Hitler

Religion as a source of morality

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , ,

Nov 17 JDN 2460632

After that brief interlude of politics and current events, I now return to my previous topic: Religion.

I am an atheist (among other things). To avoid confusion, allow me to explicate further: I do not believe in any sort of divine being, supernatural entity, or mystical force. I do not believe in super-human beings, immortality, or prayer. I accept neither Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Taoism, Shinto, Sikhism, Jain, Scientology, Wiccan, astrology, Greek religion, Norse religion, nor any other religion or faith-based belief system. I do not believe in Yahweh, Jesus, Allah; Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva; Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Ares; Tyr, Wodan, Thor, Freyja (It’s amusing to note that our days of the week are named primarily after these Norse gods: After Sun-day and Moon-day, we have Tyr’s-day, Wodan’s-day, Thor’s-day, and Freyja’s-day. How Saturn’s-day (a Roman god) got in there, I’m not sure. A historian might be able to explain this.); Amen-Ra, Anubis, Hathor, Bastet; Amaterasu, Sarutahiko, Inari; nor any other god, deity, or divinity. While I have read several of the texts believed holy by various religions, including the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Bhagavad-Gita, and would be open to reading more, I consider them works of literature written by human hands with human flaws.

I believe in science, in rationality, in the observable and the verifiable. I accept the evidence from neuroscience which shows that human consciousness and identity does not survive death; as such I have neither hope nor fear for an afterlife, only hope for life and joy and fear of death and pain. While I recognize that God’s nonexistence cannot be proven with logical certainty, I see so little evidence for divine beings that I believe quite strongly that these things do not exist, about as strongly as I believe that the Earth is round, that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, and that unicorns and fairies are fictional. In some rarified philosophical sense I am “agnostic” about all these things, but in the same sense I am “agnostic” about nearly everything. In practical terms I believe many things to be true, and am quite confident in many of these beliefs. My answer to the question “Do you believe there could be a God?” is the same as that of Richard Dawkins: “Yes, but there could be a Leprechaun!” (The exact statement, “There may be a Leprechaun”, and its context can be found in around time-stamp 7:15.} The standard “cannot be disproven with logical certainty” is absurdly weak, and applies just as well to Amaterasu and Thor as it does to Jesus.

There is something strange about the word “atheist”, as Sam Harris has remarked; we generally do not define people by what they don’t believe. We feel little need to call people “non-racists” or “non-astrologers”, nor do we typically specify people as “non-Keynesians” or “non-utilitarians”. While I agree with this observation, the general expectation in our society is that people will hold to a particular religion, usually Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; and when asked, “What is your religion?” I need an answer; for these purposes, I use the word “atheist”. Sometimes I will also use “rationalist” or “secular humanist”, but these terms are not as familiar to most people; other times I will say “I have none”, but this too leads to confusion. Like it or not, “atheist” is the word most people are familiar with. (And there definitely are people who identify as “anti-racists”.)

Because I am an atheist, I’m sure my arguments for why religion cannot be the source of morality will be viewed with suspicion. Of course an atheist wouldn’t think that morality can come from religion; he doesn’t believe in religion. And this is part of it, certainly: I do not think we should base our morality upon ideas that are not true, and I do not think that religion is true. But that’s not the only reason; I have plenty more.

Good and bad believers and nonbelievers

Your next thought might be that I will deluge you with examples of religious people doing terrible things, often in the name of their religions. There certainly are plenty of examples, especially in Christianity and Islam, but also for Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and just about everything else. Even Jain, renowned for its nonviolence, has its examples of people who have refused to treat their sick children on the grounds that it would harm the parasites or bacteria. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists have refused blood transfusions that could have saved their lives or the lives of their children. Such things are hardly as evil as the Crusades or suicide bombing, but they are still deeply immoral, and the fact that they could come from religions of nonviolence should give us pause.

But of course there have been evil things done by atheists; apologists are fond of mentioning Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, who were most definitely atheists, but because his evil is more widely acknowledged—the Hitler Principle—they tend to also throw in Adolf Hitler, whose religious affiliation was much more complex. Hitler officially affiliated himself with the Catholic Church, publicly insisted he was Catholic, and spoke of God and Christianity often; and yet people who knew him privately often acknowledged that he was not really a devout Christian. Even if Hitler was in fact a closet atheist, most of the Nazis considered themselves Christian (mostly either Catholic or Lutheran), and proudly carried crucifixes and wore belts saying Gott mit uns, “God with us”. But of course this is not an argument against Christianity; if anything it is an argument against Nazism, or against abusing Christianity in the support of fascism. Almost everyone agrees with this; but why is it that so few will admit that for the same reasons, Stalin’s evil is no argument against atheism? Millions of atheists around the world agree that Stalin was an evil man. Moreover, Stalin believed the Earth was round; does that make round-Earthers evil? Hitler loved dogs; does that make dog people evil? “Someone bad believed X” is a very poor reason to believe that X is false; in fact, if just as many good people also believed X, the fact that so many people believe X is prima facie reason to think that X is true. Almost everyone, good and bad, believes the Earth is round; that’s reason to think the Earth is round!

There is an important point to be made that religion could justify acts commonly regarded as evil. If a powerful, wise, and benevolent God really did give us commandments, it would be our duty to obey those commandments, even if we didn’t understand their purpose. If people in other cultures really were servants of evil incarnate, it would make perfect sense to kill them. If people with other beliefs really would suffer eternal pain for what they believe, it would make perfect sense to capture and torture them until they convert. If homosexuality really were a crime as bad as murder, it would make perfect sense to outlaw it. Moreover, beliefs like this are remarkably mainstream in religion; even most moderate religious people, if pressed, will agree that they think people who don’t believe the right religion will suffer eternal pain. In fact, the real question is how religious people can justify not torturing infidels. If I honestly believed I could save you from eternal pain by causing some temporary pain, I would feel strongly obligated to do so. Do religious people really believe what they say? If so, why do they act the way they do? If not, why do they keep saying it?

Sometimes religious moderates make excuses about “autonomy”, but this cannot work. Consider the following analogy. Suppose I were about to drink a vial of deadly poison, which would cause me a long, agonizing death. I was doing this not because I was suicidal, but because I honestly believed that the vial contained a medicine that would make me healthier and happier. You, on the other hand, know better; the vial is poison, and if I drink it I will surely suffer and die. Given that you are in a position to stop me, what would you do? Would you stay your hand out of respect for my autonomy? If you have any sense at all, you would not. Whatever my life projects may be, they will fail if I die of this poison; I am not being rational. My autonomy is better served by your coercion, and once I realize that the vial contains poison, we will both understand that.

How much more true this must be, if infidels will suffer eternal suffering. If you honestly believe that Hell awaits all nonbelievers, then you must think that nonbelief is the most terrible of all poisons. You should be convinced that I am completely irrational, acting against all my own interests. You should be willing to do almost anything to change my mind—up to and including torturing and killing me, since you profess to believe that death is not the end. If you truly believed in Hell the same way I believe in cyanide, you would feel obligated to convert all nonbelievers by literally any means necessary. In this sense the Crusades and suicide bombing are not bizarre aberrations; they are the direct rational consequence of truly believing what holy texts actually say.

It is an incredibly disturbing yet undeniably true fact that the books which are most widely considered the source and font of morality (the Bible and Qur’an) are in fact full of rape, slavery, murder, and genocide—and these acts are not merely depicted but condoned. I believe the most chilling example, Deuteronomy 20:16, will suffice: “However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.” That goes beyond genocide—it is something even worse than that, where not only the men, women and children are slaughtered, but so are the cats, dogs, cows, and goats. It is the absolute and total destruction of all sentient life—which is almost the exact opposite of morality.

There are people who still believe exactly what the holy books say, and it makes them do or say terrible things. In the United States in 2014, a Christian pastor sincerely argued that gay men should be put to death. Make no mistake: He didn’t come up with that out of thin air. He read it in the book. He even properly cited his source (Leviticus 20:13). This man is most likely not a psychopath—he just actually believes what most self-identified Christians claim to. Many news reports put “Christian” in scare quotes when describing this man, but they have it exactly backwards; read the Bible, and you will see that he believes in it more truly and thoroughly than 99% of so-called “Christians” ever have. He is the most honest and devout Bible-believing Christian I have ever heard of. If you do not see that, you desperately, desperately need to read the Bible, cover to cover, for it is not the book you think it is. And no, you can’t just say the Old Testament doesn’t count—if so, why include it at all?—according to Jesus himself in the Bible itself, the Old Testament laws are not supposed to be changed in the slightest until the end of the world (Matthew 5:18). It honestly couldn’t get any more unambiguous: The Bible says to kill gay men, and this is meant to be a universal law for all time. If that disturbs you—and of course it does—your problem isn’t with me; it’s with the Bible.

If you are not willing to commit such horrific acts at the behest of ancient books, then you must not really believe that eternal suffering awaits me—at least not with any confidence. Maybe you suppose it to be so, or maybe for some reason you want people to think you believe it, or maybe you are simply so accustomed to repeating it that you never bothered to consider whether you actually believe it. I think most religious people are in precisely this condition—they don’t actually believe that infidels will suffer eternal torment. Why they keep saying it, I’m not entirely sure; but this proposition simply doesn’t fit the behavior of most religious people. Knowing that most people are basically rational, I am forced to conclude that there is a kind of deception (perhaps self-deception) involved in anyone who contends that Hell awaits all nonbelievers but doesn’t try to torture me until I repent.

But this means that if I want to argue against mainstream religion, I can’t simply point out that some religious beliefs can lead to obviously immoral actions, because the beliefs that lead to immoral actions are almost always beliefs that aren’t sincerely held by mainstream religious people. People may say things that would have those logical consequences, but for the betterment of us all they cordon off these statements from their actual behavior. Even people who say “Abortion is murder” don’t usually treat abortion doctors the way they would treat serial killers—and the few who do we rightly call “fanatics”. Even people who say “gay people go to Hell” don’t actually advocate the murder of homosexuals.

Defending Moral Realism

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , ,


Oct 6 JDN 2460590

In the last few posts I have only considered arguments against moral realism, and shown them to be lacking. Yet if you were already convinced of moral anti-realism, this probably didn’t change your mind—it’s entirely possible to have a bad argument for a good idea. (Consider the following argument: “Whales are fish, fish are mammals, therefore whales are mammals.”) What you need is arguments for moral realism.

Fortunately, such arguments are not hard to find. My personal favorite was offered by one of my professors in a philosophy course: “I fail all moral anti-realists. If you think that’s unfair, don’t worry: You’re not a moral anti-realist.” In other words, if you want to talk coherently at all about what actions are good or bad, fair or unfair, then you cannot espouse moral anti-realism; and if you do espouse moral anti-realism, there is no reason for us not to simply ignore you (or imprison you!) and go on living out our moral beliefs—especially if you are right that morality is a fiction. Indeed, the reason we don’t actually imprison all moral anti-realists is precisely because we are moral realists, and we think it is morally wrong to imprison someone for espousing unpopular or even ridiculous beliefs.

That of course is a pragmatic argument, not very compelling on epistemological grounds, but there are other arguments that cut deeper. Perhaps the most compelling is the realization that rationality itself is a moral principle—it says that we ought to believe what conforms to reason and ought not to believe what does not. We need at least some core notion of normativity even to value truth and honesty, to seek knowledge, to even care whether moral realism is correct or incorrect. In a total moral vacuum, we can fight over our values and beliefs, we can kill each other over them, but we cannot discuss them or debate them, for discussion and debate themselves presuppose certain moral principles.

Typically moral anti-realists expect us to accept epistemic normativity, but if they do this then they cannot deny the legitimacy of all normative claims. If their whole argument rests upon undermining normativity, then it is self-defeating. If it doesn’t, then anti-realists need to explain the difference between “moral” and “normative”, and explain why the former is so much more suspect than the latter—but even then we have objective obligations that bind our behavior. The difference, I suppose, would involve a tight restriction on the domains of discourse in which normativity applies. Scientific facts? Normative. Interpersonal relations? Subjective. I suppose it’s logically coherent to say that it is objectively wrong to be a Creationist but not objectively wrong to be a serial killer; but this is nothing if not counter-intuitive.

Moreover, it is unclear to me what a universe would be like if it had no moral facts. In what sort of universe would it not be best to believe what is true? In what sort of universe would it not be wrong to harm others for selfish gains? In what sort of world would it be wrong to keep a promise, or good to commit genocide? It seems to me that we are verging on nonsense, rather like what happens if we try to imagine a universe where 2+2=5.

Moreover, there is a particular moral principle, which depends upon moral realism, yet is almost universally agreed upon, even by people who otherwise profess to be moral relativists or anti-realists.

I call it the Hitler Principle, and it’s quite simple:

The Holocaust was bad.

In large part, ethical philosophy since 1945 has been the attempt to systematically justify the Hitler Principle. Only if moral realism is true can we say that the Holocaust was bad, morally bad, unequivocally, objectively, universally, regardless of the beliefs, feelings, desires, culture or upbringing of its perpetrators. And if we can’t even say that, can we say anything at all? If the Holocaust wasn’t wrong, nothing is. And if nothing is wrong, then does it even matter if we believe what is true?

But then, stop and think for a moment: If we know this—if it’s so obvious to just about everyone that the Holocaust was wrong, so obvious that anyone who denies it we immediately recognize as evil or insane (or lying or playing games)—then doesn’t that already offer us an objective moral standard?

I contend that it does—that the Hitler Principle is so self-evident that it can form an objective standard by which to measure all moral theory. I would sooner believe the Sun revolves around the Earth than deny the Holocaust was wrong. I would sooner consider myself a brain in a vat than suppose that systematic extermination of millions of innocent people could ever be morally justified. Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion at Oxford, put it well: “it is more obvious to almost all of us that the genocide conducted by Hitler was morally wrong than that we are not now dreaming, or that the Earth is many millions of years old.” Because at least this one moral fact is so obviously, incorrigibly true, we can use it to test our theories of morality. Just as we would immediately reject any theory of physics which denied that the sky is blue, we should also reject any theory of morality which denies that the Holocaust was wrong. This might seem obvious, but by itself it is sufficient to confirm moral realism.

Similar arguments can be made for other moral propositions that virtually everyone accepts, like the following:

  1. Theft is wrong.
  2. Homicide is wrong.
  3. Lying is wrong.
  4. Rape is wrong.
  5. Kindness is good.
  6. Keeping promises is good.
  7. Happiness is good.
  8. Suffering is bad.

With appropriate caveats (lying isn’t always wrong, if it is justified by some greater good; homicide is permissible in self-defense; promises made under duress do not oblige; et cetera), all of these propositions are accepted by almost everyone, and most people hold them with greater certainty than they would hold any belief about empirical science. “Science proves that time is relative” is surprising and counter-intuitive, but people can accept it; “Science proves that homicide is good” is not something anyone would believe for an instant. There is wider agreement and greater confidence about these basic moral truths than there is about any fact in science, even “the Earth is round” or “gravity pulls things toward each other”—for well before Newton or even Archimedes, people still knew that homicide was wrong.

Though there are surely psychopaths who disagree (basically because their brains are defective), the vast majority of people agree on these fundamental moral claims. At least 95\% of humans who have ever lived share this universal moral framework, under which the wrongness of genocide is as directly apprehensible as the blueness of the sky and the painfulness of a burn. Moral realism is on as solid an epistemic footing as any fact in science.

The facts will not speak for themselves, so we must speak for them

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, heuristics and biases, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 3, JDN 2457604

I finally began to understand the bizarre and terrifying phenomenon that is the Donald Trump Presidential nomination when I watched this John Oliver episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-l3IV_XN3c

These lines in particular, near the end, finally helped me put it all together:

What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. Because if anything, that was the theme of the Republican Convention this week; it was a four-day exercise in emphasizing feelings over facts.

The facts against Donald Trump are absolutely overwhelming. He is not even a competent business man, just a spectacularly manipulative one—and even then, it’s not clear he made any more money than he would have just keeping his inheritance in a diversified stock portfolio. His casinos were too fraudulent for Atlantic City. His university was fraudulent. He has the worst honesty rating Politifact has ever given a candidate. (Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are statistically tied for some of the best.)

More importantly, almost every policy he has proposed or even suggested is terrible, and several of them could be truly catastrophic.

Let’s start with economic policy: His trade policy would set back decades of globalization and dramatically increase global poverty, while doing little or nothing to expand employment in the US, especially if it sparks a trade war. His fiscal policy would permanently balloon the deficit by giving one of the largest tax breaks to the rich in history. His infamous wall would probably cost about as much as the federal government currently spends on all basic scientific research combined, and his only proposal for funding it fundamentally misunderstands how remittances and trade deficits work. He doesn’t believe in climate change, and would roll back what little progress we have made at reducing carbon emissions, thereby endangering millions of lives. He could very likely cause a global economic collapse comparable to the Great Depression.

His social policy is equally terrible: He has proposed criminalizing abortion, (in express violation of Roe v. Wade) which even many pro-life people find too extreme. He wants to deport all Muslims and ban Muslims from entering, which not just a direct First Amendment violation but also literally involves jackbooted soldiers breaking into the homes of law-abiding US citizens to kidnap them and take them out of the country. He wants to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, the largest deportation in US history.

Yet it is in foreign policy above all that Trump is truly horrific. He has explicitly endorsed targeting the families of terrorists, which is a war crime (though not as bad as what Ted Cruz wanted to do, which is carpet-bombing cities). Speaking of war crimes, he thinks our torture policy wasn’t severe enough, and doesn’t even care if it is ineffective. He has made the literally mercantilist assertion that the purpose of military alliances is to create trade surpluses, and if European countries will not provide us with trade surpluses (read: tribute), he will no longer commit to defending them, thereby undermining decades of global stability that is founded upon America’s unwavering commitment to defend our allies. And worst of all, he will not rule out the first-strike deployment of nuclear weapons.

I want you to understand that I am not exaggerating when I say that a Donald Trump Presidency carries a nontrivial risk of triggering global nuclear war. Will this probably happen? No. It has a probability of perhaps 1%. But a 1% chance of a billion deaths is not a risk anyone should be prepared to take.

 

All of these facts scream at us that Donald Trump would be a catastrophe for America and the world. Why, then, are so many people voting for him? Why do our best election forecasts give him a good chance of winning the election?

Because facts don’t speak for themselves.

This is how the left, especially the center-left, has dropped the ball in recent decades. We joke that reality has a liberal bias, because so many of the facts are so obviously on our side. But meanwhile the right wing has nodded and laughed, even mockingly called us the “reality-based community”, because they know how to manipulate feelings.

Donald Trump has essentially no other skills—but he has that one, and it is enough. He knows how to fan the flames of anger and hatred and point them at his chosen targets. He knows how to rally people behind meaningless slogans like “Make America Great Again” and convince them that he has their best interests at heart.

Indeed, Trump’s persuasiveness is one of his many parallels with Adolf Hitler; I am not yet prepared to accuse Donald Trump of seeking genocide, yet at the same time I am not yet willing to put it past him. I don’t think it would take much of a spark at this point to trigger a conflagration of hatred that launches a genocide against Muslims in the United States, and I don’t trust Trump not to light such a spark.

Meanwhile, liberal policy wonks are looking on in horror, wondering how anyone could be so stupid as to believe him—and even publicly basically calling people stupid for believing him. Or sometimes we say they’re not stupid, they’re just racist. But people don’t believe Donald Trump because they are stupid; they believe Donald Trump because he is persuasive. He knows the inner recesses of the human mind and can harness our heuristics to his will. Do not mistake your unique position that protects you—some combination of education, intellect, and sheer willpower—for some inherent superiority. You are not better than Trump’s followers; you are more resistant to Trump’s powers of persuasion. Yes, statistically, Trump voters are more likely to be racist; but racism is a deep-seated bias in the human mind that to some extent we all share. Trump simply knows how to harness it.

Our enemies are persuasive—and therefore we must be as well. We can no longer act as though facts will automatically convince everyone by the power of pure reason; we must learn to stir emotions and rally crowds just as they do.

Or rather, not just as they do—not quite. When we see lies being so effective, we may be tempted to lie ourselves. When we see people being manipulated against us, we may be tempted to manipulate them in return. But in the long run, we can’t afford to do that. We do need to use reason, because reason is the only way to ensure that the beliefs we instill are true.

Therefore our task must be to make people see reason. Let me be clear: Not demand they see reason. Not hope they see reason. Not lament that they don’t. This will require active investment on our part. We must actually learn to persuade people in such a manner that their minds become more open to reason. This will mean using tools other than reason, but it will also mean treading a very fine line, using irrationality only when rationality is insufficient.

We will be tempted to take the easier, quicker path to the Dark Side, but we must resist. Our goal must be not to make people do what we want them to—but to do what they would want to if they were fully rational and fully informed. We will need rhetoric; we will need oratory; we may even need some manipulation. But as we fight our enemy, we must be vigilant not to become them.

This means not using bad arguments—strawmen and conmen—but pointing out the flaws in our opponents’ arguments even when they seem obvious to us—bananamen. It means not overstating our case about free trade or using implausible statistical results simply because they support our case.

But it also means not understating our case, not hiding in page 17 of an opaque technical report that if we don’t do something about climate change right now millions of people will die. It means not presenting our ideas as “political opinions” when they are demonstrated, indisputable scientific facts. It means taking the media to task for their false balance that must find a way to criticize a Democrat every time they criticize a Republican: Sure, he is a pathological liar and might trigger global economic collapse or even nuclear war, but she didn’t secure her emails properly. If you objectively assess the facts and find that Republicans lie three times as often as Democrats, maybe that’s something you should be reporting on instead of trying to compensate for by changing your criteria.

Speaking of the media, we should be pressuring them to include a regular—preferably daily, preferably primetime—segment on climate change, because yes, it is that important. How about after the weather report every day, you show a climate scientist explaining why we keep having record-breaking summer heat and more frequent natural disasters? If we suffer a global ecological collapse, this other stuff you’re constantly talking about really isn’t going to matter—that is, if it mattered in the first place. When ISIS kills 200 people in an attack, you don’t just report that a bunch of people died without examining the cause or talking about responses. But when a typhoon triggered by climate change kills 7,000, suddenly it’s just a random event, an “act of God” that nobody could have predicted or prevented. Having an appropriate caution about whether climate change caused any particular disaster should not prevent us from drawing the very real links between more carbon emissions and more natural disasters—and sometimes there’s just no other explanation.

It means demanding fact-checks immediately, not as some kind of extra commentary that happens after the debate, but as something the moderator says right then and there. (You have a staff, right? And they have Google access, right?) When a candidate says something that is blatantly, demonstrably false, they should receive a warning. After three warnings, their mic should be cut for that question. After ten, they should be kicked off the stage for the remainder of the debate. Donald Trump wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. But instead, they not only let him speak, they spent the next week repeating what he said in bold, exciting headlines. At least CNN finally realized that their headlines could actually fact-check Trump’s statements rather than just repeat them.
Above all, we will need to understand why people think the way they do, and learn to speak to them persuasively and truthfully but without elitism or condescension. This is one I know I’m not very good at myself; sometimes I get so frustrated with people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old (over 40% of Americans) or don’t believe in climate change (35% don’t think it is happening at all, another 30% don’t think it’s a big deal) that I come off as personally insulting them—and of course from that point forward they turn off. But irrational beliefs are not proof of defective character, and we must make that clear to ourselves as well as to others. We must not say that people are stupid or bad; but we absolutely must say that they are wrong. We must also remember that despite our best efforts, some amount of reactance will be inevitable; people simply don’t like having their beliefs challenged.

Yet even all this is probably not enough. Many people don’t watch mainstream media, or don’t believe it when they do (not without reason). Many people won’t even engage with friends or family members who challenge their political views, and will defriend or even disown them. We need some means of reaching these people too, and the hardest part may be simply getting them to listen to us in the first place. Perhaps we need more grassroots action—more protest marches, or even activists going door to door like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Perhaps we need to establish new media outlets that will be as widely accessible but held to a higher standard.

But we must find a way–and we have little time to waste.