Plus ca change

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Ruth Richardson was not my favourite politician. But to be fair, she stood for something. Once she'd gone, greyness descended over much of Jim Bolger's ministry. Philosophical schizophrenia was best handled by doing little. Despite Jenny Shipley's more vigorous interlude, modern National still confronts this ideological illness. It believes in free enterprise and growth, but passed many conflicting messages before last week's tax package. There's a raft of private initiatives in health, education and welfare that could provide humane choices for people, supplement the public system, lift burdens off taxpayers, and stimulate growth. Some options such as a clearly-focused review of public school syllabuses and teaching standards could enthuse many anxious parents, and cost little. But Bill English, Roger Sowry, Nick Smith and Murray McCully contrive to sound as though they are either attacking this Labour-led government from the left, or want simply to catch it preaching one thing, while doing another. Since the latter happens so often, it's no novelty to hear about it. Extra spending isn't what this country needs, and smart-alecky tactics hold little appeal.



Elsewhere in the world, conservatives have done best in modern times when identified with a clear brand. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl enjoyed long spells in office by aggressively putting top of their agendas growth, and the policies to ensure it. Lesser lights like John Howard and Canada's Jean Chretien have turned their predictable styles into vote winners. They have reduced debt, reformed welfare, and promoted enduring family values. Bumbling around with a sop here, and a concession there, never works, as Labour found with Bill Rowling between 1975-83.


Yes, Helen Clark is a formidable foe. A superb political trapeze artist, she bemuses her opponents. But her government is exposed on many fronts. It likes the poor so much its policies create more of them. It is ridiculously politically correct and makes bad appointments. Such silliness would be gleefully exploited by red-blooded conservatives elsewhere. While it's true that some cloyingly sycophantic journalists give Labour an armchair ride, that would change in a trice if National stopped being a "me too" party. Despite some recent stumbles by Labour, it looks as though another defeat must occur before National sets any credible agenda for the Twenty-first century.

Know who wrote that? Ex Sunday Star Times commentator Dr Michael Bassett, and what is most depressing, he wrote this around the 17th April 2002. Before Don Brash took National's helm in October 2003. Before Don Brash was Bill English, who led National to it's worst election defeat (21%) a few weeks after that column. Dr Bassett had this to say after the 2002 election...

The attempts by Bill English and his "brat pack" to refill the ranks by preaching family values and an alternative version of Labour's message would be a tough task under any electoral system; under MMP it was a suicide note. Any National leader will always be a less convincing centraliser than someone like Helen Clark, to whom it comes naturally. Labour gets away with its policies because its voters are less economically literate than National's, and equate state spending with growth. But big government is a less convincing creed to National's target group. They are marginally better educated on average, and certainly more entrepreneurial. When they hear Bill English preaching more spending on education and health as he did throughout this campaign, they instinctively clutch their wallets, knowing they'll have to put more in the collection plate.


In effect, National's failure to brand itself with something exclusively theirs led voters to seek alternatives. Why did English persist in sounding like a down-market Labourite throughout the campaign? Why, when he had the nation's eyes upon him during the televised leaders' debates, did he choose meaningless slogans over substance? In last Thursday's final debate, the former Treasurer was given a golden opportunity to outline the steps he would take to arrest our economic slowdown. He dodged the gift question and began talking about air points! Words flowed out of him. Most added up to nothing: "The best way to predict the future is to make it happen!"; "Stand up for what you believe in!"; "We are ambitious for New Zealand!" etc etc. When the time available to press home one's policies is so limited, a leader must produce memorable sound bites. Sadly, there is nothing of the revivalist orator about Bill English. It was Bill Rowling, not Robert Muldoon who sprang to my mind as I watched him.


But we shouldn't just blame the pastor. The sermon produced by him, his "brat pack", and Michelle Boag, was confused and weak on detail. They conspicuously failed to exploit the opportunities given them by Labour's political correctness. For instance, why hadn't they read Martin Hames's The Crisis in New Zealand Schools? Hames doesn't confine himself to the sorry political saga of the PPTA and its egregious leadership. He convincingly argues that teachers and ministry policy makers are corks bobbing in a see of pink fluff and politically correct agendas. Standards are falling and teachers have become increasingly undervalued. They in turn through their actions give the whole public educational sector a bad name. Public confidence spirals downwards, and parents turn to private schools in desperation. Crusading for higher educational standards, even if this implied some criticism of National's past stewardship, would surely attract more voters than unspecific prattle in "support" of parents and students, and empty promises to "get alongside" them.


In this campaign National passed up opportunities to reposition itself in line with the party's core principles. On health and welfare, as well as Treaty issues, they should have been more forthright. And surely the extra burdens placed on the productive sector by Labour were ripe for exploitation? It is a fact that economic growth could have been at least 1% higher in each of the last three years had competition within ACC been retained, and excess compliance costs tackled. National could graphically have shown what that extra growth meant for families, but which had been stolen by the left's social engineers. In the end, when past supporters peeped in National's church door during this campaign, there was nothing to entice them further except empty words and even emptier pews.


This caused the second stage in National's disintegration. With the Greens having identified themselves as the right's Public Enemy Number One, something akin to panic seized many past and current National supporters. They didn't have to hear out Bill English's dirge. Instead they set off down the street checking out the political peep shows that MMP provides. There they ogled Peters, Prebble and Dunne. Shop worn each might be, but at least their messages were clear, and none was clearly of the left. Peters in particular has an irresistible appeal to elderly ladies, Dunne to those earnestly seeking a steady, reliable restraining force on a left wing government whose experiments they feared might get out of control. Once it was clear that National and ACT together couldn't form the next government, the same fear that had led to National's creation in 1936 produced its 2002 collapse.


This is crisis time for the Nats. Before they can attract back their lost congregation they will have to define their niche within MMP, and sharpen the message. Make no mistake, there is a place in the market for policies based on National's core free-enterprise principles. Moreover, there are enough bewildered voters milling around to respond to solid leadership and credible policies. This is a conservative country not given to socialist experimentation, and voters will always be on the lookout for a steady, reliable political vehicle. Why else Peter Dunne? Either National engages in very tough soul searching and puts everything up for discussion, including the leadership, or it will end up like the old Liberal Party which finally gave up the ghost in the 1930s, its last few parishioners straggling across to National in 1936. Saturday night was either a new beginning, or the beginning of National's terminal phase.

Does anyone else find it the most depressing and tragic thing for New Zealand politics that in between then and now National managed to effectively halt that "terminal phase" with a three year course of Brashidation bringing them back to 49% in the polls, and now they have gone back to English (albeit as second to Key) and those words written five years ago are still relevant.

Apathy Jack writes:

I wish Roger McGough had published his autobiography while I was at university. Actually, I wouldn't have touched it, because even if I had made a habit of reading books during the course of my English degree (I didn't) I was still in my hating-poetry phase (as opposed to the I-leave-poetry-alone-it-leaves-me-alone phase I'm currently in) so the life story of an old poet whose work I wasn't familiar with wouldn't have been top of the list. But still, I really wish some (alright: all) of the people I went through uni with had read this:


When flower power drifted across the Atlantic from California in the late sixties many young people grasped the ideals of freedom and gentleness that it seemed to enshrine, but I was old enough to be cynical. What may have begun as a peace movement initially, an antidote to the horrors of Vietnam, had become a fashion show. It was fun, but essentially mindless. If I sound slightly jaundiced, it’s not because I’ve got jaundice, or because I believe that as a decade it is often misconceived, so powerful are the images of the period, but rather that I regret the false sense of nostalgia that passed into the tribal consciousness of young people. They inherited, many of them, a sense of loss, an ‘if only I’d been there’ sort of yearning. What was exciting about the sixties for me was that I was young, and there’s never a better time to be young than when you’re young.

Vaguely Helpful Tidbits

Josh writes:

New rule for the Antiques Roadshow drinking game:

• If you see a coloured face, drink until you can't feel your legs.

Also: today's bit of Jack-baiting comes with a hat-tip to Paul's always worthwhile Fundy Post.

Helpful Hints

Josh writes:

OK, here's my contribution to the Brain Stab "How to Argue More Gooder" project, consisting of the single most important thing I can think of to avoid bad arguments.

I'd like to say it was the first thing I ever learnt in a Philosophy class, but that's not true -- it was in Stage II Ancient Greek Philosophy. I still have my old notes, and there it is:

Aristotle says: "BEWARE OF EQUIVOCALS!"

Beware of equivocals. BEWARE THEM! Beware them like you would the Ides of March. Equivocals are what you get when you're using the same word to mean slightly different things. In the context of the bit of Aristotle that we were studying at the time, he's talking about how "being" is equivocal -- the "is" in "Josh is human" means something different to the "is" in "Josh is sitting at his desk". Sometimes it really does depend on what the definition of "is" is (although it didn't when Bill Clinton really wanted it to).

At any rate, in the vast (VAST) majority of cases I see where people are disagreeing over something, it's not that one side is flat out wrong, it's that both sides are using the same word differently, and neither realises it, resulting in the sort of "talking past each other" scenario that Eric mentions in his post below.

The Perigo vs. Nola debate that he highlights is the perfect example. Frankly, I couldn't stomach reading all the way through to the end, but it all started with Perigo objecting to Nola's statement that "logic has nothing to do with reality". Now, Nola was using "logic" to refer to the abstract symbolic systems that describe the relationships between propositions; systems which, being abstract, have no immediate relation to the real world, and must be combined with real world facts to form a meaningful argument. On the other hand, Perigo seemed to understand it in a more colloquial sense, where "logic" is used as a synonym for "reason". Under Nola's definition, it's true that "logic" has nothing to do with reality; under Perigo's, that's not true at all. However, Perigo doesn't seem to notice the equivocal at all, and Nola does a piss poor job of explaining it.

Bonus argument tip: Consider your audience, and put things in a way that they will relate to. Nola makes the mistake of talking like the member of a Philosophy department to an audience hostile to academic register of Philosophy departments, as does our Morthos when trying to discuss the Free Will vs. Determinism controversy on Peter Cresswell's blog (see Eric's post for links).

Sometimes it seems that philosophers are obsessed with definitions (Aristotle particularly so), but this is why -- you need to be really sure how everyone's defining the words they're using, to make sure that equivocals aren't cropping up and buggering everything up. BEWARE THEM. Bewaaaaarrrre...

We don't take kindly to Objectivists round here.

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

UPDATE!: See that, that up there, see what Josh did!

Back in November, That Morthos Stare enlivened us all with a collection of snippets, unfinished musings on assorted topics, one of which was this bit on Objectivists.

"I'm not fond of Libertarians in general, although I do respect some (read: few) of their intuitions. The Randians, however, get no sympathy from me whatsoever. I'm not sure that they mean to act as religious zealots (indeed, I would imagine that they would be horrified by the suggestion) but Objectivists, with their character worship of Ayn Rand, one of the last century's dullest writers, would most resemble a Roman Catholic's devotion to the Pope... except that Catholic's, by and large, ignore the Popes for the out-moded fuddy-duddies that they tend to be.

Still, blind devotion to an author doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. I don't dislike goths due to their insistence that Anne Rice is worth reading. I pity them, just as I pity anyone who decides to read a Poppy Z. Brite novel (the short stories are another matter entirely). No, it's the insistence that Rand's philosophy has real world relevance. Well, that and the claim that Rand's aphoristic style is philosophy.

Let me put this into perspective. Philosophy is a dialectical discipline in which we trade and develop ideas. One of our chief virtues is the ability to be wrong and admit to that fact. Objectivism, however, is a dogmatic belief system best analogised with a Jack Chick tract. I don't whether Objectivists think that it is immoral to show dissent from the official view or whether their intellectual poverty is so great that they have to toe the party line, but such strict adherence to a distinctly impoverished ideology isn't philosophy. I suspect that what appeal Objectivism has is psychological; if you think being a prick is a good thing then Objectivism gives you nice variety of shallow reasons to do so."

Hewligan concurred, goading Morthos to more fully explain why Objectivists are bad people. A task I volunteered myself for in my December Commentfest after he inadvertently answered his own question. And so, here we are.



Before we get started, for those who want to know what Objectivists belive in, go here. This post would also be good to gain some New Zealand context.

Although it should be obvious, not all libertarians are Objectivists, and not all Objectivists are pricks. I have met many fine normal Objectivists, this post only targets those who fit the bill.

Ayn Rand

First off, are some Objectivists pricks because Ayn Rand was a prick. Well no, because she wasn't. Not that she was perfect, she had flaws like anyone, some wrong ideas, a few character flaws, but she still falls within the range of normalcy and wasn't a bad person, or a prick. Ayn Rand's life and personality won't enlighten us in our quest.

But what of her writing? Here we are on firmer ground. I think the origin of many Objectivist's prickishness lies in her fiction. When you watch a normal TV program or read a normal novel, the main characters go through "an arc", I think it is called. They start off with personality / beliefs "a", go through various experiences, and end up with personality / beliefs "b" And it is through watching them go through that change that we find reading novels enjoyable. Ayn Rand's novels don't have this. Her protaganists seem to be like T 34 tanks. They start off as they finish, and everyone else just pings off them or goes under their tracks.

Ayn did this for a reason, she wrote that the goal of her fiction is to project her vision of an ideal man: not man as he is, but man as he might and ought to be. The problem is that Objectivists use Ayn’s characters as a template for how they should be. This, unfortunately leads to this by Kane Bunce. which is absolutely tragic because it is not (please surely not) the view that Ayn had or wanted her followers to have, but given the flaws in her fiction is what you can get.

Objectivism isn't about having a low opinion of and indifference to your fellow man, but of having a high opinion of and will to engage them to use their full potential, but unfortunately since Ayn's characters are so one-dimensional and un-engaging, Kane Bunce’s view is often the end result. Andrew Bates also deserves a kick up the arse for concurring. And that is the first reason why Objectivists are bad people. Since the characters in Ayn's novels are indifferent and one-dimensional, then people who use those novels as guides will end up in danger of being the same.

Objectivism

Morthos has claimed that Objecivism is a mock philosophy. Does this make Objectivists bad people? I don't think so. It isn't so much that Objectivism is not as developed in the "formal academic philosophy", but how Objectivists have dealt with that fact. Another aspects are that Objectivism is a meta-narrative.

I say "isn't so much" because it is still a factor. One of Objectivism's difficulties is that there isn't/wasn't a good, academic quality, setting out of it's beliefs. This has led to a) academic philosophy pretty much ignoring it, and then, b) an air of anti-intellectualism among Objectivists due to academics ignoring or deriding their philosophy. More specifically there is an unfortunate distrust of Philosophy departments and contemporary philosophers, viewing them all as a Caligulan orgy of subjectivism and relativism.

This should improve over time. There is no reason why Objectivism can’t be tidied up and presented academically, and this is slowly beginning to happen. People like, unfortunate Tibor Machan , Chris Sciabarra, and Tara Smith are presenting Objectivist ideas in a format that people like Morthos could engage with.

Secondly, and briefly, being a meta-narrative, makes Objectivism prone to the usual schisms and denunciations that other meta-narrative’s like Marxism and Christianity suffer. This is normally fine, since it only affects how believers deal with each other. Problems arise because meta-narratives tend to have their own vocabulary and terminology, meaning that when others try and engage them they need to get to grips with how terms are being used (as Morthos found himself doing here, and here) and are also in danger of having their beliefs misconstrued and often end up just talking past each other (see the exchange between Robert Nola and Lindsay Perigo one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, oh, dear, god)

And, in case anyone was thinking it, Objectivists are not pricks because Objectivism is a cult or because Ayn Rand was cultish. It isn’t and she wasn’t, despite the ferocious arguments amongst her followers. Read this for more.

Objectivists

Lastly, and most importantly, the reason why many Objectivists (and in the New Zealand context “Libertarianz” since the two are linked here more than anywhere else) come across as being pricks or bad people is simply how they present their ideas. Curiously, and perhaps fatally for people who profess their admiration for a free-market system, mnay Objectivists feel they are at war. This is wrong for many reasons.

Firstly, almost no-one is actually fighting against you. At the recent Libz conference, attendees were told by one speaker:

“We must Attack! Attack! Attack! With your dying breath! Attack!
This aint no game people! This is war!”

God only knows why, or against whom. The vast majority of the voting population are not in metaphorical opposing trenches doing all they can to combat reason and laissez faire economics.

Most people are in a marketplace for ideas and political philosophies. They have a set of requirements - they want law and order, to have a comfortable standard of living, well educated kids, and for grandma to get a hip replacement of she needs it – and shop around for whoever will offer that to them. Almost everyone, even parties opposed to markets, grasp the importance of marketing their ideas so they are the most persuasive they can be.

This is often a matter of language, and no I don’t mean lying or Orwell, but using the language of the marketplace rather than that of the battlefield, and of avoiding needless use of terminology that has negative connotations.

Look at Peter Cresswell’s admiration for Barry Goldwater’s statement that "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice". The sentiment is admirable, but why call yourself an extremist? What do your customers, the people who you want to sell your ideas to, think of when you use the word extremist? They think of lunatics, hijackings, bombings, and violence. So why use that word? Why not “principled”? This isn’t being deceptive, or Orwellian, it’s just a better word.

What really makes the “battlefield” view of many Objectivists, and libertarianz, so devastating is that it is polarising. With war, there is no middle ground. You are either with us or you are against us, and if you are with us, you are with us the whole time, 100%, there are no weekend soldiers. And so not only do you come across as a lunatic / extremist to your potential customers, you find yourself in constant battle with your own side to keep them on a war footing.

Large parties, like National and Labour, are successful because they are a broad church. You are valued no matter how large or small your contribution or skills. If you are out there every weekend doing a sausage sizzle to raise funds for the electorate, fine. If all you do is send in $5 with your membership form in June, fine. If you think you’re at war, then anyone who doesn’t go to war with the same fervour as you is guilty of cowardice, or if they leave because of your behaviour, then they are guilty of treason. The punishment for that in real war is death. However for a small political party / movement the punishment is a small divided membership, and severely disabled organisation. I should point out again that there are many good normal Objectivists and Libertarianz to whom this does not apply.

Which brings us to Hewligan’s observation. The context he was using was the invasion of Iraq, but the principle is the same.

“If you can't convince people of the rightness of the invasion, the question is: "Why can't you convince them?"

or rather “If you can’t convince people of the rightness of your position, the question is: “Why can’t you convince them?”

If you are at war, the answer is often “Because you haven’t attacked with enough strength and fervour”, and the solution is to attack harder in your black and white world view, coming across as a prick, and selling your philosophical wares to few.

If you are in a marketplace, the answer is “Because I have not been persuasive enough” and you work harder to offer what your customer wants, and are happy even if he only buys part of your philosophy because he is welcome to come back any time for more, or even a look around, since you have been so pleasant. And your staff retention is better than on the battlefield where you keep killing them.

Books You Should Be Reading # 20 Of A Bunch

Apathy Jack writes:

The Devil You Know, by Mike Carey

The man who opened the door to me was presumably James Dodson, the birthday boy's father. I took a strong dislike to him right then to save time and effort later. He was a solid-looking man, not big but hard-packed: eyes like two ball-bearings, salt-and-pepper hair adding its own echoes to the grey. In his forties, but probably as fit and trim now as he had been two decades ago: clearly, this was a man who recognised the importance of good diet, regular exercise and unremitting moral superiority. Pen had said he was a cop: chief constable in waiting, working out of Agar Street as one of the midwives to the government's new Serious and Organised Crime Agency. I think I would have guessed either a cop or a priest,and most priests gratefully let themselves go long before they hit forty: that's one of the perks of having a higher calling.
'You're the entertainer,' Dodson said, as you might say, 'You're a motherless piece of scum and you raped my dog.'

Maneater

That Morthos Stare writes:

10) Maneater - Nelly Furtado
Though, in terms of Misogyny, Furtado has Spankrock beat. I was a bit slow on this one, but it eventually clicked and took over my life for those handful of days which any great pop-record always does. All drums and a dirty synth riff which sounds like it’s just squeezed itself into something skin-tight, Furtado manages to both take the role and mock the role with equal… well, sense of distance. There’s something dead deep inside the song – when describing the riff, the initial metaphor which came to mind was a zombie’s lurch. Nightclub of the Living Dead. No-one gets out here with what makes them human alive.
[Youtube]

Kieron Gillen isn't a name you probably know, although you bloody should. He's a games journalist and writer of sequential art (his new series, Phonogram (at Image) is a tribute to 90s Britpop reimaged as some perverse superhero mythology; it's glorious and beautiful and, well, stuff). Anyway, his top 40 for 2006 finally forced me to confront my love for Nelly Furtado's 'Maneater.'

I was never particularly interest in Furtado when she first appeared on the scene. 'Insipid' was the word I used, I believe. Frankly, I was waiting for the world to realise that her music wasn't all that, and when her latest album was released I sighed a gentle sigh and returned to the textbooks.

My first encounter of 'Maneater' was the music video. I was entranced, mostly by just how bad the song was (and a bit by the imagery). Subsequent viewings did little to improve my mood and as I don't listen to the radio my only other exposure to it was as musak in shops, which is hardly what I would call positive reinforcement.

A little under a week ago, in the 'Number One Shoe Warehouse' I found that not only did I like 'Maneater' as it played in the background but that I really liked it. And that it works as musak (which is kind of disturbing when you think about it).

Why? Because it's actually a clever little bit of pop, and incredibly well-crafted in things sonic.

It reminds me a little of Rachel Steven's 'Sweet Dreams (My LA Ex)' in that 'Maneater' is not just two songs merged but also two musical genres battling it out by verse and chorus. 'Sweet Dreams...' has a moment of Big Band Dance Hall to it (about two thirds of the way through) and it just works. 'Maneater' is two kinds of pop, neither of which I would usually nod my head to, but, well, as Gillen puts forward, its deep, its undead and it changes you.

Ya, verily, 'Maneater' snizzles my nizzle. Also, me mizzen mast.

Admitting to past mistakes is a virtue (although public confession of such things is often vice as the Pope keeps pointing out) and so I wish to apologise to all those who had to suffer under my sighing and gnashing of teeth in re 'Maneater.' I was wrong. I may well got to Hell for this, but I now place 'Maneater' into its rightful place in last year's pop pantheon.

Although, and I dare you to disagree, the best thing about last year's Music was my discovery of the 'They Might Be Giants' podcasts. There is something delightful about the Dust Brothers remixing TMBG tracks.

Better than sex. Well, at least that's what the Vicar told me, and he'd know moreso than I.

New Year...

Apathy Jack writes:

The Good

New Year's Eve, chatting with the flatmate, and I show her one of the cards I got from a student. She reads it to herself, then quotes reproachfully:

"I remember all those cracked days in English when you threatened to kill us, told us you hated us, and even threatening us with the chair."
"Yeah?"
"I thought you were exaggerating when you said you did all of that?"
"Every story I tell you is completely true."
"Well, it says here you shouldn't change because you make learning fun."
"Yeah, well, every story..."


The Bad

Let's get this clear from the start: It is a bad thing that Saddam Hussein was killed the way he was. Let me explain why: If someone murders someone else, they are a bad person who deserves to die and go to hell. However, if the murderer is killed by a serial killer, for the sole reason that the murderer wouldn't give his oil to the serial killer at discount prices, then that's not cool, and it certainly isn't justice. It's just another murder.

As of the end of '06, more American lives have been lost in Iraq than in the terrorist attacks on September 11th. George W Bush has officially caused the deaths of more Americans than Osama Bin Laden.


The Rest

So I'm woken up at 6.30 on the first day of the new year by a text from a student. This is one of my projects that I've invested a lot of time and effort into - she's turned up in a fair number of Brain Stab posts in the last year - but she was one of my failures, deciding to leave school. Her text is the general how-are-you? sent when one is bored. We trade stories of New Year's debauchery (a short process, as neither of us drinks - yes, I have a student who doesn't drink. I know, I'm surprised too...) and I decide to go for a walk to clear my head. As I walk, I text her the plan I came up with to get her back to school. By the time I reach the summit of Mount Eden, she's agreed to return this year. I stand there looking out at the sun rising over Auckland. The sight is a magnificent reminder that the city may be an ugly, poorly designed monstrosity, but from the right angle it's breathtaking. One of the few cars on the Mount is playing The Feelers' new track One World loud enough to escape through the windows, so all I hear over the birdsong is James Reid repeating "It's a beautiful world, It's a beautiful world".

If that moment was 2007, I'll take it.




Sure, that wasn't quite how it happened. Mostly, sure, but not exactly. But I think a lot of this year will be what we make it, so if that's the way I think it should start, then that's what I'm going to go with...

Anonymous writes:

I'm sitting here, watching the patterns that the tide and the wind make in the water. The street lamps illuminate from a block away; their yellow halogen glow only penetrates so far. I'm sitting, over the water, while a single headlight shows me what lays beyond the fluid surface. The tide's coming in.

I cannot see across the water. I know the headland lays across the waves; an estuary, the waves start a lot later than in the ocean. The lights are what frame this nullity of vision; pilot lights of red of green and the stars above. A city boy can look up at the stars and not recognise a damn thing.

The waves come in repeditively; I know not their pattern. I should know their pattern - I studied them enough in high school. There's something about REALITY that strips the rules and formulas away, where it becomes the lapping of the ocean, the regular pattern of a world so many of us do not care about.

I'm a two hour drive from anything that I would consider "civilsation"; "We have a supermarket, a cinema, and a Subway - we're REAL now!". Daylight will touch this place the same as any, where is the ligitimacy? Is it for you to decide? Me? I hate this place as much as I hate where I live - wherever I will live - but I ask, is this any less of an existance as any?

There are fish in the water. I know this, as I can see their ripples in the water. Not my ripples - god forbid I ever step foot in actual LIQUID - or my cigarettes or spit or drink. Real creatures. Things that are born, live, and die in this water. Fish, as I was told, are too small to catch with nets - they just pass straight through. And I find this amazing. When was the last time you walked outside and saw life that was not influenced by your way of life?

It's the fireworks and the sound of cars on the road that give it away. The sound of people, of their spawn, and merriment. The doppler effect of automobiles down a roadway; and all the progress that comes with it. And for just a moment, just an instant; it all goes quiet. All I can hear is the wet slap of the water against the sand, and the lone echo of some animal against the wind. And for just a second, I can lose myself - no-one was ever here, and no-one will ever be. And enjoy it. Enjoy it.

It's a humbling experience, archiving twenty years of snapshots down to an explanation. How many people can describe the life of something by twenty years? When one sees something from conception, through it's fumbling beginnings, to growing adolscence? Every year, you say "Every year, it just seems to be growing bigger"; but what do you actually feel?

The patterns in the water are what makes it so captivating; these waves, arches and speckles which dance on the sandy floor. The waves coming off the tide, the wake off the last boat, the interferance from the lay of the sand below it, the fish living within it. And what makes it the most interesting? Being here. Being a part of it, and being able to watch it, partake in it, influence it.

I'd like you to think about that.

- N for Nihilism

Sorely Tested

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

As the evil monkey is to Chris, or the chicken is to Peter, so Creationism is to me. I hate it, and find myself standing at the top of the stairs pointing out its obese failings and launching into a hearty attack should it get too close.

I hate Creationism for its abysmal understanding of biology and D-Grade philosophy. I hate creationists for the above, and for their slimy lying deceitful ignorance, their deliberate misrepresentation of other people's work and lack of anything remotely scientific in their own.

This may be all very well. But the thing is, my previous post was an exhortation to all to apply the "Principle of Charity" to our opponents, and here I am facing a belief that deserves nothing but derision. I am sorely tested, but must lead by example nonetheless.


The latest affront comes from Mr Cresswell's Blog, where he gave one Berend de Boer free reign in return for a beer. O tempora, O mores. The old hoary chestnut of transitional fossils and the fossil evidence for evolution was the order of the day, and Peter gave Mr de Boer space to "pile up the quotes from evolutionists having serious doubt about that fossil evidence?"

I should note that Berend does not explicitly state that he is a creationist, although he does list it as one of his interests (alongside the Bible), and so it would be premature, though not in my presumption inaccurate, to tar him with that brush, and to be fair, he has stated elsewhere that he is unsure about ID being scientific - not that this would make any difference since all creationists ever do is moan about evolution, and moaning about evolution is all Berend has done whether creationist or not.

So, let's see if we can add some formal structure to Berend's argument.

1) Evolution is divided into micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
1a) Micro-evolution is the rearrangement of existing genetic material.
1b) Macro-evolution is the appearance of new genetic material.
C1) If Macro-evolution has occurred then the fossil record would show examples of 1b.
2) The following list of quotes come from believers in evolution.
2a) They state that the fossil record does not show 1b.
2b) They are qualified to make that assessment, and the quotes are scientifically recent.
2c) They have been quoted accurately.
2d) If (2a), (2b), and (2c), were true then we can reasonably assume that the fossil record does not support macro-evolution.
2e) 2d is true.
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(C) - The fossil evidence does not support evolution.

Let's start at the beginning. Berend's definition of evolution:

Micro-evolution is natural selection, i.e. Darwin's Finches, but also breeding dogs and horses. It is a rearrangement of existing genetic material. No one is arguing that this is real and is happening.

"[M]acro-evolution...is the appearance of new genetic material, new functionality that didn't exist before."

I have said before that I have never met anyone who did not both understand evolution and mange to refute it (a quote borrowed from Lenny Flank and that certainly is the case with Berend de Boer. Measuring his definition against reality, we find out that Microevolution is the occurrence of small-scale changes in allele frequencies in a population, over a few generations, also known as change at or below the species level.

Which, of course, means that Macroevolution, if it is even a valid concept, is change above the species level. If it is even a valid concept, mind. But we won't get distracted down that path, the point is that Berend is wrong, and that is premises 1, 1a, and 1b taken care of.

So, Berend has his definitions wrong at the offset, not a good start. Incidentally, speciation, and thus macroevolution, have been observed heaps. Now to our sort of halfway conclusion C1. Let's recap where we are up to

1) Evolution is divided into micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
1a) Micro-evolution is the rearrangement of existing genetic material.
1b) Macro-evolution is the appearance of new genetic material.
C1) If Macro-evolution has occured then the fossil record would show examples of 1b.

C1 is fairly innoccuous. Whatever sort of evolution has occured it would not be unreasonable to expect that if there was a fossil record it would show examples of it. As species evolved, and fossilised, we would expect to find transitional and intermediate fossil examples of them. It might pay to amend it slightly in the light of 1b being rendered meaningless to:

C1a) If evolution has occured we would expect to find transitional fossils in the fossil record.

This might also involve getting rid of premises 1, 1a, and 1b completely, but I'm not going to go overboard examining all the possible permutations. The point is that (once again) whatever happened in evolutionary history we should find examples of it in the fossil record.

Now on to the second half of Berend's argument.

2) The following list of quotes come from beleivers in evolution.
2a) They state that the fossil record does not show 1b.
2b) They are qualified to make that assesment, and the quotes are scientifically recent.
2c) They have been quoted accurately.
2d) If (2a), (2b), and (2c), were true then we can reasonably assume that the fossil rcord does not support macro-evolution.
2e) 2d is true.
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(C) - The fossil evidence does not support evolution.

Now then, I am not going to go through every single quote and apply all those criteria to them. We would be here forever. Instead, I will cull them so the strongest (for Berend's argument) quotes are left. If the strongest quotes fail then we would reasonably expect the weaker ones to fail as well.

The most important criteria is recency, part of 2b. Science is an incredibly fluid discipline with many new discoveries being made all the time. If you take science papers at university you would be bloody lucky to get assigned a textbook that had not been revised within the past five years. But we are going to be exceedingly generous and give Berend a twenty year window. If Berend's quotes are more than twenty years old, we can ignore them, they are obsolete.

We ignore quotes of Charles Darwin, of G. G. Simpson in 1959, Norman Newell, Stephen Jay Gould from 1977, Colin Patterson from 1979, S Stanley from 1979, and David Pilbeam. The Richard Dawkins quote is unreferenced.

So, we are left with:

1) A quote from Stephen Jay Gould from his 2002 book "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory"
2) A Colin Patterson quote from 1988.
3) A Mark Ridley quote from 2004.

I'm also going to cull the Michael Denton and Luther Sunderland bits. Because of premise 2., and in Sunderland's case because of the first half of 2b.

We're down to three quotes. Let's start with Colin Patterson. In Berend's words:

"Dr Colin Patterson, a senior palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History and author of the book Evolution said (quoted in Darwin's Enigma, Luther Sunderland, 1988):

Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least "show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived."? I will lay it on the line-
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record."

1988 is (just recent enough to be included, but has Patterson been quoted accurately?

No.

And we are down to two. Messrs Gould and Ridley.

Let's start with Gould. According to Berend:

"In his last book, the Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Stephen J. Gould wrote:

... since we have no direct data for key transitions that occurred so long ago and left no fossil evidence ... such entirely speculative scenarios must be understood within their acknowledged
limits -- that i as hypothetical stories, "cartoons" in Buss's words, invented to illuminate a potential mode and not as claims about any historical accuracy.

Stephen J. Gould also quotes George Gaylord Simpson:

... the greatest and most biologically astute paleontologist of the 20th century ... acknowledged the literal appearance of stasis and geologically abrupt origin as the outstanding general fact of the fossil record and as a pattern which would "pose on of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life.""

For those who don't know, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" is more than 1,400 pages long. Berend has helpfully left out that page numbers of his quotes. But we can dismiss those quotes for two reasons.

Firstly, when people quote Gould as doubting evolution in any way, they are distorting him.

Secondly, Gould recognises this tactic, and does not approve of it. He does believe there are transitional fossils, as quoted accurately from the above link.

"transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common—and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim."

Given those two facts, I would bet that Berend has taken Gould out of context and has distorted Gould's message.

Which leaves us with Mark Ridley. Berend again:

"In Evolution by Mark Ridley, published in 2004, we learn why there has never been a Nobel Prize awarded for evolutionary theory. He states:

We need to keep in mind the status of the evolutionary biologist's argument here. The series of stages may in some cases not be particularly plausible, or well supported by evidence, but the argument is put forward solely to refute the suggestion that we cannot imagine how the character could have evolved. (p. 263)

He continues and concludes his argument in the following paragraph:

It is fair to conclude that there are no known adaptations that definitely could not have evolved by natural selection. Or (if the double negative is confusing), we can conclude that all known adaptations are in principle explicable by natural selection. (p. 263)"

To be honest I can't see how this strengthens Berend's case at all. Mark Ridley firstly (presumably, since I don't have Ridley's book, and given Berend's form I have very, very little certainty that he has been quoted fully and accurately) says that there are some cases where evidence is lacking and that scientists put forward scenarios to explain how they could have evolved - which is their job as scientists, to try and find answers and put forward hypotheses, and so on. But Ridley doesn't doubt evolution or the fossil record at all. As he said "we can conclude that all known adaptations are in principle explicable by natural selection."

And that's pretty much that. After culling out a good many obsolete quotes we were left with two distortions and one guy who says that "we can conclude that all known adaptations are in principle explicable by natural selection." Hardly the death knell for Darwin, is it.

The final word on fossils and evolution goes to Richard Dawkins from his most recent book

"In spite of the fascination of fossils, it is surprising how much we would still know about our evolutionary past without them. If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblences, especially of their genetic sequences are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus. A welcome bonus, to be sure, but not an essential one. It is worth remembering this when creationists go on (as they tediously do) about 'gaps' in the fossil rcord. The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelming. At the same time, if we only had fossils, and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand we are blessed with both."
The Ancestor's Tale, p13.