectful of religion.

Why Pick on Darwin?

Via Brian Weatherson, this interesting exchange between Michael Rea and Daniel Dennett, over the latter's NY Times "Brights" op-ed.

It occurs to me that I don't know the answer to a rather simple question. Why do Creationist 'literalists' about Biblical interpretation single out Darwinism for attack? Surely physics - cosmology, in particular - is just as hard to square with "Genesis". Either this creation story is allegorical, to some degree, or physicists labor under significant delusions about how stuff got here. I mean: "Genesis" isn't a scientific textbook, not literally. But once you are willing to admit any degree of allegory, surely it wouldn't be that hard to accommodate Darwin. Why aren't fundamentalists forever fulminating against godless astrophysicists?