Quantum Non-Linearity: Right Wing Celebrity Death Match

Friday, April 23, 2010

Right Wing Celebrity Death Match

Michelle Malkin: The 5-foot-2-inch, 100-pound mom

VERSUS

Alex Jones: The bug-eyed hulk

As a bit of light relief I have recently been dipping my finger into the hot bath of passionate politics that immerses the evolution vs. anti-evolutionist ~~fracas~~ debate. This has partly been encouraged by watching my Xmas DVD collection of Adam Curtis documentaries and partly because in order to comment on Robert Sheldon’s blog I had to sign up to Townhall.com, an American right wing webmagazine. After signing up I subsequently started receiving Townhall.com’s headline email-shots. One these emails advertised the May edition of their paper magazine that was running a feature article on a lady called Michelle Malkin described by Townhall as:

Most people know her as a conservative firebrand who has written best-selling books, including "Culture of Corruption," which dealt with the shady characters that have populated the Obama administration, and "Unhinged," which exposed the lunacy of the Left. She has been a regular analyst and contributor on Fox News for years. Week in and week out, her columns are always among the most read on Townhall.com. And her eponymous blog reaches millions of readers.

And adds:

Her impassioned opposition to Barack Obama has certainly stoked more outrage on the Left…..

But what caught my attention in this email was not so much the outrage from the left, but rather the outrage from a very different quarter altogether:

Not all of the threats come from the Left. Michelle covered the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver and expected to get challenged, but the most disturbing experience involved an altercation with conspiracy-theory extremist radio host Alex Jones. While attending a demonstration of "anarchist loons trying to levitate the Denver Mint," Jones charged out of the crowd toward Michelle.

"This bug-eyed hulk came stalking up and screaming at me about how I was a threat to his First Amendment rights," Michelle recalls. "He was spoiling for a fight with a 5-foot-2-inch, 100-pound mom; his clenched fists, bulging neck veins and spittle-flecked face were, I must say, rather disturbing."

Yes, that’s right good old right winger Alex Jones! Jones calls himself a Christian, but he does not believe in Young Earth Creationism and instead is an Intelligent Design anti-evolutionist. (See here)

I must admit I am bemused by this altercation and I don’t think I have made full sense of the sharpness of this right vs. right embroilment. The best sense I can make of it at the moment is that Jones identifies himself with the old school “patrician”* right wing, whereas the new republican right represented by townhall.com (and perhaps Uncommon Descent, also) think of themselves as the radical right advocates of free market democracy.

When I was contributing to this thread on Uncommon Descent a correspondent called “Jerry” helpfully gave me the following insights into the relevant politics:

Most atheist reside in the Democrat party which is highly secularist. However, many atheist are free market advocates and anti big government so they reside mostly on the conservative side except for social issues when they are often in favor of such things as choice in abortion, euthanasia and same sex marriage. TE’s tend to be liberal Christians and reside mostly in the Democrat Party. Those that adhere to traditional religion will mostly be Republicans because of the secular nature of the Democrats. I have no firm information about YEC’s but suspect they are mostly Republican due to the highly secular and anti Christian nature of the Democrat Party.

....so I’ll throw that into the melting pot as well and see if anything clear emerges.

Footnote:
* I have picked up this term “patrician” from Adam Curtis.

No comments:

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Friday, April 23, 2010

Right Wing Celebrity Death Match

No comments:

My Other Blogs

Papers and Essays etc

About Me

Blog Archive

Labels

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION