Page of Moss - bloglet for Sunday 8 April 2001

And all that's just focusing on the differences within the debate on each individual issues; it doesn't even begin to touch on the different rankings of the comparative importance of each issue. _
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06:50:45 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

My own opinion is that, when there's such widespread disagreement about the moral significance of something, the government should avoid making laws about it. And in the abstract, of course--if I could state that position without actually mentioning the content of any actual issue--that opinion would put me squarely in the conservative camp. But I'm obviously not a conservative. And indeed, I suspect that my opinion is itself more than a little influenced by the content of the issue at stake. _
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06:48:19 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

Nobody is anti-choice, nor is anybody anti-life. Except perhaps the voluntary human extinction movement, but even there it's voluntary. One could perfectly consistently support voluntary human extinction but oppose abortion. _
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06:46:14 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

There are all sorts of things wrong with the way debate happens on environmental issues. Fundamentally, the two sides differ over a question of fact, but they are moved to hold their opinions based largely on unrelated ideological biases. But again, given that disagreement, the two sides will have very different analyses of what the question they're debating actually is. _
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06:43:04 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

Slavery is an interesting case, too: I imagine people on both sides viewed it as an issue of the very highest importance, but on one side its importance was economic, its moral significance trivial, while on the other side, it had the very highest moral significance--and, usually, no serious economic impact. _
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06:40:38 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

The intensity with which someone who's pro-choice supports the right to have an abortion may be very great, but it can never approach the intensity with which someone who's pro-life must oppose the slaughter of millions of innocent babies. Not because one of them has more cause for doubt than the other, just because the importance of what's at stake changes radically based on which view you're convinced of. _
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06:37:27 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

For a Christian, belief in God should be very important indeed, possibly the most important thing of all. For an atheist, disbelief should be trivial, hardly even conscious, except to the extent that it should itself be questioned and doubted. _
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06:34:59 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

Here's another (oversimplified) attempt at describing the situation in the U.S.:

It's true that, as the leftists say, we have one extremely right-wing party and one centrist conservative party, but it's also true, as the (even by U.S. standards) conservatives say, that the views of the centrist party are more strongly supported in the media, and that the media portrays these as left vs. right issues.

This is why the "liberal media bias" and the "conservative media bias" are both so clearly visible to the people who complain about them.

This is different from just saying that someone at either extreme sees the center as the opposite extreme. What I'm saying is that the radical left and the radical right in America today have different views about what the important, polarizing, political issues are. Something like: liberals and conservatives have disagreements about many issues, but they also disagree about which disagreements are the important ones. _
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06:23:57 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

Ah ha! It's not:
prescriptive / descriptive
it's
prescriptive / descriptive / predictive

That is, saying what happens will help you understand something more than telling what should happen, but neither will be as useful as trying to say what will happen, because then you get responses back that tell you how good your original statement was. _
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06:20:48 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

It's been so long since I finished a book. Wait... it's been less than a minute since I finished a book. _
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03:04:03 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

Yes! Yes, that did work, and it's got the best semantics of any of these options, because a pre tag really does indicate specifically that you want to keep formatting. So I guess the thing to do is to update bloglet to allow newlines. I imagine Miss Cain will be pleased, too; no more enter problem. _
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02:05:49 PM, Saturday 7 April 2001

Well, no, it didn't. Maybe it actually wants newlines. Which would be irritating, because it would mean having to use an editor (or update bloglet), but let me see:

Did that work? _
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02:04:00 PM, Saturday 7 April 2001

Hmm... I suppose, if you don't want the browser to strip out whitespace, the traditional tag to use is <pre>... I wonder what happens if I use it in the way that would seem to be indicated here.

There... did that work? _
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02:01:41 PM, Saturday 7 April 2001

Oh! If only the seniors can wait for two weeks! That would be so cool! _
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07:28:59 PM, Friday 6 April 2001

This is an entry so that the last entry, which I corrected manually, will get copied into the backup. _
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12:49:47 PM, Friday 6 April 2001

Kerne, why not just use the <br> tag? That's what it's intended for, after all. Line break. Like
this. And unlike spaces, html does recognize repetitions of it, like

this.Also, if you use line break, instead of paragraph, you get much better control of the outcome, because the space it leaves on a blank line will always be exactly one line height. With the paragraph tag, sometimes there will be a space (of unpredictable width), but there's also the chance that a browser won't seperate paragraphs vertically. When I have a browser that permits user-defined default stylesheets (come to think of it, Mozilla may do that already--I should check) I fully intend to have no vertical seperation between paragraphs, but to indent the first line of a new paragraph.

In fact, this is what I do now in the stylesheet for my Bloglet. Note the especially nice touch of leaving the first paragraph unindented. Of course, all that said, I really shouldn't talk about cross-platform issues until I fix my stylesheet so that it doesn't break Netscape. Or at least so that Netscape will ignore it and just show the content correctly. _
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12:41:45 PM, Friday 6 April 2001

Okay, I just have to get this out of my system: a city government deciding what language it will use in city documents, or a mayor deciding what sort of art can receive taxpayer funding, or a school telling a student not to wear something out of concern that it would cause fighting, is not a violation of the first amendment, nor is it a serious threat freedom of expression, nor is it even (in the abstract) a bad idea. _
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05:44:54 PM, Thursday 5 April 2001

Well, it's not implemented in Internet Explorer 5.0 either, alas. The lack of IE support means it doesn't work for somewhere between 80% and 95% of the people on the web--stupid, but true. Does it work in Opera? _
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12:06:40 PM, Thursday 5 April 2001

I can report that it fails under Internet Explorer 4.0 on Windows, and works under Mozilla Build 2001032218 and Lynx, both under Linux. Will try IE5 tommorow at work. It's quite a new tag, and, if I remember correctly, was inserted into the standard before any browser supported it. I personally feel it's best to be conservative about these things, and avoid using newer HTML in such a way that it breaks older browsers, but it all depends what you're trying to do. When it's more widely accepted it'll certainly be handy.

BTW, if you're using Netscape under Linux already, I really do recommend getting a recent build of Mozilla instead. It still has some weaknesses, but it's faster, prettier, and better-implemented than Netscape 4.7. _
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12:47:05 AM, Thursday 5 April 2001

"Satan sucks, but you're the best." _
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02:45:46 PM, Wednesday 4 April 2001

The news in classical Latin. That's wonderful. (Note: it's in RealAudio). (Link courtesy of www.jamesarcher.net. And that link is courtesy of me randomly following links from people's Slashdot .sigs). _
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04:41:08 PM, Tuesday 3 April 2001

Tools : Internet Options... : Advanced : Browsing : Disable script debugging _
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07:36:33 PM, Monday 2 April 2001

Oh, that's beautiful: the new image rendering library for Mozilla is called libpr0n. _
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01:50:45 PM, Monday 2 April 2001

And Slashdot's April Fool's Day joke this year seems to have been to start a totally pointless religious flamewar. _
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11:59:03 AM, Monday 2 April 2001

Twelve column inches of very confused explanation--evidently that comment hit a nerve. Here's the short, comprehensible version:

I'm ashamed to have displayed such intellectual arrogance.
Please don't take it seriously.
I don't understand me at all.

_
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05:41:12 PM, Saturday 31 March 2001

Oh dear--yes, I'm afraid it did come off that way. The militarism is intended ironically, a response to many skeptics who do seem to view it as a war (often the same ones that see evolution as a clear disproof of Christianity). I've got a slightly awkward combination of beliefs: I'm quite firmly convinced of the theory of evolution (like any theory, it may be changed utterly by its further refinements, but I don't expect it to be overturned), and thus I think it's good for people to become convinced of evolution, and bad to oppose it with with arguments that actually misunderstand it; I also believe that there's no necessary conflict between being convinced of the theory of evolution and believing in Christianity, and even that the theory of evolution has no especially significant moral or metaphysical consequences; but I'm also not a Christian myself--I'm an atheist, for reasons that could best be described as historical accident--so I don't really feel it's my place to tell Christians what is and isn't in accordance with their beliefs.

Where was I going with this?

Oh yes: the people whose beliefs I have the most in common with are skeptics (of the Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins variety), but they tend to see their beliefs as some sort of crusade, whereas I see mine as just what I happen to believe, for no very good reason, and probably wrong half the time anyway. And, the human mind being what it is, one way in which I deal with this is to play up some of the ridiculous extremes to which my beliefs can be taken. But it's all bluster. It's a half-playful half-grim self parody. It's a way of taking what confidence I have in my convictions so far that it becomes overconfidence, just so that I can see what overconfidence would lead to. I do the same thing with my communism, or even my support for Free Software. Or my voting for Ralph Nader in the recent election: I'm not actually glad that Bush won, I don't actually see no difference at all between the parties, but I still think I did right, and, since I feel that way, it's important for me to find ways of acknowledging the irrational elements that go into my convictions. And one way is to make them thoroughly obvious. But I don't do it out of extreme faith in my convictions; the haughty militaristic tone is there to let itself be seen, and to keep me from descending into actual haughty militarism.

The priests also marry not. _
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03:55:16 PM, Saturday 31 March 2001

Hurray! I'm going to Annapolis, probably from April 21st through April 29th. _
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02:36:53 AM, Saturday 31 March 2001

Oh dear, can I have slept that long? Now how will I sleep tonight? _
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11:44:10 PM, Friday 30 March 2001

Physics be damned--what we need here is a topologist. _
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05:46:04 PM, Friday 30 March 2001

But on Slashdot, 'troll' seems to have come to mean 'someone I disagree with in any way, or whose tone I disapprove of in any way'. _
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11:53:56 AM, Friday 30 March 2001

To surprise and delight. _
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03:06:56 AM, Thursday 29 March 2001

Note to all Annapolis St. John's students who read this bloglet: even if you haven't read Faraday yet, try to go to as much of the Faraday Conference as you possibly can--he was a fascinating man, and the lectures and presentations are likely to be very interesting indeed. _
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05:08:46 PM, Wednesday 28 March 2001

The sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel. _
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03:00:27 PM, Wednesday 28 March 2001

Nonetheless, the political situation in this country being what it is, it's altogether likely that some intelligent creationists may read this. Don't worry, I'm not saying I think you're stupid, I'm just saying I honestly believe that, if you can examine the evidence with an open mind, you'll see that the arguments for evolution really do constitute proof, and that you'll also see that this has no bearing on any other beliefs you may have--that the association of creationism with certain religious beliefs is purely a historical accident, no more meaningful than the former association of geocentrism with certain religious beliefs. _
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12:21:05 AM, Wednesday 28 March 2001

Essentially, I don't see creationism as being a real danger to human understanding at this stage. It's still stupid and wrong, of course, for any informed person to support creationism, and the fact that apparently intelligent people believe it speaks for either a tragic failure of education or an equally tragic disorder of understanding, but the evidence for evolution is so clear and complete that there's no longer any danger that the idea will be silenced, so any popularity that creationism (even 'scientific' creationism) has is purely a temporary situation. And this is why it disturbs me when evolutionists castigate people like Gould or Chomsky for having somewhat unorthodox (or even just unorthodox SOUNDING!) views on evolution. Yes, misunderstandings of their views certainly lend fodder to the creationists' arguments, but we don't need to worry about that little war anymore--we've already won, so we can afford to allow dissent--even foolish or misinformed dissent--in our ranks, without greeting it with any more venom than that which it deserves simply for being foolish or misinformed.

And of course, I must note that by 'creationism' I really mean the idea that belief in divine creation is somehow opposed to evolution. The questions have no bearing on each other except on the most grossly materialistic level, and any interpretation of the bible that works on this level has already been thoroughly discredited, is a quite new form of belief, and may be daily disproven by the simplest observations of the world. _
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11:40:54 PM, Tuesday 27 March 2001

Oh bother! I was having AIM problems--it had stopped talking to the server, I think--and by the time I finally realized it, the person I was talking to had logged out. _
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11:26:41 PM, Tuesday 27 March 2001

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