"If the product is so superior, why does it have to live on the tit of the State?" (Charles Krauthammer)
One answer is that the booboisie of these United States is too backward and benighted to appreciate the high level of NPR programming. The rubes of fly-over country are too much enamoured of wrestling, tractor pulls, and reality shows, and, to be blunt, too stupid and lazy to take in superior product.
Being something of an elitist myself, I am sympathetic to this answer. The problem for me is twofold. NPR is run by lefties for lefties. That in itself is not a problem. But it is a most serious problem when part of the funding comes from the taxpayer. But lefties, blind to their own bias, don't see the problem. Very simply, it is wrong to take money by force from people and then use it to promote causes that those people find offensive or worse when the causes have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government. Planned Parenthood and abortion. NEA and "Piss Christ." Get it?
And then there is the recent anti-Christian nastiness. Just in time for Christmas. What a nice touch. Would these liberal pussies mock Muhammad similarly?
Second, we are in fiscal crisis. If we can't remove NPR from the "tit of the State," from the milky mammaries of massive Mama Obama government, what outfit can we remove from said mammaries? If we can't zero out NPR how are we going to cut back on the 'entitlement' programs such as Social Security?
Ah, but no one wants to talk about a real crisis when there is 'Ferguson' to talk about.
Don't get me wrong. I like or rather liked "Car Talk" despite the paucity of automotive advice and the excess of joking around. I even like the PBS "Keeping Up Appearances" in small doses. But if frivolous flab like this can't be excised, what can?
What exactly is the distinction between a universal and a particular? Universals are often said to be repeatable entities, ones-over-many or ones-in-many. Particulars, then, are unrepeatable entities. Now suppose the following: there are universals; there are particulars; particulars instantiate universals; first-order facts are instantiations of universals by particulars.
One and the same universal, F-ness, is repeated in the following facts: Fa, Fb, Fc. But isn't one and the same particular repeated in Fa, Ga, Ha? If so, particulars are as repeatable as universals, in which case repeatability cannot be the mark of the universal. How can it be that all and only universals are repeatable? I stumbled upon this problem the other day. But Frank Ramsey saw it first. See his "Universals," Mind 34, 1925, 401-17.
Instantiation as holding between particulars and universals is asymmetric: if a instantiates F-ness, then F-ness does not instantiate a. (Instantiation is not in general asymmetric, but nonsymmetric: if one universal instatiates a second, it may or may not be the case that the second instantiates the first.) The asymmetry of first-level instantiation may provide a solution to the Ramsey problem. The asymmetry implies that particulars are non-instantiable: they have properties but cannot themselves be properties. By contrast, universals are properties and have properties.
So we can say the following. The repeatability of a universal is its instantiability while the unrepeatability of a particular is its non-instantiability. So, despite appearances, a is not repeated in Fa, Ga, and Ha. For a is a particular and no particular is instantiable (repeatable).
Solve a problem, create one or more others. I solved the Ramsey problem by invoking the asymmetry of instantiation. But instantiation is a mighty perplexing 'relation' (he said with a nervous glance in the direction of Mr. Bradley). It is dyadic and asymmetric. But it is also external to its terms. If a particular has its properties by instantiating them, then its properties are 'outside' it, external to it. Note first that to say that a is F is not to say that a is identical to F-ness. The 'is' of predication is not the 'is' of identity. (For one thing, identity is symmetric, predication is not.) It would seem to follow that a is wholly distinct from F-ness. But then a is connected to F-ness by an external relation and Bradley's regress is up and running. But let's set aside Bradley's regress and the various responses to it to focus on a different problem.
If a and F-ness are external to each other, then it is difficult to see how a could have any intrinsic (nonrelational) properties. Suppose a is an apple and that the apple is red. Being red is an intrinsic property of the apple; it is not a relational property like being in my hand. But if a is F in virtue of standing in an external instantiation relation to the universal F-ness, then it would seem that F-ness cannot be an intrinsic property of a. So an antinomy rears its ugly head: a is (intrinsically) F and a is not (intrinsically) F.
Call this the Problem of the Intrinsically Unpropertied Particular. If there are particulars and universals and these are mutually irreducible categories of entity, then we have the problem of bringing their members together. Suppose it is contingently true that a is F. We cannot say that a is identical to F-ness, nor, it seems, can we say that a and F-ness are wholly distinct and connected by the asymmetric, external tie of instantiation. Is there a way between the horns of this dilemma?
David Armstrong at the end of his career suggested that instantiation is partial identity. The idea is that a and F-ness overlap, are partially identical. This bring a and F-ness together all right, but it implies that the connection is necessary. But then the contingency of the connection is lost. It also implies that instantiation is symmetrical! But then Ramsey is back in the saddle.
When functioning optimally the body can seem, not only an adequate vehicle of our subjectivity, but a fitting and final realization of it as well. Soon enough, however, Buddha's Big Three shatters the illusion: sickness, old age, and death.
Everything partite is slated for partition. Shunning inanition, maintaining a wholesome spiritual ambition, work out your salvation with diligence.
A glance at the graphic to the left suggests that the order is: old age, sickness, and death. Prince Siddartha, forsaking the unreality of the royal compound, goes out in quest of the Real and the Uncompounded. But who is the figure standing on the ground? Siddartha the seeker as opposed to Siddartha the prince?
"The trouble is, you think you have time." (Attributed to Buddha)
John Lennon was gunned down this night in 1980 by Mark David Chapman. I remember that night well: a student of mine called me in the middle of it to report the slaying. Lennon was my least favorite Beatle due to his silly utopianism, as expressed in the lyrically inane 'Imagine,' but this tune of his from the 1965 Rubber Soul album is a gem, and more than fit to remember him by.
And I believe he penned Tomorrow Never Knows from the Revolver album, the best song I know of about meditation. It gives me goose bumps still, almost 50 years later.
Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.
Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.
And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions.
It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy. It seems that science education should include some basic modules on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and the other great philosophers, as well as writings of more recent philosophers such as Tim Maudlin and David Albert.
That's exactly right. As I said in an earlier post,
I fear that a lot of our contemporary scientists are hopelessly bereft of general culture. They are brilliant in their specialties but otherwise uneducated. But that does not stop the likes of Dawkins and Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and Mlodinow from spouting off about God and time and the meaning of life . . . . They want to play the philosopher without doing any 'homework.' They think it's easy: you just shoot your mouth off.
My Scientism category contains detailed critiques of Krauss and other 'scientisticists' to give an ugly name to an ugly bunch of 'philosophistines.' I coined 'philosophistine' years ago to refer to philistines when it comes to philosophy.
One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes. Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Islamophobe' is an example of the former, 'disenfranchise' an example of the latter. 'Racial profiling' is a second example of the former. It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon. Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.
Let's think about this.
I profile you if I subsume you under a profile. A profile is a list of several descriptors. You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors. Here is an example of a profile:
1. Race: black 2. Age: 16-21 years 3. Sex: male 4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head 5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated 6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.' 7. Physical condition: robust, muscular 8. Location: place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black 9. Resident status: not a resident.
Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile. Would I have reason to be suspicious of him? Of course. As suspicious as if the fellow were of Italian extraction but fit the profile mutatis mutandis. But that's not my point. My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.
Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.* But that fact means little by itself. It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics. An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone. But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.
There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.
I wrote and posted the above in July of last year. This morning I find in The New Yorker a piece entitled No Such Thing as Racial Profiling. It is just awful and shows the level to which our elite publications are sinking. It is not worth my time to rebut, but I will direct my readers to the author's comments on the R. Giuliani quotation. Get out your logical scalpels.
Addendum. There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers. Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean. So one can expect the following to happen. 'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing.
Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]
"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."
