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Weiye Loh

Angry Doctor: Standing up for the 'godless' - 0 views

angrydr.blogspot.com/...standing-up-for-godless.html

God Religion Atheism Morality Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • THE Saturday Special report last week ('God wants youth') stated that religious groups were determined not to lose a generation to godlessness, especially now with youth gangs in the news.It also noted that what is at stake is the potential of losing the youth to cynicism, violence and even fanaticism.These remarks suggest a prejudice against those without any religious affiliation.
  • As a society for non-believers, the Humanist Society (Singapore) disagrees.The reality in societies everywhere is that there is no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity towards violence. There are actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as 'religious' or 'faithful'.As for cynicism, there is certainly no correlation between non-belief and a cynical attitude. Many non-believers are involved in the world around them, trying to make it a more humane, compassionate place.
  • "The reality in societies everywhere is that there is no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity towards violence. There are actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as 'religious' or 'faithful'."were contradictory
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the original letter submitted by Mr Tobin read (emphasis):"The reality in societies around the world is that there is either no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity toward violence or there is actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as "religious" or "faithful." [See, for instance, the studies cited in Michael Shermer’s book “The Science of Good and Evil” 2004 pp. 235-236]"
Weiye Loh

A Culture of Poverty - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Personal - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...64854

Culture Poverty Violence

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • When we talk "culture," as it relates to African-Americans, we assume a kind of exclusivity and suspension of logic. Stats are whipped out (70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock) and then claims are tossed around cavalierly, (black culture doesn't value marriage.) The problem isn't that "culture" doesn't exist, nor is it that elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility.
  • It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. Of course, most white people only pay attention when Bill Cosby or Barack Obama are making that criticism. The problem is that rarely do such critiques ask  why anyone would embrace such values. Moreover, they tend to assume that there's something uniquely "black" about those values, and their the embrace.
  • If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • once I was acculturated to the notion that often the quickest way to forestall more fighting, is to fight, I was a believer. And maybe it's wrong to say this, but it made my the rest of my time in Baltimore a lot easier, because the willingness to fight isn't just about yourself, it's a signal to your peer group. 
  • To the young people in my neighborhood, friendship was defined by having each other's back. And in that way, the personal shields, the personal willingness to meet violence with violence, combined and became a collective, neighborhood shield--a neighborhood rep.
  • I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment.
  • I suspect that a large part of the problem, when we talk about culture, is an inability to code-switch, to understand that the language of Rohan is not the language of Mordor
  • how difficult it is to get people to discard practices which were essential to them in one world, but hinder their advancement into another. And then there's the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world, that you may not master. 
  • The streets are like any other world--we all assume an armor, a garment to suit that world. And indeed, in every world, some people wear the armor better than others, and thus reap considerable social reward.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10
     
    A Culture of Poverty
Weiye Loh

Climate of Hate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10krugman.html

Rhetorics Politics Media Effects

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?
  • The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.
  • Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.
  • Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.
  • As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.
  • It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.
  • there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.
  • And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.
  • Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.
  • And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.
  • Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand.
  • But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.
  • Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”
Weiye Loh

Freedom's our defence - 0 views

www.indianexpress.com/...0

Freedom of Speech

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Few things are more crooked in India than the discourse on free speech and its relation to violence. Rather than focusing on the basic framework governing speech, the debate quickly descends into the politics of double standards.
  • The first is, could Husain have gotten away with taking artistic liberties with Islam the way he did with Hindu icons? On this view free speech cases are not about free speech. They are the tests of two things. Does the state favour one community over the other in the way it interprets what is offensive and what is permissible?
  • Second, what exactly are the protocols that govern offensive art? Are these standards applied uniformly across different domains? And third, whether Husain’s acceptance of Qatari citizenship is exactly a ringing endorsement of the values of a liberal democracy? These political questions will continue to cloud the fundamental issue: can India as a society handle freedom of expression in a way that befits a liberal democracy?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the state’s reaction is typical: legitimise the violence by classifying the purported article as the culprit rather than those who took offence at it and engaged in violence. While our laws on speech undertaken with the malicious intent to give offence, or those governing attempts to produce enmity, are well intentioned, they have made the climate for free speech more, rather than less, precarious.
  • the simple fact that the state signals that it will easily punish those who engage in offensive speech creates incentives for offence mongering. Instead of sending a signal that a very high bar has to be crossed before speech is proscribed, the state essentially tells the people: if you can incite violence, or show that you are deeply offended, you will have your way.
  • A lot of representations of religion are needlessly gratuitous. But if we legitimise the taking of offence there will be more provocations, not less. The law should send a clear message that we live in a world where people cannot be protected from assorted things like Danish cartoons, Husain paintings, burqa lampoons or speculative novels on godly love. And religious believers commit the ultimate blasphemy by thinking that they need to protect their gods rather than their gods protecting them
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Mar 10
     
    Freedom's our defence
Weiye Loh

If suspect Jared Lee Loughner has schizophrenia, would that make him more likely to go ... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

Mental Illness Health Crime media bias

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Shortly after Jared Lee Loughner had been identified as the alleged shooter of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, online sleuths turned up pages of rambling text and videos he had created. A wave of amateur diagnoses soon followed, most of which concluded that Loughner was not so much a political extremist as a man suffering from "paranoid schizophrenia."
  • For many, the investigation will stop there. No need to explore personal motives, out-of-control grievances or distorted political anger. The mere mention of mental illness is explanation enough. This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don't expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.
  • Seena Fazel is an Oxford University psychiatrist who has led the most extensive scientific studies to date of the links between violence and two of the most serious psychiatric diagnoses—schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, either of which can lead to delusions, hallucinations, or some other loss of contact with reality. Rather than looking at individual cases, or even single studies, Fazel's team analyzed all the scientific findings they could find. As a result, they can say with confidence that psychiatric diagnoses tell us next to nothing about someone's propensity or motive for violence.
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  • The fact that mental illness is so often used to explain violent acts despite the evidence to the contrary almost certainly flows from how such cases are handled in the media. Numerous studies show that crimes by people with psychiatric problems are over-reported, usually with gross inaccuracies that give a false impression of risk. With this constant misrepresentation, it's not surprising that the public sees mental illness as an easy explanation for heartbreaking events. We haven't yet learned all the details of the tragic shooting in Arizona, but I suspect mental illness will be falsely accused many times over.
Weiye Loh

journalism.sg » Racial and religious offence: Why censorship doesn't cut it - 1 views

journalism.sg/...sorship-doesn%E2%80%99t-cut-it

Community Regulation New Media Hate Speech Censorship Race Religion

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • All societies use a mix of approaches to address offensive speech. In international law, like at the European court of human rights and more and more jurisdictions, there is growing feeling that the law should really be a last resort and only used for the most extreme speech – speech that incites violence in a very direct way, or that is part of a campaign that violates the rights of minorities to live free of discrimination. In contrast, simply insulting and offending others, even if feelings are very hurt, is not seen as something that should invite a legal response. Using the law to protect feelings is too great an encroachment on freedom of speech.
  • Our laws are written very broadly, such that any sort of offence, even if it does not threaten imminent violence, is seen as deserving of strict regulation. This probably reflects a very strong social consensus that race and religion should be handled delicately. So we tend to rely on strong government. The state protects racial and religious sensibilities from offence, using censorship when there’s a danger of words and actions causing hurt.
  • in almost all cases, state action was instigated by complaints from members of the public. This is quite unlike political censorship, where action is initiated by the government, often with great resistance and opposition from netizens. In a string of cases involving racial and religious offence, however, it’s the netizens who tend to demand action, sometimes acting like a lynch mob.
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  • in many cases, the offensive messages were spread further by those reporting the offence.
  • What is the justification for strong police action against any form of speech? Why do we sometimes feel that it may not be enough to counter bad speech with good speech in free and open debate, and that we must instead use the law to stop the bad speech? Surely, it must be because we think the bad speech is so dangerous that it can cause immediate harm; or because we don’t trust the public to respond rationally, so we don’t know if good speech would indeed triumph in open debate. Usually, if we call in the authorities, it must be because we have a mental picture of offensive speech being like lighting a match in a combustible atmosphere. It is dangerous and there’s no time to debate the merits of that match – we just have to put it out. The irony of most of the cases that we have seen in the past few years is that the people demanding government action, as if the offensive words were explosive, were also those who helped to spread them. It is like helping to spread a fire while calling for the fire brigade.
  • their act of spreading the offensive content must mean that they did not actually believe that the expression was really that dangerous in the sense of prompting violence through reprisal attacks or riots. In reposting the offensive words or pictures, they showed that they actually trusted the public enough to respond sympathetically – they had faith that enough people would add their voices to the outrage that they themselves felt when they saw the offensive images or videos or words.
  • This then raises the question, why the need to involve the police at all? If Singaporeans are grown-up enough to defend their society against offensive speech, why have calls for prosecution and censorship become the automatic response? I wonder if this is an example of the well-known habit of unthinkingly relying on government to solve all our problems even when, with a little bit of effort in the form of grassroots action can do the job.
  • The next time people encounter racist or religiously offensive speech, it would be nice to see swift responses from credible and respected civil society groups, Members of Parliament, and other ordinary citizens. If the speaker doesn’t get the message, organise boycotts, for example, and give him or her the clear message that our society isn’t going to take such offence lying down. The more we can respond ourselves through open debate and grassroots action, without the need to ask law and order to step in, the stronger our society will be.
  • Weiye Loh on 11 Mar 12
     
    No matter how hard we work at developing media literacy, we should not expect to be rid of all racially offensive speech online. There are two broad ways to respond to these breaches. We can reach out horizontally and together with our fellow citizens repair the damage by persuading others to reject harmful ideas. Or, we can reach up vertically to government, getting the authorities to act against irresponsible speech by using the law. The advantage of the latter is that it seems more efficient, punishing those who cross the line of acceptability and violate social norms, and deterring others from doing the same. The horizontal approach works through persuasion rather than the law, so it is slower and not foolproof.
Weiye Loh

Can Flip Cams & Online Video Help Stop Violence in Slums? | The Utopianist - Think Bigger - 0 views

utopianist.com/...eo-help-stop-violence-in-slums

Violence Camera Anonymity

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • people are more prone to despicable behavior if it’s masked by a crowd. So could widespread knowledge that the identity of mob participants might be made known via portable technology help reduce crime?
  • Weiye Loh on 06 Jun 11
     
    The knowledge that the protesters in Egypt were equipped with hand held video cams and cellphone cameras is thought to have prevented brutality in many instances. And certain nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations have deemed distributing cheap video-recorders like Flip-Cams and helping to train citizen journalists in desperate parts of the developing world a priority. Cisco donated 1 million of its Flip-Cams to NGOs around the world to do exactly that. Bill Clinton has even endorsed the idea.
Weiye Loh

Is Assange the "world-spirit embodied"? A Hegel scholar reports fro... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...5%BEi%C5%BEekassange-troxy-gig

wikileaks Philosophy Open Data Open Government

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Although the atmosphere at the Troxy was very genial, and Žižek generally enthusiastic about WikiLeaks (as he was in the London Review of Books article he published about it), there was a distinct tension between the rather standard Enlightenment rhetoric employed by Assange (more facts, a more complete historical record, better educated journalists)  and the significantly more radical conclusions the philosopher was drawing. This is why - whilst it should no doubt be read in a similar light as Žižek’s own remarks on his position during the conversation (I feel now like that Stalinist commentator: the leader has spoken, I provide the deeper meaning) - the ventured analogy nevertheless contains a kernel of truth beyond its bombast: defining the emancipatory significance of phenomena should not be left to the actors alone.
  • in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.
  • the reply was firmly anchored in the key trope Žižek has championed since his first major work in English: that ideology in today's "post-ideological" world is not dead, but rather more powerful than ever - alive not so much on the level of knowledge but in the ways it structures social reality itself.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Žižek points out, the innocence of the accusers is anything but innocent; they decry the violence of WikiLeaks revelations, themselves oblivious to the military, economic, political and social framework of everyday violence that goes unmentioned in public discourse. The violence of leaks is on a formal level, and precisely this is at the root of the Slovene’s exclamation to Assange: “Yes, you are a terrorist, but by God, then what are they?”
  • WikiLeaks should not be seen as merely another chapter in investigative journalism and free flow of information, but a positive, subversive emancipatory force by virtue of the way it operates outside the system of secrets and allowed revelations. What then remains ahead is the hard task of keeping this subversive strength alive.
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11
     
     in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.
Weiye Loh

Hacktivists as Gadflies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...hacktivists-as-gadflies

Hacking hacktivism Law Technology Censorship

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 13
     
    "Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known as "Weev." When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not "hack" anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google Web crawlers do every second of every day - sequentially walk through public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole. For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying its customers of its own security failure. When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in Plato's "Apology." "You consider yourself a hero of sorts," she said, and noted that Weev's "special skills" in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence. I was reminded of a line from an essay written in 1986 by a hacker called the Mentor: "My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." When offered the chance to speak, Weev, like Socrates, did not back down: "I don't come here today to ask for forgiveness. I'm here to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life." He then went on to heap scorn upon the law being used to put him away - the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that prosecutors used to go after the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swart
Weiye Loh

Newspaper Uses Photoshop To Dramatise Violence In Syria | Gizmodo Australia - 0 views

www.gizmodo.com.au/...to-dramatise-violence-in-syria

Photoshop Journalism Representation War

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jul 12
     
    The Kronen Zeitung is Austria's largest newspaper, with a daily readership of around three million people. Yesterday, those readers were treated to the image on the left of war-torn Aleppo, bombed out and desperate - but that wasn't the scene at all. As one sharp-eyed Redditor points out, it was just another Photoshop job.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: On Utilitarianism and Consequentialism - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...nism-and-consequentialism.html

Ethics Philosophy Utilitarianism Consequentialism

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Utilitarianism and consequentialism are different, yet closely related philosophical positions. Utilitarians are usually consequentialists, and the two views mesh in many areas, but each rests on a different claim
  • Utilitarianism's starting point is that we all attempt to seek happiness and avoid pain, and therefore our moral focus ought to center on maximizing happiness (or, human flourishing generally) and minimizing pain for the greatest number of people. This is both about what our goals should be and how to achieve them.
  • Consequentialism asserts that determining the greatest good for the greatest number of people (the utilitarian goal) is a matter of measuring outcome, and so decisions about what is moral should depend on the potential or realized costs and benefits of a moral belief or action.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • first question we can reasonably ask is whether all moral systems are indeed focused on benefiting human happiness and decreasing pain.
  • Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, wrote the following in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility, it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle itself.”
  • Michael Sandel discusses this line of thought in his excellent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and sums up Bentham’s argument as such: “All moral quarrels, properly understood, are [for Bentham] disagreements about how to apply the utilitarian principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, not about the principle itself.”
  • But Bentham’s definition of utilitarianism is perhaps too broad: are fundamentalist Christians or Muslims really utilitarians, just with different ideas about how to facilitate human flourishing?
  • one wonders whether this makes the word so all-encompassing in meaning as to render it useless.
  • Yet, even if pain and happiness are the objects of moral concern, so what? As philosopher Simon Blackburn recently pointed out, “Every moral philosopher knows that moral philosophy is functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing.” But is that the central and sole focus of all moral philosophies? Don’t moral systems vary in their core focuses?
  • Consider the observation that religious belief makes humans happier, on average
  • Secularists would rightly resist the idea that religious belief is moral if it makes people happier. They would reject the very idea because deep down, they value truth – a value that is non-negotiable.Utilitarians would assert that truth is just another utility, for people can only value truth if they take it to be beneficial to human happiness and flourishing.
  • . We might all agree that morality is “functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing,” as Blackburn says, but how do we achieve that? Consequentialism posits that we can get there by weighing the consequences of beliefs and actions as they relate to human happiness and pain. Sam Harris recently wrote: “It is true that many people believe that ‘there are non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality,’ but I think that they are wrong. In my experience, when you scratch the surface on any deontologist, you find a consequentialist just waiting to get out. For instance, I think that Kant's Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism). Ditto for religious morality.”
  • we might wonder about the elasticity of words, in this case consequentialism. Do fundamentalist Christians and Muslims count as consequentialists? Is consequentialism so empty of content that to be a consequentialist one need only think he or she is benefiting humanity in some way?
  • Harris’ argument is that one cannot adhere to a certain conception of morality without believing it is beneficial to society
  • This still seems somewhat obvious to me as a general statement about morality, but is it really the point of consequentialism? Not really. Consequentialism is much more focused than that. Consider the issue of corporal punishment in schools. Harris has stated that we would be forced to admit that corporal punishment is moral if studies showed that “subjecting children to ‘pain, violence, and public humiliation’ leads to ‘healthy emotional development and good behavior’ (i.e., it conduces to their general well-being and to the well-being of society). If it did, well then yes, I would admit that it was moral. In fact, it would appear moral to more or less everyone.” Harris is being rhetorical – he does not believe corporal punishment is moral – but the point stands.
  • An immediate pitfall of this approach is that it does not qualify corporal punishment as the best way to raise emotionally healthy children who behave well.
  • The virtue ethicists inside us would argue that we ought not to foster a society in which people beat and humiliate children, never mind the consequences. There is also a reasonable and powerful argument based on personal freedom. Don’t children have the right to be free from violence in the public classroom? Don’t children have the right not to suffer intentional harm without consent? Isn’t that part of their “moral well-being”?
  • If consequences were really at the heart of all our moral deliberations, we might live in a very different society.
  • what if economies based on slavery lead to an increase in general happiness and flourishing for their respective societies? Would we admit slavery was moral? I hope not, because we value certain ideas about human rights and freedom. Or, what if the death penalty truly deterred crime? And what if we knew everyone we killed was guilty as charged, meaning no need for The Innocence Project? I would still object, on the grounds that it is morally wrong for us to kill people, even if they have committed the crime of which they are accused. Certain things hold, no matter the consequences.
  • We all do care about increasing human happiness and flourishing, and decreasing pain and suffering, and we all do care about the consequences of our beliefs and actions. But we focus on those criteria to differing degrees, and we have differing conceptions of how to achieve the respective goals – making us perhaps utilitarians and consequentialists in part, but not in whole.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 10
     
    Is everyone a utilitarian and/or consequentialist, whether or not they know it? That is what some people - from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to Sam Harris - would have you believe. But there are good reasons to be skeptical of such claims.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: Don't blame free speech for the murders in Afghanistan - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...ree-speech-for-murders-in.html

Islam Religion Murder Freedom of Speech

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The most disturbing example of this response came from the head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, who said, “I don't think we should be blaming any Afghan. We should be blaming the person who produced the news — the one who burned the Koran. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of offending culture, religion, traditions.” I was not going to comment on this monumentally inane line of thought, especially since Susan Jacoby, Michael Tomasky, and Mike Labossiere have already done such a marvelous job of it. But then I discovered, to my shock, that several of my liberal, progressive American friends actually agreed that Jones has some sort of legal and moral responsibility for what happened in Afghanistan
  • I believe he has neither. Here is why. Unlike many countries in the Middle East and Europe that punish blasphemy by fine, jail or death, the U.S., via the First Amendment and a history of court decisions, strongly protects freedom of speech and expression as basic and fundamental human rights. These include critiquing and offending other citizens’ culture, religion, and traditions. Such rights are not supposed to be swayed by peoples' subjective feelings, which form an incoherent and arbitrary basis for lawmaking. In a free society, if and when a person is offended by an argument or act, he or she has every right to argue and act back. If a person commits murder, the answer is not to limit the right; the answer is to condemn and punish the murderer for overreacting.
  • Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Governments have an interest in condemning certain speech that provokes immediate hatred of or violence against people. The canonical example is yelling “fire!” in a packed room when there in fact is no fire, since this creates a clear and imminent danger for those inside the room. But Jones did not create such an environment, nor did he intend to. Jones (more precisely, Wayne Sapp) merely burned a book in a private ceremony in protest of its contents. Indeed, the connection between Jones and the murders requires many links in-between. The mob didn’t kill those accountable, or even Americans.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But even if there is no law prohibiting Jones’ action, isn’t he morally to blame for creating the environment that led to the murders? Didn’t he know Muslims would riot, and people might die? It seems ridiculous to assume that Jones could know such a thing, even if parts of the Muslim world have a poor track record in this area. But imagine for a moment that Jones did know Muslims would riot, and people would die. This does not make the act of burning a book and the act of murder morally equivalent, nor does it make the book burner responsible for reactions to his act. In and of itself, burning a book is a morally neutral act. Why would this change because some misguided individuals think book burning is worth the death penalty? And why is it that so many have automatically assumed the reaction to be respectable? To use an example nearer to some of us, recall when PZ Myers desecrated a communion wafer. If some Christian was offended, and went on to murder the closest atheist, would we really blame Myers? Is Myers' offense any different than Jones’?
  • the deep-seated belief among many that blasphemy is wrong. This means any reaction to blasphemy is less wrong, and perhaps even excused, compared to the blasphemous offense. Even President Obama said that, "The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry.” To be sure, Obama went on to denounce the murders, and to state that burning a holy book is no excuse for murder. But Obama apparently couldn’t condemn the murders without also condemning Jones’ act of religious defiance.
  • As it turns out, this attitude is exactly what created the environment that led to murders in the first place. The members of the mob believed that religious belief should be free from public critical inquiry, and that a person who offends religious believers should face punishment. In the absence of official prosecution, they took matters into their own hands and sought anyone on the side of the offender. It didn’t help that Afghan leaders stoked the flames of hatred — but they only did so because they agreed with the mob’s sentiment to begin with. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the U.S. should punish those responsible, and three well-known Afghan mullahs urged their followers to take to the streets and protest to call for the arrest of Jones
Weiye Loh

Free Speech under Siege - Robert Skidelsky - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

Law Freedom of Speech Discrimination Libel Political Correctness Truths Opinion

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Breaking the cultural code damages a person’s reputation, and perhaps one’s career. Britain’s Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke recently had to apologize for saying that some rapes were less serious than others, implying the need for legal discrimination. The parade of gaffes and subsequent groveling apologies has become a regular feature of public life. In his classic essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill defended free speech on the ground that free inquiry was necessary to advance knowledge. Restrictions on certain areas of historical inquiry are based on the opposite premise: the truth is known, and it is impious to question it. This is absurd; every historian knows that there is no such thing as final historical truth.
  • It is not the task of history to defend public order or morals, but to establish what happened. Legally protected history ensures that historians will play safe. To be sure, living by Mill’s principle often requires protecting the rights of unsavory characters. David Irving writes mendacious history, but his prosecution and imprisonment in Austria for “Holocaust denial” would have horrified Mill.
  • the pressure for “political correctness” rests on the argument that the truth is unknowable. Statements about the human condition are essentially matters of opinion.  Because a statement of opinion by some individuals is almost certain to offend others, and since such statements make no contribution to the discovery of truth, their degree of offensiveness becomes the sole criterion for judging their admissibility. Hence the taboo on certain words, phrases, and arguments that imply that certain individuals, groups, or practices are superior or inferior, normal or abnormal; hence the search for ever more neutral ways to label social phenomena, thereby draining language of its vigor and interest.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A classic example is the way that “family” has replaced “marriage” in public discourse, with the implication that all “lifestyles” are equally valuable, despite the fact that most people persist in wanting to get married. It has become taboo to describe homosexuality as a “perversion,” though this was precisely the word used in the 1960’s by the radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse (who was praising homosexuality as an expression of dissent). In today’s atmosphere of what Marcuse would call “repressive tolerance,” such language would be considered “stigmatizing.”
  • The sociological imperative behind the spread of “political correctness” is the fact that we no longer live in patriarchal, hierarchical, mono-cultural societies, which exhibit general, if unreflective, agreement on basic values. The pathetic efforts to inculcate a common sense of “Britishness” or “Dutchness” in multi-cultural societies, however well-intentioned, attest to the breakdown of a common identity.
  • The defense of free speech is made no easier by the abuses of the popular press. We need free media to expose abuses of power. But investigative journalism becomes discredited when it is suborned to “expose” the private lives of the famous when no issue of public interest is involved. Entertaining gossip has mutated into an assault on privacy, with newspapers claiming that any attempt to keep them out of people’s bedrooms is an assault on free speech. You know that a doctrine is in trouble when not even those claiming to defend it understand what it means. By that standard, the classic doctrine of free speech is in crisis. We had better sort it out quickly – legally, morally, and culturally – if we are to retain a proper sense of what it means to live in a free society.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Jun 11
     
    Yet freedom of speech in the West is under strain. Traditionally, British law imposed two main limitations on the "right to free speech." The first prohibited the use of words or expressions likely to disrupt public order; the second was the law against libel. There are good grounds for both - to preserve the peace, and to protect individuals' reputations from lies. Most free societies accept such limits as reasonable. But the law has recently become more restrictive. "Incitement to religious and racial hatred" and "incitement to hatred on the basis of sexual orientation" are now illegal in most European countries, independent of any threat to public order. The law has shifted from proscribing language likely to cause violence to prohibiting language intended to give offense. A blatant example of this is the law against Holocaust denial. To deny or minimize the Holocaust is a crime in 15 European countries and Israel. It may be argued that the Holocaust was a crime so uniquely abhorrent as to qualify as a special case. But special cases have a habit of multiplying.
Weiye Loh

California ban on sale of 'violent' video games to children rejected - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

Violence Children Video Games

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • "The First Amendment does not disable government from helping parents make such a choice here -- a choice not to have their children buy extremely violent, interactive games," he wrote. At issue is how far constitutional protections of free speech and expression, as well as due process, can be applied to youngsters.
  • Justice Clarence Thomas also dissented, saying the law's requirement of having parents purchase the games for their underage children was reasonable. "The freedom of speech as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors, without going through the minors' parents or guardians," he said.
  • The motion picture industry has its own self-monitoring ratings system, imposed decades ago after complaints that some films were too explicit for the general audience in what was seen and heard. The gaming industry says its ratings system roughly follows the same self-imposed guidelines, and ratings are clearly labeled on the packaging.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Efforts in at least eight other states to restrict gaming content have been rejected by various courts. Video game makers have the support of various free-speech, entertainment, and media organizations. Nine states also agree, noting California's law has good intentions but would compel law enforcement to become "culture critics" and "distract from the task of policing actual violence." But 11 other states back California, saying they have enjoyed a traditional regulatory power over commerce aimed at protecting children, including such goods as alcohol and cigarettes.
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    The Supreme Court has struck down a California law that would have banned selling "violent" video games to children, a case balancing free speech rights with consumer protection. The 7-2 ruling Monday is a victory for video game makers and sellers, who said the ban -- which had yet to go into effect -- would extend too far. They say the existing nationwide, industry-imposed, voluntary rating system is an adequate screen for parents to judge the appropriateness of computer game content. The state says it has a legal obligation to protect children from graphic interactive images when the industry has failed to do so.
Weiye Loh

Genetic Sequencing Will Have to Wait: Links Between Genes and Behavior Still Largely Un... - 0 views

utopianist.com/...behavior-still-largely-unknown

Genetic Crime Sociology Nature Nurture Bioethics Depression Neuropsychology

shared by Weiye Loh on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • A recent article in The New York Times reported that over 100 studies show a relationship between genes and criminality but that the environment plays a key role in the effects of this relationship: “Kevin Beaver, an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said genetics may account for, say, half of a person’s aggressive behavior, but that 50 percent comprises hundreds or thousands of genes that express themselves differently depending on the environment. He has tried to measure which circumstances — having delinquent friends, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood — influence whether a predisposition to violence surfaces. After studying twins and siblings, he came up with an astonishing result: In boys not exposed to the risk factors, genetics played no role in any of their violent behavior. The positive environment had prevented the genetic switches — to use Mr. Pinker’s word — that affect aggression from being turned on. In boys with eight or more risk factors, however, genes explained 80 percent of their violence. Their switches had been flipped.”
  • “This idea that if something is genetic it’s deterministic is a misconception that we have to get over because saying that genes are involved in depression does not necessarily mean that someone who has certain genetic variants is doomed to become depressed, it just means that under certain circumstances, he or she may have to do certain things to help alleviate it, but it’s not unchangeable. You can change your brain, you can change your brain in many different ways and genetics is just one of many of these ways.”
  • In fact, environment plays the same crucial role for criminality as it does for obesity and depression. In an interview I did for a story in The Michigan Daily on depression research, Dr. Margit Burmeister, a professor of human genetics and a researcher in the Molecular and Biological Neuroscience Institute at the University of Michigan, explained the dangers the public oversimplifying the link between genetics and depression:
Weiye Loh

A Clockwork Chemistry - Guy Kahane - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

Neuroscience Morality Behavior Free Will Rationality Facts Data Bioethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    Over the past decade, an army of psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists has been busy trying to uncover the neural "clockwork" that underlies human morality. They have started to trace the evolutionary origins of pro-social sentiments such as empathy, and have begun to uncover the genes that dispose some individuals to senseless violence and others to acts of altruism, and the pathways in our brain that shape our ethical decisions. And to understand how something works is also to begin to see ways to modify and even control it. Indeed, scientists have not only identified some of the brain pathways that shape our ethical decisions, but also chemical substances that modulate this neural activity.
joanne ye

Measuring the effectiveness of online activism - 2 views

Reference: Krishnan, S. (2009, June 21). Measuring the effectiveness of online activism. The Hindu. Retrieved September 24, 2009, from Factiva. (Article can be found at bottom of the post) Summary...

online activism freedom control

started by joanne ye on 24 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

John Prendergast: Reforming Wall Street and Ending the World's Deadliest War: Congo - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-wall-street-and_b_633352.html

Conflict Minerals War Computer

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Jul 10 - Cached
  • conflict minerals are helping fuel the deadliest war in the world since World War II, the conflict in eastern Congo in which 1,100 women are raped every month, and 1,500 people die every day. The main armed groups that orchestrate the violence make hundreds of millions of dollars by trading in four minerals - the 3 Ts of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold. These minerals are then bought by electronics and jewelry companies and are used in our cell phones, laptops, and gold necklaces.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Jul 10
     
    Reforming Wall Street and Ending the World's Deadliest War: Congo
Weiye Loh

The American Spectator : Can't Live With Them… - 1 views

spectator.org/...cant-live-with-them

Intellectual Common Sense

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • ommentators have repeatedly told us in recent years that the gap between rich and poor has been widening. It is true, if you compare the income of those in the top fifth of earners with the income of those in the bottom fifth, that the spread between them increased between 1996 and 2005. But, as Sowell points out, this frequently cited figure is not counting the same people. If you look at individual taxpayers, Sowell notes, those who happened to be in the bottom fifth in 1996 saw their incomes nearly double over the decade, while those who happened to be in the top fifth in 1995 saw gains of only 10 percent on average and those in the top 5 percent actually experienced decline in their incomes. Similar distortions are perpetrated by those bewailing "stagnation" in average household incomes -- without taking into account that households have been getting smaller, as rising wealth allows people to move out of large family homes.
  • Sometimes the distortion seems to be deliberate. Sowell gives the example of an ABC news report in the 1980s focusing on five states where "unemployment is most severe" -- without mentioning that unemployment was actually declining in all the other 45 states. Sometimes there seems to be willful incomprehension. Journalists have earnestly reported that "prisons are ineffective" because two-thirds of prisoners are rearrested within three years of their release. As Sowell comments: "By this kind of reasoning, food is ineffective as a response to hunger because it is only a matter of time after eating before you get hungry again. Like many other things, incarceration only works when it is done."
  • why do intellectuals often seem so lacking in common sense? Sowell thinks it goes with the job-literally: He defines "intellectuals" as "an occupational category [Sowell's emphasis], people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas -- writers, academics and the like." Medical researchers or engineers or even "financial wizards" may apply specialized knowledge in ways that require great intellectual skill, but that does not make them "intellectuals," in Sowell's view: "An intellectual's work begins and ends with ideas [Sowell's emphasis]." So an engineer "is ruined" if his bridges or buildings collapse and so with a financier who "goes broke… the proof of the pudding is ultimately in the eating…. but the ultimate test of a [literary] deconstructionist's ideas is whether other deconstructionists find those ideas interesting, original, persuasive, elegant or ingenious. There is no external test." The ideas dispensed by intellectuals aren't subject to "external" checks or exposed to the test of "verifiability" (apart from what "like-minded individuals" find "plausible") and so intellectuals are not really "accountable" in the same way as people in other occupations.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • it is not quite true, even among tenured professors in the humanities, that idea-mongers can entirely ignore "external" checks. Even academics want to be respectable, which means they can't entirely ignore the realities that others notice. There were lots of academics talking about the achievements of socialism in the 1970s (I can remember them) but very few talking that way after China and Russia repudiated these fantasies.
  • THE MOST DISTORTING ASPECT of Sowell's account is that, in focusing so much on the delusions of intellectuals, he leaves us more confused about what motivates the rest of society. In a characteristic passage, Sowell protests that "intellectuals...have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, have long been rated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia, and new ties that intellectuals have created, such as class -- and more recently 'gender' -- have been projected as either more real or more important."
  • There's no disputing the claim that most "intellectuals" -- surely most professors in the humanities-are down on "patriotism" and "religion" and probably even "family." But how did people get to be patriotic and religious in the first place? In Sowell's account, they just "sorted themselves" -- as if by the invisible hand of the market.
  • Let's put aside all the violence and intimidation that went into building so many nations and so many faiths in the past. What is it, even today, that makes people revere this country (or some other); what makes people adhere to a particular faith or church? Don't inspiring words often move people? And those who arrange these words -- aren't they doing something similar to what Sowell says intellectuals do? Is it really true, when it comes to embracing national or religious loyalties, that "the proof of the pudding is in the eating"?
  • Even when it comes to commercial products, people don't always want to be guided by mundane considerations of reliable performance. People like glamour, prestige, associations between the product and things they otherwise admire. That's why companies spend so much on advertising. And that's part of the reason people are willing to pay more for brand names -- to enjoy the associations generated by advertising. Even advertising plays on assumptions about what is admirable and enticing-assumptions that may change from decade to decade, as background opinions change. How many products now flaunt themselves as "green" -- and how many did so 20 years ago?
  • If we closed down universities and stopped subsidizing intellectual publications, would people really judge every proposed policy by external results? Intellectuals tend to see what they expect to see, as Sowell's examples show -- but that's true of almost everyone. We have background notions about how the world works that help us make sense of what we experience. We might have distorted and confused notions, but we don't just perceive isolated facts. People can improve in their understanding, developing background understandings that are more defined or more reliable. That's part of what makes people interested in the ideas of intellectuals -- the hope of improving their own understanding.
  • On Sowell's account, we wouldn't need the contributions of a Friedrich Hayek -- or a Thomas Sowell -- if we didn't have so many intellectuals peddling so many wrong-headed ideas. But the wealthier the society, the more it liberates individuals to make different choices and the more it can afford to indulge even wasteful or foolish choices. I'd say that means not that we have less need of intellectuals, but more need of better ones. 
Weiye Loh

The Irrationality of the Anti-Sex Lobby - 0 views

www.freedominapuritanage.co.uk/?p=1511

Pornography Sex Sexuality Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • with so little ethical and credible research on children in this area, the case is far from closed. See, for instance, the recent Scottish Executive report on the topic, with indications that both children’s and parents’ understanding of sexualised imagery is rather more nuanced than the media and government give them credit for. [i] However, as far as the public are concerned, there is no debate to be had. And so the endless ‘childhood in crisis’ nonsense is trotted out again and again.
  • when it comes down to Facts vs. Fear Related To Your Kids, most people will choose the fear option “just to be on the safe side”.
  • So what are the options? Basically, to find the trigger issues that will help people understand why restricting adult access to adult materials is in no-one’s interest, why it is important to support the rights of sex workers to work, and why deciding what children are and are not exposed to is a job for families and communities, not governments.
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