Apparently Poor Taste Knows No Bounds

I just saw a report at IMDB suggesting that video of Michael Jackson’s final concert rehearsal will probably be broadcast and might be released as a DVD.   Someone within the concert promotion company also is alleged to have stated that “(w)e have a live album in the can”. 

I was not a Michael Jackson fan.  I personally think that Michael Jackson was a very troubled individual who existed in his own little world with no concept of how the world at large perceived him. 

I also think that shameless exploitation of the dead such as the concert promotion company seems to be driving to is about as crass and ghoulish as you can get. 

Let the man rest in peace.

CB

True Blood

There are relatively few TV programs that I watch with any regularity.  House, NCIS, and occasionally Burn Notice are really about it, with an odd smattering of SpongeBob tossed in.

One program that I recently found myself caught up in is HBO’s True Blood, which just started its second season.  I burned through the first season of 12 episodes in a couple of evenings, and am currently debating whether it’s worth it to subscribe to HBO to watch the second season or just wait until the DVDs get released. 

The series is based on Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire books, in which a key plot point is that vampires, which have been around basically forever, reveal themselves to the general public and begin making some efforts to integrate into human society.  I’ve not read any of the books, but the integration efforts are very significant to the show.

The results are interesting, and True Blood functions in many ways as a metaphor for tolerance.¹  By setting the narrative in rural Louisiana, the writers are able to leverage the deep, complex, and often violent history of social relations in the southern United States to great effect.

Now while I like the show itself, the thing that really sticks in my head is the opening title sequence.  (Bear with me on this…) 

The sequence was produced by Digital Kitchen, and constructed from a combination of newly shot and archived footage set against Jace Everett’s song Bad Things.  (The sequence is available to view at Digital Kitchen’s website, as is a short “making-of” feature.  Remember, this is an HBO series – the title sequence is NSFW, and not particularly family-friendly.  It’s also available with some discussion at The Art of the Title Sequence.)  It is built up of short film clips with abrupt transitions, and generally contrasts concepts of sin and redemption.  About halfway through is a short black-and-white segment showing a small boy of perhaps 10 wearing KKK robes with a haunted, vaguely uncomprehending look on his face.  That look is what burned itself into my mind. 

I haven’t been able to determine if the scene from the KKK rally was staged for the title or if it’s older archived footage.  My suspicion is that it’s archival.  Either way, it’s a powerful image that drives home how malleable children are and how much they learn by example.² 

CB

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¹Vampires have been used as metaphors for just about everything from repressed Victorian-era sexuality to high school awkwardness.  I’d venture to say that with a little thought and effort, one could construct a vampire metaphor for nearly anything…

²Don’t worry.  I don’t have any intention of waxing philosophical on the SpongeBob title sequence any time soon…

Postcards From Space

The Big Picture has a series of photos taken from the International Space Station.  They’re uniformly breathtaking.  The resolution is astounding – the first 4 progressively zoom in on an eruption of the Sarychev Peak Volcano.  The gallery is well worth a look.  (HT to Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy.)

CB

Sales Pitches

Rebecca at Skepchick has a good video up that is vaguely related to my previous post about decisions.

I think she captures the essence of product marketing pretty well…

CB

Decisions, Decisions

The other day at lunch, the discussion turned to how decisions get made for major engineering projects.

Frequently, such decisions are made based on a trade study or an analysis of alternatives, in which different technical solutions are investigated and graded based on a set of established criteria such as cost, reliability, technological maturity, and suchlike.

In the pure state, such a study can be very valuable in identifying a smart solution to a vexing design problem. If the proper constraints are identified, the grading is appropriately weighted, and the people involved in the study are skilled and knowledgeable, there can be a high degree of confidence that the solution obtained through this process is a good one.¹

Sometimes, though, reality intrudes and skews things. It’s not unheard of for the desired outcome of investigations like this to be determined beforehand, and the results can therefore be suspect. (It’s worth noting that the result might actually be the “right” result, but the process has been short-circuited to get there.) There are a lot of nuances to this situation, but the net result is that an option ends up getting chosen from an incomplete set of valid alternatives.

This situation turns up a lot in our day-to-day lives, and we often don’t recognize it. It’s called, in broad terms, the fallacy of false choice. (It may also be called false dilemma or excluded middle , and is often found hand-in-hand with the loaded question.)

Let’s look at a couple of well-known examples and pick them apart and see why they don’t work.

If you’re not with us, you’re against us!

This one turns up a lot in political rhetoric. Famous examples include Jesus’ usage in Matthew 12:30. Many people may be familiar with this one because of post-9/11 rhetoric – George W. Bush included the statement “[e]ither you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” in his 30 September 2001 address to the joint session of Congress. On the surface, this seemed like a reasonable and true statement, especially at a time when Americans were still apprehensively watching the skies for hijacked airplanes. But let’s consider the statement more closely. When Bush made his statement, the word “us” was overloaded with meanings. It could mean “us” Americans, “us” victims of terrorism, “us” policy makers within the administration, or any one of several other “us”es. Similarly, the term “terrorist” does not identify a single, unambiguous group – we tend to think of “terrorists” as being extremely conservative Muslims, but that’s overly narrow. The Irish Republican Army, largely Catholic, would be considered a terrorist group by many in England. PETA could be considered a terrorist group by the meat packing industry. Given such considerations, Bush’s statement becomes much more ambiguous. One could very well oppose, for example, many of the Bush administration’s decisions in the prosecution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet still be opposed to the extreme flavor of Islam that tends to produce people that end up flying planes into buildings. Or one may simply not have a dog in the fight – someone living hand-to-mouth in a squatter’s camp outside of Washington, DC, may well not have cared what the administration did in response to actions that originated half-way around the world, being more concerned with where his next meal would come from. Ultimately, Bush’s statement was likely intended to drum up support for actions that the administration was likely to take by preemptively painting anyone who might raise objections to them as sympathetic to the “terrorist” agenda.

Lord, liar, or lunatic (Lewis’ Trilemma)

(Before I get into this, I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to make any theological points by using this example. I picked it because it’s familiar to a lot of people, and because despite its popularity, it’s really a very poor argument.  The fact that it’s about Jesus doesn’t earn it any special consideration one way or the other.)   C.S. Lewis popularized this one in his 1952 work Mere Christianity.² Lewis is rather more wordy in how he presents this topic, but he proceeds from the presupposition that Jesus claimed to be God, and then states that one who claimed to be God either must be God, or is lying, or is a lunatic “on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg”. You frequently run into Lewis’ argument in popular apologetic works, but where you aren’t likely to find it is in a course on New Testament studies or in a scholarly treatment of the New Testament. Here’s why. Despite being a superficially appealing argument, it falls apart on a number of levels. Let’s look at it in closer detail.

The trilemma boils down to a series of presuppositions and propositions³:

Presuppositions
1) Jesus claimed to be God. (Directly stated)⁴
2) All people with mental illness are stark-raving lunatics. (Implied)
3) All liars are evil, on par with “The Devil of Hell”. (Implied)

Propositions
1) A claim to be God is either true or untrue.
2) An untrue statement is either a lie or the product of insanity

The biggest single problem is internal to the structure of Lewis’ argument – namely the second proposition is just flat wrong. Let’s think about it for a minute. Even if we allow for the truth of the presuppositions, the second proposition is simply untrue, and a moment’s reflection should demonstrate why. It’s certainly possible to make an untrue statement that one honestly believes to be accurate – one need look no further than the weather on the evening news. It’s entirely possible that a perfectly sane and honest Jesus might have claimed to be God and simply been mistaken about it – there’s a lot about Jesus’ life that isn’t represented in the Gospels, and absent knowledge of all that missing time we simply aren’t in a position to know what he may or may not have been told during his formative years.⁵ The simple fact that one can be innocently and sincerely wrong and not realize it breaks Lewis’ argument right there.

Beyond that, though, his presuppositions aren’t right, most importantly the second two. Lewis uses some heavily loaded terms (e.g. lunatic and the Devil of Hell to characterize mental illnesses and liars, but he’s going for the emotional response there and not acknowledging other possibilities.

First, not all people with mental illnesses are obviously barking mad and foaming at the mouth. Many appear quite normal, and go about their lives quite unobtrusively. One could conceptualize an individual with grandiose self-delusions being firmly convinced that he was God (ahem…L.Ron Hubbard…ahem) and developing quite a following if his message resonated with some part of the population.

Second, not all lies are evil. When I’m putting a basketball goal together and get an inch-long metal splinter in my hand, I’m going to tell the kids that “it’s not that bad” as I’m leaving a trail of blood across the floor on my way to clean up the wound enough to see if it needs stitches. Likewise, it’s not hard to imagine a situation where someone trying to advance social reforms might claim stronger credentials than he really has in order to make his message more appealing to the public. One could argue that the benefits to society outweigh the lie.

The bottom line here is that Lewis’ trilemma argument fails largely because he ignored reasonable (if not particularly appealing) possibilities in order to steer his readers into accepting the answer he wanted them to accept. It’s a poor argument on its face, and that’s why you’ll almost never see it in a scholarly setting except as an example of how not to construct an argument.⁶

Tying it all together

I’ve spent quite a few words here talking about false choices and incomplete lists of alternatives, but how does this fit into day-to-day life? Lots of places, actually. We face decisions every day – what to eat, where to shop, what to buy, what medicine to take – and everywhere we look someone is trying to convince us to eat this sandwich or buy that brand of shoe or take the newest cholesterol lowering drug, and it’s often very difficult to cut through the advertising and promotional gimmicks and figure out what the best choice really is. While we certainly can’t all become experts on everything, we can pause and ask ourselves whether we have sufficient information to make a reasonable choice. We should pause long enough to wonder whether we’re being steered into a decision, and wonder whether what we don’t know could make a difference in our decision making process. In short, we need to be active and critical consumers.

CB

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¹Let’s say you need to decide which sort of thingamajig to use in your time machine. You might consider a widget, a framistat, a whatchamacallit, and a wingding. As you evaluate, you might look at what sort of power source each of these uses – wingdings require the use of an Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator, and we’re using a Flux Capacitor, so wingdings are right out. Widgets are extremely efficient, but prone to breakage after only a few uses, so on balance they’re a more expensive option, so they fall to the bottom of the list. Whatchamacallits are cheap and reasonably efficient, but they use aluminum which would be hard to come by if you needed to make repairs in the distant past, so they’re not as attractive an option. That leaves framistats, which while being more expensive than whatchamacallits and less efficient than widgets, are very reliable, made from wood, and work with flux capacitors. Bingo! Framistats it is.

²I did not realize until a few days ago that he also included the trilemma in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. It shows up when the Professor is talking to the kids about Lucy’s and Edward’s early visits to Narnia. This book was published in 1950, which means that Mere Christianity wasn’t the first time Lewis used the trilemma in print. However, since Mere Christianity was derived from material that Lewis was using in the early 1940’s, it isn’t too surprising that it turns up in his writings.

³A word on terminology: The term presupposition here is something which must be true in order for the subsequent argument to hold. If the presuppositions don’t hold, the rest of the argument doesn’t stand up.

⁴This presupposition itself rests on several others – namely that Jesus existed and the New Testament accurately records Jesus’ words and actions without any editorial embellishment. While there are those who argue that Jesus never existed in the first place, the overwhelming scholarly view is that he did. However, there are very good reasons to conclude that the New Testament is not a perfect record – largely because the earliest books of the New Testament weren’t written down until decades after Jesus’ death – and that the exact words of Jesus may be lost to history. Very few New Testament scholars would unreservedly support Lewis’ statement that Jesus claimed to be God.

⁵This fact always bothered me. We’ve got two nativity stories that don’t completely agree with each other, a couple of anecdotes about the youthful Jesus in the Temple, and then around twenty years of no information at all, followed by a 1 to 3 year ministry. What was going on for those two decades?

⁶If you still think Lewis was onto something here, I urge you to look up the part in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe where he has the Professor use this argument. When you see it in that context, it seems much less impressive – the first thing I thought was “the kids could have been dreaming…”