Author: VD

Christians: No to Noah

We have this on the authority of no less than Mr. John C. Wright:

I saw the movie NOAH just now. What a load of horse manure. In days to come, time permitting, I will pen a more thorough review, but for now, let me just say: Christian men, save your money. Go see GOD’S NOT DEAD. Tell Hollywood we don’t like movies about Biblical figures that mock the source material.

I have to admit that it never even occurred to me to go see it, but it’s always nice to receive confirmation that one’s assumptions were correct. Wright adds in the comments:

This movie particularly offends me, because back when I was an atheist, I could and did, write stories so convincingly Christian that I fooled at least one editor and two reviewers into thinking I was one. It is a talent all artists have. It is called make believe. No director of this stature lacks this talent. The atheist flavor in the film was not inserted by accident nor oversight, it was deliberate.

The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again

In light of John C. Wright’s Unified Field Theory of Madness, perhaps we need an addendum to explain the Contrapuntal Certainty of Left-Wing Social Policies:

From Grand Theft Auto V to Saints Row 2 and Fight Night, many games let players choose between characters of different races. However, researchers have found that when white people play as black characters in video games classified as violent, the players were more threatening, offensive and racist in real life. Scientists described the findings as ‘disturbing’ because it is the first time the race of a computer alter ego, or avatar, has been linked to this change in behaviour.

There may be a third certainty beyond death and taxes, and that is the tendency of every left-wing social policy to deliver consequences that are the EXACT OPPOSITE of those expected and predicted. We have seen tax hikes that raise less money, we have seen a War on Poverty that increased the number of the poor, we have seen how multiculturalism increases social divisiveness, and now we are seeing that the proposed solution to supposed racism in video games actually increases racism in real life.

This should have interesting ramifications for the women who are incessantly crying for more female protagonists in video games in order to encourage more female involvement; at this point, one wouldn’t be surprised if that ended up leading to the development of online prostitution through video gaming networks.

A belated awakening

It would appear that the Ukrainian nationalists who led the US/EU supported charge against the democratically elected government are beginning to wake up to the fact that they were used as cannon fodder by the globalists:

Fears are growing of a neo-fascist uprising in Ukraine as ousted president Viktor Yanukovych called for referendums in every region to determine how pro-Russian the country actually is. Hundreds of members of the ultra-nationalist Right Sector movement stormed the parliament (Rada) building in Kiev last night, smashing windows and breaking down doors.

The riot erupted just hours before Russia’s foreign ministry today warned that ethnic minorities in Ukraine are ‘living in fear’ of the expanding power of the far-right across the divided nation.

Right Sector activists are angry over the killing of their leader, Oleksandr Muzychko, better known as Sashko Bily, who died in a shoot-out with police in a cafe in Rivne, in western Ukraine, on Monday.

Based on the term “neo-fascist” that is being applied to them now, what do you want to bet that Right Sector’s assault on the unelected government will be portrayed rather differently than their previous assault on the duly elected one in the Western media?

A failure of leadership

This is what happens when you buy into the tolerance trap and permit the lavender mafia entrance into your organization:

Employees and volunteers at Mozilla – the organisation which promotes open source software such as its Firefox browser – have called for new chief executive Brendan Eich to stand down because of his donations to political campaigns to ban gay marriage.

This week Mozilla named Brendan Eich as its new chief executive, following the resignation of Gary Kovacs which was announced in April last year. Eich was previously Mozilla’s chief technology officer and has a long history with the group dating back to before its formation from Netscape, having worked on the Navigator browser in the 90s and creating JavaScript in a marathon, ten-day programming session in 1995.

The controversy stems from a $1,000 donation he made in 2008 to support California’s Proposition 8, which opposed gay marriage. The donation was listed in a public database with Mozilla appearing next to Eich’s name as his employer. It caused controversy in the technology industry when it was uncovered in 2012.

Eich posted on his own blog to “express my sorrow at having caused pain” and promised an “active commitment to equality” at Mozilla. “I am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion,” he wrote.

But employees were unconvinced. Chris McAvoy, who leads Mozilla’s Open Badges project, took to Twitter last night to call for the new chief executive to stand down and said that he had been “disapointed” by his promotion. 

Eich is in over his head and clearly has no idea what he is dealing with here. He committed a major blunder with that statement; it’s rather like watching a gamma male shot down by a woman respond by supplicating even harder.

What he should have done is fired everyone who called upon him to resign and announced that anyone who would permit their political ideology to interfere with their work at Mozilla or Mozilla’s internal affairs would be fired. That would have brought the matter to a speedy close and prevented similar outbreaks of political insubordination. Instead, he poured gasoline on the fire by showing that he is vulnerable to ideological pressure.

When confronted by a pressure group, one should never apologize and never back down. Confront every challenger outside the organization and crush every challenger inside it. People respect strength and confidence in a leader, even when they disagree with him, because at least he shows that he is decisive and is capable of providing direction. Ironically, in his inept response to the attacks on him, Eich has shown that he is unfit for leadership because he is fundamentally a follower.

What he should have said is: “Like everyone else at Mozilla, I am free to donate to any political organization or cause I choose. It is no one’s business here to tell me to whom I can and cannot donate my money, in the past or in the future. I have donated another $10,000 to [some anti-homogamy outfit], fired Mr. McAvoy for cause, and I will fire any other Mozilla employee or volunteer who publicly demands that this organization to cater to his personal political or ideological beliefs instead of pursuing our corporate objectives.”

The consequence of multiculturalism

Roissy points out more scholastic support for the hypothesis that Diversity + Proximity = WAR:

Community psychologists are interested in creating contexts that promote both respect for diversity and sense of community. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has uncovered a community-diversity dialectic wherein the contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity run in opposition to those that foster sense of community. More specifically, within neighborhoods, residential integration provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.

Using agent-based modeling to simulate neighborhoods and neighborhood social network formation, we explore whether the community-diversity dialectic emerges from two principle of relationship formation: homophily and proximity. The model suggests that when people form relationships with similar and nearby others, the contexts that offer opportunities to develop a respect for diversity are different from the contexts that foster a sense of community. Based on these results, we conclude with a discussion of whether it is possible to create neighborhoods that simultaneously foster respect for diversity and sense of community.

Multiculturalism isn’t merely a failure, it is, like the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty, a leftist program that is delivering precisely the opposite of what it purported to deliver. Instead of racial peace, it has created racial hate. Instead of an end to nationalism, it is delivering intranational ethnic strife.

The Croats don’t fight the Vietnamese, they fight the Serbs. The North Koreans don’t threaten the Ibo, they threaten the South Koreans. And mass inter-ethnic migration has only ensured that the 21st century wars will be even more savage and less limited than those of the 20th century.

No more hate crimes

One hopes that this means an end to the absurd propagandistic concept of “hate crimes” will soon be in sight. The FBI removes both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center from its web site.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has labeled several Washington, D.C.-based family organizations as “hate groups” for favoring traditional marriage, has been dumped as a “resource” on the FBI’s Hate Crime Web page, a significant rejection of the influential legal group.

The Web page scrubbing, which also included eliminating the Anti-Defamation League, was not announced and came in the last month after 15 family groups pressed Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey to stop endorsing a group — SPLC — that inspired a recent case of domestic terrorism at the Family Research Council.

“We commend the FBI for removing website links to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that not only dispenses erroneous data but has been linked to domestic terrorism in federal court. We hope this means the FBI leadership will avoid any kind of partnership with the SPLC,” Tony Perkins, FRC President, told Secrets.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center’s mission to push anti-Christian propaganda is inconsistent with the mission of both the military and the FBI, which is to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States,” he added….

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told Secrets, “We are shocked, surprised and disappointed that this would be done without any consultation with groups such as ours who have been working closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on issues of hate crime. We look forward to having further conversations with them on this issue.”

It’s like the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition all over again! The fact is that these parasitical charlatans have made a literal fortune by preying on white guilt and fears of race hatred while advocating the very multicultural policies that lead directly to widespread ethnic violence.

In a just world, both Foxman and Dees would be prosecuted for their anti-Constitutional, anti-American, and societally destructive actions.

A house blithely divided

It would hard to have provided a better example of John C. Wright’s Unified Field Theory of Madness than we saw in the comments yesterday. And further proving that leftists will say literally anything in order to salve their feelings without concern for their past or future arguments, consider this gem from Snowflake in which he attempts to justify the Left’s primary tactic of disqualification:

the fact that one thing (a round earth) which is true, but for which at one time there was no evidence of, does not mean that anything or everything else for which there is no evidence is also true. Nor can you properly claim anything, be it a round earth, a flat earth, or a pink unicorn to be true, until you provide evidence of it. Disqualification is valid, in that until you provide evidence, the disqualification holds, and you can’t claim that your particular unproven theories are true, simply because there is no other alternate proven theory at the time.

Now, the first statement is partially true, although we know the earth is not actually round, but rather an oblate ellipsoid. It’s rather fitting that an erroneous example should be cited here, but regardless, one can hardly argue with the statement that one cannot assume the correctness of all naked assertions on the basis of one correct naked assertion.

So far so good.

On the other hand, it is absolutely false to assert that one cannot claim anything to be true until evidence for the claim is provided. This exhibits a fundamental confusion between two different concepts, a “claim” and a “proof”. One can claim anything to be true without providing one iota of evidence. Others can freely choose to accept the claim or reject it, but they cannot credibly argue that the claim is intrinsically “disqualified” on the basis of no evidence being provided.

If that were the case, then no one could ever make any statement of fact without simultaneously providing the evidence supporting it. This is an intrinsically anti-scientific perspective, as it would necessarily disqualify all hypotheses, which are claims made in the known absence of evidence. Moreover, it is an inherently self-negating statement, as Snowflake has provided no evidence to support his claim that disqualification of a statement sans evidence is valid.

Moreover, Mr. Wright’s discussion of his theory was not presented as a proof. It was, rather, an explanation of behavior that has been observed on many occasions by many observers in the past. It was a hypothesis, in other words, and one for which considerable evidence was gathered by the feverish attempts to disqualify it.

But why is the Left so eager to disqualify claims and hypotheses? Why does it make a fetish of evidence here while simultaneously denying literal millennia of evidence collected with regards to matters such as human intelligence, genetics, and even the law of supply and demand? (Recall that Wright specifically noted this very behavior in his essay, which none of the critics appear to have actually read before leaping to attack it.) Because the entire aim is to shut down the discussion, silence the perpetrator, and to divert the train of thought before the logical incoherency of the Leftist and the obvious errors of his positions are exposed.

(This is why I crack down so hard on the fools who leap in to engage the trolls on the trolls’ terms. And I use the term “fools” advisedly; one is snapping at the troll’s bait and doing PRECISELY what the troll hopes someone will do by permitting him to shift the matter being discussed away from the one that the troll finds threatening. For example, note how every single discussion of the flaws in TENS is immediately met by multiple attempts to change the subject to Young Earth Creationism. Don’t fall for it.)

The Leftist doesn’t care that his own argument would destroy his own positions; apply this standard to human equality or evolution by natural selection and both fall apart immediately. But because he has no objective standards and no attachment to the truth, the Leftist will blithely apply one subjective standard to his opponents and another to himself without even necessarily realizing it.

The irony is that in attacking Mr. Wright’s Unified Field Theory yesterday, his critics provided the very evidence that they irrelevantly claimed was lacking. If you wish to destroy the credibility of a Leftist’s arguments, you have only to go through it step by step, until you reach the change of definition, ambiguity, logical inconsistency, or outright lie that will INEVITABLY be there. A little patience and precision is all that is required.

The players’ union

I’m not a big fan of unions, but there is no question that college football players have a much better claim to be permitted to unionize than policemen and federal employees.

In a ruling that could revolutionize college athletics, a federal agency ruled Wednesday that college football players at Northwestern University can unionize. The decision by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board means it agrees football players at the Big Ten school qualify as employees under federal law and therefore can create the nation’s first college athlete’s union….

CAPA attorneys argued that college football is, for all practical
purposes, a commercial enterprise that relies on players’ labor to
generate billions of dollars in profits. That, they contend, makes the
relationship of schools to players one of employers to employees.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to argue with that. The fact that the employer is a university doesn’t mean that the janitors and professors are not employees, and they generate considerably less income than the football players do.

These young men are actually putting their bodies on the line, and they deserve the right to a significant slice of the income their activities are producing.

Madness and the Unreality Principle

John C. Wright presents a brilliant explication of the Left and their relentless denial of observable reality with his Unified Field Theory of Madness:

The Leftist has only two choices here: accept reality, in which case he is no longer a Leftist, or deny reality, in which case his loyalty to the ideals of Leftism becomes rarefied and refined, and he become of their Cathari, the Pure Ones, an arhat of enlightenment.

I spoke above of the Unreality Principle. Here is where it comes into play. The Unreality Principle is the moral imperative to ignore and deny reality at all costs, and remain loyal and faithful to the make-believe illusion-choked funhouse-mirror Wonderland of Liberal Bullshit. You must bathe in the bullshit, eat the bullshit, drink the bullshit, and stuff the bullshit up your nose as far as far can be, because from now own the offal will be feast and wine to you, and will be your baptism and your oxygen. It will feed and sustain you.

However, the Unreality Principle demands a cost. First, there is something like a daily maintenance cost: you must attend closely to whatever the social cues are telling you, and believe them and not your lying eyes….

The Leftists are people who are stupider than average, less moral and
upright and decent than average, who at once combine the worst features
of a self-deceived fool and a self-deceiving conniving con-man. The only
thing that saves them from the constant pain of the dentist drill of
their conscience, the constant clamor of their wretched self-esteem
telling them that they do not deserve to live, the only thing, indeed,
keeping them alive, is their false and inflated sense of sanctimony.
Each one is a Judas, who has betrayed all he hold dear. The only reason
why he does not hang himself from the nearest redbud tree is because he
adopts the numbing hypocrisy of the Pharisee.

There is no greater high than to fly on the drug of smug moral
superiority. You may look down your nose at all fashion of men greater
than you in every other way, but if they are evil and you are righteous,
the savory odor of your righteousness in your own nostrils is finer
than myrrh. It is more than wine which mortals drink; it is nectar of
the gods.

In case you were wondering where our modern-day Chesterton was, well, John C. Wright is it. It is a little frustrating to be publishing his excellent book of essays, the forthcoming TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN, because not a week goes by that he doesn’t produce another new essay that fairly screams for inclusion in it.

Needless to say, there will be a sequel if Mr. Wright is so inclined.

And if you haven’t read his GOLDEN AGE trilogy yet, you simply must. It is more than excellent, it is inspiring. Consider this quote from THE GOLDEN TRANSCENDANCE, which I am currently reading:

“[E]very intelligent entity, human or machine, requires justification to undertake the strenuous effort of continued existence. For entities whose acts conform to the dictates of morality, this process is automatic, and their lives are joyous. Entities whose acts do not conform to moral law must adopt some degree of mental dishonesty to erect barriers to their own understanding, creating rationalization to elude self-condemnation and misery. The strategy of rationalization adopted by a dishonest mind falls into predictable patterns.”

Note that this isn’t exposition or preaching, but a concept that is seamlessly integrated into the plot in order to explain the potential of mere human minds to correctly anticipate the thinking of superhuman, supersmart machine intelligences.

Ebony and ivory

Dwelling together in what would appear to be less than entirely perfect harmony:

The other night we reported how a mob of 200 teens went on a rampage in downtown Louisville, Kentucky last Saturday night, assaulting people and mob-robbing stores. There was surveillance footage from a store that was mob-robbed that showed the teens to be black – a detail left out in the reporting of the story.

One of the women attacked was reported to be in her car with her children in the backseat. She has come forward to explain what really happened and it’s a situation none of us would want to find ourselves in, especially with 5 children in the car:

    WDRB – It was around 8 p.m. Saturday when Viola Loeffler says she and her family were attacked at the intersection at First and Liberty.

    “Right before we got to the stoplight, we noticed about 50 to 100 teens coming to the middle of the street. It was a one-way street so we couldn’t go any further. All of a sudden, one of them throws a garbage can on our car,” said Loeffler.

    Loeffler says after that, the situation quickly escalated.

    Her boyfriend, Ron Carter, was in the driver’s seat and stopped the car to see what was going on. They say when he got out, the teens moved in on him.

    “All of a sudden, I’m getting attacked,” Carter told WDRB.

    Meanwhile, Loeffler and her five children were still inside the car.

    “At that point , I jump in the driver’s seat. I hear them throwing rocks at my car. The rocks were hitting the kids inside of the car,” said Loeffler.

It would appear that it is not only European-Americans who are becoming increasingly disinclined to suffer the joys of vibrancy, as seen in this predominantly African community:

Detroit homeowners have had enough. Police are too slow, and criminals are relentless. Since Feb. 22, homeowners have fatally shot six would-be intruders. The latest came at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday when a man shot and killed two men who were tying to break into his home on the 14800 block of Dexter, police said. So far this year, Detroit has recorded at least 10 justifiable homicides, compared to 15 in all of 2013.

The law is clear, as is the police disinclination to endanger themselves or attract criticism by getting involved. This presents the non-vibrant individual with three options. One is to take the Derbyshire approach and simply avoid public gatherings of Vibrant Americans. The second is the Detroit approach. Mind your own business, be prepared, and shoot to kill without hesitation if attacked in any way. And the third is the SWPL approach. Pretend that it is 1950 and that everyone is the same except for their skin color, then express complete shock and dismay when you or your children are attacked by rampaging vibrants.

UPDATE Fox has a clip of the Vibrant TV in Louisville.