Collage Technique: Link Dumping with commentary

First of all, Jerry Coyne seems to have really good taste: I haven’t heard some mention The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott in a long time. I have Coyne’s book by my desk, but I don’t know if I am going to review it because I am, frankly, not really qualified to get into the nitty-gritty of the evolutionary biology. It’s convincing, I’ll say that.

Secondly, I mentioned Ophelia Benson’s questions for Mooney. Honestly, these questions are the best critique of the Mooney’s position on the Mooney and Kirshenbaum versus Myer’s debacle. She also points out why standing up to absurd ritualism that forces itself on others is important, regardless of how one feels above tone or religion. Strangely, however, I think Benson’s questions do actually point out the effectiveness of using a moderated tone.

While I am mentioning Butterflies and Wheels, I read something reposted there by Marieme Helie Lucas that put the speech in Cairo into an uncomfortable light. While you will often find me foaming about the mouth about how we should not be monolithic in our framing of culture(s) and how we shouldn’t treat abstracts like they were physically real, I completely missed that Obama did it in the Cairo speech. Lucas says,

First of all, Obama’s discourse is addressed to ‘Islam’, as if an idea, a concept, a belief, could hear him. As if those were not necessarily mediated by the people who hold these views, ideas, concepts or beliefs. As Soheib Bencheikh, former Great Mufti of Marseilles, now Director of the Institute of High Islamic Studies in Marseilles, used to say: ‘I have never seen a Qur’an walking in the street’…

Can we imagine for one minute that Obama would address himself to ‘ Christianity’ or to ‘Buddhism’? No, he would talk to Christians or Buddhists as to real people, keeping in mind all their differences. Obama is essentializing Islam, ignoring the large differences that exist among Muslim believers themselves, in terms of religious schools of thought and interpretations, cultural differences and political opinions. These differences indeed make it totally irrelevant to speak about ‘Islam’ in such a totalizing way. Obama would not dare essentialize, for instance, Christianity in such a way, ignoring the huge gap between Opus Dei and liberation theology…

Unfortunately, this essentializing Islam feeds into the plans of Muslim fundamentalists whose permanent claim is that there is one single Islam – their version of it -, one homogeneous Muslim world, and subsequently one single Islamic law that needs to be respected by all in the name of religious rights. Any study of the laws in ‘Muslim’ countries show that these laws are pretty different from one country to the other, deriving not just from different interpretations of religion, but also from the various cultures in which Islam has been spreading on all continents, and that these supposedly Muslim laws reflect as well historical and political factors including colonial sources [*] – obviously not divine.

This is the first adverse consequence of Obama’s essentializing Islam and homogeneizing Muslims: as much as he may criticize fundamentalists – which he calls ‘a minority of extremists’-, he is using their language and their concepts. This is unlikely to help the cause of anti fundamentalists forces in Muslim countries.

It follows suit that Obama talks to religions, not to citizens, not to nations or countries.

Painful now that you see it that way, no?

While I am on this topic, Tauriq Moosa stated the problem with the Ireland’s blasphemy laws better than I did. Moosa is quite a good writer.

On eerie, vaguely theocratic inspired depression, Maryam Namazie blog reporting on a lot of what is going on in Iran has me wanting to crawl under a rock. I would love to see some sociological studies on why overt oppression seems bring out real political momentum on a street level. I normally don’t feel the need to make superficial gestures of political solitary. I often think they do more harm than good, but I’ll be wearing green for a while.

Now for something completely different: Jamais Cascio discusses a revolution in Desktop manufacturing at IEET:

Take a design for a simple product—an engine part, for example, or a piece of silverware, and feed it into a computer. Press “print.” Out pops (for a sufficiently wide definition of “pops”) a physical duplicate, made out of materials plastic, ceramic, metal—even sugar. Press “print” again, and out comes another copy—or feed in a new design, for the next necessary object.

It may sound like a scene from a low-rent version of Star Trek, but it’s real, and it’s happening with increasing frequency. This process goes by a few names, but it’s most commonly known as “3D Printing” (the older name, “rapid prototyping,” no longer captures the range of uses, while the other alternative name, “fabbing,” is a little too cyberpunk for the moment). While the process has been around since the mid-1980s, the cost of 3D printers has been dropping quickly, and now range to well under $10,000. If that still sounds like a lot of money, you’re right—but don’t forget, it was when laser printers dropped to this price range in the mid-1980s that the desktop publishing revolution kicked off.

Right now, most 3D printing is limited to single-material objects (as designer Sven Johnson noted on Twitter, we’re now starting to see two-material 3D printers). Most systems use (often proprietary) plastics, but a few use metal “toner.” The latter is turned solid by a variety of high-tech means, from sintering with lasers (for simple objects) to using high-energy electron beams to melt the metal into dense, high-strength parts.

One over-used but very apt word comes to mind: NEAT!!!

The Rogerian Argument and Internet Polarization

There are times when one must forgive the source. I am not one to cite Counterpunch as a general rule: while I understand the purpose of firebrands, I am not one these days. In fact, while I find a lot of the quest writing on Counterpunch that is interesting and insightful, Cockburn and company engage in over-generalizing, a knee-jerk distrusting of any form of authority, and hyperbole. In fact, as of the day I post it, a prominent article is attacking the DSMV. Here’s the example:

Here’s where the drug lords, the shrinks and the insurance companies collude in establishing hundreds of bogus psychic conditions requiring the psychotropic drugs from which they reap billions every year.

While I do have a mild distrust of the expansiveness of the normative criteria in the DSMV, this sort of near conspiracy mongering tires me. However, ignoring the wide wage of writers and topics at Counterpunch would be like ignoring The Huffington Post for its publishing of quackery and ignoring the fact it has published David Sloan Wilson and Michael Shermer in the past.

What struck me on the Counterpunch was an article on the Rogerian argument by Kaz Dziamka,. I was hooked from reading the first two paragraphs, which I will now quote:

It is, of course, regrettable that logic and reason hold little sway in politics and religion. Politics is typically concerned with expediency, not with moral principles or rational conduct. Religionists often cater shamelessly to our infinite capacity for delusion and wishful thinking, never to our ability to reason.

But rational argument could have unexpected benefits, particularly for politicians and religionists, assuming that in their irrationality they are prepared not to be outright dogmatic and unrelenting. I am not talking about correct deductive and inductive reasoning. I am talking about Rogerian argument, a conflict-solving method popularized by the American psychologist Carl R. Rogers (hence “Rogerian”) in his essay “Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation.”

Rogers interests was largely in conflict resolution and resisting polarization. Something that has been on my mind since I watched the rabble-rousing between Pharyngula and The Intersection yesterday. In fact, reading the myriad response in the comments section indicates my point-people just read through each other.

Actually, its much deeper than that for me: I am very tired of being asked to take sides with camps when I don’t really endorse either side. This seems to be the story of my life these days. (Are you Democrat or Republican? Neither. Are you a religionist or a secularist? Both depending on your definition. Are you for vouchers or public education? Neither as they are currently constituted. Do you support PZ Myers or Chris Mooney? I think they both have great points depending on the subject and fans of both have acted out of hand lately. Are you a libertarian or a socialist? I am Technocrat. And so on and so forth)

So I am intensely interested in the implications of the Rogerian argument. What was the crux of the Rogerian argument? Essentially, the methodology as an attempt to bypass our natural tendency towards confirmation bias. Dziamka explains it as follows:

The tough problem is to try somehow to listen to the other side before we make up our mind and act on our beliefs because we are actually often unwilling to listen for fear that we might be affected by other points of view. And we don’t want that: We’ve grown comfortable believing that ours is the only valid point of view. “The great majority of us,” points out Rogers, “could not listen; we would find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening would seem too dangerous. So the first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.”

In Current Issues and Enduring Questions (the book I use for teaching argumentative writing at the Central New Mexico Community College), the authors, Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau, summarize the main points of Rogerian argument and contrast it with the traditional, combative mode, which we all tend to overuse and abuse æ Aristotelian argument. The Rogerian formula for arguing and conflict-solving shows sympathetic understanding of the opposing argument, recognizes what is valid in it, and demonstrates that those who take the other side are nonetheless persons of goodwill.

So what is Roger’s prescription according to Dziamka: Just Shut Up and Listen to Your Enemy.

Now, I am not going say its that simple. In fact, I think taking too sympathetic a line towards certain things is harmful. That said, I think you should listen to the arguments at first before launching into the assault for three reasons: 1) to find out if both parties even understand the basic premises of each others disagreement, 2) to allow for a fuller expression of the opposing view so that all logical attacks can be done on grounds of solid form and not strawmen, and 3) its civil.

So let’s look at the form of a Rogerian argument and see how it goes. I found this summary at a Colorado University website that explains the rhetorical form of the argument. Note the structure is akin to the Hegalian thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The difficulty of the Rogerian strategy is that both sides really have to understand each other and have the best arguments put forward, and the any conclusions both consider both point of views.

Now, I am going to give some warning: if you bend too easily on points where logic or ethics dictate that you should not, instead of being more reasonable, you will simply FAIL to make an argument. Furthermore, it is easy for your heuristics to make you unable to hear the other side EVEN when you are sincerely trying because each thing the “opposing” side says triggers a pre-established pattern of reaction in your thinking. Regardless of how reasonable you are, this trait is common. Basic heuristics a neuro-linquistic shorthand that makes making decisions easier and complicated heuristics are patterns of ideology and reification that make other views hard to understand because your philosophical assumptions mean that you treat the category as invalid.

It seems to me, however, that the Rogerian form of argumentation is harder to do on the internet where selection of bias of most readers and contributors have already limited you to people who are previous polarized in opinion. Furthermore, polarized opinion sell more and are more dramatic to watch. If Carl Rogers had a blog, the hits would probably be lower than say Instapundit.