[ Replace this ad for $1/month ]

12 Responses to “Hello (lo, lo, lo, lo….)?”

1. Dad Says:
   October 18th, 2008 at 11h24

   If a blogger blogs in cyberspace and no one responds does he/she still exist?

   Can he/she still pick their nose?

   Are they really typing?

   And, to your trick question, the DeMorgan Laws to not address the Epimenides Paradox.  Any thrid grader knows THAT!

2. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   October 18th, 2008 at 11h50

   Can he/she still pick their nose?

   That’s nice and grammatically ecumenical!  You’ve gotten both “he/she” as a universal singular pronoun and the grammatically sloppier (but more efficient) “their” as a singular neuter pronoun.

   We really must fix this sexist grammar in English, native speakers.  But not right now.

   (cf. Douglas Hofstadter’s William Satire essay.)

   And, to your trick question, the DeMorgan Laws to not address the Epimenides Paradox.  Any thrid grader knows THAT!

   Hint: Start by assuming the truth of the Epimenides Paradox ((NOT(P)) AND (NOT(NOT(P)))) and work through the reductio.

   But then again, I’ve slept a total of less than five hours since the third grade, so I could simply be insane.  In that  case I could avoid the proof and just call you a cretin.  Or should it be “Cretan”?  Hmm.  “Chretien” is  probably safest, judging by your vestments.

   Thanks for commenting.

3. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   October 18th, 2008 at 11h52

   (If you didn’t follow that last bit, dear reader, please take my word that it is best described as “Fucking Funny”.)

4. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   October 18th, 2008 at 14h02

   Less convoluted:

   The Epimenides “Paradox” is the alleged paradox resulting when Epimenides, a man from Crete, said “All Cretans are liars”.  More formally, the claim is that “All Cretans always lie.”

   This cannot be true.  If it were true, then Epimenides would be lying when he said that.  But we just posited that the statement was true.  If Epimenides always lies, then he can never tell the truth, but he has to be telling the truth for the statement to be true.  Paradox.

   So it cannot be true.  Can it be false?

   Sure.  The negation of “All Cretans always lie” is not “All Cretans always tell the truth”.  The negation is “There exists at least one Cretan who at least once in his life will tell the truth.”

   Lat’s call that person the Exceptional Cretan.  If the Exceptional Cretan always tells the truth, and every other Cretan also always tells the truth, we are back at paradox.  So that cannot be the case.

   So first, let’s ask how many Cretans exist.  We know that at least one — Epimenides himself — exists.  So let’s say that Epimenides is the only Cretan.  Then Epimenides is guaranteed to be the Exceptional Cretan, and to avoid paradox, we must conclude that Epimenides sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth, and, in this particular case, is lying.

   It gets more interesting if there is more than one Cretan, though.  Then Epimenides does not have to be the Exceptional Cretan.  In fact, all we know about him is (again) that he does not always tell the truth, because if he always told the truth, then his initial statement — that all Cretans are always liars — would be true.  But that can’t be true.  If it were true, then Epimenides would have to be lying.  We’re back at a contradiction, which is paradox.

   So all we know for sure is that Epimenides is lying in this particular instance.  It may be the case that he always lies.  It may be the case that he sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth, and happens to be lying in this instance.  Either scenario is possible, and does not lead to paradox.

   Therefore, “All Cretans always lie” is not guaranteed to be a paradox.  Q.E.D.

5. Karina Says:
   October 18th, 2008 at 14h58

   Hello back. Sorry about not commenting, I discovered the awesomeness that is Google Reader. And it seems I’m too lazy to click on the link to comment. But I still read ya.

6. Dad Says:
   October 19th, 2008 at 07h44

   I did notice the grammatical inconsistency of “he/she” picking “their” nose…I thought it was funny and I was too lazy to fix it.

   Take that for what it’s worth because everything I tell you is a lie; and that’s the truth!

7. Bob Mike Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 11h07

   Fine, fine, I’ll bite…

   Hey, being an atheist in America is a lot harder than not being heterosexual!

   This is totally true, which is why in the upcoming election, I’ll be voting against the largely popular proposition that would once again deny atheists their newly-won right to marry. According to the FBI’s numbers, there were 7 incidents of hate crimes against atheists in the year 2006 in America. For non-heterosexuals, there were 1169. Still, you can probably account for the fact that that’s 167 times as many reported hate crimes against non-heterosexuals by taking into consideration that gay people aren’t the bastions of stoicism that atheists have been in recent years.

   You folks actually have people in Congress!

   Pete Stark is only a “person”, not a “people”, but he is an openly atheist member of Congress. If we’re going to be honest about it, I suspect that there are more atheists than homosexuals in Congress at the moment, but I’ll never know for certain. I would like to encourage more atheist members of Congress to come out of the Gawd-closet, though.

   And what is up with the whole ‘We’ll adopt a pejorative adjective and apply it to ourselves, but you aren’t allowed to use it?’

   We do it to piss you off, whitey.

   Does it have anything to do with talking in movie theaters?

   Since I’ve actually caught you snoring in a movie theater, I’m going to chalk this up to the pot calling the kettle a reclaimed pejorative adjective.

   And Tolkien is overrated!

   Wildly, yes.

   And there is absolutely no reason why large terrestrial vertebrates could not evolve wheels!

   Once the singularity occurs, we’ll recognize that large terrestrial lifeforms evolved wheels years ago.

8. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 13h16

   Thank you, Mike.  You have helped establish trolling as a very inexpensive way to generate quite a bit of well-considered content for a site.  :^)

   Still, you can probably account for the fact that that’s 167 times as many reported hate crimes against non-heterosexuals by taking into consideration that gay people aren’t the bastions of stoicism that atheists have been in recent years

   To be fair — and I did the same thing — I think one needs to expand the statistics to include all attacks by one flavor of religionist against another flavor of religionist.  Those numbers are not artificially deflated, as the numbers of atheists are, among intellectuals, politicians, and people residing in theocracies such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States.  I will eagerly allow you to include the cases in which bisexual people kill transsexuals.

   I’ll be voting against the largely popular proposition that would once again deny atheists their newly-won right to marry.

   I’ll email you something, hold on.  It is actually a thought-experiment letter I wrote considering the (yet) fictional Proposition to deny marriage rights to heterosexual atheists.  It’s a slight stretch, but not a long one.  Religionists don’t like marrying atheists in churches any more than than they like marrying Christian GLBT people in churches.  Atheists are fortunate in this election cycle, but not forever fortunate.

   Also — of course — I have been deeply involved in the support and funding of the No on 8 campaign, as any person of conscience in California should be.

   Since I’ve actually caught you snoring in a movie theater, I’m going to chalk this up to the pot calling the kettle a reclaimed pejorative adjective.

   Yes, but to be fair, that movie essentially consisted of Val Kilmer sitting in a hunting blind for an hour and a half, waiting for a lion to walk into his sights.  I certainly stayed awake during Sabrina and Chain Reaction.

   In other news, why the hell didn’t we ever see good movies in the theater?

   Thanks for playing along.

9. Bob Mike Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 14h20

   I think one needs to expand the statistics to include all attacks by one flavor of religionist against another flavor of religionist.

   This is an argument for why atheists have it worse than non-heterosexuals in America? I look forward to following this logic to its ultimate conclusion, explaining how white people are the real victims of black-on-latino violence.

   It is actually a thought-experiment letter I wrote considering the (yet) fictional Proposition to deny marriage rights to heterosexual atheists.

   It could potentially happen, but it seems unlikely. The number of open atheists in this country is larger than it has been at any point in the nation’s history, and growing. If there hasn’t been a law denying said rights to atheists before now, it probably won’t happen for the foreseeable future.

   Also, the law would be nearly impossible to effectively enforce. A heterosexual atheist couple can easily “pass” in a fashion that same-sex couples can’t. It’d be like trying to enforce a drinking age law in a state that doesn’t have an efficient way of determining age, or trying to ban a drug that is in all observable ways identical to water. The most effective discriminatory laws in are the ones against people who are visibly different and easily identifiable.

   Not that I’d particularly mind seeing the government get out of the marriage racket.

   In other news, why the hell didn’t we ever see good movies in the theater?

   I thought that Curse of the Were-Rabbit was enjoyable. Having said that, the difference between a somewhat decent movie and a good movie might be a couple of stiff drinks.

10. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 14h45

    This is an argument for why atheists have it worse than non-heterosexuals in America? I look forward to following this logic to its ultimate conclusion, explaining how white people are the real victims of black-on-latino violence.

    If a gay man goes to rural Texas and walks into a bar with his boyfriend, he may be accosted in the restroom by men bearing pool cues, Bowie knives, and sawed-off shutguns.  He may be beaten to death, then stabbed through the heart, then, for good measure, have his head blown off.

    This would justly make the national news.  However, it would be immense folly for a bisexual man to then visit the same bar with his boyfriend.  “They don’t like gay people,” he’d argue.  “If I’m accosted, I’ll simply explain to my would-be attackers that I’m bisexual.”  The likelihood of his surviving such an encounter would not, I believe, be startlingly high.

    So, blah blah blah, Jewish journalist is kidnapped by religious extremists in Iran, and ritually murdered.  Would it be more clever for the news agency to then send an atheist, or to send a Muslim?

    The number of open atheists in this country is larger than it has been at any point in the nation’s history, and growing.

    Your point is evidently that this is not the case among GLBT people?

    Also, the law would be nearly impossible to effectively enforce. A heterosexual atheist couple can easily “pass” in a fashion that same-sex couples can’t.

    Yes, that is true for most GLBT couples.  But is not history replete with light-skinned black people who received a modicum of success in bigoted areas, until the details of their heritage comes to light?

    Were I to try to apply for a teaching position in a new town, I might be able to pass at a Catholic school: if, that is, I were willing to lead the class in prayer.  Were I actually to have a conscience, it would become immediately apparent that I am not Catholic.  Would I be any less fired?  Would the firing be any more or less just?

    Not that I’d particularly mind seeing the government get out of the marriage racket.

    Yeah, I thought my argument in that email was rather good, myself.  :^)

    I thought that Curse of the Were-Rabbit was enjoyable.

    Shit, did we see that together?  At Arclight?  In the dome?  Just the two of us?  My memory is, for some reason I’ve forgotten, somewhat spotty as regards that period.

    Having said that, the difference between a somewhat decent movie and a good movie might be a couple of stiff drinks.

    A couple stiff drinks could also be offered as the difference between a redneck beating a GLBT man to death in a restroom, and not.  It may be a sufficient explanation, but it is not necessarily a very good one.  :^)

11. Bob Mike Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 16h09

    Let’s go back to the source, here. The statement being an atheist in America is a lot harder than not being heterosexual tells us that our subject matter pertains to events in America and to non-heterosexuals (as a group). Yes, it would be ill-advised for an openly bisexual individual to go to the aforementioned bar, but the group whose problems we’ve been discussing includes bisexuals, because bisexuals are by definition non-heterosexual. Non-heterosexuals in America face many of the same problems, regardless of whether they’re gay, lesbian or bisexual.

    On the other hand, when someone firebombs the local synagogue, most atheists probably don’t worry much about being attacked. If attacks against Muslims in the US rise, it’s not really cause for atheists to start only venturing out in groups and getting home before dusk. In America, which is the area that your statement stipulated, hate crimes between religious groups doesn’t seem to have much cross-pollination with hate crimes against atheists.

    Your point is evidently that this is not the case among GLBT people?

    My point is that bans against gay marriage have been in place in this country for most of its existence, and they don’t need the same expenditure of energy that would be required to ban atheist marriage. In point of fact, gay marriage is right this very moment illegal in most states in this country. It has inertia, and we’re fighting against the flow of American history, where just the opposite would be true in attempting to ban atheist marriage. Americans, generally speaking, like things to be the way that they’ve always been. They oppose gay marriage because “marriage has always been between a man and a woman”, but they’ve lived their entire lives in a world where atheists get married, and they’re not all that scared of it.

    Were I to try to apply for a teaching position in a new town, I might be able to pass at a Catholic school: if, that is, I were willing to lead the class in prayer.  Were I actually to have a conscience, it would become immediately apparent that I am not Catholic.  Would I be any less fired?  Would the firing be any more or less just?

    You would be fired, and it would be just, if you knowingly took a job for which you were unwilling to perform the duties that were a part of the job. Let’s look at it this way:

    Were I to try to apply for a medical position in a new town, I might be able to pass at Planned Parenthood: if, that is, I were willing to provide birth control and information about abortion. Were I actually to have a conscience, it would become immediately apparent that I do not support these options. Would I be any less fired? Would the firing be any more or less just?

    People should not apply for jobs (particularly at private institutions) that they are unwilling to perform. Yes, your atheism would prevent you from being a priest, and might prevent you from being teacher at a private religious school (although my mother is clearly not Jewish, she taught at an Orthodox Hebrew private school for several years; mostly, they just wanted someone who could teach English). Similarly, someone who thinks that stripping is degrading to women probably wouldn’t last too long standing by her convictions working at a strip club, and a PETA member standing by his convictions will probably be fired within a week of getting a job clubbing seals.

12. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 16h40

    You have helped establish trolling as a very inexpensive way to generate quite a bit of well-considered content for a site.

    Let me really reiterate this.  :^)  The entire point of the second paragraph was to be humorously provocative.  I’m not back-pedaling: I like playing devil’s advocate, but consider:

    And there is absolutely no reason why large terrestrial vertebrates could not evolve wheels!  And isn’t that a really good reason not to believe in Intelligent Design?”

    No, not really.  It doesn’t immediately occur to me why they couldn’t evolve firebreathing, for instance, if they had a stomach that catalyzed sugars into alcohols (which might have evolved, initially, as an efficient way of storing large amounts of energy in a rapidly-oxidizable fashion) and, like fowls, swallowed specific stones.  And just because it doesn’t occur to me does not mean that there’s no reason that wheels couldn’t evolve — that would be as daft as saying that Intelligent Design must be true because the person making the claim can’t think of the (profoundly easy) way in which eyes could have evolved.

    Anyway, I personally believe that only ballpoint-pen style spherical wheels would be likely to evolve, and not wheels with axles, and I was holding this as a rejoinder in case anyone wanted to challenge me on it, in typical troll fashion.

    And if you think the Epimenides Paradox is paradoxical, you need to review your DeMorgan Laws!

    The Epimenides paradox is not paradoxical, which my father noted, surprising the hell out of me that the argument came from him — but then he didn’t respond to my first response, making me worried that my weak argument would actually be accepted.  De Morgan laws are insufficient for proving this because the Law of Excluded Middle is insufficient argument in a domain in which paradoxes are possible, and using it without addressing the possibility of paradox begs the question.

    And Tolkien is overrated!

    What would this even mean?  That I don’t like Tolkien?  Personally I think his prose exceptionally poor, but even if that’s true, his project to create a unified mythological background for a culture that would have professed itself (as per Howard’s End) to possess only “witches and fairies”, or, from a more reflective perspective, witches, fairies, and plagiarized tales of Arthur, is certainly admirable, as is his work on language generation and his works’ startling consistency in seemingly trivial details such as phases of the moon.

    In any case, writing that something is “overrated”, as a blanket statement, is by definition trolling.

    And I’m not even going to get into what I hope everyone perceived as silly stereotypic pronouncements about black people talking in movie theaters.

    I thought we were both playing along, and while I believe I think that being an atheist in America is harder than you think it is, saying “I’m a more marginalized minority” is inevitable to degenerate into a bad enactment of the three women in Richard III, arguing who has it worse: one thinks, “Can’t we just execute the three of them and get it over with?”

    If I wanted to be provocative about something I really was intending to support, I’d do something like cite Dawkins’ argument that instilling Abrahamic religion in children is like “littering the street with loaded weapons: you cannot be surprised when they are used.”  But if I put that into the list, it would change the whole tone of the post.

    But that being said, there are a few points I honestly wish to challenge:

    the group whose problems we’ve been discussing includes bisexuals, because bisexuals are by definition non-heterosexual

    Which was my point.  My point was that I initially framed (and you continued to frame) the issue as anti-non-heterosexual hate vs. anti-atheist hate, which limits the latter unnecessarily.  I believe that those are not at parity in terms of exclusion/inclusion.

    On the other hand, when someone firebombs the local synagogue, most atheists probably don’t worry much about being attacked.

    This is more likely to be a serious fire because your synagogue is stuffed with straw men.  There are certainly people who attack transsexuals — because of embarrassment that they initially hit on the person, for instance — and would leave gay people alone.

    I’m not saying that these numbers are equal — I don’t have the figures, so I’d be trolling again — but the issue’s not as clear-cut as the italicized text.

    It has inertia, and we’re fighting against the flow of American history, where just the opposite would be true in attempting to ban atheist marriage.

    In the twentieth century, America went from a republic formed by atheist, agnostic, and ceremonially-deistic enlightenment intellectuals, to a virtual theocracy generated by the alleged complete godlessness of the USSR.  The words “under God” were added during the Cold War, which did not stop the Bush I administration — the administration of a man who was an adult when those words were added, and was supposed to be an effective ambassador to China — from saying that atheists could not be considered patriots, and maybe not even Americans, because this is “one nation under God”.  So, smallest violin.  Inertia matters very little in a world of McCarthyism, as Rob Sherman could attest.

    People should not apply for jobs (particularly at private institutions) that they are unwilling to perform.

    Great.  But then, those institutions who have hateful hiring practices should therefore be considered private businesses or social clubs, and should, profoundly, not have tax-exempt status.  Rockwell wouldn’t have hired me regardless of how good of a basket-weaver I am.  Which is fine — they can have hiring standards — but they can’t really claim to be a charitable organization.

    To restate, I am arguing that things are not as clear-cut as they may seem, not that all percentages are equal — which they never are.

Leave a Reply, but read first

1. Feel free to leave replies even to very old posts.
2. Is your comment not specifically about this post?  Great!  Go here.
3. Flame, swear, rant, shout — just don't spam!  You won't increase your PageRank, even temporarily (the URLs are tagged 'nofollow'), and I'll delete it anyway.  Save us both time.

Name (required)

Email (not shared or displayed in any fashion) (required)

Personal website (Commercial websites here).

Spam protection: What is 6 + 8 ? (required)

Authenticate this comment using OpenID.

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail