10 Things Atomists Should Go Without.

Time for a list-y post. All the things in this list are things that have been created by governments, which (as earlier discussed) libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and other atomist ideologies would like to see dismantled and replaced with an entirely free market. If you find yourself tempted by these ideologies, think of this as a reminder of what you’d have missed out on.

• Stephen Hawking. Infamously held up as an example by American conservatives of the sort of person who’d have been killed by “death panels” under a public health system, Hawking in fact owes his life, and the technology that enables him to work and communicate, to the British National Health Service; science today would be far poorer without him.
• The Internet. Grew out of a US defence project.
• Doctor Who. For that matter, the majority of decent British telly.
• Related, a lot of quality journalism. I’ll go into this one more next time, as the irony involved deserves its own post.
• Daylight savings time — for that matter, any form of time coördination.
• Highways. All roads for that matter, which is why the first question to ask a libertarian is always whether he owns a car. Or a bike. Or a bus ticket.
• Competent employees. Sure, the wealthy send their kids to private schools, but even they’re government-subsidised; and their companies benefit from a publicly-educated workforce.
• Your telephone number.
• Courts. It always amuses me that libertarians love to stand on their individual rights even as they tear down the institutions expressly designed to guarantee them those same rights.
• Public transport. You hear people bitching about Metro, the private train operator, and Connex before it, a lot more than you heard them bitching about the government-run Met.

Sorry this one went up a bit late — and sorry for missing Thursday. Got a new Flash-blocker that’s been messing with my Web browser and stopping me from posting. Uninstalled it now and it’s working fine. If anyone can recommend a decent Flash-blocker for Safari that isn’t ClickToFlash, please let me know.

On Conscience.

I read a while ago about a case of a pharmacist refusing to fill a prescription on the basis that the drug prescribed is sometimes used in post-abortion care. He didn’t know whether the patient had actually had an abortion or not — there are, after all, rules about patient confidentiality, and it was a nurse rather than the patient herself who made the request — but he exempted himself from the requirement to do his job nonetheless, because the law allows health professionals for whom abortion is against their beliefs to refuse to provide services.

I’m sorry, what? Isn’t America (where this incident occurred) supposedly a free country, where people are entitled to not experience discrimination in the provision of services? Where the right to be served is so ingrained in the culture that when they come to our country they are seen as presumptuous and demanding?

I respect the right of everyone to act in accordance with their conscience, or at least to refuse to act against it — if someone’s conscience called for revenge killing, we aren’t OK with that, but I agree that a person shouldn’t be forced to do something that goes against his conscience.

BUT, when you sign up for a job you take on the responsibilities involved. If you are unable to take on those responsibilities, you shouldn’t be signing the contract; if you take the job and then refuse some of its requirements on grounds of conscience, you are violating your contract. Ordinarily, if something like that happened, you’d be fired. Now, I’m aware that some people will have been in the business since before abortion was legal in their area. But I don’t think that changes anything, as that change would have resulted in a functional, if not a written, addition to their contract. (I’m using “contract” more in its moral sense than its legal one here, so the idea of an unwritten one is not as counterintuitive as it might seem.)

In a free society, people have the right not to provide abortion services; but if they don’t want to do that, then they shouldn’t be in a job that might require them to. A free society in turn has the duty to say to an anti-choice doctor “you’re not doing your job” and replace them with somebody who will. If being a pharmacist means sometimes filling prescriptions for abortion patients, then someone who isn’t OK with this shouldn’t be qualified to be a pharmacist, because they are unable to actually do the job.

Right?

I’m back!

Hello again!

It’s been rather longer than I intended, I’m afraid. I didn’t expect to be away from WTA all month. The paper I was presenting yesterday took more of my brain-time than I expected. It wasn’t that it was harder or more time-consuming than expected. I had plenty of free time, and I didn’t have to rush to get it ready or anything like that. It’s more just that the part of my mind I use for this blog is the same part I was using for the project, and I didn’t have enough of the right mental resources to go around.

I have put together a few entries while I’ve been away, to make up something of a backlog while I get used to doing this on a regular schedule again. Thanks to anyone who’s waited for me to come back, and hello to any new readers! Do stick around, and I promise to try and do the same! First major entry to come on Tuesday. See you then.

— Oolon.

Saturday Morning Bleargh.

Hi all.

Sorry for not posting much this morning. I’ve been working overtime the last couple of days and have had practically no time to myself since Wednesday evening. At least no time worth blogging in — I spent Thursday evening in a daze and last night seeing a mate off to his new job in Alice Springs.

So I’ll just share this amusing article which I just read (it gets a few things wrong, but still very cool), and this image macro which I saw last night:

Floods: emergency housing needed.

Today’s post is another appeal from GetUp regarding the floods in eastern Australia. The sheer scale of the disaster is unfathomable and I’m sure there isn’t a person who hasn’t been personally touched by it or knows someone who has. A friend of mine lives in Kerang and I’ve no idea if she’ll have a job when she returns there.

The recent floods have had a devastating toll on communities, homes and lives. Now thousands of Australians in flood affected areas face the daunting question of where to have their next sleep. Together, we can help.

As the process of rebuilding begins, thousands of people will need a place to stay as they put their homes and lives back together. But with more than ten thousand homes still without electricity, and many more uninhabitable, no government or aid agency could ever house all of those in need.

So we’ve launched an emergency national housing drive to connect empty beds with flood affected Australians who could use a place to stay while their homes are repaired or rebuilt. You can post your offer of housing (a spare room or an extra bed) and search for available housing online at:

www.OzFloodHelp.org.au

Housing is most urgently needed within reasonable driving distance of the affected areas, particularly in Queensland, northern New South Wales and Victoria, where flood waters are peaking and levees breaking, as well as Tasmania and other parts of the country.

Please forward this message to anyone you know in the region who might be able to help and be sure to post www.OzFloodHelp.org.au on facebook and twitter. Those without internet access can call 1300 998 603 to get assistance or to offer a bed.

No matter where you live, your help could still make a world of difference to a person or family in need, so please offer what you can. The process is simple:

1. Post your offer of help. Your name, address and contact details remain hidden and you can change or remove your offer at any time.
2. Flood-affected Australians, relief organisations, friends and relatives can search the site for housing. We'll do our best to get your offers where they are needed most.
3. You will receive emails when people are interested in taking up your offer. It's up to you to call or email those people, decide if it's a good match, and make the necessary arrangements with them. Then you can remove your offer.

Click here to take part.

As progressive Australians we share a belief in service to one another and today is a great opportunity to put that belief into practice. There are thousands of families who’ve lost everything and who need a comfortable bed and a warm welcome. Let’s do what we can to help.

PS. You can also help by spreading the word about www.OzFloodHelp.org.au to everyone you know. In addition to email, facebook and twitter, word of mouth is very important, particularly to reach people in flood affected communities without internet access who are looking for a place to stay. Those without internet access can call 1300 998 603, but we are encouraging everyone who can to use the website, to reduce the burden on our call centre.

The Empiricist Strikes Back.

I recently got into a discussion where the case for my correspondent’s particular flavour of God was framed as rationalist against my empiricist atheism. Implicit in this are a whole lot of assumptions and accusations; that empiricism is somehow irrational is the most obvious one. This was quite odd, as I was using the word “rational” in its less strict sense, to refer to any form of valid reasoning, deductive or otherwise; my correspondent decided, and later insisted (which is something you never do), that I was using it in its narrow sense, to refer only to reasoning that is mathematically provable, despite the fact that this definition would have rendered my points meaningless.

The scientific method is rational under the former definition, and not under the latter. Yet it is widely accepted as a knowledge-generating technique. We can take from this that just because something is not mathematically certain, doesn’t mean it can’t be certain enough to be assumed, unless to do so would be question-begging, and unless and until a later development casts doubt on it. In the case of the scientific method, neither of these conditions are in play.

The usual problem with what might be termed hard or deductivist rationalism is that it tends to lead to solipsism, which basically means that you accept Descartes’ proposition I think therefore I am and nothing else, or at least nothing which you cannot derive with mathematical certainty from this proposition. This usually entails hard atheism, moral relativism (or its less paradoxical functional equivalent, moral nihilism) and theoretical, if not practical, selfishness — traits commonly associated with the stereotyped perception of atheism, but atypical in actual fact.

As mentioned, my solipsist correspondent is unusual in this regard in that he is not an atheist, but he defines God as existing outside the Universe, which is a common trick among theologians when they’re up against empiricism.  Now, if you define Universe as referring to everything that exists, then the notion of something existing outside it is paradoxical. So instead he uses the cosmological sense of Universe, which refers to everything we can observe (or infer from observation). Unfortunately, as far as we know, the second definition is functionally identical to the first, as it’s a principle both of science and of deductivism that what cannot be observed or inferred/deduced from observation cannot be claimed to exist.

I wonder if anyone’s thought of claiming that God follows a form of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle — that he exists, but you can’t detect him if you’re looking for him. They’d still have to back up why they thought he did, and even then it would mean that as far as we or anything else is concerned, he may as well not exist; but it’s the only way I can think of that he could both exist and be undetectable. Practically, I think, it would be as much a dead-end as the existing-outside-the-Universe trick, but it just struck me curious as to whether it had been tried.

The Old Cretin’s At It Again.

Everybody’s favourite Emperor Palpatine look-alike is attempting to paint education as the enemy of religion in general and, of course, his own religion in particular. Bizarrely, he has done so as part of an address to various ambassadors to his own country, in a direct attack on the governments they represent.

You almost have to admire the bastard. Not everyone would have that level of honesty. Or sheer balls. One is reminded of Sir Humphrey’s assertion that one official meeting between politicians can negate two years’ patient diplomacy behind the scenes.

But seriously, Popeatine. The only reason this hasn’t caused an international incident is that nobody pays any attention to what he says. Oh, they notice; and people like me with a bit of an axe to grind will chew him out; but he doesn’t have nearly as much influence as he’d like to think. Even relatively friendly governments are much more concerned with the opinions of the actual Catholics on the ground who vote for them, than they are with the official opinion of the Church.

As I was saying, though, I almost admire his honesty. Education — real education, the provision of facts and techniques for rational thought and inquiry — has long been a threat to religion; but as it’s usually also seen as a good thing, religion is usually hesitant to openly oppose it. It’s refreshing to see a major religious leader come straight out and say he doesn’t want facts taught in schools.

And, despite his supposed lack of experience with the subject, he’s once again speaking out about sex. Not long ago there was an utterly bewildering suggestion from the Vatican that condoms were A-OK for preventing disease, but only among sex workers, whose existence I was pretty sure the Church was not OK with in the first place. The “only among sex workers” bit stinks of retcon: the Pope isn’t supposed to be capable of being wrong when speaking on matters of doctrine, so they couldn’t retract it in this information age, but they were able to restrict its scope.

The very idea that education somehow constitutes an attack on freedom seems initially incoherent, as more information can only make one more free. It may illuminate one’s lack of certain freedoms, but it doesn’t remove them itself. But what he means, of course, is that parents are no longer free to keep their children in ignorance. I honestly cannot fathom how he considers this to be a good thing. Children have a way of finding these things out one way or another; better it be from a trusted and accountable source, in an open environment that encourages tolerance and inquiry.

If parents are given the right to withdraw their children from classes, it is the children’s freedom that will suffer. Children have a right to education, and deserve equal opportunity in this, regardless of who created them.