SelfAdoration.com

I made another video, this one highlighting some of the issues we dealt with here this week. I don’t know that I’ll do this every week, but it’s not terribly difficult, so it’s a possibility. I’ve got a YouTube page half set up, and I’ll build an iTunes site, too, to echo the videos as audio podcasts.

In this weeks’ action packed episode, we take up The Conversation, the global dialog about self-adoration that I am trying to incite. I talk at some length about the fiasco that was The Army of Cartmans. To flesh out the idea of the existential, taken up in last week’s video, I explore the idea of the subjunctive. And to conclude, I discuss the idea that “Linking Frees Slaves” — linking from your own work to the sources you are citing is a transparent demonstration of your own credibility.

I’ve written at length about linking as a proof of reliability:

The purpose of linking is to demonstrate to your audience that you are telling the truth. By means of the link, you provide your reader with the means to check up on you, to verify your claims, to follow up on the sources you say buttress your case, to find out if they really do reinforce what you are saying.

I am scrupulous about linking, and I always have been. I encourage you to follow up on my outbound links to assure yourself that I am not misrepresenting other peoples’ positions.

And with that, the video:

I talk a lot about logical fallacies. If I were shipwrecked, I might have a lot to say about water. Fallacies are not quite as plentiful as water in the ocean, but they are everywhere — and they’re just as deadly in the long run.

What is a fallacy? It is a path to error. That’s all. People hear the word fallacy and they think it means “false.” That’s not so. An argument defended by a logical fallacy may in fact be true. It’s just that the defense itself — at least the fallacious part of the defense — is not a good reason to embrace the argument. It is posible to reconstruct the argument without logical fallacies, creating a rhetorical structure that is logically unassailable.

Of course, most arguments defended by logical fallacies are madly, badly, stupidly wrong. And a significant number of those stupidly wrong arguments will be defended with logical fallacies because the proponent knows his argument is false. His objective is not to discover the truth, but to gull you into acting against your own interests and values.

This is why you need to learn how to identify fallacies in the informal arguments you hear every day. The best benefit to this undertaking will be to make your own arguments better. But as a matter of self-defense, even if you seek to persuade no one of anything, you need to learn how to tune in to the cunning deceptions of demagogues.

Below are links to some resources worth looking at. I’m not endorsing any of these sites, and I think it’s a fine idea to read more than one site when you want to know more about a particular logical fallacy.

• The Nizkor Project — Rigorous and easy to navigate
• How to construct an argument — The author is no friend to religion, so if you are, bring your A game
• Fallacy Files — Discussions of fallacies augmented by a blog of current examples
• Logical Fallacies — Broken out by taxonomy

You would never think to deliberately seek out bad food, or to ingest poison inadvertently from a careless indifference to the consequences. But you will (more…)

You come into the house by the kitchen door, and mama is there at the table. Her head is in her hands, her hair is a mess and her eyes are swollen, red and wet. She’s not crying, not quite, but you can hear the catch in her breathing and you know she has been sobbing, and she’s trying very hard not to break out in tears again. She smiles weakly, and you know she doesn’t want for you to see what she’s going through, but there’s really no way to hide it.

What do you do in that circumstance?

You want to help, don’t you? You want to soothe and comfort and console. You want to take the pain away, to take a tissue and wipe away the agony as you wipe away the tears. You want to make it all better.

That’s the way I’ve been feeling about a column Peggy Noonan wrote for the Wall Street Journal. It’s a compendium of tragic episodes, and on reading it you might think there is no connection between the events. But there is. The connection is Noonan’s pain, the despair she feels for a modernity that seems to be nothing but ugly and twisted and wrong:

A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He’s pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They’re too busy taping it on their smartphones.

I reject pain. I refuse to let it have my mind, I rid my life of anything that might cause me pain, and I forget all about it as soon as it is gone. I’ve never been any damn good around people in pain, because I don’t see why anyone should ever feel anything but Splendor. But there’s mama crying in the kitchen, and a stirring lecture on the avid pursuit of values may not be the best medicine in the immediate moment.

But that really is the cure, the topical ointment and the general vaccine: Pursuing your values.

The world is full of news, good and bad, and all of it matters to you to the exact extent you tell yourself it does.

If (more…)

We are getting some inbound links, despite my kvetching. I’d like to see more, but for that I have to wait — which is the human behavior I am worst at.

Psalm was cited in the Objectivist Round-Up, a blog carnival. The carnival recap is echoed here as well. I am very far from being an Objectivist, but I think that post speaks to the best within us, a quality I strive to cultivate.

Psalm is also linked from a very link-rich post at Not PC.

Both Man Alive! and this site have been blessed by much attention from Libertarian Information, a daily Paper.li newspaper. Publisher Jack Oughton (@koukouvaya) seems to have a good nose for news.

Ken McManigal is re-pinning out a lot of our images on Pinterest. All of the pix on his board are fun for me.

In my own behalf, I am trying very hard to live by this admonition: “What would Socrates do?” So, while it is very easy for me, when I am met with opposition, to roll right over people, I am trying to think more carefully and to answer questions in ways that light fires in my interlocutor’s mind. You can see me doing some of this here, still more on FaceBook.

This is a new praxis for me, and I’m growing into it. You can see some of my best Socratic rejoinders at FreeRepublic.com. I’ve been posting there periodically since 1998 or so, and Jim Robinson and his moderators have been very gracious hosts to me — especially taking account of who I am.

Here are some of my favorite responses from the past two weeks:

> If you do not accept this principle

How successful has this approach been for you? Do you find that other people like having their values dictated to them? Do you like that, when other people do it to you? I know I don’t.

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> I don’t think you know yourself very well.

How much first-hand experience of my life are you able to share with me?

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> That’s what I like about Aristotle and Aquinas.

You’re seeing what I like about Socrates. 😉

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> Interesting and well-written, but what’s (more…)

Ahem:

1. Saul Alinsky was evil, as are Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, etc. There is no benefit to a self-loving mind in emulating their vile, rhetorically invalid tactics. Breitbart was wrong: Tu quoque is not okay.

2. No matter how much you revile or ridicule your opponent, this will not make you a better person. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

3. Everything you do that does not advance your objectives retards them: 1 > 0 > –1.

4. Mobbing up is always self-destructive — for every member of the mob.

As it happens, I wrote a book about these ideas.

The walking irrelevancies who call themselves libertarian and conservative “thought leaders” could have read it today, instead of wasting their time and soiling their characters making dumb-ass dog-meat jokes.

Suitable for framing — just like you.

Click here to get one for your front door.

The woman has style. I am so proud to know her.

Meanwhile, my challenge to the libertarians is still unanswered. Apparently, the crucial responsibility of making dog-eating jokes is more important.

A question for you: By whom are you led — and why?

A not-so-brief movie about philosophy and guitars. I address the four issues raised in the heading above, among them a post I wrote for Richard Nikoley’s FreeTheAnimal.com about mastering difficult tasks.

This comes down to being a body, demonstrating the reality of my own person. Here are some other videos I’ve done. This clip exists, primarily, so that you can see for yourself how I conduct my intellectual life in existential reality.

This is pure housekeeping. The two videos I’ve done so far are now also available in audio form. The first video, which you can find here, is echoed below.

Here is the link to the iTunes page for the podcast.

This project was built to be viral — to be spread by propagation by internet users. Viral memes are spread by “sneezing,” by people sharing the meme with each other. My objective is to get as many people as possible to read Man Alive!, ideally as quickly as possible. We’re disintermediating “thought leaders,” plain and simple, helping people free themselves to think for themselves.

That’s where you come in. If you want to see these ideas spread, there are things you can do that can make a big difference. I’m going to list some I’ve thought of, but I know there are plenty of other ideas. Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

• Blogging. If you have a weblog or web site, or if you post to public forums, writing about the book is a great way to introduce people to the ideas taken up in Man Alive! So far, Sunni Maravillosa and Kent McManigal have written blog reviews of the book. Avail yourself of the propagation kit and the image library to work your magic.
   
• Commenting. Leaving apposite comments on web sites with a link back here can be a great way to draw people to SelfAdoration.com. People are looking for answers. Some will click through to learn what you know.
   
• Twitter. @TeriLussier is becoming a goddess among libertarians at #tlot (top libertarians on Twitter). If you tweet, you can retweet Teri or @gswann — that’s me. Links are the coin of the realm on Twitter, so a good Twitter entry is a reflection on a particular post or link. The “share” buttons at the bottom of each post make linked tweets easier to compose.
   
• FaceBook. What’s not to Like? 😉 FaceBook is a great resource for viral propagation, because your own network of friends will take your recommendations very seriously.
   
• Pinterest. Kent McManigal is taking our image library to the streets. People like to express themselves icongraphically, and we’ve got the most-compellingly iconic ideas around.
   
• Other social media sites. There are tons of these sites by now. My desire: If you’re there, I want for Man Alive! and SelfAdoration.com to be there with (more…)

Nathan Stocker was gracious enough — and talented enough — to do what I could not do: He built Kindle Reader and iBooks versions of Man Alive! To use them, you will have to “Open in…” your eReader of choice. Here are the links: Kindle Reader or iBooks. Nathan did me one better by building a table of contents into his versions.

The photo is from my own iBooks collection on my iPhone. You can tell a lot about people by looking at their books, and, clearly, I am no exception to that rule.

I’ve built an Image library, as well. In it you will find the images I have built for weblog posts and promotional purposes. Please feel free to use these images in your own efforts to spread the word about Man Alive!

Chapter 6. Evaluating values.

The name philosophers give to any ethical doctrine promoting self-love or self-interest is egoism. I use that term myself to describe the system of ethics I am elaborating here, but I’m not crazy about it.

First, most creeds that call themselves egoism actually refer to invalid ideas of the self whose interests are to be served. Either “self” is used to mean the reflexive idea of the bodily self or to self-identity – the object of sentences like “I clothe myself” or “I promote myself on the internet.” Or “self” is deployed as a matter of bodily or pecuniary utility: “It was to my self-interest to take a loss on this one deal in order to hang onto a valuable client.” There is nothing wrong with any of these behaviors, they just don’t have anything to do with the actual human self, the self as we documented it in the last chapter.

The second type of ethical creeds called egoism is actually other-centric. Whether the philosopher claims that his egoism permits him to dominate other people, or that his egoism forbids other people from dominating him, the focus of the doctrine is not the self at all – not the self as I describe it nor even the reflexive or utilitarian self – but is instead those other people.

I’m inclined to think that most philosophical or theological arguments – of all sorts – are essentially Cargo Cults: The doctrine in all its interminable, incomprehensible verbiage exists to justify some desired end-state goal the proponent had already upheld in advance of writing his supposed defense of that “inevitable” outcome. The theorist works backwards, from the conclusion to the allegedly-validating premises and evidence, tying everything up with a tidy rhetorical bow. This is completely invalid as a matter of method, of course, since the map is not the territory. It is simply absurd, when you cut through all the fog, for the champion of some doctrine to insist that human nature is what his theory commands that it “must” be. If you tell me these folks are deliberately fooling themselves, I will (more…)

Chapter 4. The greatest invention in the history of humanity.

That chapter heading is really just a tease. What’s the most important invention ever devised by the mind of man?

Fathertongue, of course. All other inventions flow from it. Without it, we are badly-adapted hairless apes, ultimately doomed to an ignominious extinction. With it, human beings danced on the Moon.

In the last chapter, I raised the idea of your being stranded on a desert island. That’s a hugely unlikely scenario, but it’s interesting to think about because everything that is true of you, as a type of entity, is true of you in isolation. You’re in this all alone, recall, and there is no factual statement that we can make about your nature as a human being that is not true of you even – especially! – when you are isolated from all other people.

In later chapters, we will take up the implications of your fundamental ontological solitude. For now I want to focus on the existential solitude of being stranded. Is there anyone for you to talk to? To cuddle up to? To fight against or to make love with? No. You possess everything you were able to recover from your plane crash or your shipwreck, but there is no one else with you, and anything else you might want you will have to provide for yourself – if you can – or else do without.

But cheer up, Bunkie! You don’t have a knife, but you know that knives exist, and you can apply yourself to making one. It may turn out to be a crude thing compared to the knives you can buy in a store, but close enough is good enough. You don’t have a calendar to keep track of time, but you can easily make one with stones or sticks. With but a few exceptions, you don’t have any of the artifacts we take for granted in Western Civilization, but you have owned a great many of those tools and toys in your time, and you can recreate some of them as you wait to be rescued. You are (more…)

Chapter 3. Speaking in tongues.

I told you I use the words “human being” as a term of art. Here is why: Because there is a valid and valuable distinction to be made between a genetic Homo sapiens (the surviving issue of the recombination of genes) and a human being (a genetic Homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated the gift of mind). A genetic Homo sapiens can have the potential to become a human being – although this capacity or its existential realization can have been damaged or destroyed by disease, injury or birth defect. But until the mind has been cultivated within a particular genetic Homo sapiens, that entity will not be a human being.

A human life is an artifact, a man-made thing. The existence of a genetic Homo sapiens is a manifestation of nature, just as with any tree or reptile or kitten. But the existence of your life as a human being is a consequence of a vast number of conceptually-conscious choices made by your parents and other human beings when you were just a baby. Had they failed to cultivate the gift of mind within you, you might have survived as a genetic Homo sapiens, but you would never have become a human being. You owe your biological life to nature, but you owe your life as a human being to choices made by other human beings.

It’s funny for me to listen to abortion ideologues, pro and con, argue about when human life begins: Conception or birth? The truth – as a matter of ontological fact – is that, for normal children raised in normal circumstances, human life begins at age four or five. The transition from toddler to child is slow and gradual, but the distinction is obvious once you know what to look for. A toddler is little more than a very smart dumb animal – an exceptionally talented dancing bear. He does amazing things, compared to the clumsy efforts of trained animals, but like a trained animal, he does not understand conceptually what he is doing or why. A child, by contrast, is a (more…)