(Sent my way by a mysterious stranger. :^)

In ancient Greece (469 – 399 BC) Socrates was widely lauded for his wisdom. One day the great philosopher came upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and said, “Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?”

“Wait a moment,” Socrates replied. “Before you tell me, I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test.”

“Triple filter?”

“That’s right,” Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my student let’s take a moment to filter what you’re going to say. The first filter is truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”

“No,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it and…”

“All right,” said Socrates. “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?”

“No, on the contrary…”

“So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, even though you’re not certain it’s true?”

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed. Socrates continued. “You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter – the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?”

“No, not really.”

“Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor Useful, why tell it to me at all?”

The man was defeated and ashamed.

This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem. It also explains why he never found out that Plato was banging his wife.

[My own response to the Dear Virginia in the 19th Century challenge.]

In 1897, Virginia O’Hanlon wrote to the editor of The New York Sun:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Dear Virginia,

Your eagerness to know is wonderful! Have you ever scooped up a lost nickel, only to discover that it is a quarter? Santa is like that, a thousand times over. No, there is no Santa outside imagination, but learning about him is greater than any gift he would bring were he really real.

Santa is a playful fantasy full of hope and happiness, inviting you down the challenging path to true adulthood. Yes, he embodies good will and generosity and inspires children everywhere to appreciate the difference between Naughty and Nice. But there is so much more that you and your friends are just now glimpsing, hidden behind the tale’s knowing wink.

Santa helps us to learn the crucial lesson that sometimes what we are told just isn’t so, no matter how splendid it sounds, who says it, or how tightly we might cling to the idea. He invites us to push through the veil of a child’s blind acceptance to join the grown-up world of facts, thought, and independent understanding. Just as nobody can breathe for us, nobody can think for us — not even The New York Sun. You have to see the truth of something to really know.

Now, do not let slip fantasy and imagination, for even grown-ups love to play! There will always be costumes and paintings and stories to delight. But we have to distinguish between make-believe and reality, and use our intelligence and creativity to understand the world and make our place in it. This is how we sustain all those things that motivate and fulfill us: love, art, play, hope, romance, achievement, joy.

The most exciting thing you can discover is that reality itself is infinitely more rich and interesting than our wildest fantasies. And Santa brings each of us a priceless gift: help in learning to face the vast wonder and glory of the universe like a hero, seeing by a light that is brighter than the brightest star, shaping and reshaping our world with a boundless engine of creation.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. But important lessons and a sweet tale that makes glad the heart of childhood live on, at least until our imagination creates something even better. So celebrate the flowering of your intellect and pass Santa forward to the next generation with love — and a wink.

A friend pointed me to the Doonesbury comic strip, where Trudeau has been exploring the phenomenon of those advocating war while not being willing to serve in the military:

What struck me is that Trudeau actually has a point, as long as people conceive of and prosecute war in a sacrificial way. It is indeed hypocritical to advocate that someone else go to war and be sacrificed for your own interests, and it’s positively evil to advocate something like the draft to make them do so. On the other, “moral” hand, there are those who volunteer to be sacrificed for the sake of their countrymen, and there are pacifists who urge that we not fight at all. The premise of war-as-sacrifice seems unfortunately widespread, so back and forth people argue with charges of impracticality against charges of immorality (the “warmongers” on one side and the pacifists on the other, with the martyrs enjoying a status as tragic but respected cannon-fodder).

Of course, Objectivists don’t accept any necessary conflict between morality and practicality, and I wince at the idea that we must prosecute war by either sacrificing ourselves or our countrymen, or resigning our country to an enemy’s aggressive ambitions. We can and should develop a foreign policy of self-interest with a non-sacrificial military.

Americans would then be able to relate to the military and its services just as they do with any other higher-risk profession like coal mining, high-rise construction, test piloting, or whatever. Americans are not hypocrites for advocating and enjoying reading at night, living in condos, and flying to visit Grandma. And even when there is a significant chance of serious injury or death, the companies who bring us these things do not do it by calling for martyrs or seeking to sacrifice their employees. The same should be true of our military: tremendously risky work, yes, but only undertaken in defense of our rights, and never dependent on calls for sacrifice at any level.

Returning from the awesome Jihad conference in Boston this last weekend, I had a brush with the brilliance of TSA and a testy Little Dictator who works for them.

I had heard that the current rules permitted carryon liquids only in containers of three ounces or less, so I transferred shampoo, gel, and so on from my slightly larger bottles to even smaller travel bottles. Not too big a deal: I’m able to play my little part in our nation’s ever-more-epic Security Theater (a term for wasting time, resources, and goodwill on things which make us feel more secure, but which in fact do little or nothing to actually make us more secure).

I guess I should have read my script a little closer. It turns out all of those containers must be carried in a clear, plastic, one-quart, Ziploc bag rather than the opaque, cloth, normal-zippered toiletries bag that I bought some time back for that purpose. But what kills me is that even retarded seventh-century barbarian Jihadists aren’t so stupid that they would be stopped by this: they could simply aggregate several bottles to have more than three ounces of whatever. And while the TSA won’t allow larger containers that are only holding three-or-fewer ounces (presumably to make such aggregation harder), the bad guys could still use something like the bag itself for that. And if the one-quart upper limit that the bag imposes is a problem for their nefarious ends, they could even borrow their buddies’ bags to put together more volume.

Feel safer yet? Yeah, bring on the security! But wait, there’s more because we haven’t gotten to the TSA employees who enforce those brilliant rules. The guy who screened me on the way out of Boise simply explained the one-quart-baggie hoop I should have jumped through, decided to cut me some slack, and sent me on my way — maybe he had a nice breakfast or something. Not so with the TSA employee on the way out of Boston. Damn, I’m thinking maybe someone pissed in her Cheerios.

Clearly testy at my not following these latest rules, she pulled my toiletries bag out of my suitcase while I explained that I didn’t know about the baggie thing until this trip. Picking out all my little bottles, she angrily observed that some didn’t have labels, so she didn’t know what was in them and she would have to test them. Struggling to stay neutral and maybe escape a little quicker for coffee, I decided not to mention that even with labels she still couldn’t know the contents without testing. And of course their being given to her in the requisite baggie instead of my toiletries bag would not have changed that fact, either. She tested all of them, including the labeled ones, and I was so pleased with my body soap not being deemed a munition that I shrugged off her inconsistency in testing the labeled bottles after her lecture.

Along the way she’d found the now-empty sandwich-sized baggie I used for vitamins, and at this point she told me that I got to keep only those bottles I could fit in it. It wasn’t an Official Quart-Sized Bag, so I’m guessing this was her version of being nice to the customer. Enjoying her generosity, I politely avoided mentioning how my being able to stuff these (tested) bottles into a sandwich baggie couldn’t possibly affect the safety of my flight. But then she stopped me while I was packing them all in there (it was going to be a tight fit), saying that I had to be able to seal the bag. Seriously, I could feel my brain shutting down with the silliness of it all, and it took genuine effort to repress the comment that allowing me to pick which ones to keep was a clear indication that she didn’t consider any of them a threat.

Instead, I selected my keepers and fled while she went to dispose of the threatening remainder. Paul also seemed to sense she wasn’t the dialoging type and said he was just waiting for me to give them an excuse to escalate to a body-cavity search.

A Reuters article reports that, “California sued six of the world’s largest automakers over global warming on Wednesday, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have caused billions of dollars in damages.”

“The injuries have caused the people to suffer billions of dollars in damages, including millions of dollars of funds expended to determine the extent, location and nature of future harm and to prepare for and mitigate those harms, and billions of dollars of current harm to the value of flood control infrastructure and natural resources,” it said.
…
[California Attorney General] Lockyer — a Democratic candidate for state treasurer in the November election — said the lawsuit states that under federal and state common law the automakers have created a public nuisance by producing “millions of vehicles that collectively emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide.”

Carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases have been linked to global warming.

This lawsuit is the first of its kind, and I was dismayed to see environmentalist nutballs press to do damage on yet another front. Even on a superficial level, it is so arbitrary: why not sue the car owners for driving them, or the car dealers for selling them, or the gas stations for fueling them, or the oil companies for supplying them. And if it is about carbon dioxide, then why are they picking on cars rather than other sources, such as all the people, pets, and animals we raise for food? What legal or moral principle drives California to pick this particular target vs. any of those others?

But of course this is really driven by the science (or lack thereof) behind the Global Warming movement, which is why we may well end up thanking them for this move.

Remember the recent lawsuit regarding Intelligent Design in the science classroom (a.k.a., “Scopes II” or the “Dover Panda Trial”)? The top theorists and proponents from the ID movement were put on the stand and under oath, where they were definitively exposed as dishonest, fraudulent, creationist pseudo-scientists with a religious agenda. Dover was a crushing blow to the ID movement: confident and influential from long taking epistemological liberties in the court of public opinion, they were finally brought into a context where obfuscation, shoddy reasoning, and populist appeals carry no weight. (I highly recommend reading that decision. Written by a Bush-appointed judge, I didn’t expect much and ended up impressed with his ability to grasp and relate the scientific and philosophical issues. His obvious anger at their mendacity was icing on the cake.)

So the Church of Global Warming wants to be put on the stand? I say that’s great! Prepare for another Dover.