Plead the First

Oftentimes in debates on blogs and in the media you’ll find labels being stuck on both people and on arguments. Un-American. Racist. Apologist. These labels are frequently used in lieu of an actual argument against a position – many people feel that if they can dismiss a claim with a label there’s no need to argue against it.

Paul Graham writes that such labels may indicate the presence of a “moral fashion“:

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It’s the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

Moral fashions determine what can and cannot be said at a particular period in time, and they change as times progress. The danger is that if we allow our thinking to be a slave to those fashions, we limit ourselves and our ideas.

Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you’d also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that’s very convincing evidence.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn’t do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.

If you believe everything you’re supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn’t also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s– or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

Graham gives a few strategies for identifying moral fashions, and has some thoughts on what should be done about them. But what you choose to do once you’ve identified a fashion seems of secondary importance to being able to think, free from constraints.

(Hat tip: Ze Frank)

The second annual ConvergeSouth blogging conference will be at NC A&T State University in Greensboro on October 14th. I had a great time at last year’s conference, and am going to try to make it again this year. Head on over to the official ConvergeSouth website to get more info and register.

So far I’ve managed to resist posting any YouTube videos on my site. This video (and the song) is too good not to post.

The band is OK Go from Chicago. After seeing this, I downloaded the whole album from iTunes, and it’s excellent.

Last week, former state representative Michael Decker pleaded guilty to switching parties and voting for Jim Black for speaker, in exchange for $50,000.

In a discussion over at Noteworthy, Jaycee has some reassuring words about the situation in Iraq:

Iraq still is NOT a breeding ground for [terrorists]. It’s a breeding ground for entrepreneurs and others enjoying a democracy for a change, with a few die-hard Fedayeen and the like still there.

Ah. But that was on Tuesday. Apparently, things went quickly downhill over the next two days – according to the BBC on August 3, Britain’s outgoing ambassador in Baghdad warned:

The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.

Even the lowered expectation of President Bush for Iraq – a government that can sustain itself, defend itself and govern itself and is an ally in the war on terror – must remain in doubt.

U.S. military leaders chimed in as well:

Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the U.S. Central Command commander, did not try to sugarcoat things. “Sectarian violence is as bad as I have seen it in Baghdad,” he said. “If it is not stopped, it is possible Iraq can slip into civil war.”

What a difference a few days can make.

[Hat tip: Ed Cone]

Update: Things just keep getting worse. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for the good old days of earlier this week when Iraq was safe:

While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it has already begun.

Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

Riding in a Humvee later that day, Capt. Jared Rudacille, Murray’s commander in the 4th Infantry Division, noted the market of a town he was passing through. The stalls were all vacant. The nearby homes were empty. There wasn’t a single civilian car on the road.

“Between 1,500 and 2,000 people have moved out,” said Rudacille, 29, of York, Pa. “I now see only 15 or 20 people out during the day.”

The following evening, 1st Lt. Corbett Baxter was showing a reporter the area, to the west of where Rudacille was, that he patrols.

“Half of my entire northern sector cleared out in a week, about 2,000 people,” said Baxter, 25, of Fort Hood, Texas.

“Breeding ground for entrepreneurs” … sure, I suppose, as long as the entrepreneurs are renting out moving vans.

Ok, I’m finally going to bite the bullet and try to upgrade to WordPress 2.0 tonight. So if things get flaky, that’s why. Wish me luck.

Update: What? That’s it? That was too easy. Surely something must have gone wrong somewhere. Please let me know if you see my blog implode or otherwise act up.

Dave over at Cognitive Daily has a possible explanation for why some of the more clueless American Idol rejects can’t accept the fact that they really can’t sing.

The Angry Astronomer addresses a few of the more common misconceptions about the Big Bang.

[via Pharyngula]

I don’t often blog about work related items, but I thought folks might enjoy this. New and wonderful things are in the works over at my day job at The Iconfactory, and we’ve come up with a series of animations leading up to their unveiling. Start with Day 1 and work your way through the links at the bottom of that page to see them all so far. Enjoy!

Here’s this week’s cartoon. Sorry for the delay – I was away this weekend.