Michael Ramirez for August 11, 2013

Ramirez clearly has no grasp on reality.

Wow. What a dumb comment. It’s clear to me that you’ve never been in the U.S. military by your lack of knowledge of the UCMJ that Gore Bane explained very well.

What??

Obama Day One in Office set the PC attitude for his regime, and the entire executive branch is poisoned by Obama’s CYA for all Muslims. His first foreign speech was to Egyptian Muslims. He even changed the mission of NASA to an “outreach to Muslims”!!!-PC language dropped “terrorism” for deaths that are obvious Islamic Jihadist terror….including Fort Hood’s disarmed base terror murders. “Workplace Violence” is Obama’s PC rule; preventing full medical care payment and possible medals for heroism during the massacre.-Ramirez has it 100% Correctly….PC is the culprit at the root of our internal threat by government welcomes for Muslims like Major Hasan. MSM helps by covering up the plot to infiltrate and install Sha’ria Law to replace American Law.

Hasan was a shrink, not a gun-totin’ soldier. Shrinks are the craziest people IN our society, regardless any “reigious pesuasion”, so go figure!

Ramirez is more or less correct. Hasan cannot be charged with terrorism under the UCMJ. He could have been charged with Mutuny / Sedition (ie., being a tratior under article 94) and / or with Aiding the Enemy (article 104).They chose “Workplace Violence” and Murder (Article 134) out of political correctness.

Hasan clearly by his own statements in court committed Sedition / Mutuny and his intent was to aid enemies of the United States in time of war.

The public majority that believes in self-defense are not the insanity crowd. The Left-Liberal-anti-gun people in charge of the White House and Pentagon are the insanity crowd.

-Mayors of cities that are drowning in murders but demand city anti-gun laws are the insanity crowd.-Either we demand local, state and federal government to enforce laws to allow citizens to be safe from terrorists and criminals who no matter what the law make sure “they” are totally and fully ARMED, and abuse citizens who are not protected, for crime profits or for terror agendas.-p.s. I sympathize with Bruce…it is too bad that the late-to-the-scene armed police failed to kill the shooter. Police are justified and legal and moral to kill the murderer in action.

Does anyone realize that Hasan was shot in the spine, is paralyzed from the waist down and is in a wheelchair.That is why the trial took so long, he can’t sit in one place very long.All of the ideas about working on a farm, etc are impossible.

I find it interesting that exoticdoc’s beliefs seem to come in what might be called an ideological package. I’m not saying this to criticize — I suspect my beliefs also come in an ideological package. But it’s perhaps worthwhile trying to see what’s in the packages and to what extent the various components are independent.I would venture that exotic believes at least the following:

1. He believes in God.2. He believes in a specific religion with a fairly detailed set of theological positions.3. He does not believe in evolution; I suppose he’s some kind of creationist.4. He believes in a particular theory of rather mechanistic causation.5. He believes that nothing counts as a cause that doesn’t fit this mechanistic theory.6. He believes that there is something called Free Will. Perhaps therefore he believes in something called the Will, though I’m not sure about that.7. He believes that in addition to this rather mechanistic kind of causation, there is something spiritual which can have effects in the physical world.8. He also believes in a rather detailed and restrictive moral system. He probably believes that his moral system is the only moral system that counts as a moral system.9. He also believes in a very particular set of conservative political positions.

I hope this is a reasonable characterization. It’s of course open to correction.

I happen to disagree with each and every one of these, so I guess my ideological package (in part) would consist of this package with a NOT in front of it. But some of these I suspect are independent of each other. For instance, there are lots of people who believe in God who also believe in evolution. There are lots of people who believe in God who don’t share exotic’s moral and political positions. There are also people who do share a lot of exotic’s moral positions who don’t believe in God. There are some who post here who are quite narrowly conservative but don’t believe in God. And of course there are people who are religious but don’t believe in the particular religion exotic believes in.

A good point. I’m not a scientist, but my sense of what scientists do leads me to think of science not so much as a set body of doctrine, but more as a method of learning more. Scientists don’t claim to know everything, and what is thought to be true today could be modified tomorrow. Of course some conclusions are very secure, and my understanding is that the basics of evolutionary theory are very secure.=What interests me about exotic’s ideological package is not each individual point, but rather the extent to which they all hang together. And one reason I’m interested is because I wonder to what extent my ideological package all hangs together. It’s really a test of my own positions rather than a challenge to his.

What garbage, you poor misguided person

Saying “We do not yet know” is not a dodge, it’s an expression of honest humility. A hundred years ago we had no idea just how big the universe is. A hundred years ago we did not know how genetics works. A hundred years ago we didn’t know about quantum physics. A hundred years from now we will know much more than we do today, but not because of religion.

I’m not pleading technicalities, I’m making a distinction which evidently is beyond your comprehension.

I know, but when I respond to him I have to clarify my own thoughts, even if I know I will never say anything which reaches him. For example, I’ve now clarified to some extent my thoughts on materialism versus mechanism. Here’s my thinking, at least for now. If we take as a rough and ready set of disciplines physics, chemistry, biology, psychology…and then it gets a little ragged. But given something like that system, I would say that chemistry can never violate the laws of physics, but can add to them; biology can never violate the laws of chemistry, but can add to them; psychology can never violate the laws of biology, but can add to them. Thus imagine throwing a stone into the air — it will describe a parabola. Now throw a living bird into the air — it may fly away, but its flight will never violate any of the laws of physics; it will take work in order that it not act the way a stone acts. So in this sense I am a materialist — I do not believe that any non-material force (such as the “soul” or the “will”) can have any effect in the world of material things. But that doesn’t mean that all of the laws of the material world are restricted to the laws of mechanics. This is one place where exotic and I part company — he seems to believe that all laws of science are mechanical — billiard ball laws. But mechanics does not exhaust science. (Even within physics, there are statistical laws, which are not mechanical.) Now I present all this with some diffidence, being as I’m a literary person and not a scientist, and I’d be interested to hear what a scientist has to say about my mutterings.

That is so neat!!! Yes, it’s really important to keep emergent properties in mind. (I’m working on a new theoretical project and your comment makes me realize that I need to include a discussion of emergent properties. I’ll give you credit.) Your pedagogical problem is deeper than pedagogy — some people assume that physics, say, is the foundation, and that everything gets built on that — but Whitehead somewhere that you can turn that perspective upside down and say that physics is derived from the other sciences. The same goes for language and logic — the positivists wanted logic to be the basis for ordinary language, but their project kind of fizzled, because they were never able to get from logic to language, so then the ordinary language philosophers said (more or less) no, ordinary language is the basis, and logic is a specialization of that. In pedagogy, I wonder if a sort of back and forth motion might be helpful. When we teach history, the first thing we realize is that you can never start from the beginning — you pick a moment, and you work both back and forward from that as far as is practical and useful.

The Times wouldn’t let me read it because I’ve read my ten articles for the month. But they sometimes they seem to forget, so I’ll try it again tomorrow.

Got it, thanks. I know it’s not fair to critique a book based on a three page summary, but it is his summary after all, so he must believe it represents his thought to some reasonable approximation. So, with some diffidence, I would say I’m not all that impressed by his argument. For instance, at the end of paragraph three, he says, in characterizing the position that he’s going to argue against, “it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.” Whoa!!! Two big problems here, or rather two instances of one fundamental misconception. This is a strawman. Maybe there are some people out there who hold this position, but this is not a reasonable characterization of what most scientists or materialist would maintain. Physics isn’t even the theory of chemistry, let alone the theory of everything.+ Nagel here seems to suffer from a mild form of one of the diseases exotic has. He seems not to understand stratificational thinking. This is stuff I learned when I was in high school. Here’s an example. Every spoken language has a sound system, and every utterance produced in a language has to (more or less) obey the rules of the sound system. For instance, in ancient Greek there are two different “p” sounds, one with aspiration, and one without, and it makes a difference which one you use, whereas in English there are no words which are distinguished because of this difference. One of the first things linguists want to do is to describe the sound system of whatever language they are studying — you come up with a phonemic analysis. But when you interpret the meaning of a sentence (I’m simplifying some theory here, but not misleadingly) you don’t specify the meaning in terms of the phonemes, you specify it in terms of the morphemes (again a simplification). I return to an example I used the other day: “Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.” The phonemic analysis would say that all of the these are the same. But a grammatical analysis would be like this (again simplifying): Buffalo(noun) Buffalo(adjective) buffalo(noun) buffalo(verb) buffalo(verb) Buffalo(adjective) buffalo(noun). That is, those buffalo who are buffaloed by buffalo who come from Buffalo also buffalo buffalo who come from Buffalo. Elephants Indian elephants intimidate intimidate Indian elephants.+ So, even though the sentence has in it nothing but phonemes, it can’t be understood at the phonemic level, but only at the morphemic level. These are two different strata, and there is no reason that the two strata have to have the same form. For instance in natural languages, the phoneme inventory is usually somewhere between twenty and fifty elements, never more than a hundred, but the morphemic inventory can be in the millions.+So thinking stratificationally I can say that everything is material, but that doesn’t mean that I have to understand it always and only at the level of physics, any more than I have to understand a sentence at the level of phonemes.+Here’s another problem I have with Nagel — this is the wrong moment in science to be making this argument. We are just beginning to understand neurobiology, and the more we understand the more we find that there is a material basis for “mental” phenomena. Perhaps he’s anxious — but if he thinks stratificationally he doesn’t have to be anxious about these discoveries.+And a third problem — it looks very much, as I understand it — as if there is no unitary mind anyway — there are a number of co-existing, cooperating and competing brain functions, but there’s no one in charge, so there is no “mind” per se to analyze.+Enough, way more than enough. Reactions?