I’d argue that our current punishment by the markets for our widespread lying about loans and our ideological “thinking” about housing loans…is simply nature rolling over on us. Putting your head in the sand works just fine for a long while, and then not at all.

there used to be a time when people would work out what would falsify their hypothesis… einstein did so, and so did many others.

objectivity can be obtained when one makes the effort to.

the fact that the rules are to tell things like books you write and what you believe, is one such effort.

yes the effort can be screwed with, but that doesnt mean that if one takes the effort, that one can get objectivity.

in african custom (of course not everywhere, and i dont remember the exact location), they invite a stranger in to decide their arguments. even if the stranger doesnt understand their language.

objectivity, like faith can be had with practice.

we dont practice this anymore. its like chivalry, and other things that stem out of wanting to reach for higher.

once science was formally drafted into the ideological war as an active combatant by people entering it for advocacy reasons to move agendas forward (and to hell with science, and facts, truth, and everything else).

claiming that there is scientific concensus on something is not scientific… it shows you that we have abandoned core principals.

even worse we lost that we could have absolute facts, and have objective views when we want to se the problems up to get that kind of answer (its harder to do this).

you measure how fast something falls, you get objective answers. even in other science areas, you can measure.. the problem is that people arent very thoughtful when they construct things as they are not taught to do that (that would stand in the way of ‘progress’).

math is pretty objective, so is physics, and even areas of biology. problems come when things are still being worked out and when they are still being interpreted, and when ideology forbids areas from being an answer (so false answers are invented in other areas as if the forbidden zone doesnt exist), and when money given is in the mix.

though by far ideology is the worst poison, it proscribes areas that answere are not allowed to be in, and it decides where all answers on a question must reside. it can result in some very bizare things that we seem to ignore or pretend to.

if we strive for it, we can acheive it. if another person was up moderating, then we would have thought that there would have been more objectivity. if we put a thousand questions in a machine and they were selected at random, we would have thought there was more objectivity.
if microphones were rigged so that they shut off and do not allow more time for one than another.

we CAN do things, we choose not to…
we claim there is no such thing, so why try?

you cant acheive something that doesnt exist. and if objectivity doesnt exist trying to be more objective is an impossibility. which direction would more objective be?

this is the pit that making everything relative and removing absolutes does. it confounds the VIEW of the world philosophically/ideologically with the View of the world as empiracle reality. the more to the philosophical we get the more plastic the world SEEMS as our minds adjust what we take in to realign the two.

an illustration is needed.

remember brian nichols? he was the big guy being escorted into court by Deputy Cynthia Hall. he basically punched her, took her gun, and then shot and killed three people and escaped. he hit cynthia so hard the hospital thought she had been shot in the face.

people had switched from using their empirical knowlege of the world to make a common sense choice, because they had switched in an ideological view of the world, in which certain premises are accepted as fact, and they lead to certain modes of choice as we seek not to violate those premises, ore even appear to.

so nichols a big guy was being escorted unchained and ready for court (thats another premise), by cynthia. why didnt nicholes get escorted by bubba the police officer that moonlights as a bouncer?

because we wont violate the ideological/philosophical premise that men and women are equal and diffferences are socially constructed.

if we live by an ideological.philosophical view (a relatively new invention i should add), then we have agreed not to be objective about the world, and so objectivity is dead. and no one ha the common sense any more to make incidents like nichols not happen, nor other things on other premises (like fat cats and run away greed with the state always being better if bigger).

note tha when nichols was captured, a woman escorted him into the jail, but she and he was surrounded by another ten large officers.

objectivity used to be a cultural goal of ours. of course we lose it when we have no culture to support the practice and train us in the thought and we start to try to live by the shortcut of ideollgy where a few easy to remember premises tell us how to act in all situations…

Btw, at least in the bit I saw, Palin held her own as though she’d been doing this as long as Biden (who also seemed surprisingly human for a politician, I must say).

Palin: “Freedom isn’t something we pass to our kids in their bloodstream; it’s something we fight for and something we teach them to fight for.”

“This is America. It is exceptional. It is the Shining City on the Hill, as Reagan said.”

Biden:

“Blah blah Bush”

“Blah blah Souplines”

“Blah blah Let’s lose the War….”

To “Peter the Alaskan Kid”

I used to be a revisionist Marxist intellectual many years ago, during my undergraduate and later during my seminary (Jesuit) years. I’ve studied philosophy and the broad historical sweep of the ideas from Classical Greece on down to contemporary philosophy, to include the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers. I used to be an adherent of Liberation Theology, but very careful about who was most systematic in his approach, which is why I favored Juan Luis Segundo, S.J. Look him up. Take a gander at his work, it’s outstanding, especially his work “Faith and Ideologies.”

I left the Left in 1987. I did so because I came to realize that socialism is a very flawed system of thought, fundamentally flawed at the level of epistemology. It rests on premises about human beings that are not correct. As a system of economic thought (my B.A. was in Economics, minor in Philosophy; M.A. Philosophy, Loyola of Chicago; M.B.A. Finance, Boston College) it has spawned failure after failure. It does not work and cannot work. Furthermore, when one takes an honest look at how Marxist governments have behaved during the last century up to the present, the record is horrific. In fact, the evidence is damning. I spent about ten years of my life on the Left, from about age 22 to age 32. During that time, particularly early on, I turned a blind eye and refused to believe those truths. Gradually, as moments of cognitive dissonance piled up on my journey, I was compelled to take a hard look at the evidence and particularly how the inner logic of those various socialisms allowed the horrific malfeasance and inhumanity. In order to appreciate why that is important to me, I saw it as my task to, eventually as a theologian/philosopher, find a way around the very cutting criticisms of socialism coming from people like Michael Novak. I mention his name because, as a Catholic, knowing his theological education his opinion carried some weight as well as the weight of his own arguments. Human nature will not change because you rearrange the power structures or rules of exchange in society. At the very core of all socialist thought is a utopian project. It assumes some telos of human social and political achievement whereby heaven has been brought down to earth. It rests more on a kind of faith and hope which the facts about who we are do not warrant. I wanted to see if I could find a way around this, based on sound reasoning and having a scientific basis. I could find none. What I did find, the more I delved into psychology and neuroscience, was a darkness and flaws that are both organic and cosmic.

A thinker has to mature on many levels before he or she renders truly important contributions to the intellectual enterprise. I have followed, over the years since I left the Left in 1987, where socialist thought has been going. And in terms of evolving beyond where I had left off with it – it has not been evolving to take into consideration the important critiques of it and the scientific and medical research breakthroughs which really ought to dash utopian faith. Not one socialist has tried to address them. They are stuck in a time warp.

Furthermore, the current alliance of convenience which exists between the Left and its totalitarian fellow travelers in Islam (the oldest surviving totalitarian system) convinces me of the moral as well as intellectual rot that is at the core of Marxist thinking. I feel fortunate to have made the right choice to go back to the classical liberal traditions of our Anglo Saxon culture, rooted as it is in Christianity and Judaism. I have renewed my acquaintance with the works of Thomas Aquinas.

Socialist ethics has to be considered an ethics of expediency. And this is what you see at work when Gwen Ifill agreed to accept the job as moderator of tonight’s debate between Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden.

But I did learn a lot during my time on the Left about some of the kinds of people over that way. The ambitious ones all have an ethics of expediency, and there is nothing in the corpus of Marxist writings to disabuse one of that way of proceeding through life. Anything done in the furtherance of the cause of “social justice” is right and justified. Only the opponents of socialism are guilty of wrongdoing. One’s loyalties and social class determine where one is as a sinner. Now, a lot of these folks are well off – don’t kid yourselves. But because they are dedicated to advancing socialism, their lifestyles, their money, their positions, and their possessions do not indict them as enemies of the people. They don’t, as do members of Catholic religious orders, take a vow of poverty. As do the apparatchiks and loyal party members in socialist countries feel entitled to their perks, these people see themselves the same way.

Ms. Ifill exhibits the all to familiar behavior and attitudes of the very elites who feel most threatened by Sarah Palin. So, deep down they know the very corruption that rots their souls.

Peter the Alaskan Kid says Ifill has a conflict of interest superimposed on her demonstrable bias (noticed what she has said about Palin lately?) but it is ok because, unlike Rush Limbaugh, she will be objective. I call BS. You are not the arbiter of who will be objective. We should not have to wonder if she will be objective.

John M’s conclusion does not surprise me. How often have media people have told us that “the appearance of corruption is what matters”? Clearly that only holds true for GOP politicians, but not for one of their own. I have been reading or hearing this theme since the story broke.