Author: Psybertron

Roughly half-way through, about as far as the reformation and the renaissance, Malik’s potted history of moral philosophy, majoring on the theological. As such it’s pretty good. Many sources I’ve already read, so my prejudice against his presumed (narrow) take on rationality in the humanist atheism vs religion wars got in the way of enjoying the read initially. His presumed agenda preceded him.

So, in fact, I need to record that it’s a good read. Whatever his ultimate agenda and conclusions, his readings are broad and sensitive to the human motivations of their times. Recognises the multi-civilisations “Axial Age” of humanity’s quest for understanding life in the cosmos. The real origins of humanism, in the quest to research “human writings” lost by the later domination of church and scripture – put me in mind of Eco’s Name of the Rose, and an excellent reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the context of Aquinas writings, and the breadths and depths of thinking that prefaced the renaissance itself – on the shoulders of giants. Good stuff.

[Post Note : Final review on completion here.]

Struck by Nigel Farage responding to questioning from Mishal Hussein on BBCR4Today on the principle of an immigration commission establishing and enforcing bases for entry (*1) being about “maintaining normality”.

Particularly impressed with his insistance that a quantifiable cap on immigrant numbers was a compete red herring, the point being “social quality”. If pushed, yes he could point at stats at what had been considered “normal”, but turning such numbers into targets and caps was to completely miss the point.

The wider meta-point, is the media generally. Even high-quality journalists are part of an establishment that values quantity above quality. The underlying point for governance is that not everything that counts can be counted. It’s a deeply pernicious (scientistic) kind of political correctness – a meme – underlying governance itself, as well as the media as part of our checks and balances monitoring that governance, to be seen to stick with “objective facts”. As if quality itself were some slippery slope to leading to the PC bogey-man of “moral relativism” (*2).

Numbers are a tool, they are never the point.

(*1) Typically the bases for entry adopt another meme – “the Australian points system” – but again the focus tends to be “economic value vs benefit cost” of the candidate. Of course here too, there must also be a more fundamental cultural normality aspect to the test beyond the numbers. Coincidentally a fit with cultural normality is the immigration focus of another UKIP supporter (Anne Marie Waters) here. A cultural melting pot is one thing, but we don’t want to import memes that positively deny values our culture holds as basic freedoms. (Though as one commenter pointed out, whilst this logic is fine, and there is an element of straw-man I acknowledged in the previous report, the scale of “a few bad apples” amongst immigrant numbers is likely to be very small compared to those home grown by degenerate radicalisation – radicalisation toward illiberal, cultural values that deny basic freedoms I’m talking here, not specifically violent muderous (eg Salafist-jihadi) extremism necessarily. But the principle is nevertheless important – the quality of values held individually is fundamentally more important than a count of total numbers, or less still economic value. Numbers must not rule.)

[(*2) Post Note on Moral Relativism.]

[Post Note : Interesting to note the similarities between Farage view and Milliband’s take. Need to read the latter more closely, is he really agreeing, are they agreeing on the qualitative point about fairness? Hat tip to Daniel Trilling @trillingual – though by exploiting their own refugee family status, they cloud immigration with refugees.]

From a BBC picture story:

“Yangon, also known as Rangoon,
in Myanmar, also known as Burma”

They’re NOT “also known as”.
They’re the same effin’ words.
Just different phoenetic spellings.
You need to learn to pronounce ’em right.

Rangoon / Yangon
Burma / Myanmar

You can just hear the British Empire quelling the natives.
Jeez. That’s all folks.

Following up a hit on Stevie Lange I happened to notice that Billy Kristian’s biog page used my photo from The Golden Lion around 1978/9ish.

Fair trade. Having left my own page with “whatever happened to … ” I also noted there were several RnB / Rock’nRoll legends I still needed to name check, and I see Billy gives them all credits.

So as well as Chris Thomson, Stevie Lange and Billy Kristian, the stellar line-up of Filthy McNasty and Night over that couple of years in London included : Geoff Whitehorn, Clive Edwards, Robbie McIntosh, Rick Marrotta, Nicky Hopkins, Michael McDonald, Bill Payne, Jimmy Johnson (!) and Steve Porcaro.

What? The Jimmy Johnson, guitar of the Swampers? Suspect he could have been on the Night recordings, but maybe not at the Bridgehouse and other London gigs – I’d have noticed, surely. Geoff, Robbie, Rick and Nicky I recall.

There’s an irony in accepted commentary around “extreme Islamism” that people are very PC around avoiding conflating “racism” with opinions about religions. There is of course a minefield of offense to be avoided in offensive presumptions linking ethnic and cultural appearance with religious positions so careful un-prejudiced correctness does not go amiss. However there are also parallels that need to be recognised for what they are, and addressed accordingly – ie correctly.

This Quilliam piece by Haras Rafiq on CNN uses the expression:

“extremism of all kinds as social ill, comparable to racism”.

So in the next breath that we, in liberal western secular democracies, might say there is no such thing as protection of religions from blasphemy to be defined by rights in law, we would also strongly defend laws that protect race, gender and sexuality from any kind of “blasphemy”. ie not just actual expressed, incited or active hatred, but even any implicit prejudice against such freedoms and equalities would get short shrift. Maintaining such positions would be considered offensive, even vicariously offensive on behalf of fellow humankind. So much so that we are happy that such freedoms are protected by rights in law and offenses in criminal law. We hold these things sacred, and consider it sacrilege to oppose them, non-PC to raise arguments against; might even expect to be considered irrational, mad or beyond the pale to even suggest such arguments exist.

If we put the boot on the other foot, there is a world of difference between believing that religion is irrational (by western objective scientistic standards) and believing that Salafist-jihadi-ideology is positively offensive to civilised human values. The former is open to debate and discussion, but doesn’t in itself demand a high-level of engagement, it’s even possible to “not care” in many a context. But the latter is an offense that should be challenged for what it is, spoken-out and acted against individually and institutionally.

The not caring position is well captured by Quilliam’s Maajid Nawaz here.

The individual and institutional challenge to the offensive position is the point of the Haras Rafiq piece. We mustn’t wait for institutional enforcement in response to hateful incitement or murderous acts, but must simply reject the position held. It should be on a par with race, gender and sexual prejudice.

Political correctness must not be allowed to paralyse our ability to identify and act on the issue.

Interesting watching the polarisation of opinion around Mohammed Emwazi (previously “Jihadi John”) – that anyone suggesting “victimhood”, that MI5’s intervention around the time of his deportation from Tanzania has anything to do with the outcome, is given short-shrift and ridicule. In fact, things that alienate angry young men enough to take violent action is a recurring topic around Islamic extremism – and it’s very old news that rebels with a pretext in the absence of a cause attract their gangster’s molls. As I always say, life’s just complicated enough. It’s scientistically simplistic – greedy reductionist – to seek simple “causes” involving existing “subjects” or “objects” to “blame” for events. Longer term outcomes that involve chaotically evolving histories influenced circumstantially by many small choices. None of which is “the” cause. Political (jihadi) ideas aired (freely expressed) at Westminster College were another part of the story. Alienation is still a bad idea. Radicalisation toward extremism is another. Conspiracy or cock-up, they’re called evil. Islamic culture, built on Quranic and other texts apparently requiring human practice beyond the social pale, is also part of the problem.

Blasphemy is invalid as a legal concept simply because of the principle of secularity says religious belief should not form part of society’s governance arrangements. Freedom of thought and expression is enough. Extremism is the evil that society must point to as beyond the pale.

Political correctness must not be allowed to paralyse our ability to consider and act on all the issues. All extremisms are social ills, beyond society’s pale.

[Post Note : I didn’t mention the “Cage” response that materialised at the weekend. They are one of the commentators pointing out the establishment agencies and security forces actions as triggers to alienation and radicalisation, as reasons or causes, even justifications for Emwazi, rather than condemning the evil actions. Fine diatribe from Boris in response:

A response which also picks up on other conflations and generalisations prompting the knee-jerk PC reactions.]

Posted Saudi 1 : Russia 0 late last year, and the strategy continues.
(Paul Mason is the common point on twitter.)

An event that passed me by in London last week. Reported here in THE.

Just joining up some obvious dots.

Should we wish humanity could replace aggression with empathy as suggested by a scientist, or should we talk softly and carry a big stick as suggested by a politician? (Hawking vs Roosevelt)

All or nothing or a balance of both. Having the power to act, the freedom to act is one thing, it is restraint and empathy brought to bear on conflict (verbal or physical) that makes us human.

(When was a “new atheist” last empathetic with a theist for example? Good job the scientists are not in charge.)

Finished Unger & Smolin. Having breezed through Roberto Unger’s 2/3, Lee Smolin’s 1/3 was tougher going. As advertised, this is not “popular science” writing and Smolin drops into the mathematical, symbolic and technical weeds of several aspects of many different theories in physics from quanta and string-theories to cosmogeny itself, and he does it in very clipped highlights, referring to published works of his own (and others) for details.

Maths itself is of course one of the target topics – it’s own evolution (evocation) within our models of the cosmos and its history. Much of the agenda is to propose new directions for research in physics given a radically simpler metaphysics – see my previous summary here – lines of experimentation especially open to falsifiability. The summaries and conclusions are clear and positive for science. Scientists must resist their knee-jerk to run screaming from the metaphysical proposals.

Like Unger, Smolin also spends a good deal of time on the cosmological fallacies and the “problem of the meta-laws”. As I said previously I don’t see meta-laws as a problem per se. Clearly having introduced them, the task is to explain them, but that’s “problematic” only if you see them simply as laws at another level operating on the erstwhile “laws” – ie just a shift in the problem to another set of “laws” outside time and the cosmos – nothing gained explanatorily. Obviously meta-laws are not law-like as we know them; they need to be seen as different principles or forms of causal explanation. For me it’s their meta-ness not their law-ness that is no-brainer significant – recursive, meta upon meta upon … and orthogonal to … the things we generally think of as laws. Different animals altogether. No simple language can yet exist to do justice to their explanation – they’re novel as far as common sense physics is concerned. Anyway, time will tell.

The other pleasant surprise from Smolin is the very brief chapter 7 on the consequences of the new metaphysics for consciousness et al. Perceptions – qualia – are the most certain realities we know, and they’re given a proper place as moments within the real flow of cosmological time. Yes, time is real, so qualia, and consciousness, and free-will, and the creativity of genuine novelty can all be real too. Hallelujah. A much needed injection of common sense into so-called science of consciousness.

I’m going to have to investigate more of Smolin and how he fits with accepted “authority” within physics and the philosophy of science. Suggestions on further reading much appreciated.

Unger & Smolin is a recommended read for anyone interested enough to wade through the philosophical and scientific technicalities, and a compulsory read for any scientists bumping up against the gaps and mysteries in the standard models of accepted physics.

[Post Note : From Bryan Appleyard’s review :

It’s important because it is not just about physics …
It is about the way we live now
and the world view we have been sold as “scientific”.

Science is currently selling us a pup. And “scientific” in scare quotes – what I tend to brand as scientistic. Interesting, last time I commented on Appleyard.]

[Post Note : Related from Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post on why science is hard to believe (via Sabine Hossenfelder) :

Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else … For some [scientists], the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Scientists can be as PC as anyone else.]

[Post Note : Another physicist (Nobel-prize-winning) Brian Josephson I’ve been following, I see also published on “Law Without Law” (after Wheeler). Semantics more fundamental than the physical. Fascinating.]

[Post Note : Noted this A C Grayling piece on Smolin’s trouble with physics from 2007.]

Not in any technical sense incest, agreed. No sense of “genetic-in-breeding” in the specific conception, but nevertheless a little weird arrangement.

“Beautiful” if you’re a geneticist / biologist that Mary chose her brother to be the “biological” father of her “adoptive” child, as sperm donor to her marriage partner, specifically to have some genetic tie with the child. Neat solution to the wish, I’d agree.

But the father (brother) living with the biological and adoptive mother in the same family household as “Daddie”(?), and the idea of choosing a donor for their genetic content for a non-medical reason(?), are both worthy of ethical committee scrutiny as possible precedents. I’m uncomfortable with both. Being possible, doesn’t make it good. (The “love” is not in doubt, but the underlying issue here as in other means of “assisted conception” is whether parenthood is in any sense a “right” – sufficiently strong to push other ethical boundaries.)