Tip: Quote Hitler at People

I have a new favorite technique for arguing, dear readers. It goes like this: An obnoxious person offers an opinion, and you quote Hitler agreeing with them.

For example...

Guy "When the government uses our tax dollars to pay for welfare, poor people have no incentive to find jobs instead of mooching off the system forever."

Me "As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."

Guy "Who said that?"

Me "Hitler."

I am looking forward to using this technique on my anarchist friend, who likes to criticize the democratic process by saying that if people are not fit to rule themselves, we have no reason to believe they are fit to choose rulers. My response to this is "Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be discovered by an election."

I do not suggest doing this to people whose company you enjoy. I am fully willing to admit that the technique is fallacious and irritating, but as Hitler would say, "I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few."

CWA 63

For as long as I can remember, Roger Ebert has attended CU's Conference on World Affairs every spring to host the Cinema Interruptus event, where he would screen great movies, pausing every few minutes to comment, discuss interesting points, and take questions from the audience.

No longer capable of speech, Ebert will not be attending this year's conference (happening next Monday through Friday). He will be succeeded as Interruptus host by a fellow called Jim Emerson, who has chosen A Serious Man as his debut film.

Now I like the Coen brothers as much as the next person, but I fear that, if Mr. Emerson takes A Serious Man as his starting point, it will only be a few years until we are debating cinematographic tropes in Eclipse.

It is only fair to note that Jim Emerson has hosted the Cinema Interruptus twice in the past. I did not attend but have been told that it was not entirely uninformative. Still, Ebert will be missed, and I can only hope that the pain of his absence will be mitigated by Friday's colloquium on Everything Sounds Smarter and Sexier with a British Accent.

Noncognitivism May be a Downer

It occurred to me just now that being a noncognitivist is perhaps not as much fun as I had hoped.

A noncognitivist believes that moral statements have no truth value; 'killing people is bad,' means something along the lines of 'don't kill people, it makes me sad.' This is appealing for many reasons. Noncognitivism allows us to avoid the messy question of what kind of fact a moral fact is while explaining why we generally want things to happen when we judge them to be morally good. It wraps up the entirety of ethics into a convenient little package as delectable as a tiny blue box from Tiffany.

However, I am also a determinist, and those who still believe in free will sometimes ask me "Don't you find it depressing to believe that everything you think and do was predetermined from the beginning of time?" I usually respond by saying "I think and do certain things because I'm a smart, educated person with the same basic preferences as any decent person. There's nothing depressing about that. What's scary is the notion that my beliefs and actions are not caused by something, that everything I do is random and meaningless and unrelated in any but a coincidental manner to everything ever. How can you free willers live with yourselves?"

You can see my dilemma. I do certain things because I have certain preferences, and I have certain preferences, because... I can't say "Because I'm a rational person;" for the most part, preferences can't be characterized as rational or irrational. Nor can I say "Because I'm a good person," since the word 'good' already refers to my preferences.

There is a physical cause of my preferences, but noncognitivism can offer no reason for them. This is a little bit sad. If you ask a moral realist "Why do you want me to jump in that pond and rescue you from drowning?" he will say "Because it's the right thing to do." If you ask a noncognitivist, all he can say is "DO IT."

Putting aside for a moment the relative persuasiveness of these arguments, it makes me sad to not have reasons.

Of course, there are many things which are both sad and true, and my preference for being correct still overrides my preference for being happy. I therefore remain a noncognitivist. But I sincerely wish, dear readers, that I could tell you why.

Return of the Toads

Something important has happened, dear readers. Something so important as to drag me out of blog hibernation after over a year and a half of ignoring you, which makes this very awkward and so should assure you of the extreme urgency of this announcement.

I'm sure you all remember the 80s cult classic documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which educated us about the plague of toads that began taking over Australia when they were artificially introduced to an environment with no natural predators. It introduced us to the dangers of messing about in ecology as well as cool stuff to do with cane toads, e.g. feeding them cat food, swerving to hit them in your truck, and smoking them.

So you will be as excited as I to discover that there is now a sequel. Cane Toads: The Conquest is almost certainly an epic adventure punctuated by trenchant insights into human (and toad) nature. I have not yet seen the film, but rest assured that you will be alerted the moment it hits Netflix. And if you are friends with a high school biology teacher, ask him or her if you can borrow it.