Author: VD

Wake up and smell the depression

Some silly and formerly-rich women clearly do not understand the dynamic nature of investments:

Michelle Young was supposed to face her estranged husband Scot in the High Court this week, but has had to postpone the hearing while she finds further funding. For the last three years, the couple has been embroiled in a bitter fight over his alleged multi-million pound fortune which she says he is hiding and he claims he no longer exists.

Last December, Mr Young was ordered by the court to pay his wife £27,500 a month pending their divorce settlement but he has since been declared bankrupt. At their last court appearance, Mrs Young said she was down to her last £13,000 of savings and owes £660,000 in unpaid legal fees.

The guy has been declared bankrupt. The money is gone. Clearly his creditors understand this, so what sort of cretin finds it hard to grasp the concept? You don’t make £400 million without leverage, so it’s not at all hard to figure out where the money went. Profit by the leverage, die by the margin call.

Mailvox: a humble request

PC has found the Common Sense dialogue to be of no little interest and has a few questions:

Love the blog and hope that you can answer a few questions for me. Your correspondence with Common Sense Atheism made me reconsider many of my thoughts on Christianity and God. Like him, I felt in command of the fundamentals of Christian theology when all I know are Bible stories and sermons from my youth. And it bothers me that I have neglected a large field of intellectual inquiry. However, many of the Christians I meet and evangelical literature I come across are just as inane as the childish arguments for atheism that are too common on the internet. I am glad to have found in you an intelligent advocate who can discuss these topics without nonsense.

How do I begin to erase this deficit? What are some books that I can read this summer to learn the doctrine of Christianity? Where can I find intelligent arguments for the existence of God? Are local priests and ministers generally good discussion partners?

I’m a mathematician, so I like my theory raw. Don’t be afraid to lay the good stuff on me.

On a different note, I am interested in your conversion to Christianity, how a self-proclaimed internet superintelligence discovered and accepted belief. Also, you mention occasionally that one of your reasons for faith is because you saw evil in the world. Could you elaborate on this? What do you mean by evil? What are some examples?

First, always remember that most people are inane. Most people are idiots no matter what they do or do not believe. If you find an honest and intelligent interlocutor in any area, then cherish him regardless of how similar or divergent your views happen to be. Synchronicity of perspective is not an intrinsic hallmark of intelligence.

Second, I must freely admit that I am overdue in writing my response to Luke’s last post. I’m not the least bit apologetic about my tardiness, mind you, as we just went gold on a year-long software project yesterday and I’m still in the process of gradually reanimating from development zombie mode. As will soon become clear, Luke and I are so far apart in philosophical areas that have absolutely nothing to do with religion that our differences of opinion with regards to Christianity almost pale in comparison. But it should take the discourse in an interesting and perhaps unexpected direction.

Third, I think it is absolutely refreshing whenever someone steps back to reconsider what they actually do and do not know, contra their previous assumptions. As much as I might brutally tear into Luke, or anyone else, for mistaking their half-remembered fragments of childhood knowledge for a comprehensive grasp of a subject, it’s actually an entirely normal failure to revisit the past. I remember being astounded when SB dryly asked me why I thought the crust was the healthiest part of the bread… the real reason was that someone had once told me that as a young child and I had never once bothered to actually stop and think about the matter. And the observable fact is that most people never stop and think about anything they have been told by their parents, their teachers, and their professors. So, it should come as no surprise at all that most atheists raised in a Christian tradition should belatedly discover that they really don’t know that much about the simple theological facts of the faith they are rejecting… in the unlikely event they ever stop long enough to seriously consider the matter.

This is why I tend to take an atheist who abandons a religious faith after the age of 30 much more seriously than the normal teenage deconvert. Think about this for a second: How many of your decisions made in your teen years do you still think were particularly wise or intelligent today? And every childhood deconvert I have ever questioned has simply had Daddy issues of one sort or another. You can usually identify the latter sort by their emotional reactions to religion.

As for learning about the Christian faith and theology, the two best books with which to begin are Letters From a Skeptic by Greg Boyd and Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. I would follow that with Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton, and Cynic, Sage, or Son of God, also by Boyd. Then re-read the four Gospels. As for priests and ministers, well, I wouldn’t expect too much out of them other than a reasonably accurate summation of the theology. Remember, they are called to be shepherds of the flock, not providers of intellectual discourse to the highly intelligent. This isn’t to say that no priest or minister is capable of it, but it’s really somewhat of a category error to seek it from them.

Regarding evil, I simply mean behavior that is described as evil or wickedness in the Bible as well as the influences, autonomous or otherwise, that encourage that behavior. I see it in the world and I see it in myself. I have seen it in the transparent lies of an almost-innocent child, in the irrational fury of a hysterical woman, in the maddened glee of a violent man, and throughout the blood-soaked pages of history. I have seen it in the rich and the poor, in the brilliant and the dim, and in the beautiful and the ugly. Once, like many an arrogant non-believer before me, I thought I could construct my own valid moral code and live by it. And, like everyone but the nihilists, I failed. Not spectacularly, but worse, ludicrously and unneccessarily.

As for evil, you know what it is. It is everything from the first lie you tell your parents and that senseless momentary impulse to smash your fist into an unsuspecting person’s face as they walk by to the Ten Persecutions of Imperial Rome and the Killing Fields. I have no doubt that you have heard the little whispers in the back of your mind from time to time just like everyone else. There are two parts to evil, the temptation and the submission. When the submission finally comes, when the resistance finally fails, it feels absolutely liberating at first and it is only after a period of repeated acts of submission that one gradually discovers apparent how enslaving evil truly is. Hence the apparent theological dichotomy of finding freedom through bending the knee before the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think that unless one understands that evil is in some senses desirable to every man and woman, one cannot even begin to make sense of the Christian faith. Unfortunately, many if not most Christians take the admonition to hate evil and twist it into an erroneous dogma that insists evil is not and cannot be enjoyable. And yet, no matter how terrible the act, it always feels either good or necessary at the moment of action. This is just one of the many ways in which I find the Christian perspective to be more observably accurate than the current scientific ones.

I do not speak about my personal experience with anyone. This is for several reasons, but primarily because I understand that personal experiences are not an objective basis for rational argument. In addition, I know that atheists reject personal experience as a basis for belief even in the case of their own experiences, or at least they claim to do so. So, there is clearly no point in it. The atheist who queries, even sincerely and in good faith, about someone else’s experience is attempting to put himself in the position of prosecutor and judge and I have no interest in playing star witness and public defender.

I tend to doubt this response answered all of your questions, but at least it should suffice to give you a starting point on your investigation. And before you begin reading anything, I highly recommend contemplating the significance of John 20:24-31. I think many atheists who are conditioned to believe in the idea of a blind Christian faith and its supposed arrogance, would do well to become familiar with what is indubitably the genuine Christian attitude towards doubts and doubters.

The sport of champions

I’m not a huge Rick Reilly fan. But his piece on going up against the great Timo Kaukonen in the World Sauna Championships is hilarious:

Okay kids, today’s activity is to go down to your local Pizza Hut, have the oven set for 261° and insert your body into it. The tips of your ears start to ignite. The backs of your arms scream. Your throat burns as if somebody had stuck a tiki torch down it. Your lips feel bitten by large, unseen raccoons. And you haven’t hit 30 seconds.

Now do it for 10 minutes or more, and that’s what it’s like to compete in quite possibly the world’s dumbest sport: the Sauna World Championships.

I know. I entered.

I’m looking forward to the inevitable Onion piece. “Does Cambodia threaten our world dominance of sauna?”

Republican spin

Charles Krauthammer suggests that Kentucky Republicans chose for Rand Paul over the establishment candidate, Grayson, because they don’t like Obama:

Well, I think that‘s the most amazing phenomenon of this day. He came literally out of nowhere. And when you compare him — politically he’s not exactly like his father, Ron Paul, but Ron Paul when he ran for the presidency in ‘08 was a bit of a joke. He was way out there.

It tells you how much our country has changed in two years that that kind of libertarianism was considered kind of kooky at the time, and now his son who is less libertarian, he’s more sort of centrist, but still – he’s really challenging the Republican establishment . . .

This has been I think the amazing story of the last year. Look, the tea party, which is behind Paul, barely existed a year ago. . . .

This is I think a tribute to how radical is the Obama agenda — the spontaneous reaction to overreach, a trillion-dollar stimulus, a health-care takeover, and cap-and-trade, all of that at the beginning of a term. This is an amazing, spontaneous phenomenon, and we‘re going to see a lot of its effects tonight.

Right, it can’t possibly be because Bush and his establishment Republican White House rammed the bank bailout down the throats of an unwilling America. What a pathetic attempt at co-option. It’s not hard to see that the Republican leadership absolutely hates what is happening and is getting concerned that their plans to send another Dole/McCain sacrificial goat up against Obama in 2012 may be falling apart. Ron Paul wasn’t a joke in 2008, but Charles Krauthammer is most certainly a joke in 2010.

Mailvox: In which we point and laugh

Keller demonstrates to all and sundry that he doesn’t have to worry about demonstrating his insecurity by joining Mensa:

There is nothing, nothing, more insecure than belonging to Mensa. I don’t think Molotov Mitchell or his wife are very smart…. Yes, there is nothing insecure about wasting money to have a meaningless membership in a “smarty” club. Ha, I mean what a lame, pathetic, girly thing. It’s like paying money to belong to a “Big Penis Club.” God forbid we verify your intelligence or penis size, we just have to see the membership card and you’ve won the argument!

It is eminently clear that Keller isn’t smart enough to figure out how Mensa works. If Mensa were, in fact, a “Big Penis Club”, it would most certainly require the third-party verification of your penis size. Hence the requirement to take an intelligence test in order to qualify for membership in Mensa. In fact, according to a 2003 survey of 5,000 men, Mensa is roughly the IQ equivalent of having an 8.15-inch penis.

Now, as to whether one considers Mr. Mitchell or his wife to be very smart or not, that completely depends upon one’s perspective. The Mensa requirement is not terribly high; there are approximately 120 million individuals on the planet capable of qualifying. However, if someone is a Mensa member, then he possesses incontrovertible evidence that he is more intelligent than 5.88 billion of the people on the planet. And that’s assuming that the individual barely squeaked past the Mensa bar, it’s entirely possible that he is oen of the few Mensans who are as far beyond the Mensa requirements as the requirements themselves are beyond the average 100 IQ individual.

As for insecurities, I can honestly say that I have never met an insecure Mensan. Of course, I’ve never been to a meeting or anything, and as is probably abundantly clear to most of the regulars by now, my membership is little more than one of the many tools in the AWCA arsenal. But since the subject of personal insecurity was raised, I would be remiss if I failed to note that getting one’s panties in a bunch over someone else’s membership card is hardly a reliable indicator of a confident and self-contained personality. A reaction to Mensa membership always tends to remind me of those poor independents who spent four years walking around a Greek-dominated campus complaining about fraternities and wearing a GDI sweatshirt.

The Dishonest Generation

To the extent that one can have an opinion on a generation, I have always felt negative about the baby boomers in a way that I simply don’t feel about any other generation. And it’s not due to my feelings about my parents either. I always thought their “never trust anyone over 30” slogan was remarkably stupid; even as a child it was clear to me that it is a philosophy with a time limit. In his article, The Technicality Generation, Larry Pressler offers an explanation for why doubts about the baby boomers, particularly the elite ones, tend to be well justified:

THE problems faced by Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general, over his depiction of his military service are indicative of a broader disease in our society. The issues of integrity in business and politics that plague us today — the way elites are no longer trusted — are rooted in the dishonesty that surrounded the Vietnam-era draft….

In private conversations with my classmates, I was told over and over that they didn’t want to serve in the military because it would hold up their careers. To the outside world, though, many would proclaim they weren’t going because they were opposed to the war and we should end all wars. Eventually they began to believe their “idealism” was superior to that of those who did serve. They said that it was courageous to resist the draft — something that would have been true if they had actually become conscientious objectors and gone to prison.

Too many in my generation did a deeply insidious thing. And they got away with it. Big time. Poorer people went to war. The men who didn’t were able to get their head start to power.

Now that flawed thinking has been carried forward.

Despite being raised to revere the Marine Corps and being an lifelong student of military history, I don’t fault those who were genuine conscientious objectors. They were right to resist the draft, right to refuse to serve in an illegitimate and undeclared war, and their willingness to go to jail rather than play the technicality game or serve as an armed slave of the state was more heroic than anything the civil rights leaders ever did in their manifest self-interest.

And yes, conservatives, the Vietnam War was not only unjust, it didn’t even rise to the level of an actual war. You will have to show me the declaration of war if you want to even try to defend it.

Clitorectomies for American girls

Wasn’t this sort of thing an old PJ O’Rourke joke?

In a controversial change to a longstanding policy concerning the practice of female circumcision in some African and Asian cultures, the American Academy of Pediatrics is suggesting that American doctors be given permission to perform a ceremonial pinprick or “nick” on girls from these cultures if it would keep their families from sending them overseas for the full circumcision.

The academy’s committee on bioethics, in a policy statement last week, said some pediatricians had suggested that current federal law, which “makes criminal any nonmedical procedure performed on the genitals” of a girl in the United States, has had the unintended consequence of driving some families to take their daughters to other countries to undergo mutilation.

“It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm,” the group said.

Shoot them full of poison and mutilate their genitals… albeit only in a symbolic manner. And that’s assuming they don’t get vaccuumed out of the womb in the first place. Needless to say, I’m not one of those National Greatness evangelicals who believes America is blessed. I merely wonder how long it is before the American Academy of Pediatrics signs off on the full mutilation.

The advocates of the Melting Pot never seem to recall that the contents of the pot depend completely upon what goes into it.

Molotov the Mensan

This should send the IQ-insecure anklebiters into a tailspin. Molotov Mitchell questions why Obama, the supposed academic super-genius from Harvard Law, is hiding his report cards, and in doing so he reveals the fact that I am not the only Mensa member writing for WND. Which, of course, raises some interesting questions about those who think more highly of sites that regularly feature drooling cretins like Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Kurtis Blow or whatever the guy’s name is.

And the SWAT slaughter continues

As, apparently, do the police lies:

An attorney for the family of a 7-year-old girl who was killed by a police officer’s bullet during a weekend raid at their home said Monday that he saw video of the raid that contradicts the police department’s version of what happened.

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger said he watched three or four minutes of video that showed police fired into the home after lobbing a flash grenade through the window. He said this contradicts the police department’s story, which was that the officer’s gun discharged during a struggle or collision inside the home with the girl’s grandmother.

You know it is getting bad when people start automatically assuming that the police version is false. I don’t know about you, but it never even crossed my mind that the “struggle with grandma” story could possibly be true.

Ban SWAT. They are conclusively proven to be more dangerous to American children than al Qaeda, the Taliban, Iran, and pit bulls combined.

WND column

Tea Party Claims a Scalp

Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown’s surprise election was not an actual victory for the tea party. While it was an important symbolic triumph for the small-government movement, electing liberal Republicans is almost precisely the opposite of what is necessary for the tea party to see any positive legislative action toward its goals.

The defeat of veteran Utah Sen. Robert Bennett in the Republican primary is another matter entirely. Despite being an 88 percent party-line voter and possessing an 84 percent rating from the American Conservative Union and a 98 percent rating from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Bennett was soundly rejected by Utah Republicans. He was defeated by not one, but two candidates, which underlines the degree to which the primary voters have rejected not only the current administration’s approach to the financial crisis, but the Republican Party elite’s response as well.