Author: VD

Derek proves to be a gift that keeps on giving. I can understand why some cynics might believe that I invent these critics, note how his attempts at criticism, as hapless as they may be, are actually more substantive and relevant than the sort usually provided by the likes of PZ, Orac, and the Sciencebloggers.

I can’t complain about a quick response. A personal insult immediately in your response, how very… expected. Anyway, maybe my stupid mind can accept aspects of science being dangerous to humanity. I have seen the terminator and matrix movies, so you actually make a valid point. However, from your writing, you have no where near the science and math education that I have. Your writing shows a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method.

I know some about Feynman, but he was a scientist. Not knowing his entire history, I plead ignorance, but if he did not follow the scientific method, then he would have been discredited quickly, because that is how the scientific method works, as opposed to blind faith in what is comfortable. The scientific method is simply observing reality and not clinging to silly stories. It is not religious, yet religious types should not be so fearful. They have been used for many years by very greedy criminals that represent less than 1% of the population. I prefer democracy and science, because it represents what a vast majority want, and that includes me.

Let me get this straight. The guy emails to declare one of my columns “the most idiotic thing he has ever read” then complains about getting personally insulted when he is described – accurately, I think – as stupid for failing to comprehend that science is merely a tool that can be either harmful or beneficial depending upon how it is used? Fortunately, however, he has seen The Terminator, so he now admits my point to be valid, despite his previous dismissal of the case as idiotic. As for his definition of science, I shall simply note that it differs significantly from mine, Karl Popper’s, and every English language dictionary.

What is a science fetishist? Would such a person worship a physics textbook written in 1983, or make offerings to a pendulum? Naked assertions? The emperor has no clothes, but I will maintain some coverage. That is some bad writing, even to respond to even worse writing.

A science fetishist is someone who regards the current state of scientage as definitive and elevates the pronouncement of scientists – particularly in the form of scientific consensus – to the level of a static and quasi-sacred scripture. Fetish, in this sense, does not imply religious worship, only the doxastic division of labor that Daniel Dennett decries in Breaking the Spell.

‘No one, least of all me, gives a damn about what you have read or what you might happen to think’

Damn, so much hospitality, I might have to wear a Kevlar vest! I was just trying to have a discussion of logic and humor. Your writing is so ironically humorous that I felt compelled to respond.

Guests who manage to avoid pissing on the Persians are treated with considerably more hospitality than those who enter uninvited and promptly exhibit all the continence of an elderly dog with a bladder infection.

‘Your childish advice to ignore the benefits of health care due to legitimate concerns about bioweapons is totally illogical, as is your ridiculous notion that I don’t understand something as simple as the scientific method.’

Bioweapons? Where did that come from? Again, Wow! That is what you wrote. Bioweapons, becomes an excuse? From your own writings, it would seem that modern hospitals are places of danger (due to that menace, science), so again, I recommend that you set up more bible appropriate hospital.

Bioweapons, along with numerous other potentially lethal threats to Mankind, are the products of science, specifically, the result of scientistry utilizing scientody. Since Derek is attempting to criticize my case against science, bioweapons are not only every bit as pertinent to the discussion as modern hospitals, they are actually more relevant due to the many non-scientific factors that contributed to the development of modern hospitals and medical care. Derek is apparently unaware that religious hospitals are the fastest growing hospitals in the United States; religious hospitals provide at least 20 percent of the total beds.

Much of what I have seen, regarding evangelicals and fundamentalists, is all about forcing some very restrictive and superstitious type of life on everyone in this country that was founded on freedom from a king and religious freedom. So, I am bothered by those that push their religion in my face and try to legislate my obedience to it. Whatever, happened to choice? I can appreciate your response and your conviction, but it seems so silly to me and it is a beautiful spring day, so I will go out and enjoy it. I will be riding a vintage schwinn with such things as brazing, gear ratios and other science things.

It was Derek’s choice to read my column, I did not push it in his face. Moreover, I am a libertarian and I have never called for legislative restrictions on science, in fact, I have even warned of the negative consequences for science that will likely stem from the Title IX legislation that is in the process of being applied to science departments across the nation.

Derek manages to stump an Internet Superintelligence:

I just read your case against science and some of your other ‘work’. Amazing! As farce it is very funny, but if serious, it is the most idiotic thing I have ever read. You instantly destroy your own ‘argument’ and pack a short article with so much ignorance, flawed logic, falsehoods, and deranged thinking, it is truly a wonder. You do not even understand the scientific method that demolishes your ‘argument’ almost immediately. Believe what you will, but trying to force those beliefs on others who reject them is offensive. Since you are so against science, you should stay away from modern hospitals with all their advances in health care derived from science. Set up fundamentalist hospitals so you can stay true to your beliefs.

Derek is really pretty stupid if he truly doesn’t understand that science is as potentially dangerous to humanity as beneficial. I’m hardly alone in noticing this, as my view is no different than Richard Feynman’s, among many others. His naked assertions mean absolutely nothing; if he has an actual case to make, then I would encourage him to actually attempt making it. No one, least of all me, gives a damn about what he has read or what he might happen to think.

Of course, the complete lack of logic that Derek reveals in just a few short sentences indicates that the probable reason Derek fails to actually substantiate any of his assertions is that he isn’t capable of doing so. This is quite common among science fetishists because they don’t think before expressing “their” opinions, they merely regurgitate the same talking points we have heard so many times before. Derek is a model example, right down to the “you just don’t understand the complicated and ineffable magic of science”.

I will freely admit, however, that I have absolutely no idea how the scientific method almost immediately demolishes my case against science. Perhaps Derek or some other science enthusiast would be so kind as to explain this to me.

VDH belatedly notes that sacrificing principle for political pragmatism didn’t work so well:

The real cause of unhappiness with the Republicans was simply that they could not make a convincing case for conservatism to a changing electorate because so many of them were not acting as conservatives…. Once Republicans started talking about federal deficits only in terms of manageable percentages of GDP rather than as real money, they forfeited the entire issue of fiscal responsibility, and lost the moral high ground. Barack Obama can get away with unprecedented and astronomical of projected deficits, in part because the Republicans are not credible any more on spending….

If the Republicans think they can outbid the Democrats for the support of feminists, gays, and growing numbers of minorities, then they will only add embarrassment and permanent failure to the present natural cycle of political correction.

As counterintuitive as it may sound to the average political analyst, it was the liberalism of the Bush administration and the Republican congresses, not their conservativism, that led to the financial crisis and enabled the Democrats to move further to the Left. Bush didn’t have to appoint Bernanke. McCain didn’t have to tie himself to the banking bailouts… had he actually been the maverick that he feigns to be, he could have slaughtered Obama courtesy of his close ties to Wall Street and Fannie Mae. And, as VDH notes, the party that outspent LBJ simply has no credibility in complaining about Obama’s even more outlandish expenditures.

Those who believe in chasing electorates and polls don’t understand that electorates are not static, which is why their efforts are doomed to failure. They’re dynamic and they will respond favorably even to those with whom they are in fundamental disagreement for a variety of reasons. Obama will screw up, and badly, there is little question of that. But it’s far from certain that the Republicans will be able to take advantage of his mistakes and eventual unpopularity; listening to the advice of the accomodationist squish faction will only ensure another 40 years in the political wilderness.

Well, that would kind of explain why the Left consists primarily of losers:

Everyone in France who passes the Baccalaureat or “Bac” has the right to take up a state university place. The result is that the France’s public universities are overcrowded, under-funded, have high drop-out rates and fail to make any international league tables.

Economics is complex and difficult; it’s often more art than science. But really, the Law of Supply and Demand is arguably as settled than any thermodynamic law. If you reduce the price and the supply remains constant, you can’t expect demand to remain static.

This little news item tends to demonstrate why looking to the monetary authorities to lead the economy out of the hole created by the financial institutions doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:

Stephen Friedman, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, abruptly resigned on Thursday, days after questions arose about his ties to Goldman Sachs. Mr. Friedman was chairman of the New York Fed at the same time he was a member of Goldman’s board. He also had a substantial stake in the firm as the Fed was crafting a solution to keep Wall Street banks afloat.

Meanwhile, another Goldman capo was running the U.S. Treasury until recently. And Larry Summers, Obama’s economics advisor, collected 135,000 from Goldman for a one-day visit.

Our favorite community college figure continues to snipe away safely from the sidelines. It’s a pity he’s still afraid to engage in any form of debate that threatens to unmask his intellectual inferiority in front of his howling herd of scat-throwing science fetishists. Yesterday, he posted about a letter to the editor of the Independent from an Irish fan of TIA:

Really, you can’t make this stuff up. An angry letter writer hates those atheists who are making all that racket, and believes that Vox Day’s awful little anti-atheist book refutes them all perfectly. You’re probably already questioning his sanity and intelligence, but then he takes one more step to impeach his own judgment.

“This brilliant critique clearly demonstrates why a mere anti-blasphemy law is not sufficient. In the interests of rationality and common sense, the legislation should go further and label atheism a thought crime.”

Wait, what? Has he read 1984? Does he understand what a thought crime is? Does he understand that the book is a critique of totalitarianism?

The Fowl Atheist is such a parochial little peasant sometimes. He clearly has no idea that the European nations already possess a host of laws banning thought crimes; the Irish writer is merely suggesting that atheism merits being added to the long list of them. The list already includes such crimes as “xenophobia against non-nationals, particularly migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers”, “aggressive nationalism”, and “denial of the Holocaust and crimes against humanity”. And then, there is the notorious case of the English schoolgirl arrested for “racism”. The EU is actively attempting to standardize and codify these various thought crimes across Europe as per The European Framework Convention on Promoting Tolerance and Combating Intolerance. One would think that even a community college professor would have understood this context since that he is clearly aware of the UN resolution calling for all countries to alter their legal and constitutional systems in order to prevent “defamation of religions”.

Given the TIA reader’s reference to current European legal debate, it’s pretty obvious he was reasoning that because “denial of the Holocaust” is a crime, there is absolutely no logical reason why “denial of God” should not be as well. There is no scientific evidence for either, after all, the only evidence for either is all that eyewitness testimony, archeological material, and historical documentation that atheists find so unreliable. And one could quite legitimately argue that there is actually greater justification for banning the “denial of God” since it’s a well-documented fact that those guilty of denying the existence of God have committed far more, and far worse, material crimes in Europe than those those who have denied the existence of the Holocaust.

Moreover, if Myers had actually read The Irrational Atheist – by his own admission, he has not – he would know that I spend an entire section, entitled “Resurrecting the Red Hand of Reason”, showing how the secular Enlightenment humanism being pushed by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett is directly connected to the increasingly totalitarian organization that is actually doing what PZ hypothetically fears, the European Union. This philosophical blind spot is exactly why I wrote the following in TIA: “The terrible tragedy of the New Atheists is that they are laboring to lay the foundation for yet another reprisal of the very horrors they think to permanently prevent in the name of Reason.”

Now, I can’t claim to know exactly what Mr. Conway was thinking when he wrote his letter, but given that he thinks so highly of a book written by an extreme libertarian that explicitly warns of the growing danger of European totalitarianism, I tend to suspect his call for making atheism a thought crime is more than a little tongue-in-cheek. Since PZ has repeatedly shown himself to be incapable of either rational debate or substantive criticism, it should come as no surprise that he should also be unable to detect such sarcasm.

As for the comments, I merely note the irony inherent in fans of the New Atheists attempting to question the logical capacities of their critics. Finally, since PZ so fears verbal debate, let him know that I am perfectly willing to engage him in a written debate concerning any argument I have made in the book that he describes as “awful”. I’m sure many people on either side of the discourse would be interested to know which of the many refutations it contains are believed by PZ to be insufficient, especially since Sam Harris has openly conceded a number of them. After all, if the book and the arguments it contains are actually as awful as he claims, he should have absolutely no problem demonstrating that in a format that does not require the mental quickness that he lacks.

It’s make or break time for the Keynesians… again:

The Obama administration today unveiled program details of a $3.4 trillion federal budget for the fiscal year beginning in October.

Assuming that the economy will shrink six percent in 2009, this means that federal spending will account for more than a quarter of the national GDP. That’s in excess of the 1942 wartime figure of 21 percent. Of course, when it doesn’t work, Obama or his successor will need their own war to get the economy out of the depression by blowing the hell out of some future markets.

And John Stewart was correct to say so, his subsequent retreat notwithstanding. It’s no surprise that those attempting to make a national interest case for defending torture should bend the truth so radically in defense of the intentional mass murder of Japanese civilians:

We can all thank Clifford May for having gotten Jon Stewart to say (at least for a while) that President Harry S. Truman was a “war criminal” for, among other things, the two atom bombs that he ordered dropped on Japan…. This began to emerge even before Iraq, George W. Bush, and the issue of “torture,” in the late 1990’s, when the Smithsonian mounted a display of the Enola Gay suggesting the bombing was a matter of race-induced genocide, and forgetting to mention such things as a) the fact that Japan started the war with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, b) the Japanese atrocities against helpless civilians, and c) the thousands and thousands of Allied and American servicemen whose lives had been saved by the end of the war.

Both (a) and (b) are true. They are both also irrelevant. And (c) is simply incorrect. Japan is an island nation and in the summer of 1945 it was completely surrounded by the U.S. Navy, which had roundly defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy and left Japan without any means of obtaining the oil which was required for it to continue the war. There was no need for a costly invasion of the home islands; in fact, there was no need for most of the island hopping that cost so many American lives. And it is not true that the atomic bombings caused Japan to surrender:

“There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan’s unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan’s disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. “
– The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, July 1, 1946

More importantly, it is also not true that Japan had been unwilling to surrender prior to the atomic bombings, because it is an established and readily verifiable historical fact that the Japanese had offered to surrender on almost exactly the same terms that were subsequently accepted months before the bombs were dropped.

“In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 — that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:

* Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
* Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
* Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
* Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
* Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
* Surrender of designated war criminals. “

There is simply no room for debate on this. The historical facts are documented and indisputable. There is no honest, informed defense of the Truman administration’s actions. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely unnecessary war crimes worthy of being ranked with the Holocaust and other great historical atrocities.

UPDATE: Nathan asked about the contrary “historical evidence” presented by Bill Whittle. The problem with Whittle’s attempted rebuttal is that he compounds historical ignorance with illogic, then throws in a substantial amount of irrelevance for good measure. For example, Whittle ludicrously cites the battle for Okinawa and quotes a Japanese military figure in an attempt to prove what a deadly threat that 20 million kamikazes would have posed to the U.S. Navy. He does so in obvious ignorance of the fact that Japan only produced a grand total of 11,100 planes in 1945, 2,000 of which had already been destroyed in the battle he references. Moreover, they had no experienced pilots and no fuel with which to fly their few remaining planes.

The “official policy” quote from the God-Emperor Hirohito was obviously just rhetoric for public consumption since Hirohito had never set military or any other official policy for Japan. “Japan’s governmental structure was such that in practice the Emperor merely approved the decisions of his advisers. A consensus among the oligarchy of ruling factions at the top was required before any major question of national policy could be decided.” – US Strategic Bombing Survey.

So, Bill Whittle clearly knows nothing of the historical US military reports, the post-war interviews of Japanese government figures, or the MacArthur memorandum. He may be a fine guy – I know Rachel Lucas likes him, but on this subject he is just a talking head with no credibility whatsoever. I suspect he obtained much of his information from this document or its equivalent.