Dale Amon at Samizdata has a fascinating post full of speculations on what kinds of gods could physically exist, and how they could come to be. It’s well worth reading.

I’d like to mention two things that Dale neglected to mention.

First, it’s entirely possible to conceive of god/dess as an emergent property of the universe. As life increases, intelligence (in the mathematical sense of information interchange) increases. The ability to think and plan is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to transmit information and switch states in the mind, and it’s possible that the ability to transmit information and switch states in the universe at large could result in something recognizably sentient, and far beyond human. Indeed, this is pretty close to describing my view of the Divine, on one level.

The other possibility is that god/dess could exist as a manifestation of belief. The possibility exists that reality is actually a shared hallucination, constructed of the intersection of all sentient beings’ conceptions of reality. In that sense, anything that enough people believe in is real. This is a little esoteric for me, but it at least is reasonable to posit.

Life has intervened so I’m running a little late today. Here’s what’s caught my eye:

• Remember the post from Jeff Simmermom that I linked to yesterday?.
  Smash has some great correspondence with him.
• Giblets of Fafblog has
  a tribute to Groundhog Day in his inimitable, errh, style.
• praktike has an interesting round-up of posts and articles about Arab reform.
• Apparently, the military is targeting journalists.
  Well, Greyhawk is, anyway.
• I’m glad to see at least one skeptic among those remembering Ayn Rand’s 100^th
  birthday today. Thanks, Professor Bainbridge.
• A Marine emails his father about the elections in Fallujah (hat tip: Roger L. Simon).
• A lot more than you probably wanted to know about She Who Will Be Obeyed.

That’s the lot.

I honestly don’t know what kind of world the conspiracy theorists
want us to have.

The conspiracy theorists are working overtime these days whether, as I’ve mentioned
before, it’s Nobel prize winners who believe that the U. S. created AIDS in
a deliberate attempt to kill black Africans, people who believe that the Clintons ordered
the murder of Vince Foster or ran drugs down in Arkansas, those who believe that the torture of Iraqi
prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison was ordered at the highest levels of the U. S. government,
or, as Jeff pointed out this morning, it’s a man who runs one of the most
influential news organizations in the world who claims that American soldiers are deliberately
targeting journalists.

Here’s an example of the arguments we’re seeing these days:

1. Black Africans are dying from a terrible disease.
2. Americans have chemical and bacteriological war programs.
3. Americans hate black people.
4. Therefore Americans deliberately created the disease.

Check it out. I’m trying my hardest not to employ a strawman argument. For analysts of logical
fallacies this is an embarrassment of riches. The fallacies in this short statement
include the ad hominem fallacy, hasty generalization, the genetic fallacy, and outright lies.
But the key point to note is that means and motive are enough to convict. There’s
no actual evidence presented.

The form that these conspiracy theories take that I find the most troubling is when
the theorists say that well, no, the torture wasn’t actually ordered or the targeting of
journalists wasn’t actually ordered but the higher-ups created an environment in which
terrible things were done. When creating an environment without directly ordering a crime
or being involved in a crime is itself a crime, you’re undermining freedom of speech and
freedom of the press. If that’s the standard none of us will have any basic freedoms. The
restrictions on creating environments won’t be limited to presidents and generals. It will be
extended to heads of news organizations, Nobel prize winners, judges, lawyers, journalists,
and you and me.

Now don’t get me wrong. I believe that if anybody has any actual evidence that the U. S.
government deliberately created AIDS in a laboratory and unleashed it on Africa to kill black
people, or that President Bush or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered the torture of prisoners
in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or that they ordered the targeting of journalists in Iraq (or
anywhere else) by American soldiers they would be doing a great public service if they produced
their evidence. But if they have no evidence they should keep their suspicions and ill-feeling
to themselves.

After all, they’re creating an environment of suspicion and doubt that encourages sedition
and law-breaking. And, in the world that the conspiracy theorists seem to envision, that
would be enough to convict them of a crime.

UPDATE: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.

Eason Jordan, the CNN executive infamous for passing Saddam’s propaganda as straight news in order to keep their Baghdad offices open, has now accused US troops of murdering journalists. He has no evidence. He is probably almost certainly wrong. He will be believed by those who hate America anyway, and the story will be widely printed in the Arab/Muslim world. In the end, this will do great harm to our long-term effort to democratize the Middle East, given that part of that effort is to show the Arab/Muslim populations that they can have better governance and don’t have to put up with arbitrary and capricious exercise of government power.

CNN, the slimiest name in journalism.

No, really. I heard about this on the news (NPR) today, along with a statement that no one was missing, but I did not hear until I read the blogs that it was an action figure in the end. As Jeff Quinton observes: “Good thing they [reporters] have editors and fact-checkers and stuff.”

As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… per the Watcher’s instructions, I am submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.
Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

It’s a gray and dreary February-sort of day both here in Chicago and, apparently, in the blogosphere. Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Beldar is back and training his sights on John Kerry again.
• Wretchard of Belmont Club makes an excellent point and it’s not one I’ve heard before:
  

  The strategic center of gravity of the American thrust into the Middle East was not Iraq the geographical entity, as so many have I believe, mistakenly put it, but the Iraqis. The war aim was access to an alliance with an unlimited pool of Arabic speakers, not a puddle of oil in the ground. The return of Iraqi security and intelligence forces will be a nightmare for regional dictators in the short term; but the advent of even a quasi-democratic Iraqi state will, without exaggeration, be their death-knell.

• A trip by Jeff Simmermom of And I Am Not Lying, For Real to an Iraqi Out-of-Country polling place that turned out a little differently than he had thought. Must read (hat tip: Isaac Schrödinger).
• So this morning I was hit by a ton of trackback spam and Ann Elisabeth has the explanation (hat tip: Jim Treacher).
• Now this observation from Wizbang is really interesting.

That’s the lot.

The Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts from Iraqi bloggers, is now available on Dean’s World. This week it’s a special Iraq election edition and focuses on the reactions of Iraqi bloggers to the election. Most are happy, some ecstatic, a few don’t care. And Kurdo is already reporting preliminary results from Iraqi Kurdistan.

As I’ve been reading the coverage and commentary of yesterday’s election in Iraq in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere, there’s a question that hasn’t received as much attention as I would have thought: why wasn’t there considerably more terrorist violence in Iraq yesterday and the day before? Zarqawi, the terrorist chief, threatened it; many Western pundits predicted it. I’ve asked the question in the comments sections of a couple of blogs today and I’ve seen that the ubiquitous praktike has done the same in a few places but I haven’t seen any answers or much commentary on the subject.

Based on nothing much more than my not-too-well-informed intuition I can think of several possibilities:

• the Coalition and Iraqi defense forces have been successful enough at raising the cost of such incidents for the terrorists that a major incident didn’t materialize (and variants on this theme)
• the terrorists are biding their time until after the elections
• the “resistance” is tapped out

It’s possible that all of these are factors in varying degrees.

Despite the costs in lives among the Coalition and Iraqi police and national guard and Iraqi civilians it does appear that some headway has been made in increasing the cost to the terrorists. Look at the rocket attack the other day on the American Embassy. Within a very short time some pretty likely suspects had been apprehended. And the number of Iraqi civilian casualties over the last several months has made the terrorists look a lot less like a patriotic resistance and more like a competitive occupation force.

On the other hand I can’t imagine why the terrorists would delay their attacks if they had the capacity to execute them. This idea seems a lot to me like the always-predicted but never-materializing rising of the Arab street.

So I suspect that the answer is that the ”resistance” has done as much as they could manage: they’re tapped out. And, if that’s true, barring some new factor it should become progressively less able to mount attacks over time. It certainly seems to me that the terrorist are behaving less like a well-organized resistance and more like very well-armed hooligans without much discipline, organization, or coordination.

Anyone else have any ideas?

UPDATED: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.