One of the best features of American culture, I think, is our willingness to adopt anything from other cultures that we like. Apparently, we’re doing that in spades with “Gangnam Style,” a catchy Korean pop song with a crazyawesome video:

The video has spawned countless imitations, including this fabulous Klingon version:

My favorite derivative work, however, is this video of the toddler who will only eat when the “Gangnam Style” video is playing:

NPR has a fascinating article on how that happened. It wasn’t dumb luck, but the product of years of careful effort. As the article concludes:

“Gangnam Style” is what happens when a developing country becomes developed. An infrastructure to make and export culture can develop just like an infrastructure to make and export anything else.

Yes, and we’re all better off as a result! Hooray for sillycrazyfun K-Pop videos!

I saw this flyer at a bar north of Denver a few months ago:

I hope — I really hope — that someone posted that as a joke.

From Facebook:

A notable Objectivist intellectual said the following about the election: “Tragically, the election revealed that we are no longer America. … The American sense of life does still exist, but it no longer is the majority attitude. The sense of life that used to be very widespread dwells now in only about half of us.”

That is, to put it gently, a gigantic non sequitur. It assumes that every Obama voter lacks an American sense of life, while every Romney voter has an American sense of life. That’s a ridiculous claim on its face. It also ignores the millions of Americans who didn’t vote for either Romney or Obama for president.

It’s not even plausible as a general claim, true of “most people.” Anyone who has ever lived in a very red state knows just how frighteningly theocratic most Republican residents and politicians are. Heck, even in the very purple Colorado, many GOP candidates are determined to govern based on their notion of biblical principles. That’s a large part of why Democrats won Colorado, yet again.

Are we supposed to consider the people who voted for Romney because they abhor gays, decry abortion as murder, demand that the borders be closed, and want creationism taught in schools as having “an American sense of life”? Because those people exist — and in large numbers too. Are we supposed to condemn the people who rejected that insular nuttiness as un-American? Really?!?

If y’all want to be doomy and gloomy about this election… well, go right ahead. It’s a free country: Obama hasn’t implemented his mind-control devices… yet. (No, really!) But pretty please with bacon on top, how about we keep a firm grip on the facts and make good use of the basic principles of logic?

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I won’t broadcast a radio show on the evening of Wednesday, November 21st. We’ll return to our usual fabulous schedule on Sunday morning, November 25th.

If you’re sad, here’s a cute picture to cheer you up. Elliot is attempting to control naughty little Merlin by laying on top of him. As you might expect, that worked for all of about five seconds.

Once you’ve had your fill of cute, you can check out any episodes that you’ve missed in the archives, sorted by date and topic.

Yesterday, I brought some catnip into the house from the garden. With three cats, including one already rambunctious kitten, much hilarity ensued.

Here’s a quick video of Merlin with that “Woah, duuuude, I’m totally stoned on catnip right now” look in his eyes:

Hospital Death in Ireland Renews Fight Over Abortion:

The woman, Savita Halappanavar, 31, a dentist who lived near Galway, was 17 weeks pregnant when she sought treatment at University Hospital Galway on Oct. 21, complaining of severe back pain.

Dr. Halappanavar was informed by senior hospital physicians that she was having a miscarriage and that her fetus had no chance of survival. However, despite repeated pleas for an abortion, she was told that it would be illegal while the fetus’s heart was still beating, her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, said.

It was not until Oct. 24 that the heartbeat ceased and the remains of the fetus were surgically removed. But Dr. Halappanavar contracted a bacterial blood disease, septicemia. She was admitted to intensive care but never recovered, dying on Oct. 28.

Mr. Halappanavar, in an interview with The Irish Times from his home in India, said his wife was told after one request, “This is a Catholic country.”

On Facebook, I’ve seen some advocates of abortion bans claim that her death cannot be definitively proved to have been caused by the failure of the doctors to abort her dying fetus. That’s true, but utterly beside the point.

Very little in medicine is cut and dried. The human body is immensely complex, and doctors mostly deal in probabilities, not certainties. That’s part of why it’s so important for each person — guided by the advice of her doctors — to make her own decisions about her medical care.

People differ in their values, and hence, in the risks they’re willing to accept or not. For a person to be free to live her own life requires that she be free to decide what risks to take with her own body and health — without interference from the government.

For the government to dictate or outlaw certain kinds of medical treatments means subjecting people to risks contrary to their own best judgment of their own interests. That’s a violation of their rights, plain and simple. That’s true for all medical care, including abortion.

That’s why laws banning abortion violate rights, even when they allow for exceptions to save the life of the mother. All pregnancy is risky: the maternal death rate in the United States is 16 out of 100,000. Many women are unwilling to undergo that risk, not to mention all the other complications and risks of pregnancy — and rightly so. Because the embryo/fetus is not a person with the right to life, a woman has the right to decide, based purely on her judgment of her own best interests, that she’s not willing to bear the risks of pregnancy, and hence, to terminate her pregnancy.

In contrast, under laws that permit abortion only to save the life of the mother, doctors would be constantly subject to second-guessing by police, prosecutors, and courts — and perhaps, subject to very serious criminal charges for murder or manslaughter. That’s why women die under abortion bans, regardless of provisions that permit doctors to act to save the the woman’s life. The doctor cannot afford to be blind to the risk to his own life and liberty of performing an abortion, even to save a woman’s life.

The advocates of abortion bans seek to evade the consequences of their own policies when confronted by these kinds of cases by claiming that the woman might have died anyway, even if she’d been able to terminate the pregnancy. That might be true, but that should have been her decision to make. Instead, she was preventing from acting based on her own best judgment in service of her life. That’s a major violation of her fundamental rights.

Ultimately, as Savita Halappanavar’s husband said, “It was all in their hands, and they just let her go. How can you let a young woman go to save a baby who will die anyway?”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: opposition to abortion rights is not “pro-life.”

On Sunday, 18 November 2012, I broadcast a new episode of Philosophy in Action Radio, answering questions on adopting ideas by default, griping versus moral judgment, veganism as child abuse, sharing lecture notes, and more. Greg Perkins of Objectivist Answers was the episode’s co-host.

If you missed the live broadcast, you can listen to the audio podcast any time. You’ll find the podcast on the episode’s archive page, as well as below.

To automatically download every new episode, just subscribe to the Philosophy in Action Podcast RSS Feed in your music player:

• Enhanced M4A Feed: Subscribe in iTunes or your RSS reader
• Standard MP3 Feed: Subscribe in iTunes or your RSS reader

Q&A Radio: Episode: 18 November 2012

The Whole Episode

My News of the Week: I’ve been working on updates to NoodleFood, plus preparing my dissertation for publication!

Listen or Download:

• Duration: 1:12:52
• Download: Enhanced M4A File (17.7 MB)
• Download: Standard MP3 File (16.7 MB)

You can also download or listen to particular questions from this episode.

Question 1: Adopting Ideas by Default (2:45)

In this segment, I answered a question on adopting ideas by default.

Should a person allow his ideology to set his default positions? When people adopt a religion, philosophy, or politics as their own, they often don’t think through every issue – or they’ve not done so yet. Does accepting the various positions of that ideology as a kind of default amount to accepting them on faith? What should a person do when he hasn’t thought through the issue for himself?

My Answer, In Brief: A person should not swallow any ideology whole. He should judge for himself on matters of importance, and he needs to differentiate what he knows first-hand from merely provisional and plausible claims.

Listen or Download:

• Duration: 20:11
• Download: MP3 Segment

Tags: Conservatism, Epistemology, Ethics, Honesty, Independence, Paleo, Philosophy, Psycho-Epistemology, Rationalism, Rationality

Relevant Links:

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

To comment on this question or my answer, visit its comment thread.

Question 2: Griping Versus Moral Judgment (22:57)

In this segment, I answered a question on griping versus moral judgment.

What’s the difference between griping about people and morally judging them? I try to be careful in my moral judgments of others, and then act accordingly. However, most people don’t seem to do that: they bitch about other people out of annoyance, but then do nothing to solve their problems. What’s wrong with such bitching? How can I explain my objections to such bitching in a friendly way? How can I avoid being bitched-to or bitched-about?

My Answer, In Brief: For a person to merely gripe about serious moral failings in others but then maintain the relationship as before is wrong. Yet it’s far worse to bandy about serious but unwarranted moral accusations out of momentary annoyance or spite.

Listen or Download:

• Duration: 16:22
• Download: MP3 Segment

Tags: Communication, Ethics, Justice, Relationships

To comment on this question or my answer, visit its comment thread.

Question 3: Veganism as Child Abuse (39:19)

In this segment, I answered a question on veganism as child abuse.

Should it be considered child abuse to feed a child a vegan diet? Most experts agree that children need some of the nutrients found in meat and dairy products to develop properly. I’ve read lots of stories about children whose development is impaired or stunted due to being fed a vegan diet. Should it be considered child abuse to feed a child a strict vegan diet? If so, at which point should the state intervene and take legal recourse against the parents?

My Answer, In Brief: Child abuse requires that parents inflict serious and lasting harm on the child that impairs its capacity to develop into healthy, independent, autonomous adult. A vegan diet might do that – in which case the state should intervene. Or it might be perfectly fine – in which case the state should leave the parents and child alone.

Listen or Download:

• Duration: 10:02
• Download: MP3 Segment

Tags: Child Abuse, Children, Free Society, Health, Law, Parenting, Rights

Relevant Links:

• Philosophy in Action: Robb Wolf on “The Paleo Solution”
• Philosophy in Action: Overfeeding a Child as Abuse

To comment on this question or my answer, visit its comment thread.

Question 4: Sharing Lecture Notes (49:22)

In this segment, I answered a question on sharing lecture notes.

Is it wrong to refuse to share lecture notes with a lazy student? A classmate of mine is nice enough but a bit odd. She’s always at least 30 minutes late for lecture, and she doesn’t come to lab sometimes. In lecture, she does not take notes but instead usually draws the whole class period. Today, she asked to borrow some of my lecture notes. I told her that I noticed that she was always late and that she didn’t take notes, and she denied that. Still, I told her that lending her my notes would be inconvenient, then I suggested that she ask someone else. Normally, I’d be happy to share my notes, but in this case, I didn’t want to share the results of my efforts in attending this class on time, every day, and paying attention. Was that wrong?

My Answer, In Brief: To offer notes to a fellow student is often generous and proper, if it’s not too much trouble. However, in this case, the student was not merely lazy but also dishonest, so sharing your notes would have been wrong.

Listen or Download: