Author: VD

Mailvox: Not so much

What we have here is a failure to comprehend a concept… MD asks about a potential equivalency:

On your thoughts about atheism (in your culture) being a syptom of social autism; presumably in my culture ceationism is also a symptom of social autism (given a tiny minority on the fringes of society hold these beliefs)?

My thought is that it simply doesn’t work like that. There are several problems with this attempt to construct an equivalency, beginning with the assumption that there is “an atheist culture” given the fact that atheists repeatedly avow that there is no such thing, indeed, that such a thing is not even possible. But unless you have reason to believe that creationists are prone to behaving badly according to the mores of the dominant non-creationist culture or that the creationists do not understand those mores or are believing as they do in a reaction to that culture, there is absolutely no basis on which to propose such an equivalency.

The social autism of atheists goes well beyond the mere fact of their failure to subscribe to theism. This should be obvious, given that agnostics too fail to subscribe to the dominant theistic beliefs and yet do not exhibit any signs of social autism.

Put not thy trust in IQ

Not that it is likely to, but the results of the IQ tests performed by an American Army psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials should put at least a slight damper on the often-heard atheist appeals to intelligence. Especially since at 121.72, the average IQs of the National Socialist leadership was more than a standard deviation higher than the 103.09 mean IQ reported for atheists:

IQ of Nazi leaders, cited from: Gilbert, G. M.: Nuremberg Diary. New York: Signet Book 1947, p. 34; Wechsler-Bellevue

Hjalmar Schacht, Reich Minister of Economics: IQ 143
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Foreign Minister of Germany: IQ 141
Hermann Göring, President of the Reichstag and Reich Minister of Aviation: IQ 138
Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine: IQ 138
Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production: IQ 128
Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht: IQ 127
Alfred Rosenberg, Commissar for Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education of the German National Socialist Workers Party: IQ 127
Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer: IQ 120

In other words, if we are to take seriously the idea that the reported 5.95-point IQ advantage enjoyed by the “not-at-all religious” over the “very religious” means that we should be inclined to reject the theistic perspective, then surely the 18.63 advantage of the National Socialists proves we should all convert to Nazi atheism.

The statistical utility of suicide

This report certainly won’t surprise the socionomists:

Suicide rates in the U.S. tend to rise during recessions and fall amid economic booms, according to study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicides reached a record high of 22 people per 100,000 in 1932 during the Great Depression, CDC officials said in a report published online today in the American Journal of Public Health. That was double the rates seen in 2000, when 10 people per 100,000 took their lives as the economy prospered, the study found.

What I’m wondering is if this might make for an effective check on the, shall we say, heavily massaged government statistics. If GDP is reportedly up in tandem with the suicide rate, then one would tend to suspect that the economy was not actually growing despite the statistically reported growth. For example, it is interesting to note that the suicide rate has been on the rise since 2000.

The six-year analysis found that the U.S. suicide rate rose 5 percent, from 10.5 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 11 per 100,000 people in 2005.

This suggests that if the economy is still in a contraction, as I have been insisting, then the suicide rates should still be rising from 2008 through 2011.

Further abusing an expired equine

Edward Feser praises Common Sense Atheism for having the good sense to abandon a disproven aphorism:

[T]he Common Sense Atheism blog used to proclaim proudly on its masthead: When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

I see that that blog has now removed this one-liner, which is perhaps a sign that intellectual progress is possible even among New Atheist types. Because while your average “Internet Infidel” seems to regard the “one god further” objection as devastatingly clever, it is in fact embarrassingly inept, a sign of the extreme decadence into which secularist “thought” has fallen in the Age of Dawkins.

Suppose someone skeptical about Euclidean geometry said:

When you understand why you regard all the particular triangles you’ve observed as having sides that are less than perfectly straight, you will understand why I regard Euclidean plane triangles as such to have sides that are less than perfectly straight.

Or suppose a critic of Platonism said:

When you understand why you regard the things of ordinary experience as in various ways imperfect or less than fully good instances of their kinds, you will understand why I regard Plato’s Form of the Good as being less than fully good.

Would these count as devastating objections to Euclidean geometry and Platonism? Would they serve as fitting mottos for blogs devoted to “Common Sense Anti-Euclideanism” or “Common Sense Anti-Platonism”? Obviously not. They would demonstrate only that the speaker didn’t have the slightest clue what the hell he was talking about.

Feser took a different tact than I did in addressing Sam Harris’s use of this aphorism in TIA, but the fact that the statement can be demolished from multiple angles is a good indication that it is a remarkably stupid statement. I leave it to you to decide which method is more effective, but I certainly can’t argue with his conclusion.

Anyhow, it’s good to see that atheists have abandoned this and the ridiculous Red State argument. Hopefully it won’t be long before they give up on the ludicrous “One Less God” assertion, the ahistorical “religion causes war” meme, and the dishonest “No True Atheist” defense as well.

Islamic democracy

This election news from Nigeria should help sober up those who are still enthusiastic about the demands for democracy in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

Violent protests erupted across Nigeria’s largely Muslim north on Monday as youths angered at President Goodluck Jonathan’s election victory torched churches and homes and set up burning barricades. The vote count showed Jonathan, from the southern oil-producing Niger Delta, had beaten Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler from the north, in the first round.

Observers have called the poll the fairest in decades in Africa’s most populous nation but Buhari’s supporters accuse the ruling party of rigging. Results show how politically polarised the country is, with Buhari sweeping states in the Muslim north and Jonathan winning the largely Christian south…. A Reuters tally of results put Jonathan on nearly 23 million votes to just over 12 million for Buhari.

A 66-34 is hardly Bush-Gore in 2000 or the Coleman-Franken senatorial election in Minnesota. It is, in fact, an absolute landslide. It also tends to suggest that Muslims will not necessarily wait until they are in the majority to demand governing power, which could have some interesting implications for countries such as Britain and the Netherlands.

A failure to follow through

Standards & Poor finally begins to consider downgrading U.S. debt, but lack the guts to point out the obvious.

Standard & Poor’s on Monday downgraded the outlook for the United States to negative, saying it believes there’s a risk U.S. policymakers may not reach agreement on how to address the country’s long-term fiscal pressures.

“Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable,” the agency said in a statement.

Of course, remember that debt rating services don’t downgrade debt until it is completely obvious to everyone. If you still think U.S. debt merits AAA status, well, you probably borrowed a lot of money to invest in real estate sometime after 2007. To say that the outlook is “negative” is a serious understatement.

WND column

Hell is for Human Trash

The Christian concept of hell has proven to be a strangely difficult one to accept for a species that has developed the concepts of capitalism, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. And it is an odd world in which metal bands contemplate the theology of damnation in a more sophisticated and intelligent manner than religious ministers – one cannot reasonably call them Christian – of national standing.

NB: this is the TIME magazine article to which I refer in the column.

The temptation of the sockpuppet

It is perhaps understandable why people in the public eye might be tempted to defend themselves this way, but it’s never a good idea:

How many people think I’m actually Scott Adams writing about myself in third person?
posted by plannedchaos at 9:21 AM on April 15 [1 favorite]

I am Scott Adams.
posted by plannedchaos at 11:09 AM on April 15 [20 favorites]

And just to be clear that this isn’t some weird joke, yes, he is.

Scott, if you wanted to sign up for Metafilter to defend your writing, that would have been fine. If you wanted to sign up for Metafilter and be incognito as just another user, that’d be fine too. Doing both simultaneously isn’t; pretending to be a third party and high-fiving yourself by proxy is a pretty sketchy move and a serious violation of general community expectations about identity management around here.

I appreciate you fessing up at this point, but I’d sure rather it hadn’t happened at all. It’s just incredibly disappointing to watch play out.
posted by cortex at 11:16 AM on April 15 [131 favorites]

I like both Scott and his work, but I would absolutely have advised him against taking this tactic. If he’d defended himself openly, many of the people on the site would likely have been thrilled that he was communicating directly with them. As it stands, well, it’s just doesn’t look good.

And for the record, I do not engage in sockpuppetry here. I realize that some of my critics do occasionally look so spectacularly stupid that suspicions I am setting up strawmen in order to knock them down are entirely understandable. But unfortunately, the fact is that both the critics and the arguments are genuine.

Anyhow, I suspect most of the Dread Ilk recognize that I am too arrogant to be so concerned about whether anyone agrees with me or not that I would resort to a real appeal to public opinion, let alone a fake one.

The benefits of immigration

So much for the idea of shiny, sexy, secular post-Christianity in Britain:

Women who do not wear headscarves are being threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists intent on imposing sharia law on parts of Britain, it was claimed today. Other targets of the ‘Talibanesque thugs’, being investigated by police in the Tower Hamlets area of London, include homosexuals.

Stickers have been plastered on public walls stating: ‘Gay free zone. Verily Allah is severe in punishment’.

The enthusiastic embrace of the importation of non-Christian religionists by secular multiculturalists hoping to reduce the cultural influence of Christianity is without question going to be considered one of the most disastrous policies in the history of the West. I wonder how long it will be before the first British government official is assassinated by a Sharia-seeking radical. I, for one, will find it tremendously amusing when feminist professors begin wearing headscarfs for fear of their students.

The secular community in government, media, and academia decided to ally itself with Islam against Christianity some time ago. I wonder how many of them are beginning to rethink the wisdom of that decision.

HBO’s A Game of Thrones reviewed

It is no secret that those who imagine themselves to be serious literati tend to despise the science fiction and fantasy genres. While it is increasingly true that there is a lot to be despised about the present state of SF/F literature, it is not at all difficult to discern that there is a big difference between those contemptuous critics who are actually familiar with the genre and those who are not. Strangely enough, the literary contempt for SF/F, which was originally based on the thin characterizations and juvenile appeal of Golden Age science fiction, has apparently now expanded into the cinematic world as well. This is a little strange given the way in which the same historical deficiencies of classic science fiction literature clearly apply to the cinema, to say nothing of the present state of television drama.

The New York Times review of A Game of Thrones, which begins tonight on HBO, is remarkable for the reviewer’s complete lack of familiarity, not only with George R.R. Martin, with the last 30 years of the fantasy genre as well. Read the rest at the Black Gate