Author: VD

Academia and the myth of matriarchy

Apparently if you believe in the perfectly logical and long-held philosophical concept that the universe did not simply appear ex nihilo for no reason, you are academically unfit, but it’s perfectly fine for academics to subscribe to the totally ahistorical notion that Man was once ruled by female committee:

There is no real evidence that humanity every passed through a stage in which society was matriarchal, and abundant evidence to the contrary. Goddesses, of course, appear frequently in the world’s religions and myths, but the notion of a great prehistoric cult of the Goddess in Europe connected to matriarchal rule has no foundation.

Why bring this up now? Because higher education’s relaxed attitude about appointing faculty members who not only believe but who actually teach this moonshine demonstrates the hypocrisy of those who say that faculty members are acting out of the need to protect the university from anti-scientific nonsense when they discriminate against conservative Christian candidates for academic appointment. The possibility that a candidate for a position in biology, anthropology, or, say, English literature might secretly harbor the idea that God created the universe or that the Bible is true, is a danger not to be brooked. But apparently, the possibility that a candidate believes that human society was “matriarchal” until about 5,000 years ago is perfectly within the range of respectable opinion appropriate for campus life….

I take it as one of the great intellectual scandals of our age that this nonsense has gained academic legitimacy. Hardly a soul who vehemently defends the university’s need to protect itself from the dangerous presence of Biblical literalists and the like sees anything amiss in having a whole tide of anti-scientific, ahistorical ideological fantasy claim the status of an academic discipline. Could there be a version of women’s studies sans the myth of matriarchal prehistory? Surely there could be, as there are substantial numbers of feminist scholars who reject that myth. But the field as a whole has not done so. If it is necessary that a candidate for an academic appointment in biology demonstrate competence in evolutionary biology, it ought surely be necessary that a candidate for appointment in women’s studies demonstrate show the ability to distinguish historical fantasy from fact.

I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, but it is a useful thought experiment. Why won’t higher education hold women’s studies to ordinary standards of historical accuracy? Because contemporary American higher education cares far more about protecting its favored group of political ideologies than it does its standards of rational inquiry and scrupulous use of evidence. The standards are cited most conspicuously when they lend themselves to fencing off members of disfavored groups.

I’ve always found Sam Harris’s assertion that being a Christian somehow renders scientific work impossible to be an interesting one, considering that it is an intrinsically ahistoric and anti-scientific philosophical argument. And PZ Myers’s insistence that academics must subscribe to TEpNS dogma has always amused me, considering that he still subscribes to economic arguments that have been disproven for decades, and in some cases, centuries. If the standard that biologists wish to apply to other academics were applied to biologists on subjects such as economics or history, nearly every biology department in the USA would find itself empty.

Six bank failures

Yesterday the FDIC shut down six banks with around $4.2 billion in assets between them. But I thought one thing was a bit peculiar with regards to the seizure of Superior Bank in Birmingham, Alabama.

“As of December 31, 2010, Superior Bank had approximately $3.0 billion in total assets and $2.7 billion in total deposits. … The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $259.6 million.”

It seems as if the bigger the bank is, the smaller the cost to the FDIC reported. In this case, the losses were only 8.7 percent, much lower than the 22.5 percent average for bank closures in 2010 and 2011. This would appear to suggest that the losses are being disguised in the assets being acquired by the new bank, which in this case is “Superior Bank, N.A., Birmingham, Alabama, a newly-chartered bank subsidiary of Community Bancorp LLC, Houston, Texas”.

I’ve also noticed that both the numbers of banks seized and percent of estimated bad assets appear to be shrinking. The 34 banks seized so far in 2011 averaged about 34.4 percent bad assets versus 42.1 percent for the 157 banks seized in 2010 and 41.1 percent for the 140 seized in 2009. This would appear to indicate a material improvement, although it is a fairly modest one considering that the fair financial winds of government spending and quantitative easing appear to be drawing to a close.

Mailvox: the “No True Atheist” defense

Cisbio is still trying to defend atheism by insisting that murderous atheists are not, in fact, atheists, while attacking Christianity for crimes that were committed by non-Christians. Needless to say, it’s not the most effective of strategies.

How is it dishonest to compared atheist to non-atheist crimes, if it is perfectly valid to attempt to heighten the enormity of atheist crimes by comparing them only with Christian crimes -exclusively from the middle ages?

First, it is entirely typical that cisbio fails to understand both the context and the nature of the comparison. TIA was not written ex nihilo, but in response to specific atheist charges made against religion in general and Christianity in particular. The Christian crimes are not taken “exclusively from the middle ages”, as should be obvious since the period of Christendom I utilized for the purposes of comparison began prior to the Middle Ages with the accession of Theodosius I to the Western half of the Empire in combination with his decrees that re-established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Prior to that point, his decrees were simply not relevant to the older half of the empire.

While one could argue for starting with 363, when Jovian rescinded Julian the Apostate’s pagan revival, or possibly even 313, with Constantine the Great’s Edict of Milan, 392 marks the moment from which Christianity most clearly reigned politically supreme. Before this date, Christian state crimes were not possible for the obvious reason that Christians did not possess sufficient political power.

Cisbio is mistaken when he thinks that I end the period of Christendom in 1453, which again should be obvious since the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre took place in 1572. 1453 merely set the limit on the number of Roman emperors, 126 to be precise, to which I added every single Christian king from all the major European kingdoms down to the present day. Again, cisbio should have known this due to the estimated number of kings utilized. Thus, this extended period is not limited to the Middle Ages and it is not only a reasonable comparison to the two centuries in which atheism has been most influential, it is the only possible one.

And the fact that not a single one of those estimated 1,781 Christian rulers committed a single crime against his people that was one-half as bad as 52 of the 89 atheist rulers, (with the exception of King Leopold II of Belgium, who appears to have engaged in societal egg-breaking with all the vicious enthusiasm of an atheist) does tend to testify that there is something peculiarly lethal about the combination of atheists and political power. While it is true that most of these atheist killers were Communists and the few that were not Communists were at least Socialists, it doesn’t change the fact that a) all of them were atheists, and b) most atheists are either Communists or socialists.

That may sound surprising, but recall that Bertrand Russell, Michel Onfray, and Christopher Hitchens are all socialists. Richard Dawkins describes himself as having been a voter for the democratic socialist party in the 1970s. Sam Harris is not a socialist, but he is an avowed globalist, which is the socialism of the 21st century. Of the six foremost atheist intellectuals, only Dennett appears to be entirely free of a lethal form of atheism, but even that is unconfirmed.

Now, I think there is room for a reasonable discussion regarding what is more dangerous, the most lethal form of religion or the most lethal form of atheism, especially when the warlike aspect of the former is taken into account. The important difference, however, is that whereas the most lethal form of religion is neither its largest nor its most influential form, the most lethal form of atheism is its dominant strain. For example, I’m not at all concerned about the potential dangers posed by libertarian atheists or even Austrian School-influenced ones like Michael Shermer. The world would be a better place if the countries where atheists now rule had leaderships consisting of libertarian atheists rather than socialist and communist ones. But very, very few atheists are libertarians, (faux libertarians like Bill Maher notwithstanding), in fact, libertarianism is attacked by militant, left-leaning atheists like PZ Myers almost as energetically as religion.

It is true that state terror is terrible regardless of the religion of the perpetrator. And it is also true that non-atheist perpetrators of state terror, like the pagan National Socialists, were of the political Left. Still, while Leftism may well be the primary risk factor in the likelihood of mass slaughter, it must be taken into account that the religious Left has historically been far less violent than the atheist Left. The Swedes may have finally gotten around to getting rid of their state church, but they haven’t killed anyone, at least not yet.

In summary, not only is the No True Atheist a logically invalid defense of historical atheist crimes, but it’s an haplessly ineffective one due to the characteristic preference of atheists for the very political ideology they are attempting to blame in order to exculpate their anti-religious creed. But these days, Communism is all but a dead letter due to its economic failure, so the future danger from the irreligious now stems from atheist trans-nationalism of the sort advocated by Bertrand Russell and Sam Harris.

In fairness, he’s right

US President Barack Obama accused Republicans of wanting to turn the United States into a “Third World” country as he rallied support for his reelection campaign.

The Republican Party by and large supports immigration and it is immigration that has turned large sections of America into a Third World country, so Obama’s statement is entirely correct. He does, however, leave out the fact that Democrats support immigration even more strongly and are just as guilty of turning the United States into a Third World country.

Just as you can’t have a police state without police, you can’t have a Third World country without Third Worlders.

The death of chivalry

A woman misdiagnoses the cause:

Sitting in traffic sucks, but it’s the ultimate observation capsule for people-watching. Might as well scrutinize while you’re stuck between a ditzy chick in a monster SUV and a tourist trying to snap pictures of the White House from the driver’s seat.

It’s where I spied a young couple out on a date. He cracked a wry joke, she giggled daintily, and they held hands as they strolled up a block in the heart of downtown D.C. How in-the-honeymoon period adorable are they? I thought. But when Cute Couple paused to enter a restaurant, my foot almost slipped off the brake: he all but broke his neck to get in ahead of her and let the door slam—I mean, physically slonk her—on her shoulder.

I sent her a telepathic message to turn tail, hail a cab, and end that date immediately. But she didn’t. She grimaced and limped in after him. And that’s one of the reasons why chivalry is dying a slow, brutal death.

A failure to provide negative reinforcement for impolite behavior is one of the reasons, but it’s not the primary or the secondary one. The primary reason is that women are behaving in an increasingly rude manner and men are taking note of their behavior and reacting accordingly. And by rude, I mean ludicrously, obnoxiously so. It’s not just the classic door-opening routine. Women just no longer wait for men; watch a man park at the mall sometime and you’ll notice that more often than not, the woman will be halfway to the entrance by the time the guy has locked the car door. Women have also become prone to issue commands rather than making requests; if you hear someone barking “hold this” or “buy that” in public, it will almost always be a woman issuing orders to a man.

I’ve also noticed that many women will simply come to a complete stop on the sidewalk or in public places without warning those behind them. It happens all the time in the grocery store, but I was most impressed with a woman I saw at a theme park a few weeks ago. She actually stopped, bent over, and started messing around with her kid’s stroller despite the fact that she was standing right in the middle of the single chokepoint through which hundreds of people were passing. It would have taken all of three seconds to move off to the side before blocking off the central portion of the passageway, but clearly that would have been far too much trouble given the apparent urgency of removing her little boy’s sweater. So, why would anyone, man or woman, be polite to those who behave in such an ridiculously inconsiderate manner?

The second reason is that men are being taught by example that it is totally pointless to even attempt to be polite. I was brought up to be conventionally “chivalrous”, but I am increasingly less so these days since one can seldom do so successfully. After the fourth or fifth time you start to walk around the car to get a door for a woman, but by the time you get there she has already opened it, gotten in, and is pulling the door shut, you start to feel like an ass. Eventually, you stop bothering. Each little such lesson adds up, until finally you reach the point where you are blithely allowing heavy glass doors to slam into your date entering behind you, much to the horror of a watching passerby.

It’s pretty simple. If women are not going to provide men, especially young men, with opportunity, positive reinforcement, and an example, they cannot reasonably lament that men don’t treat them the way their grandfathers treated their grandmothers. However, it must be noted that the young woman does correctly identify what she can do to help improve a man’s social graces.

And if I did so happen to be out with a dude who apparently didn’t know better, I’d stop at the restaurant door and wait. And wait. And wait some more until he got the drift. Same thing at the table pausing for a chair to be pulled out. Same thing at the car door.

That’s what my mother did with me when I was younger. Once, when I was about 10, I was curious to see what would happen if I didn’t get the door. She didn’t say anything at first, she just stood there silently at the entrance to Rosedale looking straight ahead. Finally, without turning towards me, she said “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got all day.” My curiosity assuaged and my lesson learned, I opened the door.

Why do atheists love killing people?

As I pointed out in TIA, it is not difficult to understand why extraordinarily ambitious atheists in positions of great political power show such a strong predilection for mass slaughter. They are usually obsessed with forcibly modifying society on a large scale and it is impossible to do that without “breaking a few eggs”. Contra Sam Harris, their bloody acts are perfectly rational; we can and should reject their justifications but we cannot fault their logic. But how does one explain the likes of largely apolitical atheists like Terry Pratchett, whose early-onset Alzheimer’s has inspired him to produce a work of murder propaganda?

Viewers of the BBC2 show will see the writer, whose Discworld series of books have sold millions of copies worldwide, at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland with the 71 year–old motor neurone disease sufferer, named only as Peter. Sir Terry, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2008, also reveals that he is “a believer in assisted death”.

In 2008, a documentary on Sky Television called Right To Die? showed 59–yearold Craig Ewert ending his life. He also suffered from motor neurone disease. Dr Peter Saunders, director of the charity Care Not Killing, criticised the BBC’s decision to broadcast the programme, saying it was acting “like a cheerleader for legalising assisted suicide”.

Despite the fervent assertions of atheists to the contrary, again and again we see that their political objectives revolve around two things, sex and death. They can’t even hide behind the defense that “assisted death” is voluntary, because in the Netherlands, at least 20 percent of the legal euthanasia is performed without the patient’s consent.

1995: The Dutch survey, reviewed in the Journal of Medical Ethics, looked at the figures for 1995 and found that as well as 3,600 authorized cases there were 900 others in which doctors had acted without explicit consent. A follow-up survey found that the main reason for not consulting patients was that they had dementia or were otherwise not competent.

2009: The annual report of the regional commissions that oversee the Netherlands’ euthanasia law said there were 2,636 cases in 2009, the vast majority of them euthanasia, or “mercy killing“, as opposed to assisted suicide, or helping someone to die. That represented about 2 per cent of all Dutch deaths last year, based on figures from Statistics Netherlands. Of the cases, slightly over 80 percent were cancer patients and more than 80 per cent of the deaths occurred in the patient’s home. The rise follows a 10.5 per cent rise in 2008….

What I find most reprehensible is that the same atheists who concoct a myriad of imaginary ways in which religious faith could be somehow considered dangerous, even though it hasn’t been for dozens of centuries, habitually feign an inability to imagine how legalizing “assisted death” could possibly go awry. But what were the Mongols, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Red Guards doing, if not energetically assisting death?

If Mr. Pratchett, whose books I quite enjoy, wishes to kill himself, that is between him and God. But it is deeply immoral for him to seek to absolve himself of the responsibility for his death and place the burden on another individual, and it is horrifically irresponsible for him to lobby for the legalization of what will certainly turn into another form of state-sponsored murder of the innocent, the aged, the helpless, and the unconsenting.

A Fed official on the need for “post-crisis” reform

From the speech entitled Financial Reform: Post Crisis? by Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City

In the United States, we observe with each crisis and market collapse that policymakers consistently intervene to protect an ever broader group of creditors and investors from loss. This includes the LDC debt crisis, the failure of Continental Illinois, and the thrift industry and stock market collapses of the 1980s. These previous public interventions, though, pale in comparison to what was done recently. Market participants and large financial institutions have little reason to doubt that they will be bailed out again.

Let me offer just one staggering example. When Gramm-Leach-Bliley was passed in 1999, the five largest U.S. banking organizations controlled $2.3 trillion in assets, or about 38 percent of all banking industry assets. Currently, Bank of America by itself and in spite of its need for government support during the crisis has the same level of assets – $2.3 trillion – as the top five did in 1999 and the top five now have 52 percent of all banking industry assets. What clearer sign could we find that market discipline no longer exists?

Past actions and this growth have given our largest organizations significant competitive advantages over other financial institutions. For example, creditors and uninsured depositors at too-big-to-fail organizations believe that there is almost no chance that they will have to take a loss. This idea is formally acknowledged by the credit rating agencies when they give these organizations separate “support” and “standalone” ratings, which explicitly factor in the government support they likely will receive. The difference in these two ratings thus provides one measure of the funding advantages that too-big-to-fail organizations have over others.

Haldane estimated that this funding advantage amounted to about $250 billion in 2009 for 28 of the largest banks in the world. At the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, we estimated the ratings and funding advantage for the five largest U.S. banking organizations during this crisis. In June 2009, these organizations had senior, long-term bank debt that was rated four notches higher on average than it would have been based on just the actual condition of the banks, with one bank given an eight notch upgrade for being too big to fail. Looking at the yield curve, this four-notch advantage translates into more than a 160 basis point savings for debt with two years to maturity and over 360 basis points at seven years to maturity.

In a competitive marketplace, where just a few basis points make a difference, these funding advantages are huge and represent a highly distorting influence within financial markets. I’ll name three. They don’t have to sell creditors on the strength of their condition. They have significant advantages in competing for funds. And, they have significant incentives to take on more risk, hold less capital, and book more assets.

Of course, the salient fact that Hoenig leaves out of the equation is that between 40 and 45% of those trillions in big bank assets are worthless, according to my calculations. Which is why more government support will almost certainly be required in order to keep the “too big to fail” banks from failing.

No deal

Even the editors at NRO can’t stomach the ludicrous no-cuts deal that Boehner is attempting to strike with the Senate and White House:

We initially supported the deal House Speaker John Boehner cut with the White House to cut $38.5 billion from the rest of the fiscal year 2011 budget. It was only a pittance in the context of all of Washington’s red ink, but it seemed an acceptable start, even if we assumed it would be imperfect in its details. What we didn’t assume was that the agreement would be shot through with gimmicks and one-time savings. What had looked in its broad outlines like a modest success now looks like a sodden disappointment….

As they push a bargain that is still not fully understood, Boehner and the leadership have put their members in an awful fix with another deadline to keep the government open fast approaching. We’d vote “no,” even if we understand the impulse to move on to more important matters and to avoid a leap into the dark that might include a politically damaging shutdown. At the very least, freshmen and other conservatives should be frank about the deal’s shortcomings, refusing to exaggerate its merits as their leadership often has. The episode is strike one against the speakership of John Boehner.

I think it was fairly obvious from the start that Boehner was a fraud, his tears and odes to the Tea Party notwithstanding. I have very little confidence that he will stand up and refuse to raise the debt ceiling next month either, which would explain Treasury Secretary Geithner’s apparent confidence that he will soon have more money to spend.

The problem with the NRO perspective is that the advertised $38.5 billion deal wasn’t any more financially serious than its $300 million revised version, it merely provided better window dressing for the House Republicans. But as Republican cheerleaders, the NRO editors have real cause to be concerned because Boehner’s actions are all but guaranteeing some sort of third party challenge to the Republicans in 2012 and 2014.

New wars, old strategies

Admiral Mahan on the best use of “the fleet in being”:

For the reasons that have been given, the safest, though not the most effective, disposition of an inferior “fleet in being” is to lock it up in an impregnable port or ports, imposing upon the enemy the intense and continuous strain of watchfulness against escape. This it was that Torrington, the author of the phrase, proposed for the time to do. Thus it was that Napoleon, to some extent before Trafalgar, but afterward with set and exclusive purpose, used the French Navy, which he was continually augmenting, and yet never, to the end of his reign, permitted again to undertake any serious expedition. The mere maintenance of several formidable detachments, in apparent readiness, from the Scheldt round to Toulon, presented to the British so many possibilities of mischief that they were compelled to keep constantly before each of the French ports a force superior to that within, entailing an expense and an anxiety by which the Emperor hoped to exhaust their endurance.
– Mahan, Lessons of the War with Spain

This strategy of “the fleet in being” is very similar to the strategy that has been utilized by the global jihad for the last decade. Since the danger posed by its “army in being” is most threatening so long as it remains largely hypothetical, there is little advantage for the jihad in directly engaging Western forces. It’s far more effective to stretch out the Western militaries then bleed them in as many different locations as possible. The Western divisions are like battleships, capable of crushing the mobile torpedo boats of the enemy any time they can bring them to bear, but seldom presented with the opportunity of doing so. It is the most sophisticated expression yet of what VDH describes as the Eastern way of war.

Due to the geographical extent of the conflict and the extremely limited amount of information involved, the ongoing war between the Islamic jihad and the nations of the West is strategically more akin to naval war taking place in the Age of Sail or the Age of Steam than any ground war from any period in history.

Mahan notes “it is evident that the active use of a “fleet in being,” however perplexing to the enemy, must be both anxious and precarious to its own commander. The contest is one of strategic wits”. Therefore, to defeat the jihad, contain its expansion, and return the Dar al-Islam to its previously quiescent state, it will be necessary to force it to reveal its forces and put them in the field. How this can best be done is a matter for strategic and tactical consideration, but it seems obvious that it cannot happen so long as an official policy of secular tolerance is in place throughout the West. And, of course, one is hesitant to have much confidence in a contest of strategic wits with the likes of CINC Obama and General Petraeus providing what passes for the wits.

In other words, this means that widespread ethnic and religious violence is almost certainly inevitable in the intermediate future. The recent ban of the burqah in France and the law against future minaret construction in Switzerland may be the first indications of an eventual European Reconquesta. Unfortunately, at this point, the two most probable outcomes would appear to be either a) secular submission to Islam or b) ethnic cleansing on a scale dwarfing that of any previously known to history. Both appear unthinkable now, and yet it is not difficult to see that the demographics dictate that one or the other will eventually come about. Either way, the multiculturalists and immigrationists are almost certain to be burdened with a historical legacy so terrible as to make the likes of Viktor Quisling and Neville Chamberlain appear national heroes by comparison.