bellatrys: ‘“X entails Y” if you find Y in places where there is no X – it’s called “necessary and sufficient” in formal logic. Chauvinism exists without Bibles; therefore “biblical” is neither necessary nor sufficient for the patriarchy.’

You’re committing a formal fallacy.

Entailment is not the same as equivalence; “p entails q” means that p is a sufficient condition for q (and q a necessary condition for p), not that p is necessary and sufficient for q. Because of the difference, you can’t safely infer “not-p entails not-q” from “p entails q” (that’d be a fallacy of denying the antecedent).

Applying this to the case at hand, you can’t safely infer (as you try to) “No acceptance of Hebrew scriptures entails no patriarchy” from Athana’s claim that “Acceptance of Hebrew scriptures entails patriarchy.” It could be true both that acceptance of Hebrew scriptures is the main or even the sole factor behind patriarchy here, and that something else entirely is what produced patriarchy in other historical societies.

This is not to say whether Athana or you is right about causes and effects here. But you are supporting your claims with a fallacy on this point.

Here’s Rebecca Traister, preparing to ask a question for O’Bierne about a “quotation” from Catharine MacKinnon in her book:

Yes. The MacKinnon quote about how all heterosexual intercourse is rape is old news. There has been a whole other wave of sex-positive feminism in part in response to ideas like that. …

In fact, the “quote” reported here as “old news” is a fabrication. It does not exist. Catharine MacKinnon never said this, although the view is commonly (erroneously) attributed to her. The one notorious example in which she was “quoted” as saying this was a column by Cal Thomas in March 1999, in which he quoted a passage from Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge giving this (mistaken) gloss of MacKinnon’s views, and then (apparently too lazy to pick up the book to get his citations straight) mistakenly claimed that MacKinnon was the author of the book and that the quotation was in her own words.

This has already been pointed out to Salon twice in the letters in response to the article, within hours of the publication of this story (letter from “Anonymous” at 9:36pm, Jan 16; letter from Mike Connell at 4:19pm, January 17th). A couple weeks ago The New York Times book review publicly posted a correction to Ana Marie Cox’s review of O’Bierne’s book, which committed a simlar hower. Why hasn’t Salon published a similar correction to this interview, which contains a plain misstatement of fact?

For more information, see the Snopes.com article at http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm and the welcome, if belated, editorial note to the New York Times book review at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/books/review/15cox.html

I’m aware that you were using it to mean “coward.”

What I’m asking is why you think a slang-term for vaginas or vulvas is an appropriate way to to single out cowardice for criticism. Is being associated with women’s sex organs supposed to imply cowardice? If so, why?

“But Rad introduces standards of fictional discourse against my objection that ‘praying to God’ is factive.”

I don’t think the connection between “writing letters to Santa Claus” (to take the example) and standards of fictional discourse is quite so straightforward. The language-game surrounding Santa Claus (to take one example) is complicated by the fact that parents engage in fictional discourse that children are expected to treat as factual discourse about Santa Claus, for a few years of their life at least. A number of kids who might tell you that what they are doing is writing a letter to Santa Claus, wouldn’t be saying it under an implicit fictional-that operator. You could, of course, just dig in and insist “Well, in that sense they aren’t writing letters to Santa Claus. They just think they are, and you’re only inclined to call it a letter to Santa Claus when you slip into the fictional context by playing along with the child’s false beliefs.” And I’d agree with you that there’s a sense of “write to” (and “speak to,” “pray to,” and other forms of direct address) where the second person has to exist for you to count as having done it. What I’m more doubtful of is the idea that this is the only sense in which the terms can be used in direct discourse. I’d be interested to know why you think direct (non-fictional) uses of these phrases presupposes the existence of the indirect object.

I’d also note, in this connection, that it’s a common use of English to say things like: “People pray to many different gods,” without presupposing that all of the gods that people pray to exist.

Stefan, well, there are lots of possible motivations that they might have had — I’m not sure what “America-bashing” is supposed to mean here, but leftist rhetoric, specifically antiwar sentiment, opposition to government war as such, squeamishness about death and violence in general, or any number of other things could have been behind different student gov members’ decisions. My point is just that it’s not obvious that universities should concern themselves with celebrating people whose chief claim to fame is killing a bunch of people at the command of the government. Certainly not in an unjust war — that’s plainly immoral — and not even in a just war, really. (I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which the air war in the Pacific was.) Trumpeting martial glory just isn’t the function of a University in the first place, and isn’t something that we need more of from the command-posts of our re-barbarizing society. So I find it hard to work up much outrage at the students whether their motives were clearly praiseworthy or muddled and sentimental. If it’s the latter, they should think harder about what their concerns are, but they do at least have some slippery hold on the good, and they haven’t done anything wrong, let alone anything contemptible or “despicable,” in rejecting a commemorative memorial for Boyington.

1. Women in prostitution are just doing a non-aggressive job for willing customers in order to keep food on the table, often in rather desparate circumstances. They, as a profession, haven’t done anything to you to justify your use of them for a sexualized slur against college-aged women that you disagree with.

2. What’s wrong with University of Washington students having second thoughts about striking up a rousing march for the memory of an old warrior whose chief accomplishment in life was killing a bunch of people at the command of the federal government? Maybe there are other things in life that deserve more notice than martial glory, particularly at this stage of civilization, such as it is.

Alex: “Involuntary dependence, of course, may be a different matter – but some people (indeed, perhaps most) may indeed want to be dependent on the police for their safety, simply because they don’t want to have to do it themselves, and have more trust in those forces than you do.”

That’s fine. Under a laissez-faire system anybody who doesn’t want to carry a gun is free to deputize other people to do the gun-toting for him.

But it perhaps doesn’t need to be pointed out that gun control laws — by their nature — require involuntary dependence on the armed forces for anyone who wanted to carry a gun but isn’t allowed to under the terms of the gun control. So the objection stands, on this point at least.

Alex: “However, I suspect you’re actually making the claim that people ought not to depend on the police forces for protection, regardless of whether they want to or not: because we can’t trust them not to abuse their power to pick on certain minorities (at least that seems to be roughly what you say in your post on Condoleeza).”

Well, there are two separate claims. (1) Depending (voluntarily or involuntarily) on professional armed police forces may be foolish, in that it exposes you to abuse or neglect by the pigs, because you have little opportunity for redress or self-defense. (2) Enforced dependence on professional armed police forces is dangerous, in that it corrodes freedom and contributes to domineering and abusive pigs, because you have no way to opt out of the system and no other choices about how to defend yourself. I think both are probably true but that (2) is much more certain than (1); also that if you knock out (2) then the dangers involved under (1) will be correspondingly reduced (because if the pigs aren’t protecting you, or are themselves part of the problem, then you can always take steps to get your self-defense from other folks or by other means.

Alex: “As I said before, at there are at least some checks on how police/military use firearms.”

I think even a casual review of how the military and police act would show that these aren’t even remotely effective. Why would they be? The checks are set and enforced by the police and military’s commanders, not by the people directly affected by their actions, so they curtail only the abuse or neglect that tends to embarass or undercut the existing structure.

Alex: “Generally, if you think that the police/military will pick on minorities, why won’t the civilian population if they have access to guns?”

Well, I take it that what you’re asking is why won’t the non-minorities in the civilian population pick on the minorities if they have access to guns. One answer is that the minorities will have access to guns too under a system with no gun control laws. (As a matter of historical record, the idea that gun control laws could protect minorities by disarming racial terrorists is an exact inversion of what actually happened, in the United States at least.) Another answer is that one of the issues with the police (the failure to defend people who need help) will be irrelevant when those people can defend themselves, and the other (active aggression and abuse of innocent people) is likely to be undermined to the degree that State-deputized professional police stop being the sole enforcers. The pigs can much more easily get away with gross abuse of other people’s rights in part because their special position, as the deputized enforcers of the State, tends to be used as an excuse, or a justification for, all kinds of violence that would never be tolerated by the courts or by your neighbors if it were being committed by private citizens without a badge. If you take away the privileged position that allows cops to frequently get away with murder, in the most literal sense, then I think there’s a corresponding decrease in worries about abuse of arms.

Alex: “I suspect that there is some reason to have a military force with guns for self-defence against outside agression (not sure on humanitarian intervention) – but I’m not convinced that you couldn’t introduce more checks on the goverment so as to prevent the use of the army against the civilian population. That would ideally lead to no gun ownership within a state.”

I’m not sure what you’re suggesting here. A system in which domestic police don’t carry guns, and the only people who do are regular military who can’t carry except when deployed in a foreign theater?

If so, then as long as that lasts you wouldn’t have (legal) gun use within the state, but it would remain the case that all the (legal) guns remain in the hands and under the control of the political classes, which is my primary objection. As a practical matter, it’s also hard to imagine how there wouldn’t ultimately have to be provisions for the use of guns within the borders of the state at some point. To take the extreme case, suppose I start making Kalashnikovs openly in the capital. The government tells me to stop; I keep making them. They send cops without firearms to stop me; I mow them down with my Kalashnikovs. Now what? Either they deploy military forces within the country to stop me, or else they don’t have a viable gun control law.

cabrutus: “… denials of conditionals don’t mean what people think they mean”

Or maybe conditionals don’t mean what logicians in the early 20th century drilled us to think they mean.

The question is who is to be the master, that’s all.

Well, what (~A -> ~P) -> G says is: “God exists if: it’s the case that my prayers aren’t answered (by God) only if I don’t pray.” But that does intuitively imply that God exists: prayers can only be answered (the way we’re using that term) if God does in fact exist.

So I don’t see the problem at this point.

Of course, there is a problem with the idea that truth-functional material implication expresses the same thing as an English “if-then” or “only if” phrase.

“Way to make a fool of yourself. You’re good at that, anonymous pussy.”

Why are you comparing the anonymous poster to a vagina?

Is that supposed to be an insult?