Incredulous

Like most small-bore, pretentious men, he shows the tendency to strike an emotional attitude and then, using that prejudice as a base, draw vast, unreasonable, philosophical conclusions.

— John D. MacDonald

The more closed the mind, the more open the mouth.

I encountered this phenomenon on Facebook recently. 

A philosopher posted an op-ed he'd published in Newsweek that argued for adding philosophy to elementary school curriculums.

Philosophy will improve kids' ability to think critically, he promised. 

"Absolutely not," one comment said. "The ability to think critically is not philosophy. Philosophy is not meant for everyone and is totally not needed for most."

No evidence. No source. Just bluster.

An argument like the one offered in the comment is known among philosophers as an argument from incredulity. It holds:

I don't know a thing to be true;
therefore, it must be false.

Arguments from incredulity are moronic, but we hear them all the time:

• "Vaccines can't be safe. Nobody should get one."
  
  
• “Humans could not have evolved from a single cell. Darwin is bunk."
  
  
• "No one would work if the government paid him not to. Socialism is wrong."
  
  
• "Immigrants shouldn't be allowed here. They're not like Americans."
  
  
• "It's always cold here in North Dakota. Global warming is bullshit."

• "Philosophy is not meant for everyone and is totally not needed for most." 

People prone to arguments from incredulity can't imagine that many true things are unimaginable. (Take, for example, that brick walls aren't really solid; that we're moving through space at 1.3 million miles an hour; or that matter is essentially mental. 

Our convictions, however strong, don't make a statement false. 

Only buffoons believe they do.

Condemnant quo non intellegunt, as the Romans said.

"They condemn that which they do not understand."

Bad Marketer, No Cookies for You!

What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself?

— George Orwell

Since Apple, Amazon and Facebook's recent admissions to eavesdropping, I interject blather into my phone calls, so marketers waste money targeting me.

For no earthly reason, I drop random nouns like "Kumquat," "Flag Day," "Jeggings," "Aardvark," and "PT-73."

As Orwell said, when the lunatic is more intelligent, what can you do?

In 2021 alone, digital marketers will spend over $455 billion on ads. With financial clout like that, we're powerless to stop them from targeting us.

Our phone calls are likely to become the primary tool they'll use in the future, because today's leading tool—cookies—are going the way of the dodo.

Data-privacy nudniks are taking cookies away, denying marketers the ability to track you on line. (Ironically, socialists in the EU are to blame.) 

Apple's Safari already blocks cookies by default. Mozilla's Firefox does so as well. Google's Chrome will begin to do so in 2023.

Bad marketer, no cookies for you!

But ubiquitous, AI-powered surveillance won't end simply because cookies go away.

 

Cookie-less, marketers will of necessity turn to phone calls for clues to our desires. 

Phone calls will provide our fingerprints.

There is, of course, a high road marketers could take to target you. 

It's called "consent management" (sounds like something an overworked lecher does.)

No—trust me—marketers will take the low road; they always do.

And Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google will be delighted to collect the tolls.

Web of Lies

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

— James Randi

Goebbels Didn’t Say It may be the best blog ever. 

Nearly a decade old, Goebbels Didn't Say It is an effort by two professors to explode myths and "put a small dent in the amount of nonsense on the Internet."

The professors have chosen to call BS on the effusion of fake quotes attributed to Hitler's chief propagandist.

"We want to reduce the incidence of a fabricated quotation by Joseph Goebbels," the professors say.

Demanding exactitude on behalf of a liar is an odd mission, but a worthy one, nonetheless.

My hat's off to these two tireless debunkers, saboteurs at loose in the falsehood factory.

The Elephant in the Room

When we don't tell the truth, and others don't tell us the truth, we can't deal with matters from a basis in reality.

— Jack Canfield

A cheerleader for the event industry recently begged organizers to avoid any mention of what's foremost on exhibitors' minds: attendance.

In an industry that's touted—and inflated—attendance numbers for 70 years, that suggestion isn't merely ironic; it's absurd.

But, as writer Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

When you're the one who's in charge of the circus, there's little sense in denying the elephant in the room.

Exhibitors aren't that stupid.

Whigs One, Tories Nothing

Sapere aude (Dare to know).

— Horace

Yesterday marked a big win for the Whigs.

Virginia’s Supreme Court ruled that the governor can remove the Robert E. Lee Memorial from Richmond's Monument Avenue.

In a seven to zero decision, the court cited testimony from historians who said the statue memorializes nothing but the Jim Crow South, a time and place anathema to the majority of Americans today.

"Values change and public policy changes too," the court concluded.

The 60-foot high colossus will be removed from its pedestal and trucked to a warehouse, according to the governor's office.

Throughout English history, the Whigs have stood for dissent (even the Americans who rebelled against the crown in 1775 were called Whigs).

The Tories, on the other hand, have stood for the natural order (the monarchy and aristocracy).

Yesterday, the Whigs won.

I'm no Tory, but when I read the breaking news about the Virginia Supreme Court's decision (on Facebook), I was saddened—saddened to learn that this particular monument would disappear from its place in public.

I read a slew of the Facebookers' comments below the news story (more than 250 of them) and noticed that the overwhelming majority were gleeful about the court's decision and echoed the historians' testimony.

Silly me, I joined in, expressing my sadness about the decision and saying that the monument shouldn't be erased, but allowed to stand as a cultural reminder of America's troubled past.

My comments unleashed a barrage of repudiations. The sameness of the angry comments was striking. Almost all were misinformed. And almost all were circular arguments that sounded like this:

Everything Southerners ever did was a form of Black suppression. Southerners erected the memorial; therefore, the memorial is a form of Black suppression.

I tried to counter-argue—to no avail—that the Robert E. Lee Memorial was unique among all the Confederate monuments, and a special case worth preserving in situ:

The Lee Memorial was erected in 1890. Lumping it in with all the rest of the Confederate monuments built by White Supremacists in the 20th century disregards its unique nature. Confederate veterans paid for it—raising $52 thousand ($1.5 million in today's money)—not to intimidate Blacks, but because they idolized Lee for his self-sacrificing conduct during the war. At its dedication, the speaker said, "Let this monument, then, teach to generations yet unborn these lessons of his life! Let it stand, not as a record of civil strife, but as a perpetual protest against whatever is low and sordid in our public and private objects."

But—no more than you can fight city hall—you can't argue with an angry Whig mob (just ask George III). It will only respond with Whiggishness.

Whiggishness insists that history represents unfolding progress—progress toward perfect equality, the end of hierarchies, and the triumph of liberal democracy.

Whigs believed this in the 19th century, as did Hegel and Marx.

Whiggishness is also a form of presentism, a foolishness known to historians as the nunc pro tunc (now for then) fallacy.

Presentism projects our current values and ideas onto the past, condemning people who preceded us for not sharing those values and ideas.

Presentism, for example, condemns Union physicians for not knowing germs spread diseases (they thought gases did) and Confederate veterans for idolizing Robert E. Lee (they weren't woke to the fact that, in defending the Confederacy, he was defending slavery).

I'd love to believe Whiggishness were true; but I cannot. History is full of dead ends, mistaken beliefs, failed theories, and lost causes.

It's why I hate to see history—and this particular memorial—erased. 

Sapere aude.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 8, 2021: The statue of Lee was removed today.