Should dog names be regulated by big government? Are libertarians hijacking skepticism?
A couple of weeks ago I was eating in a restaurant when I encountered something that utterly horrified me.
Now if you have a weak stomach, don't worry. It's wasn't a rat, some spoiled meat, or a curly hair in my soup. Nor was it the ridiculous prices on this particular establishment's menu. Nay, what shocked and disgusted me was that a rich lady who was eating there called her dog 'Petunia'.
Ok, perhaps that statement makes unjustified assumptions. Let's be good skeptics, and unpack it a bit. How did I know this lady was rich? Well, I suppose that I can't for sure. However the SUV that was parked beside the restaurant's patio, the one that 'Petunia' (a standard poodle) was incessantly barking from, looked very, very expensive. And how did I know that 'Petunia' wasn't just a... er... pet name? Like maybe the dog was really called Ralph or something and this woman was just calling it 'Petunia' in the same way my Mom used to call me 'Bunkie'?* Possible, but doubtful. See, Mrs. Richey McDollarpants was pretty pissed at her florally named canine, as evidenced by the statement that followed.
"Hey, PETUNIA!!! SHUT UP!!!"
And then after that, a bunch of money fell out of her bum.
I had my evidence, so I set forth to share my thoughts with social media peeps.** What did I say, you wonder? Well, apparently it was a sentiment controversial enough to illicit the ire of conservatives everywhere. I'll paste the observation I made, both on Twitter and Facebook, the one that got me into endless heaps of trouble, below.
"Saw a rich lady today who had named her dog 'Petunia'. For that crime alone I believe we should rise up & defeat the upper class."
Alright, it was obviously a joke, and by claiming that it got me into trouble with "conservatives everywhere", I'm doing a bit of self-indulgent make-pretend. You have to be well known to be controversial, so it's no mystery that the angry mobs never came. In fact, only one of my social media contacts proclaimed her distaste for the comment, so perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the joke pissed off "conservative onlyonewhere", or something like that. Yet the passion behind this person's attack in many ways made up for the lack of numbers.
Enter "Juliana", (a pseudonym I've created to protect her identity from any mutual friends we share, even after me having blocked her on Facebook.) She's a former TV reporter who sees everything in the black and white terms of partisan politics. I hid her from my Facebook feed a long time ago because she filled it with ranting conservative rhetoric thrice daily; and while she has every right to do so, I couldn't help but to find it tedious. Juliana's argument against my status was essentially as follows. (Fair warning, I'm abridging and editing her remarks to get her point across efficiently. Accuse away.)
"Sorry, Brad... But as past and/or current employees of the CBC, you pretty much *are* the upper class."
(I've freelanced on occasion for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's nationally funded broadcaster. My wife works there as well.)
"If you want to discuss politics honestly, then, fine. If, on the other hand, you want to talk about 'rising up', shitting on privileged people, starting a riot, etc... Well? Then maybe you should get honest, and be in a place where you aren't actively supporting the state broadcaster that pays you so far more handsomely in salaries, benefits, perqs, child care, etc... then the rest of your 'Che-inspired' gang. Just a thought.If you think them inappropriate or awkward, then please... just try to picture how offensive your juvenile 'Kill the Rich' observations come off when you and your family already collect dollars paid for by the rest of the country. Yeah, it makes your cheesy poverty mewl seem a bit weak."
Wow.
The thing is, I wasn't looking to discuss politics honestly, nor was I looking to discuss them at all. It was a joke designed to make fun of any person who would name their dog Petunia, not a manifesto with which I hoped to inspire the eradication of wealthy people. While I'm certainly not a conservative myself, and don't hide that information, you'd be hard pressed to claim that I spend a lot of time actively advocating for any political doctrine. Had I come across a poor person that same day who had named his pit-bull "Throbbingcock", I might have instead tweeted a humourous quip about the impoverished.
I'm terrible at naming my logical fallacies, but I'd call Juliana's assertion that doing work for any governmental agency necessarily means that you're undeservedly wealthy is a non sequitur. Yet in any case, I chose not to have that discussion with her. (But quickly, for the record: since the company I own and operate does work all over for a variety of clients, I can say that that the CBC pays me the least of all of them) After explaining that my statement was obviously a joke, I replied further:
"I don't live in a world where every single solitary idea is divided into opposing political ideologies. I obviously have some personal opinions about such notions, but I find many, MANY other ideas far more interesting. I understand you like discussing these ideas at length, and you should do so. But not on my wall please."
When that was ignored I started getting snippy.
"Obsession with politics is not the path to happiness. Do yoga."
After multiple requests, and Juliana's repeated assertions of the same ideologically fueled points, I blocked her from contacting me on Facebook. Perhaps that seems rash, but it was a long time coming, based on previous discussions. In any case, the conversation didn't stop there. Juliana then contacted me via e-mail and sent perhaps a half dozen incredibly personal and insulting attacks; calling me everything from "sloth"♠ to "stupid". It also got much worse than that.
Even though she got rather nasty, to which I replied with irreverent quips as seen above, the discussion eventually became amicable again, and we 'parted' on good terms. In any case however, I know what some of you are saying. "Juliana just went after you with the political opinions she has every right to. Why can't you just defend your position instead of sending her packing? Are you afraid that you can't hold up in a real political debate?"
Well, that's the crux of this article. Could I have countered Juliana's talking points with my own, more liberal talking points? Certainly. Could I have 'defeated' her in a debate on politics? Certainly not. That's because both her argument, and whatever my refutal of that argument might be, would essentially boil down to a question of political values. Values are subjective♠♠, and while I'm not saying they can't be examined or debated, the differences between people's values are simply wholly uninteresting to me. The fact that there's no resolution to be had, no consensus to be reached, puts politics I think into a place where only those who truly admire the sounds of their own voices care to go. Debates about different political values never make new ground, almost always turn nasty, and to my mind, are unvaryingly boring.
Juliana feels that working for a publicly funded, or at least taxpayer subsidized, broadcasting agency means that you're a drain on society. Firemen are also a drain on tax dollars, and yet are universally accepted as a necessary one. It's a value judgment in both cases, whether or not you believe more or fewer services should be socialized. What it's not, at least in my opinion, is an interesting discussion. Certainly not interesting enough that I should be 'required' to defend my beliefs on the subject every time a crazy woman calls them into question.
There's a well known libertarian wing within the skeptical movement, populated by folks like magician Penn Jillette and science historian Michael Shermer, which would collectively disagree with me. Libertarianism seeks to maximize individual freedom, and minimize government involvement; in many ways like run-of-the-mill conservative thinking, but with nothing stopping them from making whoopee before they're married. A libertarian might argue that these ideas fall naturally out of skepticism; that critical thinking begets the throwing out of old ideas, whether they be scientific, religious, economic, or political in nature. In Penn Jillette's recent opinion piece for CNN, entitled "I don't know, so I'm an atheist libertarian", he goes from talking about the skeptical reasons for rejecting belief in gods, to the rejection of government, seemingly in one step. The man is a magician, after all.
"What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist -- I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe. /.../ I'm not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I'm not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I'll wait for real evidence and then I'll believe. /.../ I sure don't know what to do about an AA+ rating and if we should live beyond our means and about compromise and sacrifice. I have no idea."
There's an implication there that rejecting government programs and spending is the rejection of a belief system, but in fact it's merely the acceptance of another. It is not necessarily a neutral or reductive act to remove functions of government, because doing so is a proactive instrument of change. (And it's not like it's one that's never been tried.) While I've heard libertarians demand evidence to support the social programs that many governments maintain, I've never heard them produce the evidence to support tearing them down. If the argument is simply that government costs money so the economy can only thrive if we spend less of it, I worry that Jillette falls prey to overly-simplistic thinking about economics. Many models of economics by people actually learned in the field say that things aren't so simple, and insisting otherwise seems to me analogous to those who reject quantum theory because it doesn't 'feel' right.
But what do I know? Like Penn Jillette, and pretty much everyone else on the planet, I don't understand economics. And I don't wish to be the Juliana to whichever arguments he'd like to make. What I would like however is to see him stop equating skepticism with his ideological beliefs. The libertarians amongst the skeptical movement may make some very good arguments about how governments should be run, but they're not skeptical arguments. Like with any set of political opinions they are simply a statement of values, no matter how many words like logic, rationality, or skepticism they hide amongst.
I'm interested in science, and skepticism helps me tell the good science from the bad. It helps us tell the difference between real phenomenon that exist in nature, and those that we simply create, intentionally or not, out of whole cloth. The fact that a discipline can do that, and the truths that it reveals, is endlessly fascinating to me.
What skepticism cannot do however is help us decide which human values are more important than others. One simply does not follow the other, another non sequitur. Libertarianism therefore makes the message of critical thinking needlessly messy and impure, a tough bit of baggage for a message already so alien to the general public.
I write this entire article, overlong and plodding as it is, to make this simple point. My personal political beliefs, my own system of values, are dear to me. Yet I'm under no delusion that they're interesting to anyone else, or that others could be convinced to share them. By identifying the difference between the objectively observable and the subjectively experienced, we get some sense about which subjects are worth studying, and which can only be fought over.
I don't want to fight with you Juliana, especially about things that don't change. There's too much interesting shit in this world to learn about before I die, and I'd like to look at as much of it as possible.
In the meantime however, I may make a few jokes. Deal with it.
*Never let it be said that I will not suffer embarrassment for the sake of my readers.
**Because, like, that's what I do
♠Make no bones about it, We're talking fat jokes here.
♠♠Although I don't completely reject Sam Harris's assertions in "The Moral Landscape", a book I've not read, but heard discussed at length by Harris himself.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BradBlogspeed/~3/Ns7Q6ChFEhI/on-not-giving-a-sht-about-politics
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