Sapere Aude!

WikiLeaks' new phase begins - WikiLeaks - Salon.com

Today has been a very big day for WikiLeaks. It just released 500 million internal documents stolen from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, allegedly obtained by hacktivist collective Anonymous in December. This is huge; it’s the first time Anonymous has ever cooperated with an aboveground entity, lending an unprecedented amount of political legitimacy to the often inscrutable group. But why? What do these strange bedfellows have to gain from collaboration? With this new collaboration, Anonymous has obtained new credibility, and WikiLeaks has obtained a hugely valuable new source. This potentially powerful alliance could point to the future of the leak economy, and this awkward symbiosis provides each party with exactly what they need to move forward. A new age of transparency activism may have just begun.

In the past, Julian Assange and other spokespeople at WikiLeaks have subtly distanced themselves from Anonymous as though it were an annoying little brother. WikiLeaks at least tries to operate within various global laws and seems to want nothing to do with a brand of hacktivism that’s also responsible for flooding Facebook with violent hardcore pornography, among other unsavory activities.

But this move comes at a good time for WikiLeaks. The organization has been brought to the brink of collapse over the last year due to internal strife and ever-rising legal bills. More broadly, WikiLeaks is a problematic system for acquiring and publishing leaks. It’s vulnerable to attacks from many sides: “patriotic” rival hackers and terrorists, legal attacks from governments, militaries and corporations. Perhaps worst of all, it has promoted the celebrity of its leader, Julian Assange, to the point where the focus of the media is no longer on the leaks themselves, but on the dramatic narrative of the organization’s most famous face.

WikiLeaks’ early success relied not on its ability to disseminate sensitive information, but from the lucky break it got in Bradley Manning, a U.S. military insider who could just as easily have directly leaked his info anonymously from a random Internet cafe. The ostensible value WikiLeaks provided to Manning was legal defense. And has it failed epically on that front. To put it bluntly, WikiLeaks is in crisis, and perhaps the only thing that can save it is a fresh, steady source of new leaks.

Meanwhile, Anonymous has risen from the sludge of geeky Web culture, first conceived as a catch-all term for online trolls who engaged in indiscriminate acts of online harassment, sometimes funny and sometimes horrific. Toward the end of 2007, a few of them realized that their ability to harness the power of thousands of bored geeks from across the globe would be put to better use against a perceived entrenched evil: the Church of Scientology. From there, Anonymous exploded into the mainstream media with physical protests and the now-ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask. In December 2010, Anonymous targeted PayPal, Visa and Mastercard for refusing to process donations to WikiLeaks, bringing the websites of all three offline during Operation Payback. From there, the list of targets expanded to security contractors, media outlets, video game platforms and more. They’ve  successfully attacked dozens of targets, some of which are multinational corporations and government contractors.

via www.salon.com

To me this raises a question about how close the relationship between Anonymous and Assange really are to one another.

Confirmation bias or expertise? The prevalence of theism in philosophy of religion - The Prosblogion

Now consider philosophy of religion. Prima facie, if we applied Goldman's principle this seems the road to take. However, if self-selection and confirmation entirely explain the prevalence of theism in PoR, this is not the right course to take. After all, in consulting astrologers, who are the supposed experts in astrology, I would find that the large majority of them believe that astrology works. As Alexander Pruss argued in the comment section here, if God exists, philosophy of religion is one of the most important areas of philosophy, but if He does not, it's peripheral. So we can expect a self-selection effect. Combined with confirmation bias, there is an additional worry that theistic philosophers of religion might overvalue the strength of theistic arguments, since theists in general evaluate these arguments as stronger. In fact, I found no significance for PoR as an AOS in how natural theological arguments were evaluated taking religious belief into account. Confirmation bias does not disappear even in people with high levels of education. As one commenter on my original entry suggested "My reading of the situation is that philosophy of religion is unhealthy, and further that your data are best understood as demonstrating a statistically significant conflict of interest."

If a self-selection effect is the sole drive of theists to the field of philosophy of religion, and confirmation bias subsequently plays a role in their evaluation of theist arguments, we should be perhaps wiser to suspend judgment. The effects of confirmation bias on the rationality of our beliefs is a bit too large in scope to treat here. Suffice it so say that I am a Kuhnian at heart; I do not worry much about confirmation bias, given its prevalence it makes more sense to counter it by improving diversity within a profession. As I have argued in several papers (e.g., here), a discipline's health does depend on having multiple, disagreeing voices. So philosophy of religion could benefit from having more atheists and agnostics.

via prosblogion.ektopos.com

They should ask how many people with an AOS in philosophy of religion changed their minds about God's existence in the course of studying it. If they came to the philosophy of religion with a particular set of beliefs but didn't adjust any of them after studying the relevant material, then I suspect confirmation bias.

There is no ethical smartphone - Apple - Salon.com

John Wood, self-described phone geek, had a problem. He couldn’t “upgrade with confidence,” he confessed on his blog. The “ethical implications” of the globalized, labor-exploiting manufacturing process confounded him. The more he knew, the more constrained he felt. In his capacity as campaigns and new media officer for the Trades Union Congress in the United Kingdom, it was his job to be a voice for the labor movement online. But in his personal life, just getting online meant trampling all over the workers of the world.

Wood’s dilemma extended far beyond the well-publicized abusive working conditions at Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant that assembles Apple’s iPhone, along with countless other consumer electronic devices. Labor and environmental abuses are endemic throughout the global electronics industry, from the mining of the minerals used to make the basic components, through their assembly and all the way up to (and beyond) the disposal of last year’s obsolete model. There’s no getting around the hard truth: right now, there is no such thing as an “ethical smartphone.” Or, for that matter, an ethical flat-screen TV, digital camera or any kind of personal computer.

Wood embarked on a quest to see if he could find, at the very least, a smartphone that wasn’t quite so badly compromised as all the others. He started contacting major smartphone manufacturers — Apple, HTC, Samsung, Nokia — to ask what their policies were regarding labor abuses and supply-chain monitoring. He pondered East Asian government reports detailing labor law violations at individual links in the outsourcing chain. He weighed whether to reject Nokia for also outsourcing production to Foxconn, or to give the Finnish company points for thinking more deeply about sustainability issues than its competitors. He wondered whether he should cut Samsung a break because the company kept more of its manufacturing in house in South Korea — where the labor laws were better enforced than in China or Vietnam.

He finally settled on a Samsung Galaxy Note, primarily on the basis that Samsung had managed to steer clear of a Taiwanese LCD screen component manufacturer under investigation for multiple labor law violations. But barely a week after purchasing the phone (which, of course, he loves) he discovered that Samsung has been criticized as both a union-buster and for failing to protect its workers from dangerous industrial chemicals.

In his attempt to find nuance that would salve his conscience, all Wood discovered were varying “shades of gray.” As he conceded in an email, there is “no ideal solution.” For every smartphone manufacturer, “the model of globalized production is fundamentally similar.”

So if you are looking for shopping recommendations, you will be disappointed. But that doesn’t necessarily imply despair — or that there isn’t any chance at all of improving working conditions for electronics workers around the world. If enough people organize and apply pressure, anything’s possible. And ironically,

via www.salon.com

'Act Of Valor' And The Military's Long Hollywood Mission

A crack team of highly skilled warriors, outfitted with the most advanced weapons of the world’s most powerful military force, storms an enemy compound, firing round after round of ammunition through concrete walls and the skulls of their terrorist adversaries.

The good guys have yet to suffer a single casualty until, suddenly, one of its leaders takes a rocket to the chest. The audience cringes, but the bang never comes -- the rocket clangs to the ground, unexploded, and the battle rages on.

The upcoming film "Act of Valor" is replete with that kind of action, but there are a few things it doesn't have: There are no corrupt officers, no damaged heroes, no queasy doubts about the value of the mission or the virtue of the cause.

That's because "Act of Valor" was born not in Hollywood, but in the Pentagon. It was commissioned by the Navy's Special Warfare Command and its success will be measured not in box-office receipts, but in the number of new recruits it attracts to the Navy SEALs.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Remember this one next time a conservative complains about "Hollywood's liberal agenda."

Santorum: Democrats Are 'Anti-Science' | Inside Higher Ed

Rick Santorum, enjoying a surge in support in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, on Monday said in a speech that he is not "anti-science," but that Democrats are, CBS News reported. Santorum has been criticized by many scientists for, among other things, suggesting that there is not a consensus that global climate change is real and is significant. Speaking in Ohio Monday, he said that the science of global warming is "political science," based on "phony studies." He elaborated: "When it comes to the management of the Earth, they are the anti-science ones. We are the ones who stand for science, and technology, and using the resources we have to be able to make sure that we have a quality of life in this country and [that we] maintain a good and stable environment."

via www.insidehighered.com

Rick Santorum Wants Your Sex Life to Be 'Special' - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics - The Atlantic

One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea... It's not okay because it's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They're supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal... but also procreative.

That's the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that's not for purposes of procreation, that's not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can't you take other parts of that out? And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure. And that's certainly a part of it--and it's an important part of it, don't get me wrong--but there's a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special. Again, I know most presidents don't talk about those things, and maybe people don't want us to talk about those things, but I think it's important that you are who you are. I'm not running for preacher.

I'm not running for pastor, but these are important public policy issues.

via www.theatlantic.com

Satorum is perverted.

Man With Split Personality Confesses To Chinese Restaurant Heist After Reading About It (VIDEO)

LEECHBURG, Pa. -- Police say a western Pennsylvania man who claims to have split personalities confessed to robbing a Chinese restaurant after reading about it in the newspaper and realizing he was the person who did it.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Suppose that there are multiple persons in the body of one individual body and one of them commits a crime. Is it wrong to jail the others?

The Daily Show on Contraception, Religion, and Public Policy

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The political message of Nietzsche's 'God is dead' | Lesley Chamberlain | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

So, God is dead: the awfulness of men killed him – this is a theme, and the spirit of, much of the Zarathustra book. It makes the message mournful, too.

Against it the explosion of playfulness in The Science of Joy sets humanity the – perhaps impossible – task of complete self-reinvention in order to live truly here, in this world.

The context in which this reinvention had been taking place since before Nietzsche was "materialism", which, in the philosophical sense, was the position opposite to the idealism of Hegel and Schelling. Ludwig Feuerbach set it out in the 1830s, and this, as is well known, gave Marx his philosophical starting point.

This is not to say Nietzsche is a Marxist. Far from it. But it means that even his thinking did not come into being ex nihilo. He was carried forward on the most radical spirit of the times in which was born, and which he lived through in his own way: as a German writer, as an anti-idealist and an anti-Christian. The title of his book Der AntiChrist, in German, means "Anti-Christian" just as much as it means "Antichrist".

The other narrative that already in the mid-19th century told the western world God had died was, of course, Darwin's. Nietzsche was not part of post-Darwinism, but what he had to say fed into the 20th-century "after God" cultural steam.

Most important when we consider him in the context of today's atheists is to remember that he didn't elevate reason to a god either, and that his involvement in the spiritual tradition he was trying to leave was intense.

via www.guardian.co.uk