By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’(1). But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. – George Orwell
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I don’t use words like “disgusting” very often because overusing strong adjectives tends to devalue their meaning, but when we find something that is genuinely repellent — say, when the U.S. Department of Defense provides more than $6 million to 16 NFL teams for advertising about supporting the troops and the teams accepting the cash — I think “disgusting” is apropos. I think pretty much the same when recalling the many examples of the exploitation of patriotism in the entertainment and sports industries and the borderline nationalism that purveys many sectors of public life. See Toby Keith. See the WWE’s Tribute to the Troops. See American Sniper. See virtually every American sports event after Sept. 11, 2001.
In that vein, Charles Pierce has given us an excellent play-by-play of the “messy business” of propaganda and how sports has not only cheapened the idea of patriotism by insisting that Americans can’t gather for an afternoon baseball or football game without obligatory rituals and renditions of the national anthem that have essentially become meaningless by repetition, but has now effectively “commodified” patriotism:
Most veterans you will see on the field in an NFL stadium, or standing on top of a dugout between innings, are genuinely worthy of the country’s admiration. They’ve earned every cheer they get. They also have earned decent health care and a chance at an education and whatever counseling they need to get beyond what they’ve experienced. What they don’t deserve to be are front people through whom the rich get richer, to be walking advertisements for the services that they already have paid back in full. This is a transaction grotesquely inappropriate for their sacrifices.
One of the unwritten rules of journalism is that unless there are unusual circumstances that call for it — say, in running a story about an unfulfilled open records request and a media outlet’s attempts to obtain public information — competent reporters, editors and television producers who actually care about producing quality journalism, don’t insert themselves or their organizations into news stories.
Journalists should simply report the news; not be the news.
But this central tenet of the news business seems to carry little weight over at CNN, which has a long history of inserting itself into the news stories it was supposed to be covering, perhaps most conspicuously in its breathless reports on Hurricane Katrina, in which correspondents and anchors and their crews, we were told, went to great lengths to get to such-and-such god-forsaken region of New Orleans, all in the interest of delivering real stories of courage in the face of immense trials. Because you see dear viewer, CNN’s is all about telling stories, namely its own. That is why tonight at 9 p.m. on CNN you will be able to relive it all, how CNN traversed land and sea and combed the globe to offer up breaking news, endless footage of Anderson Cooper and other reporters pointing to things and panoramic shots of empty courthouses, abandoned buildings, windswept Middle Eastern war zones, Anthony Bourdain eating weird shit and still more footage of Cooper pointing at things.
So, let’s all gather around the boob tube for some shameless self-aggrandizement, give three cheers for CNN and weep as national journalism continues the death march closer and closer to its own heat death.
The following “exclusive” report from Fox News claims that officials within the Obama administration were “fully aware” about a weapons transport between a terrorist post in Libya and Syria before the attack in Benghazi and the subsequent death of four Americans:
And what is Fox News’ source for this claim, that implies the administration seemed to turn the other way as one terrorist group in Libya fed weapons to another potential threat in Syria? You guessed it. The documentation comes secondhand from a right-wing group named Judicial Watch, which tells us — we have no way to verify this, other than taking their word for it — that the filed substantiating this claim came from the Department of Defense and the State Department via a court order related to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from May 2014. The documents are on Judicial Watch’s website, of course, and the lawsuit is public record, but we have no way of knowing if the items posted on JW’s website are complete and authentic.
As a side note before I get into a couple points on JW’s claims and the documents themselves, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the little journalistic games Fox News plays on a routine basis. A reporter named Catherine Herridge is introduced as a “chief intelligence correspondent” coming to the show “live in D.C.,” as if Herridge had spent the whole day using her journalistic prowess and combing the earth for these documents when, in fact, all she (or a writer or producer) did was go on JW’s website and summarize her version of the findings with as much access to the documents as I have sitting here in my living room.
In any case, I’ll assume that the documents posted on JW’s website are authentic and complete and came straight from the DOD and State Department. Judicial Watch’s main points are that the Obama administration knew back in August 2012 that ISIS, far from the “JV team” as the president previously claimed, planned to establish a caliphate in Iraq and that the administration was aware that weapons were being shipped from Libya to Syria. The first document JW linked to does indeed say that a group that subscribed to “AQ (Al-Queda) ideologies” “claimed ultimate responsibility” for the attack in Benghazi and that the hit was planned 10 days before Sept. 11, 2012. The government file, which was produced on either Sept. 12, 2012, or Sept. 16, 2012 — it makes little difference which date is correct — says nothing about the United States or officials within the administration knowing before Sept. 11, 2012, that the attack was going to occur, as implied by Judicial Watch and presented as more or less fact in Fox News’ report.
The second document from October 2012 just confirms that the U.S. was aware by that time in October that weapons had been shipped from Libya to Syria in late-August of that year, not that the U.S. was aware of this activity all along. Yet, JW seems to make this rather large leap in logic when, further down in its report, the organization claims the U.S. was “monitoring” the shipment of weapons all the while:
Another DIA report, written in August 2012 (the same time period the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria), said that the opposition in Syria was driven by al Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups …
But I’ll give Judicial Watch a little credit in its carefully worded report; part of the news release at least attempted to imply some kind of coverup in the Obama administration rather than, in Fox’s case, making ball-faced accusations of malfeasance, an attempt that nonetheless unraveled once JW inserted a quote from its president, Tom Fitton:
These documents are jaw-dropping. No wonder we had to file more FOIA lawsuits and wait over two years for them. If the American people had known the truth – that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other top administration officials knew that the Benghazi attack was an al-Qaeda terrorist attack from the get-go – and yet lied and covered this fact up – Mitt Romney might very well be president. … These documents show that the Benghazi cover-up has continued for years and is only unraveling through our independent lawsuits. The Benghazi scandal just got a whole lot worse for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
Judicial Watch’s supposed smoking gun was a report from August 2012 that was seemingly supposed to establish a connection between terrorists in Libya and Syria, but the report, while it does contain a reference to ISIS, possibly exposing Obama’s attempt to downplay the group’s influence in the region, the document says nothing about terrorist groups operating in northern Africa or any connection they might have to insurgents in Syria and Iraq, which belies JW’s and Fox News’ claim that the Obama administration had detailed knowledge about developments in Libya all along.
As I was browsing YouTube today, I decided to see if users had posted any new or interesting videos about the existence of God. Since I have addressed a great many arguments from Christian apologetics on this site since 2009, I thought I would check out some arguments for God from Islam. As anticipated, while Islam has its own particular slant on the god question and in some ways is actually more accepting of scientific principles than evangelical Christianity, Muslims by and large use many of the same stock arguments for God as Christians.
Indeed, close your eyes, take out the accent, the Arabic and references to Allah and the Quran, one might imagine watching a diatribe from William Lane Craig.
In this video, Tzortzis tells us that he is going to provide the “Quranic argument” for the existence of God, which is really just the old cosmological argument that has been restated and refuted for hundreds of years now. In any case, Tzortzis identifies four “logical possibilities” for the existence of the universe as follows:
The universe came from nothing.
The universe created itself.
The universe was created by something else created.
The universe was created by something uncreated.
As you can see, possibilities 2-4 all commit a fallacy by assuming a priori that the universe necessarily had to be created — it very well could have just always existed, and while that is hard for our mind to grasp, it is nonetheless another possibility — but after ruling out the first three as impossibilities, Tzortzis then hones in on the fourth option, which he calls the “best explanation” for the existence of the universe. He begins to get on the right track when he concedes the point that the “something uncreated” doesn’t necessarily have to be Allah or any other god in human history, but when he then says that by using the “Quranic approach,” we can draw conclusions about the universe’s origins, we know where he’s going to take the argument.
Here are his basic “conclusions,” which we will more accurately call assumptions:
Assumption 1: “This uncreated creator must be powerful.” — Notice what he did there. He went from calling the entity an “uncreated” entity to an “uncreated creator” and then bestowed it with a certain power that was, up to this point, not part of the argument. Also as part of this first point, he implied that the mere existence of billions of atoms in the universe and the subsequent release of energy that occurs when an atom is split is somehow suggestive of a powerful god, although splitting just one atom does not produce anything near an atomic explosion, nor does the existence of atoms suggest anything other than the existence of atoms.
Assumption 2: The creator must be “intelligent and all-knowing” because “it created laws in the universe like the law of gravity.” — Like many of his Christian apologist counterparts, Tzortzis, most likely is speaking to potential converts or people who may be amenable to accepting his brand of faith, uses some fast talking to blaze through these last points, apparently hoping that he can move quickly enough through the message before any sparks of logic creep into the listeners’ minds. But if we slow down and hear what he actually says, we can see that he is just begging the question and taking as an assumption that which he might hope to prove. Simply put, the existence of natural laws in the universe only prove the existence of the natural laws and does not imply a law giver, just like the existence of the universe does not imply by fiat a conscious creator. Attributing laws to the various attributes we observe in nature is just our way, as humans, to describe our world in a scientific way. Unlike God or the various characteristics commonly attributed to him, we can demonstrate these natural laws, which would exist whether we had ever evolved far enough to discover them or not.
Assumption 3: The creator must be “transcendent” and exist outside of space and time. — This is a common trope in apologetics and was presumably conjured to excuse God from being beholden and subject to the laws of nature. Thus, believers might say, if we just put God outside of the observable universe, we can say that he is a higher force than anything in this universe and that he is the progenitor of morals, of the natural laws and of life itself. Of course, by definition, we can’t experience anything that is outside of our space and time; indeed, there is nothing outside of space and time. To say otherwise is to just make unsubstantiated claims based on pure fantasy, not unlike fictional tales of unicorns, the Loch Ness monster and Flying Teapot making laps around Planet Earth.
Assumption 4: The creator must be eternal. — This is just an extension of the previous claim. Here again, Tzortzis just makes another assumption about an uncreated creator, with no basis in reality, other than, perhaps, a deep-seated desire for it to be true.
Assumption 5: The “uncreated creator” must have freewill. — By now, and based on the other points, we can pretty well take it for granted that Tzortzis thinks a transcendant, all-knowing creator pretty well has free reign over his own decisions, but Tzortzis spells it out for us, although Allah or Yahweh being browbeaten and lorded over by an even more powerful overlord is humorous to think about. One might wonder, though, if this uncreated creator was “intelligent” and “eternal,” why would he so freely and benevolently choose to create the universe if he knew beforehand that a good 50 percent of his creation would be doomed to suffer unspeakable torments for all eternity, unless, of course, he was also a sadist and sinisterly set this plot in motion. In fact, if we were to judge God or Allah on his success rate, that is, the number of people who were compelled to believe based on scripture or inspirational speaking or some kind of “revelation” versus those who were not convinced of any of it, a 50 percent rate of belief for the most powerful force in the universe has to be disappointing.
Assumption 6: Humans sense the nature of God as creator as part of their disposition, and God as the creator is the “best and most comprehensive explanation” for the existence of the universe. — The first part of this assumption is just an appeal to personal experience, and as any judge, attorney or psychologist will attest, personal testimony is a poor basis to substantiate truth claims. Millions of atheists in the world, some of whom have sincerely searched for a spiritual component, have precisely the opposite experience, having had no innate sense of something spiritual outside of themselves, while millions of Buddhists have no conception of a theistic creator at all.
The last few seconds of Tzortzis’ video — and this ties into the sixth assumption — seemed to take a swipe at the Christian concept of the trinity in suggesting that God is one, rather than three separate, autonomous beings as in the Christian godhead.
Interestingly and ironically, Tzortzis says this concept is “irrational because it creates far more questions than it solves,” which would, on the surface, seem like a tip of the hat to Occam’s razor, if he hadn’t just spent the last five minutes making arguments about God that, themselves, raise more questions than they answer.
While it is true that we do not have an answer for why the scientific laws exist as we observe them in the universe, there is no reason to think that the eventual explanation will spring from anything other than a natural cause, as has been the case with every other question about the universe we have answered from science in the last 250 years. Why some believers think that questions about our origin are somehow exempt from having to be explained by natural processes, when all of our other knowledge about the universe comes to us this way, escapes all comprehension.
In the end, suggesting that an all-powerful, highly complex deity who sits outside of space and time is responsible for everything that we see in nature is, number one, a cop-out for having to come up with any kind of real explanation, and number two, complicates questions about our origin exponentially. For more on this, see my post, Response to Apologetics III: Aquinas and Occam’s razor.