#48701: — 11/14  at  06:52 PM
I take exception to listing Marx as a "hero", unless they mean Groucho, Chico, Harpo or Zeppo.

-jcr

#48703: — 11/14  at  06:55 PM
I seem to be a hard-hat, too. I don't think I'm particularly militant -- less so than PZ, and most of the atheist blogs I happen to read. Is there anything "harder" than hard-hat?

#48704: Viv — 11/14  at  07:00 PM
Well, AIG says that Gould absolutely said there were no transitional fossils.

That must be it.

#48705: — 11/14  at  07:00 PM
I got the same result.

The "heroes" bit seems a bit much. Ok, Einstein and maybe Watson & Crick, but Karl Marx? What does that have to do with anything?

Ok, so I did like his "opiate of the people" remark, but just because he said something witty once doesn't erase all the dumb stuff he wrote. He was very wrong on the big stuff. I'm just not sure why he's connected here to a science-based viewpoint...

#48706: — 11/14  at  07:27 PM
Never mind the dumb stuff Marx wrote, he was a completely reprehensible human being. I have no respect at all for someone who thinks he's too important to get a goddamned JOB and support his family.

-jcr

#48711: Tom Ames — 11/14  at  08:00 PM
Who comes up with these crappy quizzes? Why does anyone pay attention to them? Why am I bothering to comment on it?

#48722: — 11/14  at  10:46 PM
It's good to see Rosalind Franklin mentioned though. She so often gets the short end of the stick, mostly due to Watson bashing the hell out of her after she was dead in The Double Helix.

As for rationality over libido...my login word is "sperm."

#48723: — 11/14  at  10:59 PM
I got Hairshirt: "That’s because you’re so anxious to prove that it’s possible to lead a good and moral life without religion that you have built a strict and forbidding creed all of your own."

Huh. So I'm an atheist Puritain. Not totally inaccurate, I guess.

#48724: Matt McIrvin — 11/14  at  10:59 PM
It identified me as the "Haymaker":

You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy. [...] Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.

Which anyone who knows me would laugh at. I think I'd like to be that kind of humanist, and I try not to be too judgmental of other people, but it completely fails to catch the morbidly self-questioning side of me that keeps on finding excuses to wonder if maybe I'm a bad person who ought to be miserable.

Trackback: That's About Right, Except for the Marx Nonsense Tracked on: The World Wide Rant - v3.0 (63.247.142.15) at 2005 11 14 21:07:29
HardhatYou are an atheist, a rationalist, a believer in the triumph of science and of reason over libido. You can’t stand mumbo jumbo, ritual, spiritual nonsense of any kind, and you refuse to allow for these longings in others....

Trackback: “Floppy-hat” would be better Tracked on: Dubbings and Diversions (70.86.157.90) at 2005 11 14 23:09:03
This doesn’t exactly seem right: Hardhat You are an atheist, a rationalist, a believer in the triumph of science and of reason over libido. You can’t stand mumbo jumbo, ritual, spiritual nonsense of any kind, and you refuse to allow for the...

#48725: — 11/14  at  11:14 PM
They said I was a hardhat. I agree that I could be called a hardhat, and I like the frumpy angry looking people on the card. Marx isn't one of my heros, and neither are Watson or Crick. Einstein is. Schrodinger was also what I'd call a hardhat, and he's one of my heros. Incidentially, if I cook up an idea that leads to contradictions, I do either revise or discard it... otherwise the whole edifice does collapse. I don't think it's particularly important that I'm respectful or mindful of the varieties of human belief. Most of them are crap, and innocuous at best.

I don't know if 'libido' means something else across the pond there, but my reason doesn't trump my libido -- ever. I can always say this with enthusiasm: "Hey! Beer and Girls! Wooo!" I have to be in a funny mood before I get that enthusiastic about Lie Groups.

I do put mystics and astrologers and all the rest in the same boat as priests and evangelicals and so on. Then I tell them to sail it straight to hell. They want easy answers, and are content to make them up.

#48726: — 11/14  at  11:17 PM
I haven't looked at the quiz but commenting from ignorance doesn't appear to be an exclusively religious trait.

Marx did a great synthesis that's already come back to bite.

I doubt any of those in agreement with "Marx Nonsense" have bothered to even finish the first book of Capital.

#48727: — 11/14  at  11:25 PM
Yeah, and the only brand of Humanist they didn't tell to lighten up was this one:

http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/handholder.html

And of the 4 types I think this test is able to return, that's the only one I have a criticism for. Here it is: Quit hedging, develop and opinion, and grow a spine.

#48728: UberKuh — 11/15  at  01:06 AM
Same.

#48732: Alon Levy — 11/15  at  02:20 AM
I got hardhat, but like John Randolph and Bored Krill, I take exception to listing Marx as a hero. Granted, he was better than his intellectual successors, but radical movements are always anti-authoritarian when out of power and highly authoritarian when in power.

By the way, what are the possible types this test can output? I'm positive there's some anarchist or other political choice, given all the political answers - "I'm not a racist, but I think we're too soft on asylum seekers" and so on.

#48749: — 11/15  at  05:37 AM
I think the bottom picture of that card duo is supposed to be someone who is blinkered, but at first sight I thought there was a pirate thing going on there ...

#48755: Jonathan Badger — 11/15  at  06:28 AM
In regard to all the Marx-bashing. Sure the Soviet Union wasn't so great, but that wasn't his fault -- that was more the the fault of the former Orthodox priest candidate Josef Dzhugashvili (aka 'Stalin'), who just jumped opportunistically from religion to rabble-rousing in the end days of the Czarist Russia when he realized that the Church was doomed as a path to power. Marx had little to do with it and certainly wouldn't have been a supporter had he still been around.

But think about all the things you enjoy today because of Marx. Take a look at your working conditions and compare them to the descriptions of the hellish conditions of the 19th century. Health care? Paid vacations? Protection from being fired for no good reason? Who won these things for you? Socialists inspired by Marx in the 20th century; people like Eugene Debs in the US, and Clement Atlee in the UK. You don't have to be a socialist to admire the man any more than you have to be a Christian to admire Martin Luther King Jr.

#48759: Federico Contreras — 11/15  at  07:15 AM


Excuse us, could you just put down that hammer for a minute and listen. You’re so busy getting things done you rarely take any time out just to relax. In fact, you’ve probably forgotten how to relax. That’s because you’re so anxious to prove that it’s possible to lead a good and moral life without religion that you have built a strict and forbidding creed all of your own.

You keep a compost heap, cycle to the bottle bank, invest in ethical schemes only and the list of countries you won’t buy from is longer than the washing line for your baby’s towelling nappies. You admire uncompromising self–sacrificers like Aung San Suu Kyi and Che Guevara, and would have liked the chance to be incarcerated for your principles like Diderot or Nelson Mandela.

You would never cheat on your partner, drink and drive, accept bribes or touch drugs. You never waste money though you give lots to charity. Living a good life? You’re a model to us all. But it wouldn’t hurt you to try a little happiness once in a while. Loosen up.

#48772: — 11/15  at  09:25 AM
Jonathan,

Attributing our standard of living to Marx, rather than to capitalism and the need of businesses to compete for labor resources, is absurd. Look at N. Korea or Cuba, and try to tell me that Marxism has something to offer.

Every instance of attempted marxism to date has been an unmitigated disaster. With that kind of track record, I have to conclude that there's something wrong with his program in the first place.

-jcr

#48791: Alon Levy — 11/15  at  10:16 AM
Lenin screwed up Russia with his collectivization program, which starved millions to death. Trotsky wasn't any better, with his fanatical insistence on fighting till death. The only crimes that Stalin committed and Lenin didn't was purging Party members and genocide.

As for the successes of socialism, they only apply when mitigating capitalism rather than when actually reigning. But you don't need Marx to fetter capitalist excesses; Britain's first restrictions on child labor predate Marx, and the really big round of regulation in the developed world, this of the Great Depression and the post-WW2 era, is due to Keynes and Galbraith more than to Marx and Engels.

Finally, portraying Marx as a liberator ignores many of the excesses of communism present in his writings. For Marx, the individual worker doesn't matter, except as part of the entire working class. Plus, let's not forget that Marx's predictions turned out to be utterly wrong; no industrialized country has had a communist revolution.

#48796: Keith Douglas — 11/15  at  10:21 AM
I'm with Jonathan - I've never read a Marx-basher that demonstrates he has understood him. This is not to say that everything the guy wrote is correct - far from it. I also agree that having him in the list with Einstein and so on is a bit odd - but then, there have been no social scientists who have been as brilliant as Einstein. (This is probably because social science is harder than physics - and I suspect this is because everyone has much more ingrained social beliefs than naive physics Not to mention ideological opposition to social science has always been higher.) Incidentally, the same applies to Cuba - again, not paradise by any stretch, but certainly not worth putting in the same breath as North Korea.

As for my result on the inane test of the week (tm), I too seem to be a hard hat, though I must say there were several times where "none of the above" worked a hell of a lot better. I mean, I don't intend to ever have children, so conditionals with false antecedents come to mind. (A little logic joke ... )

#48801: Alon Levy — 11/15  at  10:27 AM
Social scientists make predictions that come true or get discarded. Marx's predictions were contradicted, and yet Marxists cling to them, and Marx himself brushed off mainstream social science as bourgeois and hence wrong.

#48830: — 11/15  at  10:59 AM
Punc_e:
Yes, Watson did indeed originally bash the hell out of Rosalind Franklin in "The Double Helix". He also regretted doing so. Not just because she was dead and therefore, unlike other people in his book, could not supply her own version of events. But because, as he wrote in his Epilogue to "The Double Helix", he decided he had been plain wrong about her. Too little, too late, some say. But it was an unequivocal apology.

#48881: — 11/15  at  12:53 PM
I got "Handholder." Uh... not exactly.

It doesn't make much sense to tell me:

"Don’t fall into the same trap as super–naïve Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge who declared it was okay for clerics like Yusuf al–Qaradawi to justify their monstrous prejudices as a legitimate interpretation of the Koran: a perfect example of how the will to understand can mean the sacrifice of fundamental principles."

... when I've already selected the "I support Qaradawi because I support Palestinians" option. I'd have preferred something more nuanced, but that's a little bit closer than the "free speech" option; I support his right not to be expelled because I think the attacks on him are based more in racism/Islamophobia than in any analysis of his beliefs, however wrong some of those beliefs may be... certainly not based in most cases in any actual principled opposition to killing civilians, or at least any opposition that's applied consistently to "secular Western" forces.



Levy; closer to "wrong and hence bourgieous." Also it's a little unfair to blame present Marxists on Marx, even if you think his theories have been utterly falsified.