Potterville...The New America

DocBrain just watched "It's a Wonderful Life". In it, we see the impact the life of George Bailey had on the people and community around him. What is worth noting is the depiction of how things would have been if he never was born. This vision of a less good world is actually like America is today.
In Bedford Falls, people of all types pulled together. We see white and black, rich and poor, living in a community where common decency, moral living, politeness, and respect are center stage.
In Potterville, we see the collapse of morality with a new freedom to enjoy debaucheries from girlie shows to loud and rancorous bars. The good and moral people are marginalized and diminished. Ernie has lost his wife and child to divorce. Nick is a skeptical and intolerant put-down artist. Even the policeman Bert seems harsher, shooting at George for punching him and running away, something he probably would not have done in a kinder and gentler Bedford Falls.
To DocBrain, Potterville seems more like America today than Bedford Falls.

Not only should every life matter, but decency can coexist with nonconformity. DocBrain believes that should be the new take home message from this movie classic.

They are the root cause of everything bad

What interesting stories people can weave! Here is a short (mutually exclusive) list of the most common groups that are blamed for all bad in the world by Expert Buts:

• Jews
• Men
• White men
• Arabs
• Islamists
• Black men (teens)
• Asians
• Catholics (aka Papists)
• French
• Women
• God
• The Devil

That an Expert But can make an argument in favor of any one cause is a sign of both ignorance and bias.

Another post from Expert But

DocBrain's father used to call his friend "Doctor But" because she would precede her medical opinions with the phrase "I'm no doctor, but..."

There is another word. Maven is a person who has more opinion than knowledge and who will gladly share, often without being asked, his wealth of weakly founded opinion. Somehow "Expert But" sounds kinder, and this is how DocBrain thinks of himself.

Where there is a lot of heat, there is not maximal light. So, whenever there is a debate, it is because of different priorities and different knowledge. Since you probably know why you hold your opinion, it is often more instructive to find out why other people hold their opinion. If a person shares their opinion with you, it is usually because they want something from you...either agreement that they are right, your following of their lead, or you to give them something (money, time, etc.). If a person is strong enough, they can just take it from you without explaining why they are right. If a person is undoubtedly right, your own conscience and judgement will lead you to give. So, whenever Expert But gives you something for nothing, remember that you are being asked for something. Be a good buyer and give it some time, research and thought before agreeing to something you may later regret.

Free Speech

When you speak, people learn about you. When you listen, you learn about other people. What you write or say communicates to others where your thoughts and passions are at any point in time.

No two people see the world exactly the same, nor should they. Through the interaction of people, we come to new ideas and new viewpoints.

Of course, there are some things that one should not be free to say. These include words that directly lead to harm of others, such as shouting "Fire!" in a movie theater, or stating something harmfully and knowingly false about a private person.

Are there others? Should there be some standards beyond the extreme? Lack of compassion or implying shortcomings of some groups is considered bad form, but this does not apply to other groups. Bigotry and racism, for example, is defined by some on the left as being applicable only if you are a group in power. Furthermore, some people believe that the lives of some people who go in harm's way for our sakes are sacred, not to be trivialized, such as police, fire and military. As mentioned in a prior post, we all want to question authority, to find our own way among the facts, to establish our own set of beliefs. Wending your way between the facts and feelings can lead to enlightenment. But, always seek common ground if you want your ideas to have the impact you believe they deserve.

Denialism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

Iran has decided to host a conference on the Holocaust, as if a conference can decide that it did not occur. As expressed in the wikipedia article, denialism is a form of propaganda, an attempt to put across a view for a specific purpose.

When it comes to massacre of people for their religious beliefs, there can be no reductio ad absurdum, or reduction to the absurd. So, the murder of 6 people for their religion is no less heinous than the murder of 6 million. Any attempt to deny the Holocaust can only be based on the belief that no Jews were murdered in Europe for their religious beliefs. This would require proof of the negative, much in the same way that true believers in God or Allah will not give up their belief unless there is incontravertible proof of the absence of a deity.

To equate a denialist with a true scientific scholar misses the point of science, which is not to question facts, but to expand on known facts to obtain deeper and broader knowledge. A denialist is more of a contrarian and a rhetorist, a debater or a inquisitor, a seeker of nefarious alternative explanations for the obvious, more a spinner of webs of deceit than a lens of clarity and focus.

One could credibly argue that the sun circles the earth, not vice versa, and dismiss all science that points in the contrary as conjecture, misinterpretation of the data, oversimplification of observations, conspiracy to deny and suppress the truth, or the existential belief that our senses may say the earth circles the sun but our senses do not tell us as it really is, only a projection of reality in our mind. These are interesting sophomoric musings, but not of much interest or importance in reality.

That the Holocaust really happened can never be known for certain, any more than whether or not Mt.St. Helens erupted in the recent past or whether or not Ronald Reagan ever existed. All things from the past cannot be witnessed in real time, only viewed through the eyes of those who were there or only examined through the images and other records left behind. Those of us who lost relatives in the Holocaust or know survivors who tell harrowing tales of mass graves and slaughter believe it happened as we believe in the veracity of what we have been told and in the records. To the denialist, facts and artifacts can be dismissed as opinions and fakes, and opinions accepted as facts.

The ability of denialists to gain center stage in public discourse is another sign of the dumbing down of the world. The game of the denialist has been well known for centuries. Actors and political poseurs have been talking this talk for some time. It is about time for us to stop being suckers and marks for this very obvious false science.

If I were more eloquent...

No one likes a know-it-all. This is for several reasons.

• Even if we know everything about a topic, knowledge has a way of changing as time moves on. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow.
• The devil is in the details. When you really drill down into almost any topic, you come to the point of uncertainty.
• If the know-it-all says what we already believe (or want to believe), we will trust, if not, we will doubt. Either way, we are no further ahead in knowledge.
• We all have a little bit of the scientist within us...the desire to question, to not accept authority or standard beliefs. This spirit of experimentation is the force that, if not balanced with reason, can lead to tragedy, most frequently seen it teens. Authorities only maintain power over us by the use of threat and force. Reward is the main motivator for questioning and experimentation.
• As discussed previously, there are four elements of truth: the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and only the relevent truth. Rarely will you get all 4 elements from the know-it-all.

Many things in this world are based almost entirely upon authority. This is because:

• Some things cannot be tested. What passes for science in these fields is observation, documentation, and generalization. This is political science, for example. It is also seen in medicine as case reports and observations that may, or may not, be generalized. Politics and religion are the most common places where testing is not possible. However, observations can lead to some interesting conclusions. For example, communism and socialism seem to have no long term success as models for governments, defining success as economic prosperity and intellectual freedom.
• Some things have not been tested. For example, when a new curriculum is started in a public school, it often has not been tested in the classical sense of valid and reliable outcome measurement.
• Some things have not been tested rigorously. This is often seen in medicine where data evolves over time as questions become deeper.

One of the hard facts of life is becoming a cog, a piece moved by fear of the machine of authority, rolling along to prevent from being rolled over. As individuality is squashed by the authoritarian power of bureaucracies, public and private, we all need a place to let out our primal screams, to release our own questioning and experimentation, to express ourselves as the individuals we are.

If you sound like a good person...

Peace and love...if you can express this in your opinion, how can you be wrong?

Here are some examples.

People are basically good. If we just did away with guns, we would have peace.

• Even the Bible refers to elimination of non-gunpowder related weapons (swords and spears for those who have forgotten).
• Laws are enforced by ... well, force. So, no force, no law. Or perhaps, if only the government had force... Attention liberals: remember Kent State?
• Weapons are a way of equalizing power among unequals. So, without weapons it becomes truly survival of the fittest. The charm of Conan the Barbarian was that a man so powerful fought for those who couldn't fight for themselves. The horror of Hitler was that he used his power to destroy the weak. In modern times, a small group of people with a suitcase nuke can bring the largest and most powerful countries to their knees...bad if the country espouses good values, but it could go the other way someday.
• Generalizations are basically generalizations...not always true, no matter how good it sounds.
• One true solution is to have people (and countries) become more connected with each other.
• The other component is to somehow alter human drives to reduce human violent passions. This is within the power of science but the ultimate in reduction in human freedom, since all passions have a common thread.

The war in Iraq was wrong.

• DocBrain has never heard this expressed as "Saddam Hussein is a good man, wonderful role model and a great leader. Why should we topple this kind and gentle soul?"
• DocBrain usually hears "They aren't our problem." "They are not worth losing even one American life." "Going there makes us look like an aggressor." "They haven't hurt us. They aren't part of the war on terror."
• Now, DocBrain hears "Look at how bad things are going there. These people are not ready for freedom. We have wasted American lives and wealth to free people who do not want to be free." "They are now free to kill each other. How unkind of us!"
• DocBrain believes that this trip led by GWB into the idealism of spreading the gospel of life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness and equality does show something. If this doesn't work abroad, how can we say that it works here? If we are willing to give up on it in Iraq (because we need more troops to enforce it), what does that say about our own aims here? We are as we think. Perhaps these aims are not part of human nature. Perhaps we need an armed, vigilant populace to prevent this from slipping away from us here? Perhaps, this combination of goals may be attained but not preserved? Surely, there are major conflicts between liberty and equality, property and life. In Iraq, we see groups choosing liberty and property and eschewing equality and life. They are free to take property, kill their enemies and to spit on those they feel are not their equals, as defined by their belief systems. It is not a large leap to see those entrenched in the welfare state as being opposed to the freedom of the employed to reduce their tax burden and the use of government power to make us all follow some measure of bureaucratic, nonsensical mediocre equality standard.