Author: VD

Chains of stars and science

Most humanists completely fail to understand that the current scientific hypotheses that free will does not exist are not a conceptual step forward, but rather a giant leap backward to the fifth century AD. This can be seen in David Boorstin’s explanation of the importance of the Christian concept of free will in The Discoverers:

The popular claims of pagan astrologers disturbed the early prophets of Christianity. Church Fathers who declared their own power to forecast everyman’s fate in the next world begrudged the powers of prophecy to those who pretended to know any man’s destiny on earth. If the astrologers’ horoscopes meant what they said, where was the room for free will, for freedom to choose good over evil, to forsake Mammon or Caesar for Jesus Christ?

The very struggle to become a Christian—to abandon pagan superstition for Christian free will—seemed to be a struggle against astrology. Saint Augustine (354–430) recalls in his Confessions: “Those impostors then, whom they style Mathematicians, I consulted without scruple; because they seemed to use no sacrifice, nor to pray to any spirit for their divinations. ‘ And he was tempted by the astrologers’ counsel: “The cause of thy sin is inevitably determined in heaven; this did Venus, or Saturn, or Mars: That man, forsooth, flesh and blood, and proud corruption, might be blameless; while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and the stars is to bear the blame.”

Astrology remained the bête noire of the Christian Church Fathers. Faith in a star-written destiny had dissuaded Romans, such as Emperor Tiberius, from paying homage even to their pagan gods. Tertullian (c. 160–c. 230) warned against astrology because “men, presuming that we are disposed of by the immutable arbitrament of the stars, think on that account that God is not to be sought after.”
– The Discoverers, Chapter 3, “God and the Astrologers”

Here we see the link between a variety of belief systems that are united in one object, in their opposition to free will. Astrology, secular humanism, rational materialism, Islam, and even Calvinism are all opposed to what is ultimately the core basis of Christianity, which is the free and voluntary decision to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

I find it both ironic and telling that Calvinists and a collection of cutting-edge atheist scientists are united in claiming that Man has no ability to choose to worship God. For is it not the Adversary who claims that Man is a helpless prisoner of fate and Jesus Christ who declares that he came to set Man free?

The astrologers blamed the Creator instead of the individual. The scientists blame – well, their theories aren’t formulated yet and are still self-contradictory and incoherent – a variety of things. The Calvinists follow, to varying degrees depending upon the Calvinist, the astrological lead in assigning blame to the Ordainer of heaven and the stars rather than the individual. It isn’t necessary to resort to the fallacy of guilt by association to question the way in which so much Calvinistic thinking tends to harmonize so comfortably with that of atheists and pagan astrologers.

I readily grant that St. Augustine is usually cited on the Calvinist side of the debate and that John Calvin derived many of his doctrinal positions from Augustine. It is worth remembering, then, that Augustine had previously found the astrological arguments to be persuasive.

Who needs economists?

Just ask the bookies:

In a candid admission to MPs, Professor Steve Nickell said he turned to the betting shop to find out whether Euro is likely to fail in the course of his work at the Office of Budget Responsibility.

Professor Nickell is one of the independent experts brought in by George Osborne, the Chancellor, to make sure Britain’s economic estimates are robust. Asked whether he thought the euro was likely to fail, he told the Treasury Select Committee the department itself did not “attach probabilities”.

“I go and look at William Hill and they actually have the odds of these sorts of things,” he said. “Last time I looked, the odds of Greece not using the euro by the end of the year were of the order of 40 per cent.”

This reminds me of the time that I talked with an acquaintance about a meeting he’d had the day before in London. He was lamenting the sheer idiocy of the men with whom he had been meeting and I was a little shocked when he happened to mention that he’d been meeting with the Bank of England. Totally confidence inspiring.

Housing can’t bounce back

Zerohedge on what would be student loan defaults, if students could still default on loans:

Back in late 2006 and early 2007 a few (soon to be very rich) people were warning anyone who cared to listen, about what cracks in the subprime facade meant for the housing sector and the credit bubble in general. They were largely ignored as none other than the Fed chairman promised that all is fine (see here). A few months later New Century collapsed and the rest is history: tens of trillions later we are still picking up the pieces and housing continues to collapse. Yet one bubble which the Federal Government managed to blow in the meantime to staggering proportions in virtually no time, for no other reason than to give the impression of consumer releveraging, was the student debt bubble, which at last check just surpassed $1 trillion, and is growing at $40-50 billion each month. However, just like subprime, the first cracks have now appeared. In a report set to convince borrowers that Student Loan ABS are still safe – of course they are – they are backed by all taxpayers after all in the form of the Family Federal Education Program – Fitch discloses something rather troubling, namely that of the $1 trillion + in student debt outstanding, “as many as 27% of all student loan borrowers are more than 30 days past due.” In other words at least $270 billion in student loans are no longer current (extrapolating the delinquency rate into the total loans outstanding). That this is happening with interest rates at record lows is quite stunning and a loud wake up call that it is not rates that determine affordability and sustainability: it is general economic conditions, deplorable as they may be, which have made the popping of the student loan bubble inevitable.

The inability of students to default on student loans has bought the financial system a little more time, perhaps a year or two, but as is always the case with economics, the negative consequences can only be delayed, they cannot be put off indefinitely.

There are two very big problems here. The first is that the inability to write off these delinquent loans means that the banks are adding to their already large pool of fictitious paper assets. The second is that these hopelessly indebted students are never going to become homeowners, thus reducing the demand for housing and thereby adding to the forces causing housing prices to decline. This further adds to the fictitious paper assets of the banks, which already stands around 40 percent.

In other words, the presently perceived inflation rests on tremendously precarious grounds. We have reached the point where we now have a Potemkin money supply, even if we have not yet reached the level of the Soviet absurdity where the workers pretend to work and the government pretends to pay them.

WND column

Hispanic kills black, whites to blame

The overwrought response of America’s blacks to the shooting death of one Trayvon Martin has been illuminating, indeed. What it demonstrates is that what passes for black political leadership has absolutely no intention of giving up the race card until the last individual of European descent has disappeared into the multiracial melting pot that is pushed so assiduously upon the American public by the mainstream media. And the media response to their usual histrionics indicates that these intentions are entirely irrelevant.

Chess mastery

I’ve never been much of a chess player, which may seem strange considering that I’m a reasonably formidable ASL player. I suspect it has to do with the spatial relations aspect of the game; the ability to quickly adapt and improvise is less important than the ability to accurately foresee the chain of consequences from each move.

Anyhow, Ender has a new Star Wars chess set that doubles as toy X-wing and TIE fighter squadrons and we’ve been playing a game every night. He’s improving fast; last night he managed to take the offensive twice and stretched the game out twice as long as they’d previously been taking. My guess is that within a month, he’ll be beating me on occasion and within a year, he’ll be expecting to win. I taught him how to play several years ago, but he didn’t express any real interest in playing it until last week.

Anyhow, I’m curious to know if there is anyone here who plays in tournaments and has a legitimate Elo rating. I’d be interested in determining what level I’m at for comparative purposes. I tried one of the online calculators, but I’m extremely skeptical of the estimates produced. I scored a 1380 when I put in my moves, but putting in complete nonsense moves produced an 1120. If it’s correct, however, I expect to soon find myself outmatched, as Ender scored 1645, which considerably exceeds the 1,000 that Wikipedia claims is the level of a bright beginner.

Anyhow, for those who aren’t chess masters, it might be interesting to know how you scored on the ten-move online test. And for anyone who is a master, I’d be interested in playing a game of chess by email in order to experience the difference between a proper chess player and a neophyte.

I’m a little choked up

I’m not sure anyone has ever said anything quite so nice to a humble award-winning cruelty artist. Munson writes:

BRAVISSIMO! (Munson rises from his chair, enraptured, vigorously applauding)

Such nuanced invective! “You’re a maleducated twit, Sigrid.” Channeling James Kilpatrick no less! Keynesian/Mises Institute-man, that Dennis Miller-like slider caught me looking; couldn’t even take a swing at it. You have the precision of a coiled cobra, with much less empathy. In an age that honors meaty roundhouse rhetoric, you show the skill of an AWACS directed surgical strike, killing only those necessary, leaving the rest to their dreary lives of drinking curdling sour goat milk and fucking their grub-like mustachioed women. Your writing is a delight sir. I could not find the post that started the exchange; no matter, the artist rises above his inspiration. And you are no less than that VD.

The true artist creates only for himself, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t take deep satisfaction in encountering those Umberto Eco describes as his Ideal Readers. In case you’re interested, both the art and the inspiration can be found here.

Another commenter, one Odds, notes what makes puncturing academic gasbags so intrinsically worthwhile in addition to the sheer entertainment value provided:

It’s that “intellectual” style of speech that does it. So many kids, especially in worthless fields like women’s studies, think it makes them sound smart. There must be some course for liberal arts children where they tell them, “communication isn’t about conveying your position in the most precise and succinct way, but about illustrating your fantabulous credentials.” Then they end up saying far more than they meant to and it reads less like an original argument than a quote mined from an obscure, little-regarded essay. And deep down, in what’s left of their soul, they fervently hope that no one will notice they’ve presented their ideas through vocabulary rather than through arguments, and that they’ve made no argument at all.

It’s always amusing to see that the worst offenders in the great game of credentialist competition are the larval academics who don’t actually possess any credentials yet. There is nothing wrong with an extensive vocabulary or complicated sentence structure. But it is a grotesquely false to believe that the mere use of either is sufficient to make an argument convincing, and it is contemptible to knowingly use such things to try rhetorically intimidating those who possess dialectically stronger arguments into submissive acquiescence.

I further note that habitual reliance upon rhetorical bullying is a relatively reliable indicator that one is susceptible to such techniques.

It’s not your imagination

Most of the portrayals of men in the media are heavily weighted towards the negative:

Until recently, gender theorists and media researchers have argued or assumed that media representations of men are predominantly positive, or at least unproblematic. Men have allegedly been shown in mass media as powerful, dominant, heroic, successful, respected, independent and in other positive ways conducive to men and boys maintaining a healthy self-identity and self-esteem.

However, this view has come under challenge over the past few years. John Beynon, a Welsh cultural studies academic, examined how masculinity was portrayed in the British quality press including The Times, The Guardian and The Sunday Times over a three-year period from 1999-2001 and in books such as Susan Faludi’s 2000 best-seller Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man. Beynon concluded in his 2002 book, Masculinities and Culture, that men and masculinity were overwhelmingly presented negatively and as “something dangerous to be contained, attacked, denigrated or ridiculed, little else”.

Canadian authors, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in a controversial 2001 book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture reported widespread examples of “laughing at men, looking down on men, blaming men, de-humanising men, and demonising men” in modern mass media. They concluded: “… the worldview of our society has become increasingly both gynocentric (focused on the needs and problems of women) and misandric (focused on the evils and inadequacies of men)”.

The role of mass media in creating and or reflecting identity has long been debated and the findings of some studies have been questioned. Nathanson and Young admitted in their foreword that their findings were based on a small sample. Also, most analysis of media content has focused on movies, TV drama and advertising: mass media genre which are fiction and, therefore, not representative of reality and ostensibly “taken with a grain of salt” by audiences.

However, an extensive content analysis of mass media portrayals of men and male identity undertaken for a PhD completed in 2005 through the University of Western Sydney focusing on news, features, current affairs, talk shows and lifestyle media found that men are widely demonised, marginalised, trivialised and objectified in non-fiction media content that allegedly presents facts, reality and “truth”.

The study involved collection of all editorial content referring to or portraying men from 650 newspaper editions (450 broadsheets and 200 tabloids), 130 magazines, 125 TV news bulletins, 147 TV current affairs programs, 125 talk show episodes, and 108 TV lifestyle program episodes from 20 of the highest circulation and rating newspapers, magazines and TV programs over a six-month period. Media articles were examined using in-depth quantitative and qualitative content analysis methodology.

The research found that, by volume, 69 per cent of mass media reporting and commentary on men was unfavourable compared with just 12 per cent favourable and 19 per cent neutral or balanced. Men were predominately reported or portrayed in mass media as villains, aggressors, perverts and philanderers, with more than 75 per cent of all mass media representations of men and male identities showing men in one of these four ways. More than 80 per cent of media mentions of men, in total, were negative, compared with 18.4 per cent of mentions which showed men in a positive role.

Now, I don’t have any problem with negative portrayals of men per se. Men do commit most of the violent crimes. Men are responsible for starting most of the wars in history. Men do beat up women and rape them. I have no problem with men being portrayed in roles that are consistent with their actual behavior.

Where I have a huge problem with the media is when their portrayals of men are totally antithetical to observable reality. Due to hypergamy, most women marry men who are smarter than they are. So, how can it be possible that in Commercial World, men are inevitably drooling idiots who must be corrected and lectured by their smart, but ever-so-patient wives? And what is the point of this obvious social programming anyhow?

All the commercials in the world aren’t going to convince me or my children that Spacebunny knows more about computers than I do when I’m the one who gets her laptop talking to the printer over the network, just as a bunch of commercials that portray women as being cretins totally unable to prepare food aren’t suddenly going to have my family looking to me for dinner… not unless they want fried eggs and toast that evening.

The alarming thing is that if there isn’t any serious social programming intended in this particular regard – whereas there quite clearly is an amount of programming intended in the inclusion of a stock African character in every party or group of friends – then it is simply meant to appeal to existing female prejudices. And that is arguably more alarming, as it suggests that many women are adhering to such concepts in spite of all the easily observable evidence to the contrary.

Observations at the theme park

1. Where did the chavs go? There were two orders of magnitude fewer neck tattoos? The vibe distinctly changed from high prole last year to low bourgeois. Lower traffic too. Conclusion: economy is not recovering.

2. Saw many white families, black families, and Arab families. One interesting observation: the multiracial couples did not have children. And with one exception, the multiracial children were there with a white mother without any adult male figure in sight.

3. European children are by and large pretty well behaved.

Mailvox: a near-first

Oregon Mouse complains:

My husband used to live in Colorado. He took his family out for a small hike and a rock tumbled down out of nowhere and hit his 9 year old on the head. It knocked her out cold but perhaps feminism is the real culprit? How dare a 9 year old girl walk around outside!!

What a remarkable near-accomplishment! And at an even younger age than the famous Grand Canyon hiker! Do send us the link to the international newspaper accounts of her deed!