When I Say “Islam” or “Muslim”, What Image Comes to Mind?

Posted on December 29, 2010 by Lex

Thanks to James for showing me the 5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam.

I’m going to be brutally honest about my own flaws and lack of education here. After I read the page above, I did a quick experiment. I asked myself to write down the first 5 Muslims that came to mind. Here’s what I wrote:

Bassam (a friend of mine)
Muhammad Ali
Osama bin Laden
Ayman al-Zawahiri
Yasser Arafat

2 of 5 of those are terrorists. That’s 40%. Obviously, I don’t believe there is a connection between the ideology of terrorism and the religion of Islam. However, as an American (with just a couple Muslim friends) that lived through the last 10 years, a not insignificant percent of Muslims I know and think about are terrorists. This is a big problem that the American media and politicians do not help. They exploit it. Famous Muslims is a good example of a website that tries to address this issue for people like me that have unacceptably little knowledge about the culture and people of Islam.

I have views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, about America’s war on terror, and many issues that involve the Middle East. However, what I am talking about in this post is outside all of that. It’s about my ignorance of other cultures. It worries me that on some subconscious level, it may effect the way I think about our foreign policy, about religion, and just about the line between good and evil in society. So, again, I have to thank James for reminding me of the things I need to learn before providing an opinion.

Jury Nullification

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Lex

“Jury nullification occurs when a jury returns a verdict of “Not Guilty” despite its belief that the defendant is guilty of the violation charged. The jury in effect nullifies a law that it believes is either immoral or wrongly applied to the defendant whose fate that are charged with deciding.”

Good (in my opinion) examples of jury nullification:

Mercy killers like Dr. Jack Kevorkian
Minor drug offenders
Those harboring slaves in 1800s

This is a powerful mechanism by which a group of our “peers” can act as a direct judge of a law’s moral soundness. However, the danger of promoting jury nullification is that a jury could also use it to uphold immoral convictions. For example, a jury of racists could easily declare a white man not guilty for killing a black man, which sadly has a long historical precedent.

It’s a dangerous crack in our judicial system that could result in good as well as evil. Still, there is something very good about the people being able to decide questions of morality in such a direct manner. It certainly does bring to the forfront the flaws in our laws as well as our citizenry when they become too prevalent to ignore.

Einstein’s Brain

Posted on December 27, 2010 by Lex

I was listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe which is a laid-back podcast that preaches the value of the scientific method.

They briefly mentioned a quote from Stephen Jay Gould:

“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

There wasn’t any discussion of the quote but it got me thinking about the old nature vs nurture debate, given my recent reading of Mountains Beyond Mountains and the realization of just how dire the living conditions are for most of the world’s population. My intuition on this debate is that both your genetics and your upbringing contribute to what you accomplish as a member of society, but the circumstance of the upbringing is much more important. Genetics, I think, can provide a ceiling, but for most of us that ceiling is so high that it does not prevent us from changing the world through brilliant ideas or exceptional productivity.

To me, genetics provides the ability for an individual to be consumed by a goal, a passion for an idea. Our parents, our surroundings, and the minuscule details of our upbringing determine if that passion is able to flourish.

At the time of writing this, I am a progressive, a liberal, in that I believe in a government’s utilitarian value to society. However, effective “nurture” requires an unabashed respect for individual accomplishment. In other words, give a liberal $100 and 2 school kids, and he’ll give $50 to each to buy school books, lunch, transportation to and from school. This is what I believe is morally right. However, it is not most effective at developing either of the kids into Einstein. In my opinion, the more effective policy is to run a contest for the two kids. Give them one week to come up with a good idea, and whoever comes up with a better idea, gets the whole $100. It’s not about money, it’s about valuing the elite. It’s what the objectivists preach as their ideal. It’s unjust in my view, but a little of that individualistic spirit is needed to serve as a catalyst for the development of genius in our education system.

Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

Posted on December 26, 2010 by Lex

There’s a nearly 100% consensus in peer-reviewed publications to climate science journals that global warming is “real” and humankind has contributed significantly to it. I’ve long felt uncomfortable having an opinion on the subject because frankly I was intimidated by the complexity of the climate system. It felt similar to neuroscience that sometimes attempts to arrive at fundamental conclusions about the human mind from observing which parts of the brain light up when you touch a hot stove top.

Today, I spent about two hours on Google skimming for breadth over depth on the available material on the subject. I was not able to find any scientific studies that (1) deny the unusual rise in temperature in the 2nd part of the 20th century and more importantly that (2) deny that the major contributing factor to this temperature rise is “anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.

I still believe that the Earth’s climate is an extremely complex system about which it’s difficult to make solid scientific claims (which require some control over or at least knowledge of most of the variables in the system). However, I find it hard to believe that so many intelligent people (following rigorous procedures of collecting data and modeling) could be so wrong. While it’s possible, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Songs of Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2010 by Lex

I like songs that make me think, that take an ironic, cynical, or just a unique step away from the norm. Here are a couple of my favorites for the holidays:

Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis by Tom Waits

Tom Waits is probably my favorite musician and lyricist. There is a beautiful melancholy feeling that he captures about lost love and lost time in this song…

“Hey Charley I think about you
everytime I pass a fillin’ station
on account of all the grease
you used to wear in your hair”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12qBoy2rhVw

White Wine in The Sun by Tim Minchin

A political man giving in to the simplicity of family and holiday spirit…

“And yes, I have all of the usual objections to consumerism
The commercialization of an ancient religion
And the westernization of a dead Palestinian
Press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer
But I still really like it”

The Great Epidemiological Divide

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Lex

The “Great Epi Divide” is a term coined by doctor Paul Farmer (who is the subject of the book Mountains Beyond Mountains) to describe two groups of people in the world based on what makes them sick and what kills them. The first group are the people that tend to die in their seventies from illnesses that are loosely-speaking “inevitable accompaniments to the aging of bodies”. The second group of people dies 10 to 40 years earlier than that from violence, hunger, infectious diseases that medical science knows how to prevent and to treat (if not cure).

The second group is defined by absolute poverty, lacking nearly every necessity: clean water, shoes, medicine, food.

What Mountains Beyond Mountains reveals (as many other sources do) that the people in the first group have very little real awareness of the conditions of life in the second group. More importantly, we can’t handle thinking of them as fellow human beings. The problem is overwhelming. Early on in the book, Farmer describes other doctors working in Haiti that couldn’t wait to get back to America. They thought of themselves as “American first”, and human second, longing for the comfort of their life in the States over the brutal reality of their moral calling in Haiti.

Nuremberg Laws

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Lex

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws established the legal basis for racial discrimination, with almost no opposition from the German people.

The image to the left shows the method for determining whether you were Jewish blood or German blood based on what your grandparents were.

Not only marriage, but sex between those labeled as Jewish and those labeled as Germans was forbidden. Also Jews were no longer permitted to display German colors (national flag) but were encouraged to display Jewish colors.

I came across these laws recently in researching the Nuremberg Trials, which by the way I recommend highly if ever you wonder about the limits of human nature. Here’s a link to the complete transcripts. It’s the darkest play you will ever read.

I bring up the Nuremberg Laws because of the question that has worried me for a long time: “Can the Holocaust happen again?”. Particularly, can I envision a reasonable downward path into a society that can breed the same mix of hatred, nationalism, and mass-conformity as was present in Nazi Germany. The Nuremberg Laws to me represent a critical step that I can envision many modern countries taking if the populous is deceived through a large propaganda campaign, most likely amidst a major war and/or an economic crisis. Or, for example, suppose that an organization like Al Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in a major American city, and declares that it did so in the name of Islam. Can a major horrific event erase the progress of the civil rights movement in the 20th century by forcing all Muslim citizens of the United States into concentration camps? It’s sick to think about, and surely seems impossible, but is it?

Human rights are violated world-wide on a mass scale, every day, still. We need to learn, ask questions, and help. A book I’m currently reading (Mountains Beyond Mountains) covers just one example of human suffering and an American that gives all his time to make the tiniest incremental improvements in their quality of life.

A Medal for Killing Two Men and a Discharge for Loving One

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Lex

The title comes from the quote written on Leonard Matlovich tombstone: “When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

The “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy was repealed by the Senate, and today Obama is signing it into law, allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military.

I think this policy was a disgrace, just like when 18 year olds could be drafted to go to war but would have to wait till 21 in order to vote (a policy changed by the 26th Amendment to the Constitution in 1971).

Despite my usual cynicism and skeptical outlook, this is a time to celebrate the progress of American social policy. Gay rights is at the forefront of the current leg of the civil rights movement in American. Even if you’re homophobic, or just don’t care about the issue, the repeal of this law is a sign that our country is moving closer and closer to the realization of the beautiful ideal represented by our constitution.

37% of College Graduates Don’t Believe in Evolution

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Lex

A gallop poll released on December 17 confirms my long held belief that the fundamentalist religious groups are still going strong in the United States. Here is a key statistics:

40% of American don’t believe in evolution. Meaning, they believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”.

As you would expect, there is a correlation between your level of education and whether you “believe” in evolution. However, what’s remarkable to me is that 37% of people that graduate college don’t believe in evolution and 22% of postgraduates don’t believe in it. Is it fair to assume that those are not scientists and engineers, but are students of humanities or subjects less related to evolution and the thinking process characteristic of the scientific method?

Lex's Socratic Dia-Blog

Some thoughts on politics, history, philosophy, and science. All hopefully with an open empathetic mind.

Monthly Archives: December 2010