Deception by Dover School Board President Alan Bonsell

This trial just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The board members who said they had no idea who bought the copies of Of Pandas and People have been shown to be liars on this and other issues. William Buckingham went in front of his church and solicited donations for the books, collected them personally, wrote a personal check (with a memo saying "for Pandas and People books") and gave it to board president Alan Bonsell, who gave it to his father to purchase the books and make the donation. Bonsell ended up receiving some angry questioning directly from the judge. Mike Argento of the York Daily Record has a funny column on this examination.

The Parable of the Roommate

This little parable/thought experiment was inspired by Steve’s comment in the Stirner birthday message, where he advocates for agnosticism over either theism or atheism.

Imagine yourself in the following scenario:

You’ve just returned home from a day at work. While you set your keys on the kitchen counter and remove your coat you can hear the familiar voices of your roommate and her/his S.O. in the other room.

You start to wonder about what you might make yourself for dinner when suddenly you are startled by a loud gunshot, followed by what sounds like a body falling to the floor. Rather than getting the hell out of there you somewhat foolishly run to the other room to see what happened. Once there, you see your roommate standing there, arm outstretched, holding a still-smoking pistol pointed at what is now, apparently, a corpse.

Your roommate looks at you and says “Santa Claus did it.”

Do you:

a) Sincerely believe that your roommate is telling the actual truth?
b) Decide that, because you didn’t actually see your roommate fire the gun, you just can’t know one way or another whether Santa did it?
c) Consider your roommate a murderer, and the claim to be the rationalization of a mind that has snapped?

If my point isn’t glaringly obvious, I think that the Christian/Muslim/Jew/whatever ought to take position A, since, according to most religious beliefs, faith is a virtue. The agnostic ought to take position B, because certain knowledge about anything is denied us. That leaves C, the only rational, reasonable, explanation, for the skeptics/atheists.

If you’re not a skeptical atheist, but you still chose option C above, well, then I applaud you for being reasonable. But I think you need to explain why you choose the analogous A or B when it comes to the equally dubious claim that there is a God.

Texas Pastor Electrocuted During Baptism

"A pastor performing a baptism was electrocuted inside his church Sunday morning after adjusting a nearby microphone while standing in water, a church employee said."

Rev. Kyle Lake of University Baptist Church was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital; the woman being baptised "was not seriously injured." More on Yahoo News, via Associated Press.

The story says that apparently the woman being baptised had not yet stepped into the water. No word on whether she will proceed with another pastor or church, or take it as a sign not to join this particular sect.

Consistent Kookery

You've got to hand it to the Amish. At least they are consistent, unlike the vast majority of the IDiots out there who poo poo the notions of evolution while at the same time readily partaking in its fruits--medicine that would be impossible were it not for our understanding of germs and genetics.

But not the Amish, who let their kids get polio rather than question "The Word." I'm not sure what you'd call them, but you can't call 'em hypocrites.

Deception by Dover Defendant William Buckingham

Dover Area School Board member William Buckingham gave testimony in the trial, contradicting his sworn depositions on a number of points. First, he had been quoted numerous times as calling for creationism to be taught in schools to balance out evolution, then denied it in deposition. On the stand, he admitted it, and that his statement in his sworn deposition was false. Second, he had claimed in deposition that he had no idea who purchased the 60 copies of Of Pandas and People which were donated to the school. On the stand, he admitted that he was the one who asked for donations in church and wrote the check to Donald Bonsall have the books purchased.

This is the same guy who stood up at a school board meeting and said, "Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

Way to be a model of moral behavior, Bill!

Looks like Dover Area School Board member Heather Geesey has also contradicted her deposition statements. (More on Geesey at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Yet more on peer review of Michael Behe's book

Ed Brayton tracked down and got comments from the other two known reviewers of Behe's Darwin's Black Box, Robert Shapiro and K. John Morrow. Shapiro reviewed the origins of life aspect (his area of expertise), and though he disagreed with Behe's conclusions, thought it was the best argument from design he'd seen. Morrow, on the other hand, thought the book was poor and disingenuous, and believes that his review led an earlier publisher to reject it.

Ed's commentary at Dispatches from the Culture Wars includes the text of an email from Morrow about the book, along with the text of reviewer comments from biochemist Russell Doolittle. Both are quite damning.

Institutional Inertia

HBO’s The Wire is an absolutely fantastic show. Written by Ed Burns, a former policeman, the show is, on one level, about a Baltimore homicide detective’s monomaniacal pursuit of the leaders of a heroin cartel. On another level, the show is an exploration of how institutions impact the choices available to the individuals who make them up. Albert Jay Nock, in his essay Anarchist’s Progress, addressed this topic brilliantly. The message of both Burns and Nock is that people are often forced by circumstance (usually one contrived by the institutions they are a part of) to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do (of course, Max Stirner would justifiably declare these people to be "possessed by spooks").

Unfortunately this phenomenon extends beyond the bureaucratic hell that a city government must be. It seems it exists even in what I would imagine would be the least likely of all places for it to be: libertarian think tanks. I personally know several Cato staffers, for example, who are staunch anarchists, and yet, apparently from a need for Cato to appear “inside the beltway,” they often put out some seriously milquetoast policy recommendations.

Arizona’s Goldwater Institute, also staffed by a few anarchistas, provides another example. In private conversations with Vicky Murray, she has told me that she thinks school and state should be entirely separate. Yet, in her capacity as Goldwater’s Director of Educational Opportunity, she writes articles like this and this. It is understandable that Goldwater would want to pander to their financial base, which consists mostly of traditional conservatives, but it’s disappointing, nonetheless. Does taking a half-assed approach really "defend liberty"? (I'm actually not sure what, if anything, defends liberty nowadays. I am more and more convinced that Stirner is right when he says that all freedom is self liberation and must be taken.)

All of these issues were really brought into stark relief for me by the article they published today, which complains about Arizona’s salary grid for teachers. The article’s author, John Wenders, points to a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, where they “began tying teacher bonuses to students’ Stanford Achievement Test results. In just one year, overall student achievement increased 17 percent, and teachers received bonuses up to $8,600.”

I can’t believe that the article’s author, an economics professor, cites this literally incredible statistic so unquestioningly. As someone versed in economic theory, Professor Wenders should know better than most that incentives matter. I submit that the amazing 17 percent increase was probably achieved via some combination of cheating (and I specifically mean teacher cheating, not student), “teaching to the test”, statistical anomaly, and perhaps a small amount of legitimately better teaching.

I think that, in publishing this article, Goldwater does a disservice to themselves and the cause of liberty. Unfortunately, the article that should have been written, and the article that I can only hope Vicky Murray probably wanted to write – that schools should be entirely private and then the salaries of the teachers would suddenly no longer be a political hot-button – is one that we’re likely never to see. I think that’s a shame.

Defending Against Botnets

I'll be speaking next week at Arizona State University's "Computer Security Awareness Week" on the above topic. My talk is on Wednesday, November 2 at 11 a.m. at the Polytechnic Campus in Union Ballroom C, and will be followed by Erik Graham of General Dynamics speaking on Wireless Security. I've been told to be as technically detailed as I like, though I think this is a problem which is in greater need of having its economic aspects addressed, in order to drive the implementation of the existing technical solutions. Bruce Schneier has suggested that ISPs need to be held liable for malicious traffic they originate; I'd amend that to say that they should be held liable to the extent there are commercially reasonable measures to prevent, detect, and respond to such traffic and they don't do it. I agree with Schneier that the ISPs whose end users have compromised machines are in the best position to address the problems those compromised machines create--along with the manufacturers of the operating systems they run.

I Am Speechless

Here it is, less than eight hours into Max's 199th and I'm already crowding it out. I'm sure Max doesn't mind.

If this blog had categories then this item would be filed in "WTF?"

I was pre-pubescent when Star Trek I came out, so I guess I was oblivious to the male camel toe fashion trend that seems to have been in full swing (if you'll pardon the pun) at the time.

That shocking image is courtesy the ladies over at Look At His Butt!, who swear that, as you might have hesitatingly concluded, that is a wet spot that Spock is sporting.

Happy 199th, Max!

What distinguishes a religious belief from, well, a non­-religious belief?

Is it belief in a god or gods? Belief in the super-natural? It seems to be something more than these things.

Aside from the usual suspects, examples of "religions" having a more secular flavor are legion. It isn't just the Christians who are screaming "The end is Nigh!" Witness those who believe in an impending technological singularity. Or those who think future technologies will be able to give us the naturalist's equivalent of an afterlife. Or those who think we're about to run out of oil. Or that our carbon emissions are causing global warming (for why I think that's bullshit, go here). Or that our very existence is causing mass extinctions (okay, maybe that one is supported by the evidence - just maybe).

And those are just the millennialists and chicken littles (and only a sample, at that)! Other "secular" beliefs that I think fall under the "religious" umbrella include SETI, Communism, Objectivism, natural rights theory...

There must be something deep in the human psyche that compels us to believe that we - meaning "we" as a species, or "we" as people living here, now - are somehow special, somehow chosen; that we have meaning; that we have import or intrinsic value, for those would appear to be some of the characteristics of the beliefs I mentioned. Another - perhaps more important - characteristic is that these beliefs are (generally) couched in terms that are not falsifiable, and hence rest ultimately on the basis of faith.

Given this apparently fundamental need to believe (i.e., "have faith") in something, it's not surprising that Max Stirner, born Johann Caspar Schmidt on October 25th, 1806, in Bayreuth, Germany, is all but forgotten.

A worthy introduction to Stirner and his thought is well beyond the scope of what I can present here. Wikipedia has a decent introductory essay about him, along with an excellent set of links to further reading (this one in particular I like!), and Svein Olav Nyberg's pages are comprehensive and indispensable.

For even more depth, I recommend as a starting point that you read the book Individuality and the Social Organism. Follow that link and you'll no doubt see my review of it, as well as my Listmania List of other Stirner-related books.

I will save a longer discussion of Stirner's ideas and influence for a later date (After all, I will need something new to say on his bicentennial) and confine myself in this post to touching on just one reason I think he is worth retrieving from the dustbin of history: his attack on "religious" thinking of all stripes.

Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons you. You have a fixed idea!

With this thought, Stirner begins his attack upon an idea proposed by his friend and contemporary, Feuerbach, in his book The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach's thesis was that all of the Christian notions of the "divine" rightfully belonged in the concept of Man. Stirner's counter (and, as it turned out, death-blow) was that this was simply a change of masters, and he would have none of it.

History seeks for man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious essence, as the divine, first as God, then as man (humanity, humaneness, and mankind), he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique one [einzige].

Stirner cautioned that such an abstraction of "essences" was identical to religion, in spite of Feuerbach's attempt to eliminate God from the equation.

With the strength of despair Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost dispair, a clutch for life or death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and hungering for the other world?

So, Stirner was interested in freeing himself from all instances of dogmatic (i.e., religious) belief, and his book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum can be seen as an exploration and casting off of these "fixed ideas," or "spooks," as he called them, one by one.

Whether a poor fool of the insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is God the Father, Emperor of Japan, the Holy Spirit, or whatnot, or whether a citizen in comfortable circumstances conceives that it is his mission to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a loyal citizen, a virtuous man - both these are one and the same "fixed idea".

...

When I have degraded [the fixed idea] to a spook and its control over me to a cranky notion, then it is to be looked upon as having lost its sacredness, its holiness, its divinity, and then I use it, as one uses nature at pleasure without scruple.

...

Here would be the place to pass the haunting spirits in review... Sacred above all is the "Holy Spirit", sacred the truth, sacred are right, law, a good cause, majesty, marriage, the common good, order, the fatherland, and so on.

Stirner's message is ultimately one of profound empowerment and self-liberation, in spite of the charge of some that it is the pinnacle of "estrangement," "desolation," and "nihilism." Admittedly, it is few indeed who are willing to follow Stirner all the way along his path. What Stirner does, though, like all skeptics worth their mettle do, is make you fight hard for the spooks you want to keep. For some, I guess, the belief in the Easter bunny is too precious a thing to give up.