Defense of Truth

Have you ever played 20 questions with one of those "stories with holes"? I remember as a kid I had a teacher pull some of us aside to challenge us with these while the rest of the class worked on something we had already mastered. The idea was to tell a story with seemingly neutral facts and with a key part of the narrative missing so that by asking 20 or less yes/no questions you could deduce the key to the narrative. Almost always, the seemingly neutral description contained a critical clue that triggered the game-players' assumptions in a way that led them down a false path, and hindered their deductive process until they could hone in on the assumption, question it, and break out of the consequences of the assumption. Maybe a few concrete examples, if I can remember some: A man is driving in his car and is killed by a gunshot, but there's no hole in his vehicle. Most people start asking about whether the windows were open (nope, all closed up), and about passenge...

I didn't want to become one of those grad students who takes forever to find out what he wants to study, so I entered the Masters program at PITT with an idea what I wanted to do as a dissertation: national identity in the Ivory Coast. It sounds like a straightforward enough concept, but I encountered an article while I was taking a history course which looked at several case studies of the construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identities over a variety of geographical locations and historical periods that made me radically re-think the entire concept of identity . It's a concept that makes intuitive sense to most people, I would imagine. It means who you are, right? The layperson could also probably understand quite readily that there seem to be many different levels at which our "identity" can be determined or constrained. A black person may feel more of a racial component to identity than a white person, for example. My religious identity takes primacy over my...

I've been promising part 2 on polygamy for a long time, but it's such an in depth topic that I postpone thought on it so I can give it it's full due in time and treatment. And today's no exception: I need an easy one. PBS's modus operandi for the entire 4-hour documentary "The Mormons" is to frame elements of LDS belief and practice as controversial, then proceed to give an accurate, but cursory glance at what Mormons believe followed by an extended critique or contrary view. In the case of the legions of young missionaries in the field today, the controversy was more contrived and less sinister than most other issues, in my view. Essentially, PBS was following the tack that so many people sacrificing so much of their youth, time, freedom, and money, were obviously numb of mind and victims of a controlling leadership, whose effectiveness at creating such a deep social pressure to conform bordered on Stalinist. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little there,...

The meat of my liberal friend's reply on gas-gouging: I make no excuses for signing the petition to stop gas price gouging. Exxon (and whoever else) was doing just fine without $15 billion profits 5 years ago. Why the price hike now? Maybe a certain war has to do with it. For simplicity's sake, big oil just doesn't need that much money, and they shouldn't have to rely on the consumer for it. On top of that, (note: the following is speculative only) if we hadn't invaded Iraq, prices would still be at ~$1.19, and everyone would be happy. To my liberal friend, You have brought up a few objections that I should have anticipated before sending my first message. So thank you for giving me another chance to address them. So let's think about your objections together seriously for a minute here: big oil * doesn't need * that much money??? How do YOU know how much money they NEED??!! And most importantly, what makes YOU, or the GOVERNMENT, or anyone else besides Exxo...

As part of my dissertation, I'm preparing to study the problem of the concept of "Nation" (as opposed to state, or ethnicity) in Africa. It's a particularly knotty problem in a lot of ways. First, one of the conditions the world imposes on itself is that there be states, governmental entities, with sovereign control over territories (whether they choose to enforce borders, or any other measure of their sovereignty is another matter and does not touch the at least formal equality of sovereignty that is assumed to exist among all nations of the world for the purposes of international communication, trade, diplomacy, and all other relations). The globe has been mapped, and boundaries have been in place, imposed or not, and now circumscribe groups of people which derive their rights only as citizens of states. African states cannot "enter", as it were, conditions of modernity, or any rapport with the world outside, without first developing states which operate ...

I've got to confess, with the Mountain Meadows Massacre I'm close to factless. I know the general context of the tragedy, and it wasn't too unfairly presented in the PBS series the Mormons. The upshot is that a group of Mormons responded to their local leader (I think he was a Stake President?) when he got spooked for no good reason about a caravan of peaceful settlers who were guilty by association from the accident of having come from Arkansas where a prominent church leader had been recently assassinated. The leader ordered an armed conflict that was apparently carefully premeditated to involve a local Indian population so as to make it seem like it wasn't his own barbarism attacking them. When it was revealed that it wasn't ONLY Indians attacking them, the LDS leaders devised a way to wipe out witnesses, won the skirmish, captured the settlers, and then ordered all but children younger than 8 years old to be massacred. Granted this was the wild, wild West at the...

Just a short post today (funny how even when I say that I end up pushing 1500 words)… I found it incredibly odd that in the account of Joseph Smith's martyrdom PBS chose not to include a detail that they could have exploited to great effect to forward their framing of the man as a power-hungry con artist: at the time of his martyrdom he was in possession of a handgun. Of course it is highly illegal to have smuggled a pistol into the jail where he was being held when he was shot, so this could have been good incriminating evidence not only to frame JS as fundamentally unethical, but also to frame the church leadership (who never mention this detail in the official account either) as secretive, exploitative, and cult-like. On the other hand, however, they do miss a great opportunity to understand the man via analysis of his last act in mortality. They DO correctly state, and surprisingly word-for-word from the official account, that JS died exclaiming "O Lord, my God" falli...

So given the economic nature of the basic threat discussed in my last post, and given that perceived threats on both sides led both sides to "defend" (whether that be preemptively or purely defensively depended heavily on the context, which itself was perceived differently by either side) quite vigorously and with arms as they felt necessary, is it really contextually appropriate to depict Joseph Smith as some sort of American religious Napoleon wannabe "obsessed with power" as they claim, and trying to set up a very martial sort of theocracy? PBS played a bit of a contextual dance of bait and switch when they moved from discussing the persecution of the Saints as a whole, to the frame of Joseph Smith as architect and directing authority of societal experiments each requiring greater centralization of power and each successively failing ever more miserably. (I just watched the segment one more time, and I am frankly continually awestruck at how easily learned histor...

The mantra of most investigative methods is: follow the money. Economics purports to be the science of human decision-making, and sheds powerful explanatory light on many individual and group motivations. A passing mention of communal living in the early days of the Restoration of the Church is given in the PBS special, but the opposition of the Church's neighbors to the Church is more commonly couched in terms of irreconcilable theological differences. To my way of thinking, relegating the socio-economic to the background and foregrounding religious motivations for opposition to the church is entirely cart-before-the-horse. I grew up in an area of Canada where Hutterite colonies were fairly common. The Hutterites are a branch of Mennonite Protestants similar in religious and social philosophy and practice to the Amish of Eastern Pennsylvania. They dress in plain clothing they sew themselves in 19th Century styles and patterns. They limit their contact with non-believers, and consu...

Blogs are meant to be frequently updated, so I'm going to try to do a little (shorter) something every day even if it's not a complete treatment of the item in question. Today, I'm thinking that there's so much to get to with the PBS special that a radical shift of topic might be refreshing, so here goes… I recently had a liberal friend of mine forward me a canvassing email from www.moveon.org , a liberal political activist site, asking me to electronically sign a petition supporting an anti-price gouging bill that was in discussion in Congress at the time. The legislation, much to my dismay, was passed, but the email conversation with my friend would make a great cut and paste here. I have heavily edited the original email to refine my arguments, to take out elements that should remain personal, and continue to establish my own internet persona. If I decide to post his replies, I'll edit even more carefully so less personal and more generally useful arguments are m...

The PBS special gave much ado to revisions and changes to the story of the First Vision so as to challenge the LDS belief in the official version of the foundational narrative of their faith. The basic charge: Why revise the truth? Only guilty parties need change their stories, right? Under this framework, hostile witness testimony can be completely honest about the facts of the successive revisions with this framework, and therefore no personal bias need be evident since the framework itself does the work of charging that Joseph Smith was a megalomaniac successively deluding himself in his desires to delude others by ever more grandiose and detailed accounts which served to consolidate his power and others' belief in him. And neutral observers are aimed to conclude that from their position the JS official version is vastly less credible than ignorant Mormons believe, and that the explanation of the scholars is much more compelling than that of the believers. So let me ask you: h...