Bill O'Reilly the self-described coward

David Brock of MediaMatters.org just posted a scathing attack on Bill O’Reilly (King of the Unfair and Unbalanced). After listing the numerous occasions on which O’Reilly had attacked both Brock and MediaMatters, Brock calls him out:
As you can see, Mr. O’Reilly, you have repeatedly and personally attacked me, Media Matters for America, and my fine staff, calling us “vile,” “despicable,” and “weasels,” and comparing us to the Ku Klux Klan, Castro, Mao, and the Nazis. And you have refused my repeated requests to appear on your broadcast.
You once offered your viewers your definition of the word “coward.” On the January 5, 2004, O’Reilly Factor, you declared: “If you attack someone publicly, as these men did to me, you have an obligation to face the person you are smearing. If you don’t, you are a coward.”
Well, Mr. O’Reilly, you have attacked me publicly on numerous occasions, and you refuse to face me. You, sir, are a coward — by your own definition of the term.
Frankly, I don’t know why anyone would want to share the same studio with that bombastic bigot, but if O’Reilly continues to refuse Brock’s request we’ll know him for what he is. No surprise, of course.
(Via Sully)

Why anything instead of nothing? We load the dice….

In his latest contribution to this discussion, Masood asks why I feel that the question “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” is incoherent. It’s because I find it breaks down under either of the common senses of “why” – the causal or the teleological. In each case, the question self-destructs in two ways. Causality presumes a cause – something that made the “anything” happen. Teleology presumes an agent: one cannot have agent-less purpose. In each case, we presume “something”. Now, either we are faced with an “infinite regress” – “why does the cause/agent exist rather than nothing?” – or [my favourite] by invoking some antecedent “thing”, the “nothing” alternative is rendered moot! (Simultaneous annihilation of the antecedent and creation of the consequent feels like a stretch!)

The traditional way to make headway with the question is to constrain the universals (“anything” and “nothing”) to some category, assigning the causal or teleological agents to a different category. (This is the supernatural or religious turn.) Thus, “Why is there a universe rather than nothing? God made the universe, but God is not of the universe: She transcends it”. But this simply pushes the question back – why is there an agent/cause rather than nothing? At this point, most people adopt the device of decreeing that the two categories are causally or teleologically different; that it’s OK for a Prime Mover to be self-caused and eternal but not for everyday stuff. Of course this proposition is arbitrary and entirely unverifiable.

Those who believe that the orginal question must have an answer are pretty much forced into this dualism, of course. For myself, I have no need of that hypothesis; the question is not meaningful to me. I imagine that a psychologist would say that we actually start with the Weltanschauung of our choice/heritage (theist/dualist or atheist/materialist); we then interpret the meaningfulness of the question based upon our stance. Thus a theist believes that there is a Prime Cause, and therefore the anything or nothing question must be coherent. Etcetera.

Register 1, Merrill Lynch 0 – game over (on Sun & RH)

My colleague Jim Grisanzio noted Ashlee Vance’s piece in the Register about the Merrill Lynch analyst who thinks Sun should buy Red Hat or Novell. Surprisingly, Jim only cited the Merrill Lynch argument; he failed to mention Ashlee Vance’s devastating rebuttal. Key quotes (with my emphasis):

Merrill Lynch ignores how messy Sun’s purchase of a Linux vendor could be. We doubt that open source zealots would warm to the idea of Sun controlling the dominate [sic] version of Linux as quickly as the analyst firm suggests. We doubt that IBM, HP or Dell would let such an acquisition happen in the first place.
Merrill Lynch’s myopic focus on what Red Hat might mean to Sun is also totally absurd. The entire IT community would be shaken by such a buy. Sun would pay a premium for something it doesn’t really need. It can ship Linux on servers just as easily as Dell can.
Backing Linux in a major, major way would make Sun look like every other vendor, and this is not a role Sun is well suited to handle. At times, it seems that Sun exists for no other reason that to be different from the herd and offer customers a choice.

This last point is important. As I’ve mentioned before, people expect Sun to be the industry’s creative, iconoclastic contrarian. A “me too” Sun would confuse (and disappoint) them. We at Sun need to meet this expectation in our conversations with them – this is simply cluetrain 101 stuff. And this fits with Ashlee’s bottom line:

Sun has got to out-invent, not out-acquire its rivals to be “hot” again. Customers will pay more attention to a screaming fast, cheap Opteron box that can run either Solaris x86 or Red Hat than they will to Sun buying an expensive open source software unit in Raleigh, North Carolina.

When do politicians take electoral issues seriously?

When their own ballots are affected, naturally! From The Seattle Times: “The King County error came to light Sunday when Larry Phillips, chairman of the Metropolitan King County Council, was looking over a list of voters from his neighborhood whose ballots had been disqualified. Phillips spotted his own name on the list, prompting an investigation by King County elections workers that turned up 561 improperly disqualified ballots.” So Gregoire may still win….

(Via E-Voting News. Their story included a grammatical howler: somebody used the word fluctuant, presumably under the impression that it was an adjectival form of fluctuate. In fact it’s a term from biology, meaning “movable and compressible — used of abnormal body structures (as some abscesses or tumors)”.
UPDATE: The author of the piece assures me that the usage is blessed by the OED, even if it is a little archaic. My apologies: I have no objection to the creative revival of archaic language.)

The Anthony Flew brouhaha

While I was visiting my mother, she mentioned that she’d heard that “Anthony Flew has got religion”. This means that the rumours of Flew’s possible recantation must have spread from the phil. of religion blogosphere to BBC Radio 4, so I thought I’d check out the state of play.

In October, Richard Carrier documented the history of Flew’s supposed conversions in a piece in SecWeb, and reported that Flew was questioning whether an “impersonal spirit” of some kind might be the best explanation for “why a universe exists that can produce complex life”. Carrier’s recently updated the piece with some quotes from Flew himself, explaining this Deist-like position:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species … [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

Is this simply an argument from incredulity? In his 1993 Atheistic Humanism, Flew points out that “Absent excellent evidencing reasons […] it becomes preposterous to postulate a” CEB [Cosmos-Explaining Being]; in the same chapter he also argues against the uncritical use of various forms of the anthropic principle. Recently Flew has admitted to being impressed by Gerald Schroeder’s The Hidden Face Of God, but Schroeder’s (widely criticised) arguments seem to fall short of the “excellent evidencing reasons” that Flew demanded 12 years ago. (See Perakh and Carrier.)

Various religious types have been running around claiming Flew’s supposed “conversion” as evidence for the supernatural. J. P. Moreland made this argument on PAX TV, and Carrier quotes Flew as emphatically rejecting it: “my God is not his. His is Swinburne’s. Mine is emphatically not good (or evil) or interested in human conduct”.

However Flew seems to have gone beyond the position that he described to Carrier, although it should be noted that the source is a story in Fox News. Last May Flew took part in a debate organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese’s Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas; a video of the debate has been released under the title Has Science Discovered God?. Typically, the press release from Varghese’s “Institute” is triumphal in tone, and does nothing to distinguish Flew’s “impersonal spirit” from popular religious notions of god. And to increase the confusion (according to Fox),

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American “intelligent design” theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

All of this is frustratingly incomplete, of course, and I hope the arguments will be fleshed out in the new edition of Flew’s God and Philosophy, coming next year. Presumably if Flew is postulating an intelligent designer, he has an answer for the question of “who designed the designer”, as well as all of the other arguments that he himself has articulated over the years in books such as the account of his debate with Terry Miethe. Nonetheless it’s hard to know how to reconcile alignment with “intelligent design” with his assertion that he “has in mind something like the God of Aristotle, a distant, impersonal ‘prime mover.’ It might not even be conscious, but a mere force.” Perhaps we expect too much: as Carrier wrote:

Flew’s tentative, mechanistic Deism is not based on any logical proofs, but solely on physical, scientific evidence, or the lack thereof, and is therefore subject to change with more information — and he confesses he has not been able to keep up with the relevant literature in science and theology, which means we should no longer treat him as an expert on this subject.

Of course such a disclaimer is unlikely to prevent people like Moreland and Varghese from using Flew as a poster child for their causes.

POSTSCRIPT, 12-Aug-05: To my amazement, this entry continues to attact comments 8 months after I wrote it. The sad thing is that so many of the comments raise points that I addressed in later postings. So please: if you stumble over this entry, and feel compelled to comment, please read the other entries on Flew before you do so. See here, here, and here. And thanks.

CD of the week: "The Best of Groove Armada"

groovearmada.jpgA couple of days ago I was checking out late night TV shows in England when I came across a video of a concert with a really exciting and energetic band. I didn’t know who it was, but the singers (a soulful woman and a stunning rapper) had the crowd in their hands, and one of the keyboard players would occasionally step out front to play trombone. I watched, mesmerized. At the end of the program, I saw that the name of the group was Groove Armada. For some reason I’d never heard of them before, even though they’ve been around for at least six years. (The official web site is a little spartan; try the BBC profile instead – at least unless and until the Beeb’s web goes away.)
Anyway I picked up a copy of their “Best of” CD at Heathrow this afternoon, ripped it into iTunes and transferred it to my iPod so I could listen to it on the flight home. Very tasty. Recommended.

Back home from England

I just arrived back in Brookline, MA after flying from LHR to BOS. The flight was late, due mainly to fierce headwinds: we took an extremely northerly route, up to the southerly tip of Greenland (around 60N 45W) and then over to make landfall over central Labrador before heading SSW towards Boston.
On Saturday I drove my mother to visit some friends in south-east London; a gruelling drive through patchy freezing fog down the M40, round the M25, and up the A21. It didn’t help that the rental car – a Fiat Uno – really sucked: the pedals were too far to the left and too close together. Not only did this mean that I occasionally caught the accelerator when I was braking; there was nowhere for me to rest my left foot, so I had to hover over the clutch or put my foot flat on the floor. (And the car had no torque, and the gear ratios were rubbish, necessitating more shifting than usual.) By the end of of the drive (2 hours each way), my left ankle was showing signs of unaccustomed fatigue.
We got back to Oxford about 7, and I was feeling desperately tired. However my brother and his wife were there, and we decided to try out a new Chinese restaurant for dinner, to see if it would revive me. That did the trick – even though sake doesn’t really go with Chinese food! (Better with Cantonese than with other styles, I suspect.)
And to round off the evening, I stayed up to watch Match Of The Day and saw a thrilling game between Southampton and Middlesbrough. Southampton was 2-0 up as the match drew to a close, and it looked as if the hapless Saints (next to the bottom of the Premier league) were finally going to win against a strong opponent (currently 5th). Then in the 89th minute an inadvertant deflection from a corner (recorded as an own goal) made it 2-1, and seconds before the final whistle Downing thumped in a beautiful shot for Middlesbrough to snatch a draw.

New Iain M. Banks: "The Algebraist"

From my list of “authors whose works I’ll buy sight unseen”, there’s a new book by Iain M. Banks: The Algebraist. This is a sprawling space opera, possibly stand-alone, possibly starting a new series – it’s not a Culture book. It’s set in a world galaxy in which all A.I. has been banned.

[Hardback edition just published in the UK; per Amazon.com, they don’t seem to have scheduled a US release date.]