Do Not Pay Attention to the Side Show, the Destructive Dynamic Remains

Posted in error to 911OnSpeedDial on: Tuesday, January 11, 2011


Besides the pain and suffering of the victims and their families, the worst thing about mass shootings, is the distraction away from real issues on account of one attention-seeking mad man. Bullets hail for a few seconds changing lives forever. However, we must remember that what was happening in Arizona before the shooting has not stopped just because the media has fogotten about it in the rush to find out what was making Jared Lee Loughner tick.



Let's not forget the unique dynamic along the southern border of Arizona. Guns flow south to help the drug lords supply the drug demand in the north. The solution is so simple. I am always astounded by the state of denial and cognitive disonance in the minds of gun supporters. They stand for freedom to own a gun, but deny freedom to control what substances others put in their bodies and blame the ensuing violence on the inferiority and moral failings of the other group.

Feminism and the Erosion of Women's Sports

It was once thought that feminism wanted to advance women in sport.  However, it seems that some would rather advance men in women's sports.  Feministing.com predictably adores this ruling.
What will their take be when the top 10 golfers on the LPGA tour are men?  Do they really believe that the only difference between a man and a woman is appearance?  The most disconcerting thing in this whole story is the complacency with which the women on the tour accept it.  This threatens to undo everything women have worked for but the players have to stoicly tow the PC party line?  Unbelievable.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd believe that feminism is trying to abolish sport altogether and using this farce to undermine women's sport so they can attack the whole of sport as a "sexist" activity.  However, it just seems to me that they are too blind and ignorant to realize what they are doing.

Onestdv, The Breastfeeding Consultant.

So Onestdv is out chasing yet another conspiracy.  This time he says that infant formula is part of the plot to undermine the family.

Infant formula is simply another example of a technology enabling the women's movement, not the other way around. Before infant formula, mothers who couldn't breastfeed had to find willing mothers to lend their milk or pay for a wet nurse. Big business, as always, filled the gap and continues to gather huge profits (egad).



The point One fails to mention is that in the heydays of science (50's -60's), the prevailing notion was that science had surpassed nature and that there was no way that nature could provide the kind of nutrient-filled food that the powers of science had cooked up. Then, we discovered that the mother's immunity was passed to the child. Of course, this small, but important difference was blown way out of proportion. Suddenly, the pendulum swung and baby formula was painted as an evil corporate plot and everyone said that nothing MEN invented could be as nourishing as a woman's all-natural milk. The science-whore was used to link breastfeeding to higher IQ and link formula to obesity. I suspect it’s more a function of income level since lower income people are less likely to breastfeed.


Women are now shamed for letting a single drop of formula touch their child's digestive system. Go to a maternity ward and witness the bleeding and cracked nipples and weeping mothers ashamed that they can’t get it right refusing to believe that they should taint their babies with that poison.

ONE has it backwards. The breastfeeding craze is perpetuated by the leftist Gaaia worshipping feminists. Like other religions that cause suffering, it is propogated by the piety of other sufferers (usually women). The same way that Muslim women don the veil to tell other women that god hates them; mothers pass guilt trips for even thinking about using formula along with a whole host of other overblown fears and parenting misteps.

In regard to the US government funding:  It appears as though even the WIC is moving toward milk banks as an alternative to formula.  This move would suggest that the government is moving away from the somewhat counterproductive practice of funding formula for anyone on the plan.

The War on Drugs in Rio - The Temporary Solution

I saw this from Marginal Revolution (hat tip). 
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/11/rios_drug_war.html

I referenced it in my post on ONESTDV.

It's what I call a temporary solution.  I guess in Rio, they want to lock up all the gangsters before the Olympics so they moved into the favellas military style.  How long before the gangster that were removed are replaced by younger, more ruthless thugs?

In a place as notoriously corrupt as Rio, I wonder how many of those bricks of pot and cocaine are going to end up back on the street within a week.

Questions About The Moral Landscape

I’m currently reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I am greatly impressed by his reasoning and I am glad that someone is finally tackling the question of ethics and morality from a scientific perspective. Ethics, says Harris, should be seen as an "underdeveloped branch of science."

I’ve long felt that something was wrong with the typical liberal moral relativistic stance that says we can’t judge any other culture’s way of thinking as right or wrong. Although I couldn’t join them in their supposed neutrality, I often called myself I a moral relativist simply because I thought the only other option was to be a fundamentalist. I believe that nobody has the right to decide what’s right for you, but of course nobody has the right to inflict harm on others unjustly. However, I don’t need to fall into moral relativism in order to see that there are many paths that are morally acceptable.

In his new book, Harris defines the right moral path as one that increases human well-being and the wrong one as one that decreases it. So, a society that performs female circumcision or brainwashes children to become killers is obviously not on the right moral path. Well-being can be scientifically tested and discussed using logical means

This Moral Realism is such an elegant way of thinking because it doesn’t over simplify any act to its singular consequence (i.e. killing is wrong) and it doesn’t absolve anyone of thinking hard about his choices. Answers must be sought using all available knowledge about oneself and one’s surroundings. Like moral relativity, there is a lot of room for different ways of living – different peaks on the moral landscape, as Harris would call them, but there is also room for pointing out how some ways could be changed to make them better.

I continue to enjoy this book and hopefully I’ll write more when I’m done. For now, I see a few difficulties, which I will explain.

A lot of people will be hesitant to give science the authority to rule their morals because they would lose control of their decisions and values that they feel are instinctual and arrived at by carefully looking into their hearts. Pure science is cold, calculated and has no room for feeling. People will be afraid that science could tell them to live in such a way that does not conform or goes directly against their current firmly held values and ask them to do things that they just cannot, morrally, perform. How would you respond to this?

Another difficulty arises because science is, in this political and economic world, a commodity. It is often used and abused by special interests, ideologists, business and even religion to further their goals. To discover scientific answers takes a lot of money, and individuals do not have the money to do their own research or the expertise to distinguish good science from propaganda, judge the validity of conclusions or interpret findings for themselves. A real fear that must be acknowledged is the possibility that science could be used for manipulating people or a weapon for twisting reality and perception even more than it is today. It is doubtful that a majority of any population can become sophisticated enough to avoid manipulation. Even more dangerous, I think that highly educated people are actually more susceptible to grand ideas that sound good in theory but can have disastrous affects if applied in practice.

Lastly, I also pose a test to the theory. Suppose that moral realism attains its deserved stature and succeeds in producing a thriving, society but the society thrives to the point of exhausting resources. What if that society then decides that in order to continue to thrive and maximize well-being for most people, it must abandon peace and do horrible harm to a portion of the people? Are we then thrust back to the in-group, out-group battle? How would you approach such a situation?