Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
The Recent Nightclub Bombings in Bali Illustrate Just What the "War on Terror" Is Really About
On the night of Saturday, October 12--the second anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, a year, month, and day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and mere days after terrorist attacks in Yemen, Kuwait, and the Philippines--two car bombs detonated outside neighboring nightclubs on the island of Bali, triggering a third explosive planted inside, and killing nearly 200 people (the majority of whom were Australian tourists), injuring several others, and redirecting the focus of the war against terror to Indonesia.
Also on the night of Saturday, October 12, the following bands and DJs were playing and spinning at several of Seattle's rock and dance clubs from Re-bar to Rock Bottom: FCS North, Sing-Sing, DJ Greasy, Michiko, Super Furry Animals, Bill Frisell Quintet, the Vells, the Capillaries, the Swains, DJ Che, Redneck Girlfriend, Grunge, Violent Femmes, the Bangs, Better Than Ezra, the Briefs, Tami Hart, the Spitfires, Tullycraft, B-Mello, Cobra High, Randy Schlager, Bobby O, Venus Hum, MC Queen Lucky, Evan Blackstone, and the RC5, among many, many others.
This short list, taken semi-randomly from the pages of The Stranger's music calendar, is designed to illustrate a point that is both facile and essential to reckoning the effects of the Bali bombings. Many of you were at these shows, dancing, smoking, drinking, talking, flirting, kissing, groping, and presumably enjoying yourselves, much like the 180-plus tourists and revelers killed at the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Pub in Bali. Though no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombings, they were almost certainly the work of Muslim radicals launching the latest volley in the war against apostasy.
Whether the attacks turn out to have been the work of al Qaeda or one of the like-purposed, loosely connected, multicellular organizations that function in the region--groups like the Jemaah Islamiyah (an umbrella network that seeks a single Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore), the Indonesian Mujahedeen Council (led by the nefarious Abu Bakar Bashir), Laskar Jihad (which waged holy war on Christians in the Spice Islands before mysteriously disbanding two weeks ago), or the Islam Defenders Front (which makes frequent "sweeps" of bars and nightclubs, attacking non-Muslims, and violently guarding against "prostitution and other bad things")--will ultimately prove to be of little consequence. What matters is that the forces of Islamic fascism have struck again, in a characteristically cowardly, murderous, and yes, blasphemous fashion that must register as an affront to every living human with even a passing interest in freedom.
The facile part: It could have happened here, at any club in Seattle. It's a ludicrous thought, of course--at least as ludicrous as the thought of shutting the Space Needle down on New Year's Eve because some crazy terrorist was arrested at the Canadian border--but that doesn't make it any less true. That doesn't mean we should be looking over our shoulders and under our chairs every time we go to a show. It simply means that it could happen anywhere, because anywhere is exactly where rabid Islamists can find evidence of blasphemy against their precious, imaginary god.
Which brings us to the essential part: The Bali bombings were not an attack against Bali; they were an attack against humankind. In all the jawflap about the whys and wherefores of the multiple conflicts currently dotting our collective radar screen--the war against terror, the war on Iraq, the coming holy war, et al.--it seems worth restating (at the risk of sounding pious) that the war against basic human liberty, waged not by us but on us, is at the heart of the matter. Discourse has justifiably, necessarily turned to complexities of strategy, diplomacy, and consequences. The moral truth, however, remains agonizingly basic. We are still dealing with a small but indefatigable contingent of radicalized, militant absolutists who believe that every living being is accountable to the stricture of Shari'a, under penalty of death. As Salman Rushdie wrote, in an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, the fundamentalist faction is against, "to offer a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." If these were fictional villains, you'd call them hyperbolic, not believable. But they aren't fictional. Their code would be laughable if it weren't so aggressively despicable.
As headlines about Bali cross-fade into news of North Korean nukes, and there are further debates about the finer points of Iraqi de- and restabilization, it's crucial to remember that there is, in fact, a very real enemy, with a very real will, and the very real power of delusional self-righteousness. How to remember? Consider the scene of the attacks (as reported by various Australian and European news sources):
It's a typical hot, sweaty, drunken, lascivious Saturday night. People, primarily young Aussie tourists from Melbourne, Geelong, Perth, and Adelaide, are crammed into the clubs, mixing it up, spilling out into the street. Rock band noises mix with techno music and innumerable voices as latecomers clamor to squeeze inside. Just after 11:00 p.m., a car bomb explodes outside of Paddy's, followed a few seconds later by a second blast that smashes the façade of the Sari Club and leaves a hole in the street a meter deep and 10 meters across. The second bomb is strong enough to damage buildings miles away. All at once, everything's on fire. People are incinerated. Cars go up in flames. Televisions explode. Ceilings collapse, trapping those still inside. Screams. Blistered, charred flesh. Disembodied limbs. Mangled bodies. Victims covered in blood. Inferno.
Now transpose this horrible, fiery mass murder from the seedy, alien lushness of Bali to, say, Pioneer Square, where clubs and bars are lined up in the same teeming proximity as the Sari and Paddy's in the "raunchy" Jalan Legian district, the busiest strip of nightlife in Kuta Beach. Imagine a car blowing up outside the Central Saloon and another, across the street at the New Orleans. Again, it seems too simple an equation, but the fact remains that the victims were not targeted at random, or for merely political purposes. They were doing exactly what any of us might be doing on any night of the week: exercising a liberty so deeply offensive to religious believers as to constitute blasphemy. And the punishment for blasphemy is death.
There is an ongoing lie in the official governmental position on the war against terror, which bends over backwards to assure us that, in the words of our president, "we don't view this as a war of religion in any way, shape, or form." Clearly, in every sense, this is a war of religion, whether it's declared as such or not. And if it isn't, then it certainly should be. Not a war of one religion against another, but of reason against religion--against any belief system that takes its mandate from an invisible spiritual entity and endows its followers with the right to murder or subjugate anyone who fails to come to the same conclusion. This is the war our enemies are fighting. To pretend we're fighting any other--or worse, that this war is somehow not worth fighting, on all fronts--is to dishonor the innocent dead.
Obviously, I disagree vehemently.
Applying logic to "different functions at different times" with the same name is committing the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Different domains of discourse are "forever separate". Trying to apply theorems from plane geometry to the problem of, say, putting your child to sleep is not likely to produce fruitful results. Discrete logic is about things in sets that are related to each other in some well-formed, functionally explicit way. It is not about the universe, as the universe encompasses more than that.
The separation of domains is the result of logic being a simple, finite mathematical tool which does not have limitless application. Take a tiny subset of the problem you propose for yourself: explain the unified logic theory that encompasses both formal plane geometry and peano's axioms of arithmetic in the same formal logic framework.
To finish your assignment, show me a crossover proof that uses lemmas derived from peano's axioms along with lemmas derived from plane geometry to formally demonstrate something valid--anything at all.
I'll save you some time. You can't even start to do it. The domain of discourse of plane geometry is is the ideal continuous plane. The domain of peano's axioms is discrete sets. This is like looking for recipes to bake an airplane.
A question that has perplexed, among others, Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, and Hume.
I like Popper's speculation on this subject: we can only sharpen our apprehension, principally by confirming that our observations are in line with those of others (many of whom, I might add, appear to be smarter than us). This proves nothing, since others are also outside throwing signals in, and could just as easily be evanescent shadows. However, if we chose to have faith in the existence and analytical instincts of others, we make progress in our joint understanding.
It's not something you can prove, it is a matter, in my opinion, of good faith, and good manners to assume that lining up our perceptions with the mainstream of thoughtful others is the right game to be playing to apprehend the world, despite it's subjective pitfalls.
Aristotalian logic was what was under discussion. I know it supports two operators because that's all I use when do traditional sorite(s).
The IMPLYs operator, as I've now demonstrated several times to Tares, applies between the major and minor predicates to produce a new statement. The NOT operator can be applied to a predicate. This is embodied in the various patterns you memorized that make up the valid implications of Aristotalian logic. All these are, is the IMPLYs operator for every combination of of universal and existential implication that's valid between two predicates.
The reason I know it, is that there ain't anything else to Aristotalian logic. Hard as you look, you will not find an AND or OR or NOR operator in use as a machine to derive predicates. You will only find them absorbed inside a predicate, where their logical function is irrelevant. The way to test this, as I have been trying convince tares, is to substitute a meaningless word for anything you think is logic inside a predicate, and see if you can still work the problem.
Hmmm. If I look at Peano's axioms, and I look at the techniques used in plane geometry, I see the former as helping to form the fundamental basis for the validity of the latter. For example, Peano's axiom #3 is essentially a statement of the technique of inductive proofs, which would have some utility in plane geometry.
I'll save you some time. You can't even start to do it. The domain of discourse of plane geometry is is the ideal continuous plane. The domain of peano's axioms is discrete sets.
However, there are discrete entities in plane geometry, for which discrete treatments are possible.
This is like looking for recipes to bake an airplane.
You've no doubt heard of aircraft made from composites -- which are, in fact, baked..... ;-)
Your larger point remains, however. When we limit discussion to areas that can be addressed by logic, we exclude real things that the logic does not, and cannot touch: things like beauty, deliciousness, ugly, boring, interesting (all of which can vary even within the perceptions of a single observer!)
It's also difficult to applly it to something like Tolkein's books -- which are pure fantasy on one level (Tolkein essentially defined a logic in that world); and yet still have significant meaning to us here in the real world.
There is no basis in deductive logic for inductive proofs. No deductive proof exists that induction works. It is something we take on faith, just like we take axioms and predicates on faith. Induction, like the "like" operator, (with which it has much in common), does not have a corresponding logical tautology, nor a proved theorem to it's name. So your example will not help you. I asked you to combine lemmas from the two disciplines to produce a valid proof. When you are talking about lemmas, you are usually engaged in formally serious efforts, and therefore talking about deductive, not inductive proof. Inductive proof is handwaving over the notion that what you have learned to expect is what you expect. It does not provide formal deductive security to a theorem.
The elements of the domain of discourse of plane geometry are points, lines, and planes in a CONTINUOUS field. All of plane geometry is theoretically accessable from the predicates and axioms. This is not true of the domain of discourse of discrete entities in sets. This seems like an unbridgeble difference to me, but if you have an example, by all means point to it.
Nicely put. I'll bow to your explanation, which sounds about right to me. There's indeed an implicit assumption that no counter-examples can be found -- which is a reasonable assumption in certain discrete cases. Inductive proofs are not necessarily true in non-discrete cases -- to my pea brain the Mandelbrot gives a good visual example of this.
(I'm also not interested in going to great lengths to prove my off-the-cuff comment....)
It's interesting to note, BTW, that your thumbnail description of inductive proofs is a fair description of how we go through life.
Those who claim to have derived a perfectly rational and logical ethical system are essentially claiming to do so on an inductive basis (they can only go by what they observe, and cannot have addressed all possible cases). Even the inductive claim is not convincing, given that there are observable counterexamples. The deductive proof is obviously out of the question.
Can the boolean operator IMPLY be derived from the Aristotalian operator IMPLY if I treat the Aristotalian predicates as boolean objects?
The logical axioms are uproved assumptions of both formal systems. To my knowledge there is no derivation step possible, except a silly tautology using the principle of identity.
In theory, you could derive predicate calculus from Aristotalian logic, in that aristotalian logic supports a non-monotonic set of operators. (NOT And IMPLY). Which ought to make the rest of the logical operators derivable as theorems, where your domain of discourse is set theory itself. At least, that was the received wisdom I got as an undergrad. I've not tried it personally.
Chances are, I'd guess, that it's never been done, except maybe as an undergraduate exercise at some university. I'd bet equivalent things have been done in circuit design, without it occuring to anyone to equate the two domains. It's extremely easy to fold all of aristotalian logic into a tidy corner of predicate calculus (three line sorites fold into one line predicate calculus statements). Producing predicate calculus from aristotalian logic would be, by comparison, an onerous and pointless exercise.
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