Satan's Game

Thought I'd not rant about how the health care saga continue to turn into bizarro world, but rather on something that comes from a place rather closer to my heart.

I'm an avid fan of Jerry "Tycho" Holkins and Mike "Gabe" Krahulik and their long-running comic strip Penny Arcade. Today they linked to a story about a man who attempted to kill two friends of his with a hammer. The story describes how the man apparently got into some form of violent rage, and in the article motive was assigned to two things: 1) a Dungeons and Dragons game gone wrong; and 2) a girl. Horrific to be sure, but mundane in a sense -- people kill each other for much, much less. The story is a month old, the original article reporting financial issues as part of the motive. The guy it seems, has a pretty rough life, is a missionary of some sort, which can be hard on people, and it was claimed completely uncharacteristic of him. Pretty standard really.

What seems to have Holkins incredulous is the apparent blaming of the attack on Dungeons and Dragons. The comments section seems to be following (or preceding, I haven't checked the time stamps rigourously) Holkins' lead. Now, the moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons seems to be a particular piece of American history, and something I'm not personally familiar with (apart from this hilarious depiction). But I can't see the implication. The piece explains that motive was established as involving D&D. That's a correlation, certainly, and there are causal elements to it, but it certainly doesn't follow that the implication is that D&D causes people to bash each other in the head with hammers. What does follow is that this particular individual, by a particular game, was lead to do this. He's still culpable, and it doesn't line D&D up for the burning. If you replaced every instance of D&D with "card," we'd have a poker player gone mad. That's not something we'd blame poker on.

What D&D does cop is its status as an involved game. D&D is an involved pursuit. No more than philosophy (recall Popper and Wittgenstein), football, or finance. I can understand the concern at the future construal of D&D as "Satan's game" considering the events of the past, but I don't believe that this article presented that facet. In fact, the comments seem to indicate that the people most concerned about this are D&D players. The rest of the comments were along the lines of "this guy is a crazy person, chill out!" As to the status quo comment response that follows the line: "I play D&D, I haven't brutalised anyone, therefore D&D doesn't make you brutalise people," -- that doesn't follow either. D&D can lead to you brutalising people. It can be a direct causal factor in leading to someone snapping. How do we know? Because this is the motive established. But it is just that - a motive. It doesn't follow that arguments like the one Langton has used on pornography (more specifically, sexualised violence in pornography).

Why is this of so much interest to me? Because in liberal society we seem to suffer this problem. Hell, forget liberal, as people we suffer from this distinction's nuances tripping us up. As it is, most of my thesis revolves around a non-D&D (unfortuantely, it'd be so much fun to write a thesis on the ethics of gaming) version of this. Scientists claim that they haven't exploited or subjugated a population with science, therefore science doesn't cause this. It may not cause in the sense that it alone creates the disposition to subjugate, but it certainly fulffils a causal process. Its parsing this that interests me, because humans are notoriously bad at cause/correlation and necessary/sufficient distinctions, and we get wrapped in them very easy.

Maybe the article is stating that D&D is once again Satan's game. I don't believe so, I believe it is stating that this person had it as a causal contributor to some pretty horrific stuff. I approach it with the same level of interest that I do science, football and philosophy being causal factors in terrible things. But that's the mens rea. That's what it is all about.

Discuss.

EDIT: My apologies, that's a Legal Fail. Motive and Intent are distinct in modern law, with mens rea covering the latter. Carry on.

Oh, PPS, I'm thinking I'll change the drapes on this site soon. The brown is getting to me.

On Internet Filtering

I was going to write a big diatribe about how this is destined for failure, and how we should all write letters to the Minister, and then Nicholas wrote an awesome letter.

I think you should go read that instead. Oh yeah, and write a letter. Cos Internet filtering is really stupid.

Moral Radar

Test your Intuitions -- this test presents you with moral dilemmas, so that you might judge each one. It kind of reminds me of the talk at the AAP by Rob Sparrow about human enhancement.

Enjoy!

The Ethics of Ethics

So it's a bit mean of me to pick on the Ticking time bomb argument (TTBA) in any of its forms, because it gets so much bad press. As it stands, I'm not really going after the conceptual problems with the TTBA, but more the practical realities of some of the empirical presuppositions I think it reast on.

Today's news article that brings all this up was on the cover of the wikinews site, which I use because its often a cross-referenced amalgam of a number of news sources, which I find intuitively somewhat more promising. At the very least it provides a convenient dump site for the big reports on the same issue across the massive news industry that sprawls the length and breadth of Interwebia.

The article, stating that Secret memos reveal Bush administration endorsed torture made me a touch cross. The kicker was when apparently Condeleezza rice, in all her obvious care and compassion, had questioned whether or not waterboarding was legal or not.

...

wait for it.

...

IT'S TORTURE! YOU ARE TORTURING PEOPLE! USING TORTURE METHODS! OF TORTURE!

Honestly! How can these people live with themselves? How can they be so STUPID!? Legal? Did anyone stop to even look up what Waterboarding was? Who cares if its allowed (which I'm pretty sure its not, Condie)? TORTURE!

And yet, philosophers and lawyers alike persist in constructing scenarios which could give these people a foothold for legitimacy? I mean, we worry about the scientists doing the research to give the technology to build the weapons, but the ethicists are creating and legitimising the tools by which corrupt administrations will attempt to vindicate themselves! Should we be analysing the ethics of giving these logical tools? Its worse than guns, we're giving these people the tools to send our sense of decency back to a place that even cavepeople would look and go "Grarg? (translation: What the F***?)"

Maybe I should start another dissertation on dual-use ethics. Because sure, its a nice little set of thought experiments, but its like the bright idea of whoever it was to give George W. Bush the words "just" and "war." Should we as philosophers be culpable for giving evil people the tools to try and justify atrocities?

A bit of a rant.

So this girl that went missing in Croatia, since found dead and decomposing? Her family seem to have the complain dial set to 11.  Fair enough, some might say. However, comments such as this, from today's front page report on the Sydney Morning Herald website:

Ms Lapthorne's father, Dale, in Dubrovnik, said he was frustrated and upset by the lack of information in the report, which he called almost "childish" in its content. It provided only a description of the state of her body.

"It is purely descriptive and it says there is no visible sign of an act of death of how she might have died because the body is in such poor condition," he said.

"It is a false statement. The body is in such a bad state of decomposition that it cannot be determined whether foul play was involved or not. It didn't say that there is no evidence of foul play, of course there is no evidence of foul play. The body is in such a poor state that nothing can be determined from it without scientific testing or forensic evidence and that hasn't been undertaken at all."

So this is the failing of the modern media and entertainment industry. There is no super-attractive Temperance Brennan, who, with a glint in her startling eyes and a flick of her fantastic hair will suddenly find that a subtle change in the rings on the bone marrow in a chip on the girl's jaw means that at 9pm she was in a Croatian 7-11 the night before she went missing. This is science. When a body washes up after a week in the water, its not going to be much help. Its unfortunate, yes. But don't blame the coroner. Sue God for creating such damn inconvenient principles under which bodies decay in saline solutions filled with all sorts of bacteria who love the taste of human flesh. "Scientific Testing"? "Forensic Evidence"? get with the program people. There is no "cause of death" machine. And to start with calling it purely descriptive, then asserting it is a false statement because it doesn't tell you what you want, and then stating that all it tells you is exactly what they said it told you (which, presumably, makes it a true statement) is just bizarre.

It isn't this guys fault. he's obviously wrecked up. But it seems just a little bit of review-grubbing emotional chain-jerking to keep on labouring this point. Especially the last point about the judge taking a swim in the bay where she was found. how does that reflect anything about her case handling?

Hey media, grow some integrity. When Milton and mill signed off on an all access pass on your behalf, they did it in the name of a certain set of laudable ideals, not so you can go about being pants-on-heads idiots about what is a tragic situation that you are milking well past even your normally poor sense of decency.

Demo-kratos and other lovely concepts.

One of my favourite authors, Patrick Rothfuss, wrote an interesting blog post today. Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind (which I heartily recommend you all read) describes in his self-styled Public Service Announcement why Americans should not vote. That's right, not vote. Let's take what I think is one of the funnier parts of the open letter to the American public (i.e. the interwebbers who watch his blog) is this:

For example, I was eating dinner the other day at a local restaurant and I heard someone at a nearby table say, "I'm voting for McCain. I heard Obama's into gun control. Nobody's taking away my guns." I'm not making this up. I'm not exaggerating or paraphrasing. These words have been echoing around in my head for weeks, and it's entirely possible that I will never be rid of them. If this sounds like something that might come out of your mouth, you need to realize that you are not very smart. I'm not saying you're a bad person. I'm not saying you're evil. What I'm asking is that you consider the very real possibility that you might not be capable of casting an intelligent vote. Let repeat myself just for clarity's sake. If you're willing to throw in with one candidate based on senseless fear and "something you heard" you are not well-informed, and you shouldn't vote. Again, I'm not saying you're a bad person. What I am saying is that the fate of the nation is probably too complicated for you to deal with properly. You should stay home on election night and watch some Nascar instead. That's right. Nice, comforting Nascar.

It raises what I think is one of the most interesting problems of democracy, or with any normatively significant practice: when rights or freedoms become duties or obligations. I'm a big fan of a view towards democracy that goes like so: every citizen has a right to vote. This right is given under a certain set of expectations, namely that such a citizen has the obligation to vote, and under an expectation that they will vote in an informed manner. Unfortunately, as with most of my beliefs, this is somewhat too good to be true. It seems that of the 224 countries who have universal voting processes, only 19 of them enforce compulsory voting. And, as Pat wishes to point out, maybe that's for the best. Whether or not compulsory voting leads to more extreme political stances is an empirical question, and one I'd love to have answered. It seems that the standard intuitive response is to the affirmative, that to allow voluntary voting within a western, developed, media-dominated democratic nation does lead to a more extreme stance by those who do turn out to vote. But I'm not really sure what this means: is this skewed towards one end of the spectrum or the other? I'm not a big fan of left or right extremism, and i don't think that the answer is so simple as one lovely blogite seems to imply, that if such an extremism is symmetrical than they cancel each other out. Please people, learn to math. These are vector sums at their simplest, although I'd suspect we'd need some pretty sophisticated, high ranking Tensors to sort that shamozzle out.

Also, it should probably be made clear that democracy does not presuppose libertarian views: some reasonably rudimentary history should settle that. Go look up some wikipedia, Indian Times opinion piece guy. If we are going to take the tack that we seriously want a liberal democracy , than maybe we want to say that one of these rights we've concocted to give people is that of voting, and right does not imply obligation, etc. Maybe so. Such arguments usually rest on some pretty boring and awful construal of everyone's favourite piece of philosophical cheap shots, The Harm principle. A whole swag of dead Afghanis and Iraqis, a crushed economy, and a streak of rights defacement beg to differ with how you use your vote, people. And as the right to vote does nothing to tell us when we shouldn't exercise such a right, maybe (don't faint, libertarians) we should be empowering voters to make the decision to vote or not. That means education, which may mean government involvement. Ha! Who would have thought that in order to live free of a restrictive government in a fashion which would allow for maximum preference satisfaction, we'd need some government involvement? Aaaah, Irony.  As my good friend Adam related though, democracy is not the right to decide how you live your life, but the right to ruin how others live theirs.

Ah, a bit of a convoluted post.  I've been away too long from the blogosphere.

No ranting this morning.

I've got some, y'know, work to do. However, for those interested in how to change the world, I think that this demonstration by His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, is just phenomenal. Some linkies below.

The Dalai Lama on the Beijing Olympics

Getting back to old school.

I'm not a huge fan of graffiti as the vernacular conception of it is portrayed. That is, the graffiti that is synonymous with vandalism. Random, indecipherable tags, or crude and poorly drawn images being sprayed on any surface just doesn't do it for me. Sure, if someone manages to tag somewhere that makes me go "holy ****, how did they manage to get there, much less have a hand free to spray?" then that's kinda cool. But generally, not a fan.

However, some graffiti can be beautiful. And (see the famous "Romans go home" sketch from ye olde Monty Python) some of ti can be highly political, which has been one of the functions of such street art since time out of mind. So, without further a do, take a look at this.

Time for a rant.

It is unfortunate that this blog post will go almost unread on the interwebs, but as the history of this great institution of online communication has shown me, that's hardly to the point now, is it?

So, McCain. A war hero. A patriot. A veteran. Gotta say, the man has the political chops needed to convince just about any American that he is worth voting for. I mean, what could make for a better leader? Especially in a country so devoid of understanding of its own military history that romantic militarism isn't just a problem, its THE problem. "He understands our world is dangerous":



Isn't this beautiful? Can't you see the craftsmanship that has gone into this particular piece of political garbage?

Now, don't let me put you offside and get words unceremoniously shoved into my mouth. He was a victim of one of the more horrible places to be in the world: a POW camp. The place on this earth that hasn't got "Geneva" in the dictionary. And that makes him a remarkable spirit, make no mistake. I'm a bit miffed in the above ad as to why voluntary imprisonment through denial of early release counts as an honourable, American thing to do. "Sure, I'll stay in for another round of solitary!" Wow, shows the guy definitely is canny. That'll show em. I think?

Back to my point, the juxtaposition of the war against the "summer of love" is a masterpiece of spin. Of course, while the hippies were out taking drugs and banging each other senseless in an unchristian show of prurient, lustful action, John McCain was out fighting for your freedom. But wait, wasn't part of this strange lefty movement a protest against your unjust war? And if that's the case, then every thing McCain says is up for question, isn't it? Well, unless you are a conservative, military realist. So I suppose its all okay, right?

But that wasn't what got me into this rantin' mood. Well, if I'm going to be honest, my recent Bill Hicks pilgrimage may have something to do with it, and it is terribly unfortunate that I'll never have the skills in dark poetry and satire that Bill did. But while reading this post in (to my mind) the quite respectable Framing Science Blog by Dr. Matt Nisbet, I came across this:



Isn't this great? Gotta love them always honest, considerate American politicians. I'm so ignorant! Of course the only solution to the oil crisis in America in a world with dwindling supplies of this natural resources is to invest even more money in creating an entirely new site where we can dig up the planet and kill a whole bunch of land, using a resource that is going to run out very soon! Wow! Thanks John McCain, for enlightening me. As for Obama, well, the fact that he won't endorse the offshore drilling projects or new oilfields is obviously because he has absolutely no policy on energy!

Or maybe, because he isn't on the payroll of the oil industry.

To at least try to introduce some ethics into this diatribe, consider the very basic ethical problem we encounter when the money of lobby groups impacts in such a way so as to not educate the public on the issues at stake in their voting, but instead lead to lead to what Nisbet refers to as "playing fast and loose with the truth" in order to fulfill the preferences of the said lobbyists. Truth, Justice and the American way indeed.

How to Sell a life...

This man wants to sell his life.

Thoughts, anyone?

Some quick Friday morning linkage

... because I'm finishing a paper to present later today.

Even the Canadians want in on the anti-piracy game!