JeremyStangroom.Com

It’s nice that Baroness Uddin has been cleared of any wrongdoing over her expenses claims.

However, it is certainly arguable that she ought to be shamed for having (jointly) written – or at least for having put her name to – the following:

No religion of the world restricts choice, and we believe that good parents cannot either.

No religion of the world restricts choice!!!! And I’m not quoting it out of context (see Page 1).

What on earth were you thinking, Baroness?

This is simultaneously amusing and rather sad.

Most of all though it is more evidence – if more evidence is needed after the on-going shenanigans of the atheist wars (“Oh no, Chris Mooney is hosting a podcast!”) – that atheists, freethinkers (ha!), and the like, are no more rational than anybody else. (Probably).

Many of the philosophers who have written on the internet have argued that internet relationships are in various ways diminished compared to everyday, embodied kinds. For example, Hubert Dreyfus in his On The Internet argues that:

our sense of the reality of things and people and our ability to interact effectively with them depend on the way our body works silently in the background. Its ability to get a grip on things provides our sense of the reality of what we are doing and what we are ready to do…All this our body does so effortlessly, pervasively, and successfully that it is hardly noticed. That is why it is so easy to think that in cyberspace we could get along without it, and why it would, in fact, be impossible to do so.

It is easy to understand how philosophers come to make these kinds of arguments. Many important facets of our personal relationships seem to require face-to-face contact. Dreyfus, for example, argues that trust in another person is in part based on the experience that they do not take advantage of our vulnerability when given the opportunity to so in a face-to-face situation. Certainly it does seem to be true that we can have a level of confidence in people we meet in person that is not available in online relationships. Particularly, the opportunity for gross deception is minimised in a face-face-situation. The philosopher Gordon Graham, and countless other people, have pointed out that it is very easy to deceive people on the internet by inventing wholly imaginary personas – something which it is much more difficult to achieve in the non-virtual world.

Continue reading »

I’m putting together an online activity about fear of death. Part of it will involve two tests of mental agility. These have to be at the same level of difficulty. So I need to pre-test the two tests. That’s where you come in!

If you could follow this link, and do the two tests – it’ll only take a couple of minutes – I’d be very grateful.

There are other tests on the Philosophy Experiments site that you should try out if you haven’t already.

The Monty Hall Problem

What Does Mary Do?

Elementary, My Dear Wason?

If you have any problems with any of the tests, or any comments – particularly if you think any of the questions in the mental agility tests are much more difficult than average – then just let me know here.

Thanks!

This is a cross post from Talking Philosophy.

This Tiger Woods thing is quite amusing, obviously. But if it is true that he has strayed, then really it isn’t surprising. Fidelity is (relatively) easy if beautiful people aren’t offering you sex all the time. If they are, as is presumably the case with Tiger Woods, then it gets a whole lot harder.

I used to think I’d always be able to resist the temptation of illicit sex. But now I’m pretty sure that if I had offers like Tiger Woods, I’d behave exactly as he has done. The flesh is weak.

A lot of people are pretty insulting about Richard Seymour. In one sense, this is understandable, because his political commitments are juvenile (I mean that literally: the SWP espouse the kind of politics one should have gotten over by the time Freshers’ week finishes at university).

But the suggestion that he is stupid – which crops up mainly in blog commentary – is completely absurd. He just isn’t. This post, for example, is an extremely good analysis of the situation confronting the far-Left in Britain in the present day.

Of course, people love to belittle their political opponents. But to be effective, the rhetoric has to have at least some resonance. Calling John Game ‘stupid’ works, because the overwhelming majority of his public utterances support this view (though not all of them, he wrote good stuff on Iran); calling Yoshie Furuhashi a ‘frothing Ahmadinejad shill’ kind of makes sense, because one does get the impression that Yoshie would like to bed the Iranian leader; but suggesting that Seymour is unintelligent is just so far wide of the mark as to be ridiculous.

Plus it smacks of intellectual jealousy.

His writing style, though – now that is ripe for parody.

Here we go again. A teacher is jailed for having consensual sex with a 16 year old girl.

I’m not going to run through the arguments again that make this a ridiculous over-reaction.

But consider the following:

Grim made a full confession to the affair, which involved sexual contact but not full intercourse.

Sentencing, Judge Paul Darlow told him… ‘In your favour I accept that you pleaded guilty at the first opportunity and you are not only of good character but people have told of your abilities as a teacher to bring on gifted children.

‘There was no intimidation and the relationship was consensual on both sides and with genuine affection.’

The guy is now in prison for ten month.

Somebody should start a campaign to end this ridiculous, infantile, illiberal, treatment of people choosing to have sex.

This is ridiculous. The boy was fifteen. It was consensual. If he is experiencing anything like trauma, it seems overwhelmingly likely that this is only because people make such a fuss about this kind of thing.

Yes, Madeleine Martin probably should have known better. Yes, the power relationship was likely asymmetrical. Yes, it isn’t a good idea for teachers to jump their students. But even so… let’s get some perspective here. It was sex that almost certainly both parties thoroughly enjoyed. It was just sex.

Here’s a newsflash for fifteen year old boys. If the worst thing that happens in your life is that you get shagged by your 39-year old teacher, then be thankful. And remember, there will almost certainly come a point in your life when you’ll be absurdly grateful if anybody wants to shag you.

Introduction

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is the kind of book that changes the way that people look at the world. Its importance is that it articulates a gene’s-eye view of evolution. According to this view, all organisms, including human beings, are ‘survival machines’ that have been ‘blindly programmed’ to preserve their genes (see The Selfish Gene, p. v). Of course, extant survival machines take a myriad of different forms – for example, it is estimated that there are some three million different species of insect alone – but they all have in common that they have been built according to the instructions of successful genes; that is, genes whose replicas in previous generations managed to get themselves copied.

At the level of genes, things are competitive. Genes that contribute to making good bodies – bodies that stay alive and reproduce – come to dominate a gene pool (the whole set of genes in a breeding population). So, for example, if a gene emerges which has the effect of improving the camouflage of stick-insects, it will in time likely achieve a preponderance over alternative genes (alleles) which produce less effective camouflage. There are no such things as long-lived, altruistic genes. If a gene has the effect of increasing the welfare of its alleles to its own detriment, it will in the end perish. In this sense, then, all long-lived genes are ‘selfish’, concerned only with their own survival – and the world is necessarily full of genes which have successfully looked after their own interests.

Continue reading »

This story is disturbing on many different levels. The gist of it is that a 15 year old girl had trumpet lessons with a 26 year old female teacher. They became close. They fell in love. They had sex. There were complaints, a scandal, a court case, and the female teacher has ended up in prison.

The relationship was entirely consensual – indeed, it seems that there is the intention that it will continue once the teacher is freed from prison. The evidence in court was that the 15 year old girl was the one who pushed for the relationship to become sexual.

Regina Naughton, for the prosecution, said: “They began to have feelings which were not expected. Miss Goddard said she didn’t see her as a 15-year-old and they would have to wait until she was 16, or for three years. But flirting and the sending of text messages to each other began. The teenager described them kissing and then sleeping with each other, and it was at that point that the girl said she wanted a sexual relationship.

“The girl was told that if she felt anything was uncomfortable at any time they could stop. But the girl said it felt right,” she added.

There are a number of points to be made here.

Continue reading »