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.
Numbers aren't exactly my field of expertise either. While one could posit a universe where countability wasn't important for any practical purposes, it seems fairly obvious to me that meaningful observation requires a space that has practical countability. Cognition (in the abstract, not just human) can't develop in a space without all sorts of countable properties.
IMHO, first order logic is quite handy for computer science but fails in natural science and thus would not be of a necessity portable to another universe or domain – which would be subject to other physical laws.
For lurkers: there are various schools of mathematics and tortoise and I are at odds because I fall in the Platonist school.
Formalism is the view that mathematical statements are not about anything, but are rather to be regarded as meaningless marks. The formalists are interested in the rules that govern how these marks are manipulated. Mathematics, in other words is the manipulation of symbols.
Unfortunately, this philosophy was proven unfit by Gödel's incompleteness theorem [see below] ...
A break off of Formalists school is the Logicists school, championed by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, who sought to show that are knowledge of mathematical truth was as certain as our knowledge of logical truth. They attempted to define mathematics in the language of logic. Their efforts resulted in some important ideas, such as the relationship between number theory and set theory, but ultimately this enterprise was found faulty as well due to paradoxes such as Russell's Paradox, an important principle of set theory which could not be based on logic.
Inventionism
Inventionism, also sometimes called Constructivism, holds that true mathematical statements are true because we say they are. Mathematicians do not discover mathematics, as the Platonists claim, they invent new mathematics.
Intuitionism
The easiest way to define intuitionism is that it is the corollary of logicism. The Logicists want to define mathematics in the language of logic. The intuitionists want to define logic in the language of mathematics.
Platonism
The view as pointed out earlier is this: Mathematics exists. It transcends the human creative process, and is out there to be discovered. Pi as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is just as true and real here on Earth as it is on the other side of the galaxy.
The above definitions are from What is Mathematics?
Incompleteness Theorum (Gödel)
But it did happen. So external proof is not required for an event to occur. Therefore, a person does not need external proof in order to believe an event occurred.
Well, of course. But believing an event occured, no matter how ardently, isn't the same as proving it. Most of what humans do, including in mathematics, proceeds happily without proof.
You wrote:
IMHO, first order logic is quite handy for computer science but fails in natural science and thus would not be of a necessity portable to another universe or domain – which would be subject to other physical laws.
I'd call this a bit of an over-reach. Predicate logic doesn't really "fail" in natural science. It just isn't called into the game very often. Occasionally, one sees a truth table imployed where we've made a system with so many conditionals it's hard to think about without turning our brains to putty, but for the most part, most daily reasoning, including most technical and scientific reasoning, takes place without the need of formal logic, because what most people think about most of the time isn't complex enough to require formal tools to avoid errors of logical conflict. We still obey the rules of logic (which apply pretty well to large, gross objects in our local environment) as laid down by Aristotle and Boole, we just don't deign to notice. In our own universe, we have examples of useful systems of logical thought (notibly in the sub-nuclear realm of quantum mechanics) which obey a different set of fundamental rules.
...
You wrote:
Unfortunately, this philosophy was proven unfit by Gödel's incompleteness theorem
I had to think about this for a bit--it seems to me that the formalist school hasn't suffered any worse than the rest of the big league logical sports teams. What Godel demonstrated certainly takes the wind out of Grand Project of formalizing all of mathematics. But this limitation is about equally sobering, in my opinion, for any players in the game. If I were betting on this event, I'd put my money against Platonists in this regard--in that we have now I would suppose, less of a clear vision as to what sort of ghostly reality math and/or logic represents. Just a hunch, of course.
At any rate "unfit" seems a bit strong. Hilbert's agenda of producting logical systems divorced from any domain of discourse (clearly a formalist agenda) proved, in the end to be highly fruitful, and is far from running out of steam as we speak. Establishing isomorphisms between disparate domains of discourse under any given set of logical rules has been a discipline that started as way to escape the type conflict dilemma, and the undecidability dilemma (which it failed to do) but in the end, has turned out to be quite helpful in sub-nuke and topology studies, amongst others.
Me too, PH. I'm so happy to find we agree on this! ;^)
Come on now, BB. Of course I agree that man is unique! We may be related to all the other life on earth, but we're certainly way superior. All that we disagree on is a few little intermediate steps along the way. That's not really so terrible, is it?
That's putting it rather starkly, A-G! But IMHO it's the truth of the matter.
Of course, there's nothing that says man has to rebel against God and the universe. Unlike animals, he has free will: He always has the option to choose the good.
The Greeks had a word for the good: Agathon. It's a symbol that encompasses the ideas of truth, justice, and beauty. You might say it represents the divine standard and measure of universal reality. By this standard and measure, man's "rebellion" against God turns out to be equally a flight from the ordered universe as it is.
Of course, it really doesn't matter whether a man actively chooses to rebel (that is, to do evil), or merely backslides into it. The result is the same in either case, IMHO: disorder -- of the personality, of family and social connections; of the natural world.
But maybe this sounds 'way too "simplistic."
Oh, just a "few little intermediate steps," eh? LOL!!! Okay if you say so, Patrick dear. :^)
I'm not so sure that it is a difference in schools of thought as it is a difference in mathematical backgrounds. I tend to look at everything in mathematics through the eye of Kolmogorov information theory and related fields of computational theory. When people posit things, I immediately frame everything in the context of those fields (which fortunately have very broad application and fairly penetrating theoretical value).
I'm pretty pragmatic about mathematics, probably because my real background is engineering and science, though I'm far better known for my applied mathematics work. My "school" lives somewhere between Formalism and Platonism. Incidentally, I don't really see how Godel's IT is a serious problem for Formalism, at least no more of a problem than it is for anyone else. There are many important theorems in other areas of mathematics that are analogous to GIT (including some extremely useful variants with respect to computation theory found in information theory). The work of Chaitin, Fisher, and others really puts a nastier limitation on our knowledge than Godel does in my opinion. Godel merely asserted that there was a limit, but others have shown exactly what the nature of those limits are and to the extent that we are regularly bumping up against those limits. Bertrand Russell's "Principia Mathematica" has been known to be a fool's errand for some time, at least in its original intent, and I don't think many people are working on a mathematical Theory Of Everything.
In the event you are trying to reduce cognitive experience to formal constructs – since we are blessed on this forum to have an expert in Artificial Intelligence - I am pinging him for his comments.
Heh. Ironically, I am quite probably the most qualified expert on AI theory on this board, though I don't spend too much time on it here. None of the rest of the guys that are recognized experts in the field are Freepers that I am aware of, and I am at least acquainted with most of them. And if any of them read my posts on AI, they'd be able to name me pretty quickly from familiarity with my theoretical work. :-) Interestingly enough, I know for a fact that there are a number of famous scientists and physicists who have been Freepers for a long time. A lot of really well-known and interesting individuals from the academic community hang out here incognito, including individuals we even occasionally talk about in threads -- heaven forbid it gets out that they are regulars on FreeRepublic!
Back to the topic, you can reduce "intelligence" in all meaningful forms to the same formal constructs (and some related proofs have been published in the last couple years regarding this), but not in the sense that most people imagine when they make the assertion that "you can't reduce cognitive experience to formal constructs". A lot of the really cool work is recent, and to a great extent, unpublished. The formal constructs that are emerging are extremely elegant, but not something you can explain to people in an elevator pitch. Explaining it to people who are very competent theoretically still takes several hours for me; people take considerable time to wrap their heads around the math despite its relative simplicity. They just aren't used to thinking about some things in the directions it takes you. Its good stuff, though, and just starting to produce really interesting results in practical application.
Thank you for the discussion, tortoise!
No, thank you! :-)
Orthogonal is better than the term Gould chose to distinguish between reason (and its realm of influence, science) and the spiritual dimension --- "non-overlapping magisteria." At least orthogonal shapes intersect.
In Gould's proposal a conflict arises. Invariably for him science occupied the deep end of Truth and religion was relegated to the separate, "non-overlapping" shallow end of Meaning.
Meaning must intersect Truth, else it wanders meaninglessly in the void.
These are challenging times for thinking, rational people who nonetheless recognize the limitations of reason. Theories of remarkable explanatory power are revealing us to ourselves in unprecedented ways. It sometimes seems as though we've got the puzzle of life knocked.
Insane criminals waging war in the name of faith make matters more difficult for people of all faiths. Sometimes --- oftentimes really --- it seems as though we are at the end of the Religious Age.
But for me the mystery of existence has proven profound enough to keep my pride in check. I take counsel from Santayana's description of Hegel: "He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe." The same tendency surfaces often among many of our learned public intellectuals, especially in the sciences. I hope to avoid their condition. On rising each day --- this is strange, and probably foolish to admit, but quite true I assure you --- I ask myself as I stand before the mirror: "How did we get here? How did all this come to be?" After many years of starting my day with those questions, and much investigation, I can safely say that I'm no closer to the answers than I was when I first started asking them.
I then say my morning prayer.
Prove it. ;)
One of the traps people occasionally fall into is that of scientism, the notion that only science can tell us that which is truthful or valuable, or that the methods of science are equally valid and applicable across all fields of inquiry. I don't think it happens all that often, but I think I would agree that Gould was occasionally prone to the affliction. It's a specific form of a general human failing - when the best tool you have is a hammer, everything around you starts looking an awful lot like a nail, if you follow my meaning.
That's not the worst of Gould's sins, though. IMO, "The Mismeasure of Man" represents one of the greatest sins in science and rationality - the distortion of the truth in order to pursue a personal political agenda. The potential damage from such poisonous perversion is immeasurable. Thanks, Steve...
I ask myself as I stand before the mirror: "How did we get here?"
Do you then tell yourself that this is not your beautiful house, and this is not your beautiful wife?
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was... ;)
And more than that, the author sets up false opposites with the implication that reason can stand as equal to religion in terms of its depth, meaning and impact on our lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Reason is a limited human tool that can deal only with what it is given. Science as well is limited insofar as it is a disciplined mode of exploration that attempts to deal with and understand what is given and what it discovers. Religion, on the other hand, goes far deeper into the source of things and, perhaps because it does, it can evoke passions that may blind believers to the importance of moral means, not ends alone. Well, I'm "preaching to the choir" here, I know. Just wanted to expand on your post.
I'm not buying what the author is selling.
Do you then tell yourself that this is not your beautiful house, and this is not your beautiful wife?
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was...
You got me. Yes, I really am David Byne.
If I may add a thought here ... You read the Bible and it "touches" you. There is resonance. I have not had the same experience but I have never devoted the necessary time to its study. I have, however, been moved, and so to a degree I understand. More, I emphatically agree that this mode of knowing is far superior to cold, "objective" reason, or any of the ideologies so prevalent in the 20th Century, all of which IMHO were and are reactionary to the dominance of Christianity for so many centuries. Those ideologies resulted in rivers of blood. Islam has a far piece to go to match them. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
The existence of God is blindingly obvious to me, and it requires tremendous intellectual effort IMHO to overcome what the vast bulk of earthly humanity acknowledges with its religions. We can pretend, for the sake of argument, that things are "out there". But where we live and where we know is "in here".
One minor example. Those of us who have been around awhile have experienced that small voice within, a gut feeling really, that has said to us "Don't do it". Well, we did, being wilful, and we paid. This has happened to me in ways small and medium large on sufficient occassions that I have begun to pay close attention to that small voice. Neither reason nor science can touch it but it's nonetheless real and true and I ignore it at my peril.
There are many many examples of experiences and truths unexplainable by science and my own view is that science and religion are false opposites. Religious knowledge encompasses science and it would be quite appropriate, again IMHO, for religious folk to say to the scientists that it is out of line when they attempt to impose restrictions on acceptable evidence (eg. replicablilty) that serve to mask science's ignorance.
I think that there is an ongoing attempt to deify "science" and "reason" here in the West which IMHO must be made to fail.
For what it's worth ...
I can't; I just believe it to be true. :^P
I wonder, what do you make of a couple of anecdotes I related on another thread recently?
Thus, he makes a false distinction between reason and religion, and he further characterizes religion (again, per se ) to mean murdering and subjugating in the name of some 'invisible spiritual entity'. Excuse me if I draw the obvious conclusion that the writer is hostile to ALL religion, not just Islamic terrorists.
As for the 'cult of rationalism', this simply describes the mentality of Randians, followers of Md. Murray O'Hare, the publishers of Skeptic magazine and many outspoken atheistic scientists who tout human reason as the highest standard in all things and often like to spell it with a capital 'R'. I do not mean that there is an organized cult or official religion, nor was it meant to be derogatory. The simple fact is that there are many people who, lacking a belief in God, substitute Reason as their god and habitually castigate all religions and all religious persons for the atrocious acts of a few extremists. However, they would be loathe to take the blame, as atheists, for all the atrocities committed by atheists throughout history (French Revolution, Marxism, Marque de Sade, etc.) Gee, THAT would be unfair, wouldn't it?
It's a certified pleasure to see you here, pariah.
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