When you want to oppose the other side.....

[nancylebov]

Please argue with what the leaders, the majority, or the most capable thinkers are saying, and reserve debunking the fringe nutcases as an occasional entertainment.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

But knocking down the fringe nutcases is much more fun ... and requires much less mental effort.

Which is to say you're right.

[avram]

How do you tell the difference?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

For example, it may be true that the current administration is thinking that New Orleans is being punished for its sins, but they aren't saying it. Neither are the majority of Republicans and neither are their most respected thinkers (whoever they may be--I don't follow the right in that much detail, and I did see a recent article claiming that the right hasn't been doing any new theoretical work for quite some years, but I have no idea how to find it again).

You can really have quite enough fun kicking the administration for what it has said, done, and not done.

On the other side, there's probably someone saying that this mess is punishment for not being careful enough with the environment, but again, it's a fringe pov.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

RFK Jr is a fringe view? Good to hear it.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Details and cite?

[zsero.livejournal.com]

here (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/afor-they-that-sow-the-_b_6396.html), for starters.

Distinguo

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Consequence =/= punishment. To say that the force of this storm is partly due to global warming is not to say that we are being punished. Punishment is imposed by some volitional authority: a person, a government, an organization.

Merriam-Webster Online:

2 a : suffering, pain, or loss that serves as retribution b : a penalty inflicted on an offender through judicial procedure

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody
a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel

Re: Distinguo

[zsero.livejournal.com]

a) That means that you've defined the offense so narrowly that atheists are by definition incapable of committing it. RFK is hardly likely to say openly "Gaia did it", however much he may think it, and even though what he's saying makes little sense otherwise.

b) Much of the similar rhetoric from the right is also of the "consequence" variety, rather than "punishment". What several evangelical leaders suggested after 11-Sep-01 was that because of the USA's sins God had removed the special protection He had previously afforded her. But this was reported as if they had said God was punishing the USA. (The same phenomenon is often seen in Israel, when some disaster happens, and some rabbi suggests that if the victims (or society in general) had been more careful with the commandments — especially with the ones, such as mezuzah, that are believed to be rewarded by special protection — then it might have been prevented. They are immediately attacked as if they had said what happened was a punishment.)

Re: Distinguo

[madfilkentist]

I'd say the difference between withdrawal of divine protection and inflicting of divine punishment is a rather slight one -- and I'd say that atheists are indeed incapable of asserting something is divine punishment, unless they're being seriously incoherent.

Whether Kennedy's claims make sense is a separate issue. Like many people trying to win quick debating points, he simply cites the existence of a study without reference to specifics (not even naming the author). But there's nothing in what he says that implies supernatural intervention.

Re: Distinguo

[zsero.livejournal.com]

I'd say the difference between withdrawal of divine protection and inflicting of divine punishment is a rather slight one

An odd point for a libertarian to make. Leftists like to blur the distinction between hurting someone and refraining from helping them. Libertarians stress that while one may not act to harm someone, one has no obligation to help anybody, and that one who chooses to help one person does not thereby assume an obligation to help all similarly situated people, or indeed to continue helping that person beyond what one has chosen to do.

Re: Distinguo

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The libertarian distinction between the obligation to not hurt and the lack of obligation to help is, I would say, largely a result of recognizing human limitations. There's no reason to expect it to apply to God.

Re: Distinguo

[zsero.livejournal.com]

On the contrary. Socialist-types, when they make such distinctions, do so on the pragmatic basis that it's not possible to help everyone. Therefore they will declare a point at which they can no longer help, cut it off there, and feel guilty that they weren't willing to deprive themselves in order to do more. Or they just say "if I can't help everyone I won't help anyone", perhaps with the subconscious idea that they might as well feel guilty for a sheep as a lamb.

Libertarians, OTOH, usually make this distinction as a matter of principle, so that it applies regardless of ability to help. A multi-millionaire who passes a beggar and won't reach into his pocket is, in the libertarian world-view, not doing anything wrong, whereas another beggar who steals the few cents in the first beggar's cup is, in the libertarian view, an aggressor. To libertarians, in general, taking from someone is aggression, a moral wrong, whereas giving to someone is not any sort of moral obligation, but merely an act of benevolence, a feeling that most people have.

Re: Distinguo

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think you're right.

It's interesting that Rand writes as though she'd never heard of non-self-destructive helpfulness as an ideal, which I believe is the standard in Orthodox Judaism.

I suppose it's not that surprising she hadn't heard of it--Christianity and socialism/Communism are much more common systems, and the Orthodox Jewish concept is so sensible and undramatic it's less likely to catch people's attention.

Re: Distinguo

[zsero.livejournal.com]

She may not have heard specifically of the Orthodox approach, since AFAIK she didn't really have any exposure to Judaism of any sort (her own family, AIUI, was not at all religious), but she did write a fair bit about benevolence, and AIUI in her own life she did give significant help to people in need, if she personally knew and cared for them.

Re: Distinguo

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

You're evidently referring to this -- after Barbour's memo deriding CO2 controls as “eco-extremism” and the Bush administration's taking it up -- and especially the last paragraph, which I'm italicizing:

Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.

Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour’s memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast. [UPDATE: Alas, the reprieve for New Orleans was only temporary. But Haley Barbour still has much to answer for.]

Surely you can distinguish rhetoric from realism! This is the last paragraph of a column, the appropriate place for a figurative punchline. If I read it on the NY Times Op-ed page from, say, Maureen Dowd, I would not conclude that she'd suddenly flipped and gone quasi-Fundie.

Nor do I so read it from RFKjr. His real(istic) conclusion, utilizing familiar Biblical language* in a play on its literal reading, is in the paragraph before. Then he turns around and points us back to the Biblical trope and its context by way of Robertson, who was taking it as literal truth. That's a punchline, not a literal attribution to the wrath of (any) God.

* which even Fundies agree is a metaphor, although they may see it as also literal; but how can one literally "sow the wind"?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks.