We Need Reason: A Health Care Rant

I thought, really, that I had seen it all during the election. The weird spectacle of madness that was put on:  the people at McCain/Palin rallies; that freaky old lady McCain had to admonish. People seriously paying attention to a guy called "Joe the Plumber" who wasn't named Joe and wasn't a plumber. The racist comments. The conspiracy theories.

And then came Healthcare Reform, and my head exploded.

Seriously. Everyone remember back in the day, when "apeshit" was those nutters who tried to spread the story that the Clintons had had people killed to hide their shady business dealings? Oh my Flying Spaghetti Monster, but those days seem sane now.

Watching Obama's speech tonight, I just got so pissed. I mean, at this moment, giving this speech, dealing with this issue, the President of the United States shouldn't have to spend time refuting claims that are so apeshit that apeshit won't go near them. The President actually had to call out the "Death Panels" lies. If that fact doesn't make you wet your pants, doesn't make you think that we are heading towards a national loony bin, I don't know what will. Think what it means:  enough people are worried about that, think it might be true -- this statement that is nothing more than the evil, twisted, fucked up, wicked, asinine ravings of an ignorant quitter from Alaska -- that the President has to waste a few minutes slamming it down. Instead of laying out more concrete details of his plan in the context of a spirited, but cordial, debate, he had to spend time to say, "Hey, Jimmy, don't worry. I'm not going to gas your gramma."

And we keep treating this stuff as if it's rational. We keep letting those voices get microphones, as if they are a serious part of the debate. They aren't. They're con artists or lunatics, or so mentally lazy that they have trouble forming enough of a thought to open a bag of potato chips. Or, to be more succinct:  they're Fox

Image via Wikipedia

News's audience. A minority, I think, in this country, but a big one, and worrying, because they hold ignorance as the highest ideal, truth as anything that is spoken -- or, preferably, screamed -- over and over, and spitting as public discourse.

Of course, there are those who benefit from this debate being nothing more than frothing at the lips. Right wing radio, Fox News (go figure!), the insurance companies, you name it, there's folks that are making money off this whole damn mess, and don't care much if the country lurches into dangerous lunacy in the process. As long as they get theirs, right? Bahamas, here we come! And meanwhile, this "debate," this discussion that is being snowed under by all this anti-rational bs, is about something really, really simple:

In the richest nation on Earth, there are people who die because they can't afford health care.

It's not an academic debate. It's a debate about a tragedy in the real world. It's about suffering. It's about lives ruined and dreams forever deferred because of illness and because of a screwed up system that too often grinds people under instead of helping them.

It's a topic that desperately needs reason. It needs serious, informed conversation, creative problem-solving, intelligence, team-work. It needs all of that and more so we can end this tragedy once and for all.

At this point, I just have to end with a quote from Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy:

If I sound angry, then, yeah, I am. I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.
 
It’s killing any real debate in this country, where the system of government depends utterly on a well-informed public. When rampant idiocy is presented as reasonable discourse without any rebuttal, then we all suffer.

What we need are government officials not afraid to talk like Barney Frank did to such a voice of lunacy. To reiterate, crackpots have a right to air their diseased notions, just as we have the right to tear those ideas to shred when they do. More than that, the news media have a responsibility to do so.

(And while you're at it, read the whole article. And also read what John Scalzi has to say in his post "That Obama Speech," which is, like Plait's, about Obama's evil speech to the nation's school children.)

Miracles would be proof?

Over at Unreasonable Faith, Daniel Florien has a nice post on "Why We Should Trust Reason Over Emotion." Mostly, I just want to chime in and say, yeah, what he said -- but with one "but."

It's that last part of the post: Miracles would be proof. Daniel writes,

Jennifer says that it is “ignorant” to dismiss miracles. And if there were real miracles, I would agree — why would someone dismiss amazing things that really happened?

I've got to disagree. I've got Paine too much on the mind right now, I guess. What I'd like to argue is that the very notion of miracles is somewhat incoherent. As Paine noted, the idea of calling something a miracle involves a truly stupendous claim -- namely, that one knows, absolutely and totally, what is and is not possible. Something may be inexplicable by current human understanding, but that does not, in any way, mean it's a miracle. It is far more likely that it just means there's something we don't understand yet. To establish that something is a "miracle," you'd have to know a heck of a lot more than we do now. Or will ever likely know, quite possibly.

But there's another point, and I'll illustrate it with an example: let's say that tomorrow, every single person on the planet hears a big, booming voice, saying (in the language of every hearer) "I am the Lord God. Bow before me, humans, lest you be doomed to hellfire!" That would, I think you'll all admit, be pretty amazing. It would be a singular event in human history, and come as close as one can to the notion of "miracle." So, wow! God spoke to us! Right?

Says who?.How would you know that the voice is God? Just because the event is amazing? Just because the voice says so? That's a pretty big leap. Maybe it's some weird alien. Maybe it's a being from another universe having some fun. The leap -- from the event to the explanation -- is huge, however "miraculous" the event appears to be. What would this miracle truly be proof of? Not much. Just of itself, really. We could say, wow, something amazing happened. But going beyond that, well, you get into pure speculation. In science, you extrapolate from your data to make a claim -- but it's important not to extrapolate any further than the data allows (that, incidentally, is one of the biggest differences between science and pseudoscience).

And that's the problem with miracles. As Paine noted, even if they did happen, it wouldn't matter -- they explain nothing. They teach us nothing. They establish nothing. They wouldn't prove anything. At most, you could say, wow, something really interesting happened. Anything else would be nothing more than speculation and wild guessing.

Welcome!

Welcome to Expanding the Proscenium! Partly, this blog is skin hunger 2.0. Partly, it is something else. When I started skin hunger, I didn't really know what I wanted it to be. But several months of writing and thinking have done a lot to clarify things for me, and thus Expanding the Proscenium is born.

I am an atheist, but this isn't, quite, an atheist blog. It is about the deeper, more interesting, and more important, issue: Reason vs. Faith.

Carl Sagan wrote, in Pale Blue Dot, that

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Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

That's what this blog is about. It is about expanding that "tidy anthropocentric proscenium." It is about Reason, and the poverty of Faith. It is about growing our imaginations to match the scale of the universe. Art, science, geeky fandom, philosophy, you name it -- it'll have a place here, as long as it challenges us to expand the proscenium of the theater of our minds.

I hope you'll join me on this journey! In the meantime, please pardon the dust. Everything will soon be up and running properly!